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Best of 2018 – Collaboration and the Craft of Songwriting

While looking back on many of my favorite songs from 2018, I was surprised by how many happened to be written collaboratively between two or more songwriters. Music is inherently social and the history of songwriting is rife with many great collaborations – Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein – John Lennon & Paul McCartney – Elton John & Bernie Taupin and so many others! Music composed collaboratively is like a magic that would not exist without either partie’s influence upon the other. 2018 saw some truly great collaborative efforts. Here are a few of my favorites.

Birds Bewildered – written by Derri Daugherty & Steve Hindalong

Back in the late 80s, my band Challenge the Light shared a bill with the then Orange County band The Choir at a club called Bogarts in Long Beach California. I remember being impressed with their textural guitar sounds and strong melodic content. Several decades later, this band is still making music and are now located in Nashville. “Birds Bewildered” reflects the varying complex emotions, regrets and hopes related to the recent dissolution of drummer Steve Hindalong’s marriage. The beautiful string arrangement reminds me a bit of “Ocean Rain” era Echo & the Bunnymen.

Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter – written by Elvis Costello & Carol King

Elvis Costello and Carol King had been friends for years, often meeting over Sushi prior to writing this song together back in 1997. Over 2 decades later, Costello has finally released this song on his excellent new album “Look Now”. Carol King has talked in interviews about how she often begins her songwriting process with chord progressions that speak to her. The harmonic elements in this song are often dense with just enough dissonance to create feelings of tension. The song lyrics which mirror this tension, paint a portrait/story of a hurt heart which turns bitter. The song carries all this tension while at the same time being very tuneful and catchy. First rate work by two absolute masters of song!

Everyday Is a Miracle – written by David Byrne & Brian Eno

David Byrne and Brain Eno have been major musical influences on me ever since I was a teenager. Through the years, have done many great and groundbreaking collaborations. For David’s 2018 album “American Utopia, Brian Eno gave him tracks he was working on, with the idea that David would finish these. So the collaboration on this project was more like a remix in some respects where one artist builds on the previous work of another. “Every Day Is a Miracle” is such a fun and uplifting track. Byrne and Eno combine sonic inventiveness with lyrics that are both joyful and hilarious. 

Flower of the Universe – written by Sade Adu, Andrew Hale and Ben Travers

My favorite song of the year. Breathtakingly beautiful! This is as great as ANYTHING Sade has done in her whole career. The song was written for the Film adaptation of Madeline L”engle’s A Wrinkle In Time. The song beautifully matches the story’s themes of human attachment and spirituality with a such haunting melody!  Sade and her long time keyboardist Andrew Hale have been composing songs together since the start of her career. They also co-wrote such classics as “is It a Crime?” and “Paradise”. 

Heart of the House – written by Becky Buller & Sarah Majors

My favorite Bluegrass album of 2019 was Crepe Paper Heart by Becky Buller. She co-wrote “Heart of the House” with Nashville songwriter Sarah Majors. It is a story of grief – of a home that feels the absence of one no longer there-  who once filled that house with such life and vitality. It’s a universal story that so many of us have experienced in our own lives – so beautifully and tunefully rendered by these fine songwriters!

Nothing For Free – written by Paul McCartney & Ryan tedder

I’m so glad that Sir Paul continues to be an active force in songwriting in this… his 5^th (nearly 6^th) decade! “Nothing For Free” was co-written with OneRepublic vocalist Ryan Tedder. The lyrics are far from profound, but it’s an extremely quirky, off the cuff and odd pop song with inventive production. It’s my personal favorite off McCartney’s latest album “Egypt Station” and was only included as an extra on the limited edition version of the album.

