Tag Archives: Taylor Swift

treble staff

Singing For The Sharks

 MGM-Sony-Streisand Scoring Stage in Los Angeles

Think of a restaurant you’ve stumbled in to where it turns out that all of the staff are trained in intellectual property litigation. Get ready to argue over the amount of the tip. 

Research on a book project has recently taken me to the far and cavernous precincts of music licensing, with topics like copyrighting songs, payment to play music in businesses, and collecting royalties from others who perform ‘covers.’  I have only one word for the experience of wading in to this byzantine subject:  Yikes!  My advice is that if you have the urge to sing in the shower, for your own good it would be good to do it sotto voce.  Anyone could be listening.  And you could be in even more hot water for not clearing the song with the publisher, a record company, or the performance rights organization that represents the songwriter.

No wonder there has been a spate of recent stories about the questionable mental health of musicians trying to survive within the music industry.  It’s an enviable goal to build a career in music.  But it is clearly not for the faint of heart.  Think of a restaurant you’ve stumbled into where it turns out that all of the staff are trained in intellectual property litigation. It may not be your best meal.  And the tip will be a matter of contention.

All of these is both a surprise and a disappointment, since music remains one of the happier experiences of living our lives.  It’s little wonder that the legendary Quincy Jones–the composer, musician and world-class producer–thinks of the business side of his work as a “disaster.”

Taylor Swift has recently been doing battle with her record label and publisher, Big Machine.  They own her masters and the copyrights to most of her older music, and she wants them back.  With some justification her label argues that they invested heavily in her when she was a young teen starting out.  But now, buying back the rights to her music outright–if she succeeds–with probably run into a few hundred million dollars.  In the meantime, she’s released a music video to torment her music-mogul opponents, Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta.

Taylor Swift – The Man (Official Video)

Official music video by Taylor Swift performing “The Man” – off her album ‘Lover.’ Stream/Download the album here: https://TaylorSwift.lnk.to/Loversu ►Subscr…

To be sure, Ms. Swift will land on her feet.  She has loyal and vocal fans.  And it’s certainly easier to admire her as a performer than a relatively faceless investment firm, the Carlyle Group, which has an interest in Big Machine.  In addition, music lovers also love to hate record labels.  It seems like it has always been that way at least since the days of Napster.  The big music groups that own the labels are often seen as taking over copyrights representing the labor of their very human musical “partners,” only to fail to deliver the promotion and success they promised in exchange.

Swift has obviously done well with Big Machine, but she wants more control of what and where she performs. However, a more typical case is perhaps the jazz/classical cellist, Zoe Keating, who is continually underwhelmed by her annual royalty statement from Spotify–now the largest streamer in the music business.  According to The Guardian, in 2018 she received all of $0.0054 per play from the streaming service.  Still, Spotify complains that they can’t make any real money.

It’s obvious only the biggest mega-stars receive royalties sufficient to live on. Most need to tour relentlessly, where ticket and incidental sales of extras can net enough income to get by.

Many of us are fascinated by this industry because its products are often so great.  But it seems to resemble something like a big and colorful aquarium: better to enjoy it from the outside than to swim with the sharks inside.

Through a Vale of Tears: The Story-Song

Joni Mitchell in 1974 Wikipedia.org
Joni Mitchell in 1974  
               Wikipedia.org

To sing is to have the self confidence to make oneself more accessible to others. Perhaps this is what Augustine meant when he said that “the person who sings prays twice.”

Are there spheres of communication that have a perfect form?  Are there ways to express the nearly inexpressible? These are grand but interesting questions with at least a partial answer. One plausible way to adding meaning to a message is to carry its burdens in two dimensions: for example, in words and images, or in words and music.  Sometimes it seems like the world increasingly prefers the first option.  We have seemingly insatiable appetites for even bad video and film, with even worse sound.  But I keep coming back to the revelatory power of the other pairing centered on the aural: words and music. The combination can suddenly make apparent what cannot be made visible or represented in language alone.

