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A lifetime of listening to how people relate to music has taught me that the love of music for its own sake is comparable to the love of cooking, gardening, antique furniture, animals, poetry and so on. Some people have it; a lot don’t. Michel Faber ‘Listen’

We recently returned from a road trip. In the past I would play one of my playlists of 80’s music or queue up albums. I always felt that if I am driving, then I am in control of the music.[1] This time around though I tasked my daughter with creating a playlist for the drive. As the youngest, like a bower bird, she is very observant of everyone else’s tastes and likes. It also gave her something practical to do to help out with the trip. Therefore, over a few days she progressively curated a playlist.

One of the interesting consequences of this was the way that different tracks bled into each other. It was like when you mix and match different foods, where one influences the other. On the one hand this process can normalise or flatten tracks, making them seem less unique and individual. However, it also has the effect of bringing certain aspects out of songs that may have been missed on previous listens.

I particularly noticed this with the Twinkle Digitz tracks that were added and how they contrasted with the other tracks. Taylor Swift’s ‘Anti-Hero’ played after ‘Autonomous Thomas’, highlighting the rhythmic backbone of both tracks, while ‘Dancing in My Dreams’ after Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Bed Chem’, touched on the overlapping melodies, where you never quite know which is the true voice you are supposed to be listening to.[2] What I found interesting was the way in which listening to songs in a different light can give a song new life. This had me wondering about whether there are in fact different stages in listening to music?

Thinking about stages, I wondered if the structure of observed learning outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy might be a useful model to build upon. The Solo Taxonomy is a model that describes levels of increasing complexity in students’ understanding of subjects:

  • Pre-structural – The task is not attacked appropriately; the student hasn’t really understood the point and uses too simple a way of going about it. Students in the pre-structural stage of understanding usually respond to questions with irrelevant comments.
  • Uni-structural – The student’s response only focuses on one relevant aspect. Students in the uni-structural stage of understanding usually give slightly relevant but vague answers that lack depth.
  • Multi-structural – The student’s response focuses on several relevant aspects but they are treated independently and additively. Assessment of this level is primarily quantitative. Students in the multi-structural stage may know the concept in tidbits but don’t know how to present or explain it.
  • Relational – The different aspects have become integrated into a coherent whole. This level is what is normally meant by an adequate understanding of some topic. At the relational stage, students can identify various patterns & view a topic from distinct perspectives.
  • Extended abstract – The previous integrated whole may be conceptualised at a higher level of abstraction and generalised to a new topic or area. At this stage, students may apply the classroom concepts in real life.

Source: Wikipedia

With the SOLO Taxonomy in mind, here is my attempt to map a set of stages associated with listening to music:

  1. Discover new music. This might be serendipitously, via an algorithm or through a playlist.
  2. Listen to new music to build a deeper appreciation. This is where something spikes our attention and we actively return to it. Here I am reminded of Ed Droste’s argument that it usually takes five listens to form a judgment on a record. (And for the tracks of an album to all blend into each other?)
  3. Make connections and comparisons. Having formed some sort of judgment, this stage involves hearing the music in a wider context, making connections with other songs and artists, categorising it, and possibly revising the initial judgment based on new inputs.
  4. Actively explore further ideas. This involves actively making further connections and comparisons beyond the music in question. If it is a new artist, it might be going into the back catalogue or exploring other work by the same producer. It might also involve secondary material, such as interviews or reviews.
  5. Being inspired and making anew. This last step involves being inspired by the music to write something new, curate a list, remix the track.

Having thought through all of this, I am left wondering if all music can magically seem ‘new’ for some in that it never ceases to step beyond background sound, but unconsciously gets consumed over time to be something that we just know, without having actively sort it out? This is what Liz Pelly touches on in her book Mood Machine – The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist, where she talks about music as being in competition with silence:

Choosing the music that soundtracks our lives can be part of how we process who we are. But Spotify’s ideal mode of lean-back listening feels different, less an act of choosing than testing one’s tolerance, how much one prefers the sound of “Deep Focus” or “Brain Food” to nothing at all. It follows that a population paying so little conscious attention to music would also believe it deserving of so little financial remuneration. Plus, passively soundtracking your everyday moments through song is not the only reason people listen, and the escalation of this single listening mode in service of boosting engagement is a disservice to artists, listeners, and music as an art form; it disregards the many different reasons why someone might listen to music.

Source: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly

I am also aware that not everyone loves music. This is something Michel Faber touches on in his book Listen – On Music, Sound and Us:

A lifetime of listening to how people relate to music has taught me that the love of music for its own sake is comparable to the love of cooking, gardening, antique furniture, animals, poetry and so on. Some people have it; a lot don’t.

Source: Listen – On Music, Sound and Us by Michel Faber

Some people even actively dislike music, having congenital amusia, where, as Faber explains, they simply ‘don’t get on with music’.

It is interesting to think about all this alongside the discussions around reading and attention. Kevin Munger has written about the way in which our indulgence of shortform reading has shortened our context window.

By abandoning the technology of longform reading and writing, we are shortening our context windows and thus weakening our capacity for attention. At the same time, LLMs advance by expanding their context windows and refining their capacity for attention (in the form of some hideously high-dimensional vector of weights).
Attention is all we need — and the lesson of media ecology is that it doesn’t come easy.

Source: Attention Is All You Need by Kevin Munger

I wonder if the same can be said for music? Has our indulgence of background music[3] reduced our ability to listen and appreciate? What impact will this have on music with the growing presence of AI to the mix? As Faber’s book captures, this is a complex question.

  1. I have not literally glued the dial onto Gold 104.3, “only the shit you love“, as one relative did when I was growing up. ↩
  2. I think that the difference is that Twinkle Digitz often doubles down on the parts, whereas Carpenter seems to buff all edges. ↩
  3. While writing this, I am listening to Aphex Twin’s Supreme playlist. ↩On
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Nostalgia can grow on most surfaces, but some surfaces are more hospitable than others. Michel Faber ‘Listen’

Listen – On Music, Sound and Us by Michel Faber is a meditation on what it is we talk about when we talk about listening to music:

This is a book about music, and about the people who listen to it – your friends, your neighbours, me and you.

Source: Listen by Michel Faber

It is made up of a number of sections, each containing a bricolage of reviews, online comments, interviews and Faber’s own experiences, to address a particular idea. These sections often read as much as self-contained essays, but as a whole, they bleed into each other to create an intriguing exploration.[1] Although the book is not intended to be Faber’s reflection on music, his style of writing cannot help being personal. This feels something akin to what Clifford Geertz called ‘thick description’, where layers of meaning and context are meticulously woven into the narrative.

