Mary Spender explores the role of privilege and economic background in the music industry. By analyzing how access to time and resources influences artistic development, this discussion examines the challenges independent musicians face when trying to build sustainable careers without established support systems.
Chapters
00:00 The Gift of Time
04:16 What Money Actually Buys
09:10 What I Actually Had
14:53 Envy
19:26 Was It Really Easier Before?
22:12 The Starving Artist Myth
25:10 What Does Success Actually Look Like?
27:55 Redefining Success
29:54 Stay in the Game
34:49 What Privilege Really Means
Billy Strings has drawn from something old to do something entirely new. The singer and virtuoso guitarist, who is 33, has broken ground by using the elements of traditional bluegrass to become an arena-filling, chart-topping phenomenon, straddling the worlds of roots music and jam bands. Along the way he has also acquired a Deadhead-like legion of fans who follow his tours from concert to concert.
As improbable as it is that Strings can sell out cavernous venues across the country while playing bluegrass classics — in addition to his own introspective compositions, which he and his drummerless band often spin into long improvisations — it’s even more surprising when you know the path he took to get there. Strings, whose real name is William Apostol, was surrounded by poverty and drug addiction in his family growing up in small-town Michigan. Those demons have continued to haunt him: Strings’s mother died from a drug overdose last year at 64 years old. That loss inspired much of the music on his beautiful new album, “So Much for Goodbyes,” due out Aug. 28. He discussed the genesis of that album, among many other things, in our heart-wrenching conversation, which took place during a rare day off from his summer tour.
Well into the interview:
How does playing music help process the feelings that you have, whether it’s about your mom or anything else? It’s always been my coping mechanism, survival strategy and my medicine. Playing bluegrass music, it’s like a portal back to my childhood, back before I knew anything dirty about the earth. And it’s a way for me to go back to a time that was just beautiful and full of light, growing up playing music with my dad. And then songwriting is my cathartic and therapeutic way of dealing with things. I think sublimation is one of my main characteristics. Instead of letting this hard stuff drag me down, I try to make art from it, make lemonade, if you will.
A bit later:
When did you realize that you had a real gift for the guitar? That was early on. I started playing when I was about 4 years old. By the time I was 6 or 7, I could carry a tune, and I was my dad’s rhythm player. He would play all the lead and do all the fancy picking and singing, and I would hold down the rhythm. One of the biggest moments for me was I was sitting in my dad’s bedroom with him, as I would basically do every night, and he was teaching me the song “Beaumont Rag.” We would play the tune and I would mess up the second part every time. And I stopped us right in the middle of the song and said, “Why don’t you just play it and let me listen?” And so that’s what we did. Instead of trying to count, I listened to what he was playing. I listened to the melody. Then I was like, “All right, let me try it again,” and I nailed it. He was awful proud. He called my grandma, made her listen on the phone. That was a big moment for me. That’s when this listening thing started: I was able to listen to the music more intently and I could tell what chord was coming next. I used to think it was magic or something. I had no concept of music theory or anything. But my dad would play a G chord and then he would play a G seventh and my ear would just lead me. I’d be like, Well, the next chord’s probably going to be a C, and then it would be. It’s better to learn bluegrass and folk and hillbilly music that way than to try to learn from some academic point of view. It’s better to learn it on the back porch and to let it get under your skin, because then it’s not some equation, it’s a feeling. It comes from your soul.
Before shows:
I read an article about you that talked about how before shows, you used to get real anxious and have stomach pain. Is that still an issue? I definitely get nervous before a show. Sometimes moments before I’m walking onstage, I feel like I might pass out. I’ve just got to get into the first song or two, and halfway through the show I’m the complete opposite. I have all this energy. I feel great. I feel super confident, almost cocky even. There is that expectation from the crowd to do something amazing, and also that expectation from myself to always do better than I did the night before, because this is my livelihood and this is my life, and deep in the back of my mind, I’m scared that this is all going to go away, and maybe I’ll have to go back to the way life was when it was really hard. There’s this little devil on my shoulder that tells me I don’t deserve any of this, and thinks that I should be in some little trailer somewhere addicted to drugs, not a penny to my name. So it does feel like I’m playing for my survival a lot. Each time I walk onstage, I’m playing so that I don’t have to go back there.