Glen Suneson and The Early Days of Breathe

Back in late 84, my friend Ed Snyder and I were talking about putting together a new music project. Inspired by Cocteau Twins, Joy Division, This Mortal Coil, Norwegian guitarist/composer Terje Rypdal, and “Unforgettable Fire” era U2, we were both interested in doing something more impressionistic – more melodic – than our past projects. We recorded a song called “Rain” as a duo that reflected some of these influences. Our friend Al Olefer saw what we were doing, and highly suggested that we connect with a local guitarist friend of his named Glen Suneson. I had heard of Glen, and had seen him around but didn’t really know him. Upon meeting him, I was immediately impressed! His musical influences were extremely broad and he was a very gentle natured guy. His guitar tone was quite beautiful, his playing melodic, and he had a good sense of the value of space in music. He was fun to hang with!

For a period of time, Ed, Glen and I used to get together to improvise and generate ideas. Our friend Shane Stewart had a local rehearsal space that he let us use. I remember some memorable nights where we would go to Shane’s rehearsal space, light candles, turn the lights off, share a bottle of wine and play. These were magical times! It was mostly improvised on the spot, but we would sometimes take ideas generated from the improvisations and develop them further into pieces.

Glen turned me on to a lot of great music. He introduced me to Wire, Julian Cope, What Is This? (who we later did a gig with), and The Blue Nile. We were both fans of the English experimental guitarist Fred Frith, so Glen and I went to check out his 80’s project Skeleton Crew at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. These are all artists that I still listen to and enjoy to this day.

We later joined forces with drummer Ernie Woody and bassist Mike Patton and became a band – Breathe – which would later evolve into Challenge the Light. Ernie and Mike had both played in Jack Grisham’s band Cathedral of Tears, and Mike was a founding member of the seminal Orange County punk band Middle Class. Once we became an actual band, we started to incorporate more elements from pop, rock and dance music into our sound. We all shared a desire to create music that defied many of the conventions of the times – music that was simultaneously edgy and accessible, melodic and powerful, introspective and celebratory. In 1985, we recorded some 4 track demos of our songs on my cassette portastudio. You can check it out here:

The first song on this demo – “Overcome” is what I always think of when I think of Glen’s guitar playing. I really love those beautiful ringing arpeggios! It also most closely resembles the direction we were moving in during those earliest days of playing with Glen.

What I remember most about the earliest incarnation of Breathe was that all the players took a melodic approach in their playing. Mike’s bass playing was unique in that he retained the edgy energy and drive from his punk rock roots but would compose bass lines which were also quite melodic. His playing always reminded me a bit of Peter Hook’s (Joy Division, New Order) style.  As I stated earlier, Glen was a very melodic player whose parts and sounds always served the songs. He never overplayed which is a rare commodity amongst guitar players who have chops!

Glen and Mike left the band after about a year. Ernie, Ed and I went on to play with several other lineups of players through the next few years and the band evolved in other directions. After Glen left the band, we drifted apart and I didn’t really see as much of him as the years went on.

A few years ago we re-connected through social media and I was so happy to catch up with him a bit – if only superficially. I was very sad to hear about his recent passing and wish we could have connected more. I send my love to his family and friends! I feel very blessed that our musical and friendship paths crossed during a very important period of my life and artistic development.

Music With My Daughter

One of the greatest gifts of being a musician is the opportunity to play/create music with others. I feel so lucky to have been able to collaborate with so many creative and gifted musicians through the years. There is an aspect to the art of music that is inherently collaborative. The act of playing music with someone is an aspect of human connection and communication that is very special! About a year and a half ago, I did a series of blogs that were tributes/appreciations of some of my musical friends who played on my album Soft Sea Creatures.

Of all the wonderful musicians I have been able to collaborate with, none have been as personally fulfilling as collaborations with my daughter Mei Lin, who plays violin/fiddle.  Whether I am accompanying her on the piano while she plays Bach, playing bluegrass tunes with her on our front porch, joining our voices in harmony in the car or playing free jazz when she joins in with Tumble, I so love the opportunity to connect with her through our shared musical languages.

