February 3, 2012 ASK JRB: ENOUGH WITH THE BILLY JOEL ALREADY
I got a weird and huffy comment this morning on yesterday's blog about "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant." Perhaps this guy was annoyed by my incessant Twittering about the Billy Joel project, perhaps he doesn't like the sound of my voice, perhaps my guitar playing justifiably drives him to distraction. Who knows? But this is what he wrote:
I'm trying to remember how I subscribed to this blog. If I recall correctly, this used to be a blog about a composer and the music he wrote. Also, I love Billy Joel, who doesn't, but NO ONE decides they want to listen to Billy, and then listens to a cover instead. I hate to say it too, but this is affecting my enjoyment of your music (LFY in particular). Now all I can picture is Jamie writing Hardy Boys fan fiction in his 40's.
I was baffled by this line of thought, but then I realized that perhaps other people were feeling a similar frustration with this particular detour on my always-amusing career path, so I responded thusly:
When I was 11 years old, Simon & Garfunkel reunited for a concert in Central Park which was broadcast on television. I didn't know the songs all that well, but I clearly remember being moved by the two of them singing the Everly Brothers' "Wake Up Little Susie," a song which had obviously inspired them as kids and through which they communicated a genuine if complicated affection both for each other and the music they grew up with.
Likewise when Joni Mitchell released Both Sides Now, we got to hear a singular artist bringing her own soul to the music she loved in her youth. I could also mention Todd Rundgren's Faithful album, or Shawn Colvin's Cover Girl, or, oh let's get crazy, Stravinsky's "Pulcinella" or Brahms's variations on themes of Haydn and Paganini. As a composer, my own act of creation mystifies me – why do I pick that chord? why do I want the melody to go in that direction? – and interpreting the work of other artists at best helps me to understand my own creative impulses, and at least comforts me that such mystification is part and parcel of the process.
But hey, if none of that is interesting to you, there are only five more songs left on The Stranger, so this probably won't drag out for too much longer. In the meantime, there are more than thirty other songs on my SoundCloud page available for you to listen, free of charge. And if you feel inspired to reinvent one of them for yourself, perhaps you'll find that some people are encouraged not just by your finished products but by the sounds of your explorations and inspirations.
When I said I was going to cover The Stranger in its entirety, I knew (as did you all) that what I really meant is that I was going to have to deal with "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant." This song is a singular, magnificent creation; it does not want to be reckoned with. I would not set about doing an arrangement of "Bohemian Rhapsody." I would not put "my stamp" on side two of Abbey Road. But here I am, staring at seven and a half minutes of beautifully written, arranged and performed music and forcing myself to follow through on my threat to Jerbify it.
When they did this song in Movin' Out on Broadway, they changed the lyric from "summer of '75" to "summer of '65." The song makes a lot more sense that way, honestly – the references to both engineer boots and "greasers" place the action comfortably in the mid-sixties. "Seventy-five" sings a lot better, though, and I couldn't make my mouth say it the other way, so I guess Brenda and Eddie are just weird anachronisms buying paintings from Sears. (That quirky detail about their home décor is my favorite line in the lyric.)
I've always been moved by the story of Brenda and Eddie, but I've never been entirely sure who the narrator was; I decided that it was the Piano Man himself, sitting at the bar on a break, telling the story to an old girlfriend from the old neighborhood who happened to stop in. In order to make my intentions clearer, I skipped one of the sections of the song; it happens to be the most iconic section, but part of the gestalt of this project has been about hearing things in different ways. And look, the good news is my version's only five minutes long.
I chose not to mimic Billy's legendary Long Island diction here, but it was hard not to sing "Brenda Renetti" and "boddla weitz" after hearing it that way for thirty-five years.
When I was in Portland last weekend, I met some of the teenage band members of a local production of 13, and all of the guitarists yelled at me for writing such hard chords. I hope that now they will listen to my execrable guitar playing on this track and enjoy the smug satisfaction of knowing that while I can write it, I most certainly can't play it.
On to side two!