As a book, Listen explores a number of questions. For example, what is it that we are actually hearing? How does this differ to what animals hear? What is the actual place and purpose of music? For adults? For children? Emotionally? As an accessory? As a commodity? Does listening to and engaging with music actually make children smarter? What are the stories we tell and are told through music? Who tells these stories and why is so much music in English? When is music just noise? Is Nickleback’s music really that bad? Is it still ok to listen to Morrissey? We are going to listen to Taylor Swift forever, right? How does music play out in the brain? What does it mean to be a fan? What is the place of music reviews? Is classical music just a fancy orchestral cover band? What is the place of music in space? What are the appropriate precautions to take when listening? Vinyl is better, right? Can everyone really sing? Or is it okay to fake it with a backing track? However, more often than not, these questions are left ambiguously unanswered with the reader simply left to dwell on things. Almost like a warning, Faber states in the beginning that he is here to “change your mind about your mind”.[2]

By its meandering nature, Listen is one of those books that sows many seeds. Some of the tidbits that took are that: “the world is intrinsically silent.”[3] “Being grown-up doesn’t guarantee that you understand anything; you merely have the vocabulary to talk as if you do.”[4] “The familiar sounds of which our tribe approves are Music. What’s not Music is Noise.”[5] Classical music is “a séance – tuning into that man and his humanity.”[6] “When a vinyl disc is brand new, the first play is the best you’ll ever get.”[7] “The only medium that’s ‘full frequency’ is your head.”[8] “If you’re middle-aged, you will soon reach a point where your brain can’t process much more.”[9]

Just as a black hole is defined by what is not there, but should be, Faber’s taste and preferences are glimpsed at or inferred throughout. There are times when I am really drawn into Faber’s discussion of his love of Coil’s Astral Disaster, his father’s collection of schlager or Jane Tabor’s ‘A Proper Sort of Gardener’. However, these threads are a distraction from what this book is really about and that is ‘you’ as the reader. As he states in the introduction:

Art does not ‘hold a mirror up to nature’. It holds a mirror up to you.

Source: Listen by Michel Faber

This made me wonder if Listen was actually written in the margins of another abandoned book?

In a discussion of the track ‘Luminous Beings’ on the Song Exploder podcast, Jon Hopkins spoke about his process of creating something in order to destroy it:

Basically I built something in order so I can destroy it and then something more interestingly can grow out of it.

Source: Jon Hopkins – Luminous Beings (Song Exploder)

I wondered about this idea while reading Michel Faber’s book Listen and the autobiographical material.

In the introduction, Faber explains that this book is one that he always wanted to write. However, while reading it I was left wondering exactly what the initial idea for the book was? Faber states that the purpose of the book is to ‘perceive your stuff differently’.[10] However, like Hopkins’ initial idea, I wondered if there was an initial autobiographical ode to music which the book actually deconstructs, a reflection similar to say Rob Sheffield’s memoir Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, that was destroyed to write this story.

Listen covers so much territory. The catch is that it often demands of the reader to stop and consider.[11] I just wonder how many readers would actually dedicate the time to properly engage with it? Interestingly, in the acknowledgements at the end of the book, Faber explains that the original script was much longer.[12]

All in all, I am glad I stumbled upon Listen on shelf of my local library, while randomly perusing while my daughter was looking for books. It is definitely a book that I feel has changed my mind about music and listening and helped appreciate the small things.

  1. “The author, writing with refreshing openness and stylishness, proceeds exactly down that path, tackling all manner of listening-related subjects, from volume to genre to atonality to classical music to white bias. The book is a heady brew of energetic essays, each one enjoyable, although it can be difficult to discern a throughline of thought or even, sometimes, the relevance of a given essay to the book’s expressed central aims.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber [6/10] – Read Listen Watch by Andres Kabel ↩
  2. “Reading this book will change the way you listen. I’m not here to change your mind about Dusty Springfield or Shostakovich or Tupac Shakur or synthpop. I’m here to change your mind about your mind.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  3. “The world is intrinsically silent. When trees fall or bombs explode or violinists pluck pizzicato, all that happens is that the surrounding air is disturbed in various ways. Atmosphere is displaced. This displaced atmosphere is what enters our ears, and we do the rest. Our ears and brains are musical instruments. To be precise: our eardrums are conceptually no different from the drums we see a drummer playing. The world is playing us.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  4. “Being grown-up doesn’t guarantee that you understand anything; you merely have the vocabulary to talk as if you do. An adult is capable of phrases like ‘sinister, stalking guitar riff’, which sounds cleverer and more definitive than ‘Argh! Vampires!’ But is it? Whenever we find ourselves feeling superior to a child who is expressing their naïve opinion of what music is about, we should ask ourselves: What is it about my own response that’s so much better than this child’s?” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  5. “The symbolic resonance is clear: avant-garde art will swamp us if given half a chance. Parochial art which harks back to a bygone era is a bastion against the dangerous incomers. The familiar sounds of which our tribe approves are Music. What’s not Music is Noise. We don’t want any of those noisy harbingers coming over here, stealing our time and violating our brain cells.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  6. “Rather than feeling like a tribute band, it almost feels like a séance to me. I mean, Beethoven couldn’t have played a string quartet, so it’s not as if he was able to make it exist; he didn’t do it. You’re enabling his concept to come to life. So I always think of it more as a séance – tuning into that man and his humanity.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  7. “When a vinyl disc is brand new, the first play is the best you’ll ever get. Almost inevitably, there will already be some unwanted pops, clicks and rustles, because molten polyvinyl chloride is prone to manufacturing defects – rogue bubbles, irregularities in the heating and cooling phases, or impurities in the vinyl itself. Each additional play will degrade the surface a little more.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  8. “I also respect that some people enjoy the sound of vinyl more than they enjoy the sound of digital. Music happens in the brain, not in some abstract realm of graphs and meters. If the ‘warmth’ of vinyl’s groove rumble makes you deeply happy, you are more blessed than a CD nerd who is deeply dissatisfied by the kilohertz parameters of the 1995 German remaster compared to the 2003 Japan-only remaster that he can’t get hold of but has read about in a hi-fi magazine. … keep in mind: the only medium that’s ‘full frequency’ is your head.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  9. “If you’re middle-aged, you will soon reach a point where your brain can’t process much more. Having once felt well-informed and connected, you will feel yourself growing increasingly ignorant and out-of-touch. More and more of the new music you wish to understand will be made by, and for, minds that don’t work like yours. Music which speaks to formative experiences that didn’t form you, music which riffs on cultural allusions that elude you, music which has no use for all the things you’re an expert on. The future is here and you’re not part of it.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  10. “Many books about music are a glorified display of the stuff the author owns, which he (it usually is a he) thinks you should own too.† It’s not the aim of this book to make you own more stuff. The aim is to help you perceive your stuff differently.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
  11. Personally, I had to read it twice to really take it all in. Even then, I feel I could easily have gone back and read it all over again. ↩
  12. It would seem that Faber listened to his editors and trimmed it back. Although I wonder if there is a means of publishing these pieces left on the chopping board elsewhere, in a blog or something, similar to Andrew Stafford’s ‘Notes from Pig City’? Or maybe I just need to read it a third time. ↩
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Looking through algorithmic social media feeds today, a user is met with a whiplash-inducing barrage of ads, influencer garbage, and other clickbait content. It can be stressful and overwhelming. Perusing search results, too, it can be hard to tell what’s trustworthy or reputable—to comprehend how you even came to be looking at a certain photo, video, or text. On news sites it can be hard to decipher sponsored content from an editorial. The internet has long stopped feeling like a town square—it feels like a shopping mall. And streaming services are part of that shopping mall, even if their sleek interfaces don’t currently frame it that way. Liz Pelly ‘Mood Machine’

With Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist, Liz Pelly unpacks Spotify’s primary goal, that being to hook users and reduce amount paid in association stream share. Instead of challenging capitalism on the back of the pirate culture, she explains how the platform is really an ultra-capitalist advertising company. Built on the back of learnings from torrent sites, the focus is on the illusion of frictionless. However, like the illusion of processed food, such magic ignores everything involved. Everything played by the user acts as a test, with the goal of the platform becoming the passive soundtrack to our lives, where the only competition is silence itself. This constant collection of data leads to the development of a ‘taste profile’, built around the idea of what you listen to and when. This simulacrum of ourselves risks taking a three-dimensional picture and flattening it into two dimensions. As a former machine learning engineer suggests:

“What do you want when you listen to music?” he continued. “I don’t think there’s a single answer. Some of the records that I would consider really life-changing, really profound, are records that in terms of listening time, they wouldn’t even show up in my top 100. Partially because they’re really challenging records. They’re records that opened me up to certain things. But they require a lot of investment. I’m not going to sit down and eat dinner to it. I need to be in a space where I can really devote myself. There is a lot of music that listeners find important but it’s not what you want to listen to all day.”

Ultimately, he determined that there was really only so much that could be gleaned from a bunch of information about someone’s listening history—from reducing a person’s music taste to a pool of data. “It’s like taking a three-dimensional picture and flattening it to two dimensions,” he told me. “It still has some relation to the actual object you’re trying to study, but it leaves out a fair amount. To say your tastes are really represented by a list of the things that you’ve listened to—almost anyone would say that’s not exclusively true. They’re correlated, certainly. But it’s decontextualized. Looking at a stream of all the tracks I’ve played, it tells you something.” But there is, of course, much that the data does not say.

Source: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly

For example, the focus on mood music and vibes that is a part of the two-dimensional vision is never really music that anyone knows and it does not create fans. While monetisation built around repeats moves artists away from more challenging ideas. It also leads to the development of cheaper standardised ‘perfect fit content’ where artists are legitimately paid to generate particular content – a concept similar to say a wedding artist – which Spotify then owns the masters for. One of the issues is that this all becomes centred around data about Spotify, rather than our music. Going beyond the town square, Pelly suggests that Spotify is best considered as another part of the social media shopping mall where you never quite know what is you and what is the algorithm.

In addition to corrupting the culture around music listening, Spotify pays labels and distros on percentage, rather than paying artists per play. This is further confounded by ‘Discovery Mode’ where artists can accept lower royalities in exchange for algorithmic promotion. This leads to the situation where independent artists are confronted with the question: “Is $0.0035 really better than nothing?” In case that was not bad enough, 86% of tracks with less than 1000 plays in the year are actually demonetised , while at the same time artists are being forced to do more and more.

“If retailers are going to take your vinyl album, it’s like, Well, what are you doing to tell people it’s on sale here? Are you doing street posters? It’s the same thing on digital services. It’s not just Ah yes, you’ve got a great record and we are going to support you. What’s the campaign? What’s the story? What can we expect? Have you got any festivals or TV appearances? All of these things feed into whether people support the music or not. I’d love to think it’s all about the music but it’s really not. Clearly having great music helps. But there’s actually a lot of great music out there.”

Source: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly

All in all, Spotify is akin to playing the slots where the house always wins.

For Pelly, the future involves rethinking profit motives and power structures. The fear is that with all the current constraints, we are losing music that will never be made.

if we keep giving too much power to corporations to shape our lives, and we don’t protect working musicians’ abilities to survive. We are foreclosing that possibility for music to evoke those ephemeral unknowns. We are losing a lot of music that will never be made. We are letting new expressions, emotional articulations, and points of connection slip away.

Source: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly

In the end, the challenge is bigger than music, it is about building the world that we want.

Mood Machine is a strange book. On the one hand, many of the ideas neither felt new or read is somehow obvious. For example, here are some links from my bookmarks collected over the years:

  • Reflecting upon Spotify’s Wrapped, the yearly review, Kelly Pau reminds us of the place of algorithms and artificial intelligence embedded within these choices and recommendations, which often come with their own sets of biases and assumptions around gender and mood.
  • Wondering about how much Spotify understands us, Meghan O’Gieblyn explains that there are limits to how much an application can know, such as your thoughts and beliefs, personal history, and the unspoken nuances of the relationships that have made you who you are.
  • Discussing the collapse of genre and music loyalities, Jack Hamilton argues that Spotify’s main focus is time on app and the data it can collect from this.
  • The Patent Drop newsletter explores a patent for mood-recommendations based on wearable data and what this actually means. For example, do you suggest songs that allow a user to revel in that mood, or do you suggest songs that try to shift a user’s mood.
  • Unpacking the Discover Weekly feature, Sophia Ciocca discusses the three main types of recommendation models that Spotify employs: Collaborative Filtering models, Natural Language Processing (NLP) models, and Audio models.
  • Widening the sources of data used to help profile users, Sarah Zhang discusses Spotify’s move to team up with AncestryDNA to provide richer results and the problems with this.
  • Discussing the role of technology in our future as a part of her Boyer Lectures, Genevieve Bell argues that all companies now are first and foremost data companies, whether it be a music application, a supermarket or an airline.

Yet, I had never really joined all the pieces as Pelly does in such a concise manner in Mood Machine.

I was interested in Pelly’s exploration of the problems with how Spotify captures our data to build a profile and how this does not really capture all the ways we listen and consume. It is interesting to consider the way in which Spotify helps mold a ‘templated self’ or what David Marshall describes as a ‘dual strategic persona’. As Michel Faber captures in his book Listen, music and the act of listening is so much more than can be condensed down into a few data points.

Personally, I am always intrigued by both the suggestions for different playlists or end of year. I always wondered how this information was garnered, especially when it compiled such weird mixes as this combination of Fleetwood Mac, Nine Inch Nails, Supertramp, Bruce Springsteen, Tool and Neil Young:

A screenshot of a playlist involving a diverse range of artists.