This is one of the first jazz albums I owned, bought with my own money mowing lawns. I would have be 12,13, maybe 14, somewhere in there. When I’d bought it I’d never heard of Maynard Ferguson. I was looking for trumpet music – I’m a trumpet player – that had “that Latin tinge,” to borrow a phrase from Jelly Roll Morton, whom I hadn’t heard at that time. Between the album title, the serape, and all the horns I figured that album would fill the bill.
It did. The title tune had that Latin tinge, though not quite what I was looking fore. But the whole album was magnificent. And this cut, it’s been on my mind for the last two or two. What a thrill! Big band, up-tempo, driving beat, repeated riffs, and then Maynard’s solo about halfway through (1:40) following a blistering sax solo. Maynard announces himself with a little call and moves into complicated rapid cleanly articulated lines and gradually worked his way into the upper register. I’d never heard trumpet playing like that. Blew my mind.
You need to understand the trumpet, it’s a very physical instrument. That kind of playing, at that tempo, moving into the upper register, you play the horn with your whole body. You feel it in your trunk, in your core. It gives you a deep visceral thrill.
A political thriller about the first American rock band to perform behind the Iron Curtain, whose members find themselves in the crosshairs between the Right and the Left of a polarized America with severe career repercussions.
I was certainly aware of Blood, Sweat & Tears back in the 1960s and 70s. After all, I played in a band that played a number of BS&T tunes. But I don’t remember them as being THAT big, perhaps because, as the Wikipedia entry notes, “by the mid-1970s the group’s popularity began a decline.” And if I was aware of their State Department-sponsored tour of Eastern Europe in 1970, which is the focus of this fascinating documentary, I’ve forgotten or repressed it.
I recently posted a video in which Adam Neely argued against using AI to make music. In that video he showed the CEO of Suno, Michael Shulman argues, “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice.” Hence the justification for an AI program that does all the work for you.
I’m with Neeley on this one. I note further that the idea and practice of being merely a consumer of music, without being able to make your own, is relatively recent. Before the invention of sound recording in the late 19th century and the invention of broadcast media in the 20th, before those things happened the only music was live music. If you wanted to listen to music, you have to be in the presence of live performers. To be sure only a small group ever became full-time professional musicians, but a somewhat larger group became reasonably competent amateurs. And I strongly suspect that everyone participated in some active music-making or associated dance more than is the place today.
Passive listening is a different kind of experience. To be sure, it is now possible for anyone to experience the best possible performances through sound recording and broadcast, and that is surely a good thing. But it’s not quite as good as being there in person. And in either case the pleasure is not the same as making your own music, even if your music is, shall we say, a bit basic.
Wayne Booth makes that point in his book, For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals (1999), which is grounded in his love of cello playing. Here’s a couple of excerpts:
So what will be the main point here? Well, obviously not the totally, finally inaccessible perfection but the playing itself, good and bad. We usually manage to rise above the distractions and play, for the sake of the playing. While much of the rest of the world is negotiating costs and benefits of a different kind, we are negotiating interpretations—and when things go well, the pay-off is beauty, friendship, and joy. (About the many in the world who can afford neither kind of negotiation—the impoverished, the hungry, the deprived—I'll not say much, and what I say will be said guiltily. To fiddle while much of the world burns is surely wicked, but everyone who has read this far is to some degree already caught up in the wickedness. Will I be able to say any more in my defense than that some kinds of fiddling come closer to redeeming the world than some other kinds?)