The song–from folk to opera–is potentially expression times three: words laid within the “hooks” of melodies, modulated in attention-getting  triads within major or minor keys, and sometimes set literally to the rhythm of the heart. The effect is both poetic and disclosive, nudging the voice into a registers that seem to make the soul more transparent. To sing is to have the self confidence to make oneself  more accessible emotionally. I’d like to think this is what Augustine meant when he said that “the person who sings prays twice.”

Story-songs are a special case. Lately they’ve been celebrated in feature films such as the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), as well as popular documentaries such as Laura Archibald’s Greenwich Village: Music that Defined a Generation (2013).  And while it’s hard to avoid being hopelessly reductive when discussing music, it’s relentless pull on our attention  still manages to bait us into the effort. Bears have honey.  We have music.

Narrative ideas are sometimes worked out in so-called “concept albums.” Cabaret singer Nancy Lamott’s My Foolish Heart (1993) has a string of pieces that start with a couple’s first infatuation (The Best is Yet to Come) and ends 10 songs later in a relationship that is spent, the broken couple dividing up their books as they prepare to move on (Where do you Start?).  

The story-song goes even further to construct its own three act play, often in very personal terms.  And if there’s not always a full third act, there is at least the expressive power bound in a sequence of events cast in the prose of personal biography. Few working in this more intimate  style settle for the kinds of statements of sheer romantic bliss that iconic writers of the Great American Songbook took as their norm. Instead, the best are individualized narratives that still manage to tap feelings we already know. The story-song offers a para-history:  partly someone else’s biography and–because of the empathy  a fragment of sentiment evokes–partly ours as well. The effect can be transformative. The mingling of words and music in three or four chords can be more precious to its listeners than multi-million dollar films that often squander their mandates to tell a compelling story.

Identifying classics of this form will always be an idiosyncratic exercise. Story songs have obviously sprung from everywhere, including Southern Appalachia (Iris DeMent’s Our Town), the folk revivals of the 1960s and 70s (Bob Dylan’s Ballad in Plain D), Nashville (Taylor Swift’s Love Story), and even suburbia (Richard Shindell’s Hazel’s House).

There are so many songs that could be called iconic.  Everybody’s playlist is different and not to be dismissed. Consider a small sample:

For a full three-act narrative there’s Marty Robbins’ 1959 ballad, El Paso. To say that it got its share of airplay in its time is an understatement.  Robbins wrote it for his Gunfighter Ballads, album, doing in four minutes what the popular horse operas of the day spread over 90.  It retains the same masculine form emphasizing action over feelings as Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (1976). Lightfoot put to music the widely known drama of a Great Lakes freighter lost in a fierce Lake Superior storm.

Sometimes story-songs seem take us very close to a writer’s past, such as Dar Williams After all (2000), It recounts a family in disarray, and her subsequent bouts of depression as a younger woman.  Some of the same kind of despair exists in The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York (1987), where the alcohol-induced meltdown of the Irish group seems to be happening during the recording.

Kris Kristofferson once said to Joni Mitchell that she was maybe too biographical in her music: “Oh Joni – save something of yourself,” he cautioned after hearing one of her sets decades ago.  Her Night Ride Home (1991) avoids the darker cast of so much of her output. It it she simply celebrates the freedom of heading out with her friends in the band after a successful performance.  No cares or phones.

Two story-songs deserve special mention for the sheer beauty of their visions. One is Shindell’s, Wisteria.  If ever a song catches an adult’s wistful sense of a place he once knew, this might be it.  And there is also Michael Peter Smith’s The Dutchman (1968), an earnest folk song in the tradition of its era, and a surprisingly touching story of an aging couple trying to hold on. Woods Tea Company found the perfect venue to record it, using the kind of coffee house intimacy the ballad demands.

Story-songs usually have a melancholy cast. Ironically, they give pleasure by taking us through endless cycles of suffering and release.  In our world they are perhaps the closest counterpart to “the vale of tears” a Christian is said to pass through on the path to a better life.

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Thanks to my daughter, Hilary Woodward, for introducing some of these songs to me.

Comments: woodward@tcnj.edu