I knew that Spotify collected information around key and scale, but I was unaware of the other elements that fed the ‘taste profile’. (Ironically, I actually listened to the above playlist wondering if in fact it worked together. Sad to say, it did not. I wonder what Spotify took from that?)

Often I will read the name of an artist somewhere, not a mood or anything, and go and listen to a track or an album to find out more. This is not a ‘like’ or anything else, it is simply serendipitously perusing the shelves. The same can be said when I dive into some human playlists, from artists such as Fourtet, Caribou, Jamie XX, Aphex Twin, Worker & Parasite and Twinkle Digitz, or based on books and podcasts, such as Half Deaf, Completely Mad, Rip It Up and Start Again and Only the Shit You Love podcast. In addition to this, there are times when I play music for my children. Yet Spotify takes all this and somehow flattens it into the same sausage.

In the end, I feel that Mood Machine provides an account of the enshittification of Spotify. With this, I appreciate the push for different models, but fear that I am trapped in convenience, especially when I am within a family account where it is bigger than me. Here I am reminded of Cory Doctorow’s point about collective action:

Any time you encounter a shitty, outrageous racket that’s stable over long timescales, chances are you’re looking at a collective action problem. Certainly, that’s the underlying pathology that preserves the scholarly publishing scam, which is one of the most grotesque, wasteful, disgusting frauds in our modern world (and that’s saying something, because the field is crowded with many contenders).

Source: Pluralistic: MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier (16 Aug 2024) by Cory Doctorow

Personally, I have turned to vinyl and Bandcamp for supporting artists and trying to step beyond my ‘taste profile’. However, I always find limits to this. However, maybe I need to accept that frictionless experience comes at a cost:

Resisting the algorithm is hard and often requires sifting through more noise yourself to find the signal, but it is doable with intention. It takes both knowing what you are looking for and being open to finding something totally not what you were expecting.

Source: Accepting friction: listening without a streaming subscription (Part 1) – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden by Tracy Durnell

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What James Taylor said of Joni is true of Taylor: “She’s building the canvas as well as she is putting the paint on it.” Now we live in a world of Taylor Swifts. Rob Sheffield ‘Heartbreak is the National Anthem’

With my daughters, I have read bits and pieces of various books on Taylor Swift bought through school bookclub. They often capture the myth or artist as commodity, always with an eye to being objective, starting from the beginning and working their way through, trying not to get bogged down by distraction. Rob Sheffield’s Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music is different to this, his book embraces the distractions.

Heartbreak is the National Anthem is complicated. On the one hand Sheffield is a writer for Rolling Stone, with his focus on various questions, connections and access, but he is also a a 6’5 middle aged man who loves Taylor Swift and has from the beginning. For example, he maintains a running list of all her songs ranked, with Bad Blood always being last. Sheffield’s text zooms in and out as required, capturing various aspects, myths, the brand, the cultural phenomenon. He is both inside and outside of the conversation. On the one hand critiquing the machine as a reviewer for The Rolling Stone:

I went to Taylor’s Tribeca apartment in the fall of 2017 to listen to her new album Reputation, for security reasons. (It was the only place where she could guarantee there weren’t any hidden microphones.) Two vinyl albums were propped up on the piano where she wrote most of the album: David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs and Kris Kristofferson’s Border Lord. She had a book (and only one) sitting on her dining room table: the collected lyrics of Bob Dylan.

Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield

While next minute at the very heart of it:

On the Reputation tour in New Jersey, in July 2018, she asked me before the show: “Enchanted” or “The Lucky One”? She knew it was an easy choice for me. But it added an element of stomach-churning anxiety to the show, as if people should be warned that something so cataclysmic was about to happen in the wild-card slot. There had been rain showers off and on that afternoon, but she triggered a full-on thunderstorm with this song. The clouds burst the exact moment she hit the “Please don’t be in love with someone else” coda—and nobody will ever convince me she didn’t make that happen.

Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield

He will zoom out to capture particular situations, such as the saga involving Kanye West or the decision to re-record her back catalogue. While he also zoom in to dig into particular tracks.

What I enjoyed about the book was Sheffield’s placement of Swift within the wider pop pantheon. He often compares her current status with artists of the past to place it in context:

Eighteen years in, even the greats tend to hit a dry spell. Let’s put it this way: When David Bowie was at this point in his career, he was hitting the skids with his 1980s shoulder-pads era with Never Let Me Down. Prince was turning into the Artist Formerly Known As, with Emancipation. Springsteen was in his Lucky Town era. Dylan bottomed out in his preachy born-again phase. Stevie Wonder got lost in The Secret Life of Plants.

Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield

He also situates her work in a wider literary tradition. For example, he compares her re-recording of songs with William Wordsworth’s lifelong revision of The Prelude or makes the connection with John Keats’ obsession with a particular kind of desire.

“Cruel Summer” is her ultimate window song, and not just the way she sings “Killing me slow, out the window.” There’s so much mystery in the erotics of windows in Taylor’s song—she’s got a Keatsian obsession with the kind of desire that doesn’t dare use the door. Heading out the window, she feels a rush that she doesn’t feel when she gets wherever she’s slithering off to. These lovers keep it on the hush, but that’s the attraction, the sub-rosa thrill. She’s seduced by the window.

Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield

It was interesting to think about this alongside Peter Kirkpatrick discussion of song lyrics as a form poetry on Late Night Live podcast. “Words used in an astonishing way.” Although, there are also some who, such as Simon Armitage, who argue that although they are related, lyrics and poetry are distinctly different:

In most cases, the orchestration has been built into the language already … when a composer takes those words, they want to fit them around another tune … very often what we admire in the poem gets lost in the transference.
…
Lyrics are made to come with this other stuff called music. When sung they can be transcendent, but when read on the page they can be inane.

Source: “Like portals to other worlds”: UK poet laureate Simon Armitage on the power of poems – ABC listen

Sheffield makes links with other artists throughout. including a bridge to the book of thirteen songs that Swift might have on a playlist.

One of the interesting things about Sheffield’s book is that he questions what writing can be. I initially wondered if the book was patched together due to lack of time, making the most of the current moment. However, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether I even wanted a dry and critical biography. In some ways, this book is as much about how to best capture the complexity that is ‘Taylor Swift’ as it is about Taylor Swift herself. Although the book begins with a traditional timeline, from there it embraces the subjectivity associated with culture and music. Some examples include listening to “Coney Island” on Coney Island.

I’ve spent an hour on the Q train each way just to hear “Coney Island” in Coney Island with the sun going down.

Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield

Having an attachment with the Archer when his mother passed away:

“The Archer,” that was the one. It spoke right to me, as I tried to blend into the background, pretending to be invisible. I flinched every time the line “they see right through me” led into “I see right through me!” Like most of the album, it’s a song about having secrets that you kid yourself you’re doing a great job of hiding, when they’re written all over your face. The woman in “The Archer,” she believes she’s making a bold confession, unaware that her intimacies are already obvious.

Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield

(In addition to the personal patchwork, another quirk to Sheffield’s writing is his perchance for littering the text with lyrics throughout.)

I came to this book after seeing Sheffield mentioned in Dylan Jones’ Sweet Dreams. I did not have much expectation other than a book about Taylor Swift. What I ended up enjoying was the way Sheffield’s bias as a fan invited me as a listener and reader into the text to reflect upon my own experiences as no book could properly do justice to all the nuisances.

She will be so many different Taylors, way too many, and they’ll all want the microphone all the damn time.
She will make brilliant moves—or catastrophic gaffes, because that’s what rock stars do, giving us facepalm concussions. She’ll break up with country music, then get back together. She will break up with being single, then get back together. She will get judged, denounced, laughed at, condemned. (Ignored? That one’s not really in the cards.) She will have great ideas and terrible ideas. She will turn some of these terrible ideas into great songs, or vice versa. She will find the drama in any situation, no matter how trivial or ordinary it might seem. She will change how pop music is made, heard, experienced. She will bait. She will switch. She will be a terrible role model for anyone trying to lead a calm and sensible emotional life. She will jump into every feeling with the certainty that it’s the last one she’ll ever have.
In 2024, it’s a cliché to say Taylor Swift is the music industry, but it isn’t necessarily wrong.

Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield

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The very thing that seems most worth resurrecting from postpunk is its commitment to change. This belief was expressed both in the conviction that music should keep moving forward and in the confidence that music can transform the world, even if only through altering one individual’s perceptions or enlarging one’s sense of possibility. Simon Reynolds ‘Rip It Up and Start Again’

I remember when I first saw chocolate being served as a part of the main dish on some gourmet cooking show. It was not what I had been brought up to expect. For me, chocolate was a sweet, a snack, not savory a part of a meal. However, what it highlighted was the way in which ingredients can be used in different circumstances for different purposes. I think something similar can be said about the post-punk movement that Simon Reynolds captures in his book Rip it Up and Start Again.

I always thought the punk ethos was about three chords and a DIY attitude, but had never really considered what was meant by ‘post-punk’. This confusion is something Jim Windolf touches on in his review of the book:

“Postpunk” proves to be a slippery label. If Reynolds wasn’t aware of this when he started his research, he learned it the hard way while talking with various postpunk musicians for this book. “A lot of them, when I mentioned postpunk, didn’t quite understand what I meant,” he said in an interview posted on his Web site. “Which is odd, because I did all this research in the music papers, and that was what people called it, even then. . . . It’s not something I’ve invented!”

Source: ‘Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984,’ by Simon Reynolds – The New York Times Book Review by Review by Jim Windolf

Reynolds sums up post-punk as a mindset of ‘constantly looking forward’ and a ‘commitment to change’.

The very thing that seems most worth resurrecting from postpunk is its commitment to change. This belief was expressed both in the conviction that music should keep moving forward and in the confidence that music can transform the world, even if only through altering one individual’s perceptions or enlarging one’s sense of possibility.

Source: Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds

The openness of the definition allows the movement to encapsulate a range of genres from new wave, no wave, goth, new synthpop and industrial. So many different flavours, but always coming back to the notion of change.

Unlike Dylan Jones’ book Sweet Dreams – The Story of the New Romantics, which focuses on years, tying together various voices, Reynolds’ book provides each chapter with a particular focus. Sometimes this is a particular band, but more often than not it is about a scene or genre in a particular place and time. Although organised chronologically, beginning with Public Image Limited and ending with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, each chapter spans a few years and sometimes overlap with other chapters and scenes.

What was interesting were the various through-lines that linked all the different scenes, the background characters that pop-up again and again, whether it be Malcolm McLaren, Brian Eno, Trevor Horn, Martin Hannett and Martin Rushent. For example, after seemingly laying the groundwork with David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, Brian Eno then worked with Talking Heads, Devo and U2, and produced the No New York no wave compilation.

Rip It Up and Start Again was good to read after listening to Damian Cowell’s Only The Shit You Love: The Podcast, in which he provided his own reflections of growing up through the punk and post-punk movements. It also provided a wider perspective on the time and filled some of the gaps in Jones’ Sweet Dreams. However, as thorough and informative as Reynolds’ book is, I was still left unsure about what actually constituted ‘post-punk’? For example, Reynolds touches on the Eurythmics, but not Blondie. This is something Windolf touches on:

That’s also how it went for the Clash, which made a rude noise in 1977 and sold big in 1982 with a brand of expensively produced pop that borrowed from funk and reggae. But the Clash doesn’t make Reynolds’s postpunk list. Neither do similar acts of the era, like the Jam, the Police, X, Elvis Costello and Blondie, all of whom began by making raw music only to end up turning out more sophisticated fare tinged with soul, funk, reggae, disco, hip-hop or Latin touches.

Source: ‘Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984,’ by Simon Reynolds – The New York Times Book Review by Review by Jim Windolf

I think one of the challenges of this sort of book is that some bands, such as U2 and Talking Heads, started out with ‘post-punk’ ethos, before transitioning to something more post-post-punk:

Many groups born in the postpunk period went on to enjoy huge mainstream fame, including New Order, Depeche Mode, the Human League, U2, Talking Heads, Scritti Politti, and Simple Minds. Others who were minor or background figures at the time went on to achieve later success in a different guise, such as Bjork, the KLF, Beastie Boys, Jane’s Addiction, and Sonic Youth. But the history of postpunk is definitely not written by the victors. There are dozens of bands who made landmark albums but never achieved more than an abiding cult status, earning the dubious consolation prize of being an influence and reference point for ’90s alt-rock megabands (Gang of Four begot Red Hot Chili Peppers, Throbbing Gristle sired Nine Inch Nails, Talking Heads even supplied Radiohead with their name). Hundreds more made just one or two amazing singles, then disappeared with barely a trace.

Source: Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds

In addition to a question of starting and stopping, I assume that there are always limits to what can be included. For example, Clinton Walker’s wrote Stranded – The Secret History Of Australian Independent Music to give voice to the Australian underground movement:

When English writer Simon Reynolds published his history of post-punk, Rip It Up and Start Again, in 2005, I was disappointed to find it was biased towards the UK and US in exactly the way that had always infuriated me, and against which I had attempted to deploy my writing as a corrective. But at least he had the diplomacy to apologise for ‘having regretfully decided not to grapple with European post-punk or Australia’s fascinating deep underground scene’.