Scenes From An Italian Restaurant (Billy Joel) by MrJasonRBrown Scenes From An Italian Restaurant
Music and lyric by Billy Joel (1977)
Jason Robert Brown: piano, percussion, guitar, harmonica & vocal
Recorded at Casa JRB, Los Angeles, CA, 2/1/12
And here are tracks 1-3, for your kind and forgiving ears:
As good as you think Shoshana Bean is, you haven't heard anything until you hear her in her hometown. Every time we get to sing together is a privilege, and we'll be doing it again at the end of February in Fort Worth (click here for details!). Thanks to Chanda Hall and all the folks at Staged! PDX for bringing us to Portland and getting a fantastic audience to the First Congregational Church. Can't wait to go back again!
All Things In Time (Shoshana Bean) I Could Be In Love With Someone Like You Long Long Road And I Will Follow (Shoshana) King of the World Another Life from The Bridges of Madison County (Shoshana) Wondering from The Bridges of Madison County I'd Give It All For You (Shoshana & JRB) Being A Geek
INTERMISSION
Nothing In Common When You Say Vegas from Honeymoon In Vegas Anywhere But Here from Honeymoon In Vegas (Shoshana) Still Hurting (Shoshana) The Old Red Hills of Home Caravan of Angels Goodbye Until Tomorrow (Shoshana) Moving Too Fast Stars and the Moon (Shoshana) Someone To Fall Back On
January 13, 2012 I LIKE YOU ALMOST THE WAY YOU ARE
There's a fun tradition in gospel music of taking secular love songs and, with the smallest changes in the lyric – a pronoun here, a reversal of direction there – turning them into love songs to God. It was in that spirit that I decided to revisit the 1978 Grammy Award winner for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. The only bumpy lyric was "Don't change the color of your hair."
In my opinion, the original recording is Phil Ramone's finest five minutes as a record producer. The groove, the choice of instruments (including Richard Tee's gorgeous - and uncredited – electric piano playing [*see Sam Lupowitz's comment below]), those wordless backup vocals (or is that a Mellotron?), the beautiful minimal string arrangement, and especially Phil Woods's sax solo, easily the hippest sax solo on any pop record in the last half-century. Ramone has a great song to work with, of course, but it could have easily turned schmaltzy or goopy, and I think it's to his credit that that recording is as fresh-sounding and honest as it is.
My wife thought that perhaps this version was a little too over-arranged, too self-conscious. That's of course one of the greatest dangers an arranger has to face – how to infuse your personality into the song without overwhelming it. It's a balancing act. I think, in this case, since the song is so well-known, so iconic, it could probably bear the weight of all the ideas I threw at it. But it's definitely tricky. For example, it occurred to me that the best way to make sure you really understood the importance of the title was to avoid saying it – because you know the song, your ear will finish the phrase, but you'll think about it differently because I didn't sing it. Or maybe that pulls you out of the song and the experience too much. It's hard to know, and I didn't want to let "perfect" be the enemy of "good" as far as this project was concerned, so I just decided to try it.
The hardest thing about this (other than the harmonica, which I'd never played before yesterday) was finding the right style for the vocal. If I played it too low-key, the song got boring; if I pushed it too hard, I sounded like I was auditioning my club act for a cruise ship. This isn't something I usually have to worry about with my own songs, since I feel like my job is just to bring the music and the lyrics into the light where people can hear them for the first time; since nobody's hearing "Just The Way You Are" for the first time, it's harder to find the tone.
In "Movin' Out," I thumped on the guitar for percussion; in "The Stranger," I hit the guitar case; finally, I've moved on to playing the guitar itself, BUT... only a two-note figure. Perhaps by the time we get to "Everybody Has A Dream," I'll even play a chord.