Later:
What I hope will harmonize the debating voices is an unqualified celebration of what it means to take on any difficult and complex task for the sheer love of the task itself, with no possibility of future pay-off. In a world filled increasingly with easy pleasures why take on a tough love that requires daily practice, burdens you with a sense of critical failure, and risks leading others to accuse you of wasting your time—and theirs? Or, if you are bored with the easier pleasures, why not instead give yourself more of the pleasure yielded by getting ahead professionally? Steady devotion at the office will get you somewhere, while steady devotion in front of a music stand or learning jazz trombone or gardening—well, won't you just end up about where you began?
And this:
I am an amateur cellist with an uncomfortable vulnerability to that word "lack" in the second definition. I do love to play the cello—especially when others are playing with me; over the years it has come to feel less and less like a mere addendum to life, a pastime, a hobby, and more and more like something beyond even an added luxury: it's now a necessity. But though I "practice" the art lovingly, "for my own pleasure," practice at least an hour a day, I often practice it with little ease and never with any skill remotely resembling "professional."
There’s more at the link.
The idea that we should rest content with having AI generate tunes for us, that ultimately we don’t need humans making music at all because the AIs can do it “better,” that betrays a frightfully shallow conception of being human, of living. It reduces being human to being simply a consumer of experiences, which seems to me to be the ultimate motivation of the fantasy that we’re living in computer simulation, that we’re not doing anything at all but are rather being done to. That’s the (ultimate) triumph of Homo economicus over Homo Ludens.
In this interview I finally get to sit down with the legendary Billy Joel. We talk about Billy's prolific career as a singer and songwriter, his love of classical music, and his techniques for writing such timeless music. Billy also shares some hilarious stories and demonstrates his unmistakable piano chops.
This video is the second part of my short two part series in which I am exploring how the melody 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star' could have sounded if composed by several composers of the renaissance era (ca. 1450 - 1600).
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, words by Jane Taylor (1783 - 1824), melody traditional
Arrangement and Performance by Jonas Wolf
Inspired by Accent: • Vocal Group History and Styles (by Accent)
0:00 Introduction
0:18 Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
2:24 Orlando di Lasso
3:32 Giaches de Wert
5:33 Carlo Gesualdo
The article is a general review of classical music in America starting with Henry Lee Higginson and the Boston Symphony. It's interesting throughout, but I want to present a single excerpt, from the end.
In the Midwest, the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra (for which, full disclosure, I serve as scholar in residence) likewise fulfills the credo pronounced long ago by Theodore Thomas when he crusaded for symphonic music across the United States: “A symphony orchestra shows the culture of the community, not opera.”
In fact, the concert orchestra, to a remarkable degree, proved an American invention — a civic hub comparable to the opera house abroad. The South Dakota Symphony enjoys a music director, Delta David Gier, who moved to Sioux Falls 22 years ago and has raised a family there. Gier has at all times insisted that an orchestra aspire to serve a specific community in specific ways. His signature initiative is the Lakota Music Project, which binds the orchestra to Native American reservations throughout the state. Beyond that, all the proposals now controversial in Boston, including thematic festivals and “affinity programing,” have already been implemented in Sioux Falls.
Do the South Dakota Symphony musicians, in Eagle Hawk’s words, “feel it”? The orchestra maintains a nine-member, full-time core consisting of a string quartet and wind quintet, both self-governing. They perform more than 100 times per season. At the Pine Ridge or Rosebud reservations, they play with Lakota drummers and singers, and mentor young musical aspirants. The remainder of the orchestra’s members, many of whom come from the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, are self-selecting: They do not trek to Sioux Falls for the income, but are enticed by the repertoire, which is brave, and the vibe, which is exhilarating.