Source: Stranded: Australian Independent Music, 1976–1992 by Clinton Walker

All in all, I feel that the more I read and listen, the more there is to know.

On a side note, I found a playlist of all the songs mentioned on Spotify.

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Kraftwerk are not just a man-machine, they are also a myth-machine. Uwe Schütte ‘Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany’

Kraftwerk is one of those artists that I grew up with a particular impression, cold, robotic, strange, almost comical. A lot of this was based on seeing Autobahn played on Rage late at night / early in the morning. However, my listening never really went beyond this. Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany offers an introduction to the band beyond first impressions.

Uwe Schütte covers the origins of the band in post-war Germany, with the influences of American culture and Andy Warhol. It then works through their various albums, the inspiration and intent around each, as well as how they were received. While the book ends with the legacy in regards to the New Romantics, inspiring acts such as Depeche Mode, and laying the ground work for acts such as Daft Punk and Aphex Twin, who are/were able to operate as something of ‘machine’ separate from the humans.

Throughout, the book, Schütte explores the way in which Kraftwerk were/are a ‘man-machine’ where they worked beyond the individual. This was in part captured in the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art’, where the act was more than just the songs, but rather the the whole package, including multimedia presentations and artistic representations. With everything being a part of the act, this in turn opened the door to various myths to fill the spaces left spare. For Schütte, this all comes back to the question about whether they were in fact as important for music as The Beatles?

What is Kraftwerk’s legacy? Were they as (or even more) important than The Beatles in the development of pop music? Could, for example, techno have emerged from inner-city areas of Detroit without them? And to what extent did their early decision to remain fiercely independent, running their own label and, more significantly, their own studio, set a model for other bands and producers? How did the overarching concept of the man-machine influence later (male and female) artists in the realm of electronic music? And are Kraftwerk not just a man-machine but also a myth-machine?

Source: Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany by Uwe Schütte

What I found interesting was that there particular legacy, when they released  Autobahn  (1974), Trans-Europe Express  (1977), The Man-Machine (1978), and Computer World (1981), was only a seven year period. Beyond that, they seem to have played on their legacy as a multimedia act. In that way, I guess they are similar to the Beatles? With regards to the legacy, it is hard to appreciate now the impact that they would have had at the time, when electronic music was not as accessible as it is today. This is something Dylan Jones captures in his book Sweet Dreams. I also cannot be helped thinking about TISM with regards to the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk.

With this in mind, it is strange how music comes in and out of vogue, how certain songs continue to live on, while other songs and artists slip back into the culture consciousness. I definitely came away from Schütte’s book with a deeper understanding of Kraftwerk, even more so than say Double J’s tour de force. Now to go back and listen with this new appreciation.

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I always think of the eighties as the alien tearing itself out of the body of punk. Toyah Willcox in Dylan Jones 'Sweet Dreams - The Story of the New Romantics'

I originally came upon Sweet Dreams – The Story of the New Romantics by Dylan Jones via an interview with Andrew Ford on The Music Show. However, it feels like one of those books that continually pops up in my feed, whether it be by Tony Martin in a conversation with Damian Cowell in episode 10 of Only the Shit You Love, the Podcast or in the Depeche Mode J-Files.

Sweet Dreams covers the period between 1975 to 1985. The book explores the music that influenced the New Romantics (Kraftwerk, Neu!, Giorgio Moroder, David Bowie, Roxy Music) and those caught up in the movement (Gary Numan, Ultravox, Visage, Orchestral Movement in the Dark, Spandet Ballet, ABC, Human League, Duran Duran, Adam and the Ants, Culture Club, Eurythmics, Wham, Sade, Depeche Mode, New Order.) Some bands were at the heart of the change, while others positioned themselves in opposition to it, however they were all a part of it in some way shape or form.

Although music is the through-line through out the book, it is more than just a documentation of the music of that time. The book explores various influences, such as the clubs (The Blitz and Hacienda Club), fashion (Antony Price and Vivian Westwood), culture (MTV and gay rights), the place of education (St. Martin’s College), and politics (Thatcherism and Falkland War).

As a text, Sweet Dreams is a behemoth, traversing ten years, including over 100 different voices, and spanning over 600 pages. As an exploration of the time, it dives in further than say the BBC documentary Synth Britannia. At the same time I was also left feeling that there was probably still so much that was cut out or possibly left silent due to access to sources or the artists. For example, although Jones touches on artists like Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, I imagine he could have gone into some of these beginnings in more detail. In addition to this, I feel that this is also one of those books that you could choose a particular thread and explore further, based on Jones’ own bibliography at the end. Although, sadly or gladly, Malcolm McLaren’s autobiography is not one of them, clearly for a reason it would seem.

What I found intriguing was how so much changed in such a short time.

Carey Labovitch: When you are living through a period, you don’t think of it as a period.

Source: Sweet Dreams by Dylan Jones

The book begins with the rise of punk and ends with drugs and stadium pop on the back of LiveAid. A particular part of this change was the revolutionary roll of technology. Gone was the punk ethic of learning ‘three chords’, this was instead replaced by electronics:

Phil Oakey: We laughed at the other bands learning three chords – we used one finger.

Source: Sweet Dreams by Dylan Jones

This is something Damian Cowell discussed in the Only The Shit You Love: The Podcast, with regard to his purchase of the Roland TR-606, but Jones’ book really fleshes this out.

It begins with bands like the Human League deciding between buying a second-hand car or a miniKORG 700, Gary Numan rewriting a whole album after finding a Polymoog in the studio, or the Eurythmics getting a loan to buy equipment, including a Movement Systems Drum Computer, Roland Sh-101 and an Oberheim OB-X, and seemingly ends with unions passing a motion to ban the use of electronic devices.

When Barry Manilow toured the UK in January 1982, he used synths to simulate the orchestral sounds of a big band, after which the union passed a motion to ban the use of synths, drum machines and any electronic devices ‘capable of recreating the sounds of conventional musical instruments’. They were particularly concerned about the possible effect on West End theatrical productions, imagining orchestra pits full of ‘technicians’ instead of musicians.

Source: Sweet Dreams by Dylan Jones

(On a side note, Massive Attack actually sold a car to replace the sampled strings on ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ with a proper orchestra.)

It is easy to write off some of these early sounds as dated or simplistic, especially as synthesisers and production techniques have ebbed and evolved over time. But this does not capture the significance of the change. (I cannot help be reminded of the quote, “There is more technology in an iPhone 5 than the first Apollo spacecraft that went to the moon.”)

Personally, I have an Arturia MiniFreak, Roland MC-101 and Roland JX-08. I imagine I could probably reproduce much of what was done in the early eighties and more and not really think much of it. However, this was all new and cutting edge.

