Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Want a Danish? I can see by the look on your face that you've got ringworm.
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2007 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
You have probably already seen that you can download Van Morrison's entire contractual obligation album or just view the lyrics. But Michael, Evan, and Stuart hadn't known of it, and none of us had heard any of it, until yesterday. Some observations.
- Leonard was confused at the "poor man's Bob Dylan" genre evidenced in the recordings, because he had thought Van Morrison was a hard rocker. This is because he was confusing Van Morrison with Van Halen.
- We agreed that it would be interesting to use the snippet-length songs from the contractual obligation album as the basis for other songs. They feel like jingles or samples, and "Just Ball" for one was favorably compared yesterday to "Revolution #9". I mean, they're perfectly competent as bits of music -- one can't just noodle about and improvise 31 songs at this level of composition without some chops. There's a combination of tossed-off horrible and baseline quality that makes this album, in some sense, the opposite of The Eye of Argon (link to a new Leonard toy relating to EoA) and "The Good, the Bad, and Scarface".
- Leonard, could you put in the comments or something what Evan wrote in response to this music? The ones about ennui and the void?
Comments
Leonard
22 Apr 2007, 13:54 p.m.
Evan said: "If regular music is the expression of some feeling, those songs have the effect of landing a void in my soul where music should normally go."