I have some special memories of our musical connection going back to when she was a baby. I remember on the day that we adopted her, I held her in my arms and softly sang the melody of a traditional Zimbabwean mbira tune to her. Her eyes latched on to mine while I was singing and I felt her body relax. The song held her attention in a deep way. I could feel the beginnings of her deep connection to music which has grown and flourished so much since that time. Several months later, I was playing a simple groove on a little kalimba I have had since I was in my 20s. She rocked her body in groove to the rhythm – looked at my hands playing – looked at her hands – grabbed towards my instrument – wanting to play. I again could sense her strong musical spirit. We were lucky enough to capture that moment on a video.

Click on link to view video: Music w Dada

Eventually, she started to play the violin, and her love for the instrument and musicality have grown steadily through the years.

It has been a real joy to have her join in as a special guest with my band Tumble on both recordings and performances. Here is a video of our set from the Night of Giving benefit concert in December 2017. Bill was not able to make it that night so we were “bass-less”. Mei Lin joined us for our set that night.

Best of 2017 – New Discoveries

On this last day of 2017, I am reflecting on all wonderful 2017 albums that I enjoyed this year. Instead of doing a typical end of the year list, I thought It might be interesting to highlight artists who were new discoveries for me this year.

Jagged Spheres – Jagged Spheres II:

I was already a big fan of saxophonist/composer Anna Webber’s music when I discovered Jagged Spheres, a group she co-leads with keyboardist Elias Stemeseder and drummer Devin Gray. They create muscular and shape shifting modern improvisational music. Their new album inspired me to think about musical composition and structures in new and different ways!

I could not find ANY videos of Jagged Spheres so I included a video of an Anna Webber performance.

L’Rain – L’Rain:

Multi-instrumentalist/composer/songwriter Taja Cheeks records and performs under the name L’Rain. She creates music from cello, guitar, bass and keyboard textures as well as sonic collages from found sounds. Her new album is a beautiful and heartfelt exploration of personal grief inspired by the recent loss of her mother.

Juana Molina – Halo:

Juana Molina has done an amazing and rare thing. In the 1990’s she had a very successful career as a television star in Argentina. At the height of her success, she completely left television to follow her muse. She had a vision of a type of music she wanted to create, and took the dive headfirst. Her music is built around unusual grooves based largely on loops she creates from her guitar and keyboard playing. Her voice is often like another instrument in the mix in her beautifully strange world of “almost” pop music.

Janna Nabay and the Bubu Gang – Build Music:

Janka Nabay was born in Sierra Leone and moved to the US in 2003. He is known as a central figure in Bubu music – a type of African pop music played by the Temne people in Sierra Leone.  I discovered him through Luaka Bop Records, a label started by David Byrne. His new album “Build Music” has a soulful homespun feel to it with some very hypnotic grooves.

Angelica Sanchez Trio – Float the Edge:

Brooklyn based pianist Angelica Sanchez has a special intimacy and flow with her instrument. I can hear influences on her playing ranging from Bill Evans to Cecil Taylor to modern classical chamber music. A review in the New York Times described her playing as “seeking out the lyrical heartbeat within an avant-garde storm”. Her excellent trio features Tyshawn Sorrey on drums and Michael Formanek on bass. The type of improvisational interplay that this band creates reminds me of Bill Evans legendary trio with Paul Motian and Scott LeFarro, only with more modern/abstract compositions. Michael Formanek’s beautiful bass tone alone is worth the price of the record!

David Virelles – Gnosis:

Pianist David Virelles was born in Cuba and later studied with one of my musical heroes, Henry Threadgill. To me, his music sounds like someone has taken the many rich musical traditions of Cuba and melted them down into a mysterious watery dream. His music is simultaneously abstract, grooving, and impressionistic.