John Foxx: I figured new instruments had always radically altered music in the past – for instance, the electric guitar. Here was the next major shift – the synthesizer.

Source: Sweet Dreams by Dylan Jones

With this in mind, the book argues that the music produced between late 70’s and early 80’s was as influential to music, if not more so, as the changes that occurred in the mid-60’s.

Simon Napier-Bell: This period was as important as the original British invasion. If you really want to look back at pop culture, the first British invasion was during the first decade of the twentieth century, when every single musical on Broadway was British and Brits invaded Broadway. The second invasion was the one we call the first British invasion, which was the sixties. But the eighties one was equally relevant, and possibly more important, because the one in the sixties basically involved a lot of groups who sounded like the Beatles. There was much more variety in the eighties. The sixties were great because that was when we all discovered we could have sex every night, but the eighties were more creative.

Source: Sweet Dreams by Dylan Jones

What amazes me now, thinking about bands that try and reproduce the ‘sound of the eighties’, is how different and diverse all the bands in the early eighties actually were, often from album to album.

Jim Kerr: The amazing thing about people in the eighties was their ambition. Not so much ambition for riches and fame – that was too far down the road – but ambition to do something glorious. And whether that was our band or spiky music like the Cure and Magazine or early Spandau Ballet and Duran. I mean, early Spandau wasn’t Tony Hadley’s chocolate box; from day one they were going to take over the world! And they did. And all of them were quite maverick. To me, it wasn’t so much any movement; it was more like there weren’t two or three bands like the Cure, there was the Cure. There weren’t two or three bands like the Human League, like the Birthday Party, like the Smiths, there was one. A lot of real individualism and wonderful imagination, to such a level that it was almost overwhelming. It was an incredibly political decade – the Berlin Wall coming down, Mandela being freed, the miners’ strikes, the poll tax, Tiananmen Square. It certainly wasn’t all shoulder pads, Rambo and Filofaxes.

Source: Sweet Dreams by Dylan Jones

As Andrew Ridgeley argues, this liberation was made possible by punk.

Andrew Ridgeley: What punk did was liberate how people thought about creativity in the musical sense.

Source: Sweet Dreams by Dylan Jones

Or as Toyah Willcox suggests, the eighties was an alien escaping from punk.

Toyah Willcox: I always think of the eighties as the alien tearing itself out of the body of punk.

Source: Sweet Dreams by Dylan Jones

With this sense of liberation and diversity, I was left wondering about the cross-overs, the bleeding between bands, the sharing of members, the different possibilities with the same technology. I also wonder what ‘shit‘ (to borrow from Brian Eno) was created that fertilised the success of others. Those bands that broke up in Wagga Wagga and did not have the luck or opportunity to get a loan to purchase synthesisers, like the Eurythmics. Sweet Dreams helped highlight that there is a world beyond ‘the hits’ or the satire of Wedding Singer and Zoolander, a world beyond the myth.

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Music criticism is not a review of the album you just made, its a review of your career up to that point. – Caroline Polachek Source: This Generation’s Caroline Polachek by Switched on Pop

After doing a deep dive into The Go-Betweens, I was looking for a new artist to delve into their discography, so I decided to dive into the world of Custard.

In part, I was left intrigued by the cross-over between Custard and The Go-Betweens. For example, Dave McCormick and Glenn Thompson had served as Robert Forster’s backing band for a time in Forster’s post Go-Betweens era, while Thompson was a part of the reformed Go-Betweens line-up. They were also integral to putting together Write Your Adventures Down, the tribute album to The Go-Betweens after Grant McLennan’s death.

I was also inspired after seeing Dave McCormack perform an acoustic set supporting The Fauves. I have never seen Custard live and was not sure what to expect. What I was privileged with was a solo set of deep cuts, classics and a countrified cover of Taylor Swift’s ‘Blank Space’. Although I had read about McCormack’s country and western origins (COW) in Andrew Stafford’s Pig City.

Robert Moore had imagined COW as a musical collective similar to the Wild Bunch behind the first Massive Attack album, where a virtual reserve bench of musicians would be on call to play gigs or recordings. Often the band would be joined on stage by backing vocalists the Sirloin Sisters, twins Maureen and Suzie Hansen; at other times, former Go-Between John Willsteed and occasional Queensland Symphony Orchestra violinist John Bone would jump up to add their own flourishes.

SOURCE: Andrew Stafford – Pig City: From the Saints to Savage Garden

This never made sense with the image of Custard that I had from the 90’s.

Lastly, I was left wondering by Damian Cowell’s comment on the Take 5 Podcast reflecting on the 90’s zeitgeist. Talking about Custard, he suggested that it was important to leave listeners with something more:

Use your power wisely … Treat them to an anchovy.

All this left me feeling that maybe there was more to hear and that maybe it was time to give Custard the time of day.

Custard were formed in Brisbane in the early 90’s. Although they have had various line-ups over their time, the classic line-up has been Dave McCormack on guitar and vocals, Paul Medew on bass, Matthew Strong on guitar and Glenn Thompson on drums. As a member of McCormack’s other project COW (Country or Western), Thompson was actually always around. For example, he was involved with creating the artwork associated with Custard’s first release Buttercup / Bedford.

They have had two distinct periods, their initial time in the 90’s until they disbanded in 2000, and their reformation in 2010’s. Their time in the 90’s stood in contrast to the dour grunge sound dominant at the time.

Although they’ve obviously been listening to the Pixies as well as Pavement, unlike many other bands of the ’90s they studiously avoided the Seattle sound, preferring to indulge in pop hooks and resolute cheerfulness.

Source: Brisbane 1990-1993 Review – AllMusic by Jody Macgregor

Or as McCormack reflected upon, they wrote “melancholy song that you could listen to a few times.”

“It’s that whole realisation that people like The Go-Betweens can have on you,” Dave McCormack said. “On the balance of things, no one wants to hear a happy throwaway song. I don’t really. I wanna hear a sad, melancholy song that you could listen to a few times. That’s something we came to realise and therefore that’s what we wanted to do.”

Source: Classic Album – Custard – Loverama by ABC Listen

During this time they worked with producers such as Eric Drew Feldman (Captain Beefheart, PJ Harvey, Pere Ubu, Augie March et al.) and Magoo (Regurgitator, Midnight Oil et al.) They were a part of the music industry being turned upside down.

The alternative boom of American bands meant Australian major labels and commercial radio were more willing to take a punt on Aussie bands, putting a guitar band like You Am I, who formed in 1989, in a prime position.
…
The alt-rock boom in Australia kicked off in earnest in 1994, building and bubbling to its own boiling point as it had in 1991 in the US.

Source: 1991 saw the music industry turned upside down, and 30 years later, its echoes remain by Matt Neal

In contrast, their later work is often a little more subdued and has largely been self-produced by Glenn Thompson, although it never quite sits comfortably within ‘Adult Contemporary’ even if it has come out through ABC Records.

