Tuesday Tunes

Ford Prefect once said: “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” Of course, he was in a book, so what does he know. There’s a lot of talk about the new year, of course, but even more so because it’s the end of the decade. Time to ring in the roaring Twenties again I guess. There’s a strange pattern that I’ve noticed, and that bothered me for a while, but I’ll get to that later. Most people see the new year as a time of reflection, of renewal and new goals. I just like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by …

The Song(s)
Song: Start Again
Artist: Bishop Allen
Album: Lights Out - 2014 - Dead Oceans
Method of discovery: Searching through my saved songs for certain phrases

Theory: This is a fantastic song to start learning guitar; it only has three chords. They are I-V-IV, in that order for pretty much the entirety of the song (except where they pull the ole switch-a-roo coming out of the chorus lines, that ascending IV-V). But I want to talk about bagpipes. When you play the bagpipes there is a constant tone, or three, that plays below the melody the bagpiper plays - this is the drone, or the ‘pedal’ in music parlance. A Pedal is a sustained tone over several changes, and is typically in the bass section of a piece. In this song, however, the guitar part that starts the song and comes back later one, acts like an inverted Pedal (a Pedal not in the Bass), so you’ve got these two fighting themes of change and permanence.

Research: Bishop Allen is the child of two friends who lived on the street the band is named for. Justin Rice and Christian Rudder are the main lynch-pins around which the band is formed. Lights Out was their first release after a five year hiatus, and it seems fitting that ‘Start Again‘ was the lead single. In 2006 the pair found an old piano, dragged it back home, and began recording new songs, releasing a new EP every month for a year. They took something old and made it new things with it …

Personal thoughts: …and that’s what I love to hear about. Stories of salvage and of wabi-sabi (see the link below). When it gets to this time of year, people tend to despair and want to cast off the old year, and start again, start fresh. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I feel some go too far, wanting to leave everything behind. For me it’s still a time of reflection, trying to leave behind that which didn’t work, but also taking with me the lessons I learnt from those experiences, and the things that went great. This Decade, you can start again, that’s fine. But be careful of thinking that ‘The Past’ = ‘Bad’ and ‘The Future’ = ‘Better’. It’s only like that if we make it that way.

Give it a go: If you are the type for an often broken resolution

Give it a miss: If you don’t like inverted pedals

[links]
Spotify: Tuesday Tunes, Start Again by Bishop Allen
Wikipedia: Bishop Allen, Pedal
Articles: New York Times, Paste Magazine, Vice
Other: Ford Prefect