Rising Tide Lyric Video

Back in November of 2001, only months after the tragic events of 9/11, my wife Juli and I headed up to British Columbia for a wedding. Our dear friends Linton & Jehanne were getting married on Hornby Island in BC. On our way up to the wedding destination, Juli and I spent a few days on nearby Denman Island. It was an incredibly beautiful and soul nourishing time! On one late afternoon, we sat on the rocky northern beach of the island and watched as seagulls were picking up live oysters and flying high into the air to drop them onto the rocks below. The rocky beach was strewn with seemingly infinite  multitudes of broken white shells and yet the birds were able to easily spot and devour the oyster body – these soft sea creatures – from their newly broken shells. Unbelievable! Juli and I sat mesmerized and moved by this amazing show of nature! As we were watching, we noticed the tide rising toward us – slowly and steadily eating up the beach. At that moment, I was touched by so many things – the fragility of life – the wonder and mystery and power of nature – the inevitability of death – the beauty all around me. I picked up my mbira and composed “Rising Tide” right there on the beach. The inspiration for a song has rarely come to me so purely and so spontaneously.

Later on Hornby Island, shortly after the wedding, Linton and I played the song together for the 1^st time. I immediately loved the way his beautiful bansuri (East Indian bamboo flute) playing lent itself to the inherent vulnerability of the song.  When I eventually recorded the song for my album, I was blessed to have Linton’s lovely playing grace my tracks. The song also features a few brief instances of otherworldly ambience provided by Michael Masley’s one of a kind cymbalom (hammered dulcimer).

 

I was recently approached by my friend, videographer Michael West, regarding the possibility of collaborating on a music video. I suggested Rising Tide and Michael got to work immediately! I am so pleased with the imagery he cooked up to compliment the song and lyrics. Check out websites for my collaborators below.

http://www.artistgeneral.com/

http://lintonhale.com/

https://www.bobbiemoonvideo.com/

New Tumble Album – Music for Trio

I have always loved jazz, especially the more experimental and progressive edgy stuff. I have never considered myself a jazz musician however, yet mbira music is full of improvisation. Playing in Tumble has given me the opportunity to bridge the worlds between traditional African trance music and modern improvisational jazz.

My band Tumble formed in the Summer of 2014. At the time we were a trio – mbira – guitar – reeds. From the very start, I realized that the interplay in our playing and the collective timbre created by our instruments was very special. As a band, we have consistently embraced a very delicate balance between structure and improvisation that is exciting to me.

We began recording our album in the Spring of 2015, before bassist Bill Douglass joined the group. In our trio format, with no bass player, there was a certain open ended quality to the sound. At times, I could play in the lower register of my mbira and become the “bass player”. At other times, guitarist Sean Kerrigan would fill that role by digging into the lower register with his already thick and deep guitar tone. Reed player Randy McKean would do the same thing, especially when playing bass clarinet or tenor. At other times, we would all play in the higher register, creating a more “bottomless” or ungrounded feeling and sound. These shifts were never planned, but could happen spontaneously as a part of the group improvisation. 

Music for Trio is unlike any album I have ever worked on. My approach to album making and recording has always been to meticulously layer parts through overdubbing over a period of time. In this sense, my artistic process in recording was more like weaving.  With Tumble, we set ourselves up in the studio facing one another in a triangle, and played live with the “tape” always rolling. With an improvisational band like Tumble, the challenge in recording is to create a space where the spontaneous musical conversation can flow freely. During the recording of this album, we were able to get deep into our collective improvisation vibe where some real musical communication happened!  I am quite pleased with how it turned out. Much thanks is due to engineer Bruce Wheelock for creating such a warm, homey and comfortable environment at his wonderful studio Flying Whale Recording. 

Music for Trio is released on 1/31/17. You can get it at Clocktower Records in Grass Valley and at Tumble’s Bandcamp page.

My Favorite Albums of 2016

2016 was not a kind year to our world community of important musicians. We lost way too many musical legends last year! Yet, despite all these losses, 2016 was a wonderful year for new music. There were so many wonderful records which inspired me greatly. When I was working on my first draft of albums I loved in 2016, I had well over 30 on my list! So… I have narrowed these down to 10. These are not scaled, but rather in alphabetical order. Instead of giving “music critic” type of descriptions of each album, I have decided to write a Haiku review/impression of each album.