The history of the Lakota Music Project tracks the South Dakota Symphony’s larger trajectory. It is an exercise in building trust and mutual understanding. Early on, the symphony members and the Porcupine Singers would play for each other. Personal and musical relationships evolved. Then there were fledgling attempts to make music together. The most recent Lakota Music Project tour, last October, premiered two compositions: one by Jeffrey Paul, the orchestra’s extraordinary principal oboist, and one by Bermel, with whom I conferred about those Met Opera broadcasts. The performers included symphony musicians alongside Pine Ridge’s Creekside Singers and the Dakota flutist Bryan Akipa.
In both pieces, elements of Native American and Western classical music merged triumphantly. Bermel has recast his composition to include the entire South Dakota Symphony; it premieres in November as part of a two-week festival considering “Native American inspirations” in classical music, beginning with Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony (accompanied by visuals exploring his indebtedness to Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha”). Given the intellectual heft of this exercise, tracking the “Indianist” movement Dvorak inspired and its more recent aftermath, the festival will reach beyond the concert hall not only to local high schools, but to classrooms and concerts at four universities in four South Dakota cities.
Here is the quintessentially cool arrangement of “Killer Joe” by Quincy Jones.
Enjoy my Remix/Remaster of this 1969 jazz classic.
Background information provided by Bruce Scott:
"Killer Joe" was written by the legendary tenor sax, composer and arranger, Benny Golson. The latter and Quincy Jones are very close friends. This classic tune is from the LP entitled "Walking In Space" (A&M/CTI 3023), which was released in stereo on November 19th, 1969. "Killer Joe" was recorded on June 18th, 1969 at the Van Gelder Studios, in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Recording Engineer: Rudy Van Gelder. Produced by Creed Taylor.
“Walking in Space” is a 1969 studio album by Quincy Jones The album was recorded for A&M and features an iconic photo of Quincy by Pete Turner who made some of the most famous A&M album covers. "Killer Joe" features Ray Brown on bass and Grady Tate on drums, an early example of a strong jazz rhythm section in pop music.
I had the half-speed mastered audiophile pressing of this album. I never cared for its lopsided stereo mix, where most everything was slammed into the right channel, save the reeds and muted trumpets, which were the only thing in the left channel.
In my mix, I kept the drums in the right channel, but the swapped channels of the instruments, putting the horns, woodwinds and guitar on the left channel with the reeds and muted trumpets on the right with the drums, so it’s a much more balanced mix. I panned the female vocalists in the right channel. [It was very boring having them centered]. The bass was originally slightly right justified, so I panned it dead-center for better balance and reduced it by 10%.
It appears to have been recorded on older 1st generation transistorized solid-state equipment due to the very sterile and distorted audio quality. The original bi-polar stereo mix was most likely done on the old 4-track mastering system as well. Having been compressed for LP mastering compromised the dynamics quite a bit. I cleaned it up and expanded the dynamic range to brighten it up and bring it into the new millennium.
Personnel on this recording:
• Quincy Jones - conductor, arranger • Freddie Hubbard, Lloyd Michaels, Dick Williams, John Frosk, Marvin Stamm, Snooky Young – trumpets
• Jimmy Cleveland, J. J. Johnson, Alan Raph, Tony Studd, Norman Pride, Kai Winding – trombones
• Joel Kaye, Roland Kirk, Hubert Laws, Jerome Richardson – reeds
• Paul Griffin - piano
• Eric Gale - electric guitar
• Ray Brown - double bass
• Grady Tate – drums
• Bob James - electric piano
• Hubert Laws - flute, tenor sax
• Toots Thielemans - guitar
• Bernard Purdie - drums
• Hilda Harris, Marilyn Jackson & Maretha Stewart - vocals
Technical Information:
I used SpectraLayers PRO-7 to isolate the Vocals, Orchestra, Drums, Bass & Piano into 5 separate tracks. Adobe Audition was used for Dynamic Range recovery, Delay, Reverb, EQ, and final mixdown. NERO 2019 Platinum used to generate the final video.
While you're laughing yourself silly at what you're seeing think about the interpersonal coordination required to pull this off. That's what music is like, all the time.