Just The Way You Are (Billy Joel) by MrJasonRBrown Just The Way You Are
Music and lyric by Billy Joel (1977)
Jason Robert Brown: piano, percussion, guitar, harmonica & vocal
Recorded at Casa JRB, Los Angeles, CA, 1/12/12
Some of you have been asking about the technical process by which I'm recording these things here at Casa JRB, so here's a very wonky paragraph about this song:
For this track, I started by beatboxing to a click – my vocal mic (which I use for pretty much everything except the piano) is this gorgeous thing, a K2 from Røde – they don't make them in this style anymore, they've changed from a tube to a condenser, but I love this mic. Once I had gone on making silly mouth noises for about five minutes, I isolated the four-bar segment where I thought I sounded most on the beat, and I looped that – GarageBand makes that super easy. I needed a bass drum sound, so I thumped on my guitar and then used a GarageBand default EQ called "Isolate Sub Bass Drum," which worked perfectly. Once I had the loop set (and to be honest, the loop doesn't change at all for the whole six minutes of the track), I laid down a piano track. My piano is a Yamaha C5 that I bought from Bondy Piano Service in 2001 when I was writing The Last Five Years. The piano mic is a Røde NT4 stereo condenser mic. (Those two mics are really the only ones I ever use, though I did use the built-in mic on my MacBook for the handclaps in "The Stranger.") My original version of the piano solo was actually three times as long, so then I set about tightening it up, and once I had done that, I recorded the first of many vocal takes. Then I added the snaps, but realized that I still needed something with a higher pitch for the rhythm track, so I got out a Grover tambourine that I stole many years ago from the Parade pit at Lincoln Center when the show closed. (Neither the tambourine nor the snaps are looped, for reasons I can't possibly explain except that perhaps I enjoy the meditative nature of playing one note every measure for six and a half minutes.) Then I added the guitar (I have one of these guys, which I bought so I could write The Bridges of Madison County on guitar) and the backing vocals. At the very end, still looking for one more thing to fill up some of the air, I grabbed my daughter's Little Lyon Easy Learning Harmonica, which happened to be in the right key, and I blew randomly into it until I hit pitches that fit the chords. GarageBand drove the entire thing, and the mics all ran through a MOTU Traveler (this one, in fact, but they make a better version now). I've got a MacBook Pro (17"), and I monitor using a set of Sony MDR-7506 headphones and these beauties, the Bowers & Wilkins MM-1 desktop speakers, which I got at the Apple Store and love unreasonably.
I'm fully aware that the next song is "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant," and I'm suitably anxious.
[Oh, here are the two previous entries, to save you unnecessary clicking.]
The second track on The Stranger is the title track, a song that on the original album bounces in turn from smoky film noir jazz to Steely Dan-style rock to tropical disco and back again over the course of five minutes and fifty-one seconds (with the best drumming and bass playing on the whole album).
As soon as I finished "Movin' Out," I started worrying about how to pull this next song together. The biggest issue was the "Stranger Theme" that bookends the song. I didn't want to keep the two musical ideas separate as Billy had on the original, so I kept putting off recording the song until I had figured out how to integrate them. As you'll hear, I think I came up with a pretty elegant solution. (One problem that solved itself immediately: my whistling range is about four notes, so I knew I wasn't going to try to reproduce Billy's virtuoso whistling solo.)
The original tempo is about 92 bpm, which I bumped up to 107, with a sort of reggae feel. I dropped the key a major third, mainly to accommodate the falsetto stuff I wanted to do in the theme. In the verses, I changed some of the chords just to simplify the harmonic motion since the tempo was so much faster. I also reharmonized sections of the bridge, but that was kind of inadvertent; the way I'm playing it is just the way I've heard it all these years, and I was surprised to look at the sheet music and see that it wasn't really that at all!
The percussion on "Movin' Out" was provided by the body of my acoustic guitar; the percussion here was actually my guitar case. It's amazing when you're recording how everything in the studio starts to look like an instrument.
The Stranger (Billy Joel) by MrJasonRBrown The Stranger
Music and lyric by Billy Joel (1977)
Jason Robert Brown: piano, percussion and vocal
Recorded at Casa JRB, Los Angeles, CA, 1/7/12
Oh God, the next one is "Just The Way You Are." All right, follow me on Twitter and I'll let you know when it's ready (probably not until February). And Happy New Year! UPDATE: The next track is now posted here!
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