Sam Beam & Jesca Hoop 

“Love Letter for Fire”

Harmonies in groove

“Don’t even know me that well”

Fractures of the heart

David Bowie

“Blackstar”

A swansong supreme

“At the center of it all”

Starman waves goodbye

Leonard Chiyanike

“Kamusha 2016”

Mbira master

Extended hypnotic spin

Get down in the depths

The video below is not taken from the album but shows Leonard and his brother playing mbira together

Leonard Cohen

“You Want It Darker”

Leonard spins song craft

“Lift the veil and see your face”

Fades into the light

Christian Fennesz & Jim O’Rourke

“It’s Hard for Me to Say I’m Sorry”

Brooding soundscapes

Sonic layers on layers

Soothes and scrapes longing

Lisa Hannigan

“At Swim”

Deep subtle textures

“Hide the rich and spare the young”

Melodies on ice

Invisible Guy

“Knuckle Sandwich”

Angular movement

Clarinet-piano-drums

Shifty interplay

Live footage of Invisible Guy – not from album

Allison Miller’s Boom Tic Boom

“Otis Was a Polar Bear”

Now who was Otis?

Polar bear Mingus glacier

counter point in punch

Radiohead

“A Moon Shaped Pool”

Haunting majestic

“The white room by the window”

Caressed in deep strings

Kjartan Sveinsson

“Der Klang  der Offenbarung des”

Ex Sigur Ros man

“Sonics of Divinity”

Rising orchestral

Please feel free to post/share some of the music that moved you the most in the past year..

Blessings for 2017!!

New Tumble Album

Over the past year, my Tumble cohorts Randy McKean & Sean Kerrigan and I have been working on our 1st album “Music for Trio”. We had the great pleasure of recording at Flying Whale Recording with Bruce Wheelock. The CD is finished and we are really excited about it!

Randy’s son Callum and my daughter Mei Lin are special guests. We recently finished mastering with “Super Genius” Myles Boisen over at his Headless Buddha Mastering Lab in Oakland.

We hope for an early Winter release. Keep posted for further announcements!

Inspired Collaborators Radio Show

Last month I had the great pleasure of co-hosting an episode Mikail Graham’s radio show “The Other Side”. “Inspired Collaborators” was a opportunity to highlight many of the musical friends and collaborators who contributed tracks to “Soft Sea Creatures”.  Mikail mixed my album with me, so it was fun to revisit some of these tracks with him and share tracks from Bill Douglass, Joe Fajen, Paul McCandless, The Moore Brothers, Mount Desert (Scott Weiser) and many others, sharing these musical treasures on the airwaves. Michael now has posted our show on his achieves page and it is available for streaming! . The show aired on 5/17/16. To listen, click on “Hour 1 – Hour 2” below the description of my show. You can check it out here:

http://theotherside.biz/PastShowsArchive/PastShowsArchive2016.html

Soft Sea Creatures Collaborators – Part 6 – Joe Fajen

I met Joe Fajen back in the mid-90s when we were both living in the bay area. I met him through our mutual friend Linton Hale. Linton, Joe and I played together in various musical projects around this time. When I first started working on this album, an important part of my vision was to have no drum kit on the record. I started recording numerous rhythm tracks with Linton and Joe on duel Djembe’s.  These tracks became the rhythmic “bedrock” of many of the tunes on the record. Joe also played tablas on “Flesh of the Land” and “Shadow” as well as a trombone track on “Beast”.

Currently, Joe is best known in the local Nevada County music scene as the trombonist for The Earles of Newtown. The Earles play an infectious brand of Americana music they describe as “Swingin Dixie”. In this band Joe plays Dixieland inspired improvisations which interweave with improvisations from the trumpet and reed players.

Joe is also an accomplished tabla player who has studied Indian classical music for years. He has performed on tablas in both traditional and non traditional settings with many fine artists including Matthew Montfort (Ancient Future), Ludi Hinrich’s Chicken Bones, Simirit, and Pandit Binary Pathak.

I have the great fortune of playing with Joe currently in both of my current bands, Tumble and Robert Heirendt’s Sea Creatures. He is a dear friend and brilliantly sensitive musician!