Although it often feels like Dave McCormack is portrayed as the face of the band, one of the things that I had never appreciated is how the rest of the band all play their part, often contributing their own songs to the mix. When asked by Lindsay McDougall about what make a Custard song in an interview for Respect All Lifeforms, McCormack explained that it was everyone adding their piece.

There’s sketches of the song and you throw it out to Paul, Glenn and Matthew and then they play it back to you and you say “ahhh, it’s a Custard song” … that nice sort of organic interchange.

Source: Dave McCormack and Custard Respect All Lifeforms by Lindsay McDougall (SoundCloud)

In some ways that may seem self-obvious, but listening to some of the other projects that McCormack has been a part of, there is a similarity and difference. I think that there is something to be said about the chemistry of the band.

It was interesting watching Jonathan Alley’s documentary Love in Bright Landscapes and the pressures put on The Triffids by the record labels with Calenture. I was left wondering if something like this never happened with Custard as the band was always bigger than the individual and maybe that is why they actually initially disbanded?

Listening to the albums, I started with Buttercup Bedford. Although their ‘first’ album, it is both hard to find (not on Spotify) and possibly intentionally forgotten.

Due to its self-published nature, the album has not appeared on any streaming sites and has largely been a rarity to find online, with most sites links to download no longer working. Dave McCormack has expressed that maybe it should stay offline.

Source: BUTTERCUP (BEDFORD) by Custaro.fans

With the majority of the album recorded in eight hours after winning Australian Academy of Music’s Encouragement Award prize of $500 recording time, it felt to me like jangly pop on speed.

David McCormack: That’s when the drugs really came into play, around that time . . . In 1988–89 it was all speed, acid, ecstasy had just hit. And because we had nothing to do – we’d basically finished our degrees and were on the dole, and we were white middle-class kids from Kenmore – we could just get out of it forever. That’s why Who’s Gerald? broke up. We’d be speeding for days on end.

SOURCE: Andrew Stafford – Pig City: From the Saints to Savage Garden

The ‘second’ album, Brisbane 1990 – 1993, combines the Gastanked and Brisbane EPs. It is full of ideas and influences. As soon as you think a song will be one thing, something unexpectedly disrupts this.

These songs capture Custard in lo-fi during the period when they were a group of Pavement fans writing quirky but straightforward love songs like “I Just Want to Be with You” and “Edie,” which has two chords — E and D. David McCormack‘s excitable little-boy tone can be heard taking shape while he sings oddball lyrics like “I had too much to dream last night” in “Satellite,” his rewrite of “Goodnight, Irene.” The self-descriptive “Short Pop Song,” which manages to cram in three tunes’ worth of material despite its 1:14 running time, shows the way toward later reflexive efforts like “Hit Song.”

Source: Brisbane 1990-1993 Review – AllMusic by Jody Macgregor

Wahooti Fandango continues the joyful chaos associated with pasting ideas together to somehow find some semblance of coherence. It often feels like each song is almost in contrast with itself.

Drawing on a vast array of influences (from the art-rock of Pere Ubu, Devo and Sonic Youth to country ballads and big band swing), Custard’s casual, whimsical approach to their own music often masks the degree of craft underlying songs.

Source: Wahooti Fandango by Wikipedia

Produced by Eric Drew Feldman in Hyde St Studios, Wisenheimer feels less contrasting than Wahooti Fandango, but each track still seems to jump between a different genre, whether it be the angular rock guitar one minute with ‘GooFinder’, to leaning back into the country origins with ‘Leisuremaster’. With sixteen tracks in under 40 minutes, you never really get to settle as a listener. Even the slower tracks fly on by.

Continuing on from the other albums in bouncing between pop, surf, stoner, country and rock, I feel We Have the Technology is best described as seriously silly. Although each track seems to make its own statement in itself, they feel like they are contrasted with how they are organised on the album.

We Have The Technology caught McCormack in an ornery mood. Heavily under the influence of Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, also made at Easley Studios, McCormack’s songs were growing ever more tangential and self-referential. And consequently, the music – as a review of another Brisbane band had earlier suggested – ‘disappeared up its own arse’.

David McCormack: I remember Eric Drew Feldman sitting me down in some diner saying, ‘Look, you’ve got to have a radio single, you’ve just got to have one . . . Go as crazy as you want, but you need three or four radio songs so the band can keep going, you can’t just ignore that stuff,’ and he was right. But I was just like, ‘No, man, we’re fucking artists!’ It’s maturity . . . If I could go back, there would be a lot of decisions I would make differently.

The release of Thompson’s Music Is Crap as a single in February 1998 painted the band into a corner.

Source: Pig City by Andrew Stafford

For me, there are just too many flavours on the plate with this album. It balances between genius, chaos and who cares. What remains after all is said and done is a certain catchiness that pervades throughout.

Teaming up with Magoo, Loverama is a case of ‘same, same, but different’. Although it is roughly the same length as previous albums, there are not as many tracks. Although the same ingredients are present, whether it be distorted guitar, slide guitar, weird effects, quirky lyrics, I feel it is the placement of the drums and bass in the mix seems to hold the songs together and provide a semblance of continuity.

“I was happy to do something that wasn’t as throwaway as some of the other ones [songs on earlier albums],” McCormack said, although he was aware his intentions might not land in the same way for listeners.

“I’m sure everyone else would think it’s an overtly happy and quirky Custard record. But I think for us, we could listen to it and go, ‘ah yeah that’s right, that was fucked when that happened.’”

Source: Classic Album – Custard – Loverama by ABC Listen

After this album, the band disbanded, with members going off in different directions and different projects.

They began playing odd concerts again in 2009, however their next album Come Back, All is Forgiven did not come out until 2015. Although it begins with a more laidback country rock feel – maybe Custard Goes Country – they still have the knack of throwing a spanner into the mix that extends allows it to pivot. Craig Mathieson described it as a ‘welcome visit’.

Despite the title, for Custard the new album isn’t so much a career comeback as a welcome visit

Source: Dave McCormack’s Custard comes back (and all is forgiven)) by Craig Mathieson

Similarly, The Common Touch is also bit more subdued than some of their earlier albums, but it feels like this space gives the opportunities for the hooks and harmonies to really flourish. For me, it is one of those albums that the more I listened, the more I could not help sing along with.

“In the ’90s it was much more of an ongoing concern that we were a professional music group, so you had to constantly think about how to make people interested in you again. How could we get people to our gigs? How do we get songs on the radio? And none of those factors really come into the equation now. Now it’s like, ‘What’s the most interesting songs we can write and record and release?’ “

And there’s no shortage of those on The Common Touch, a varied and focused record that shows the band’s eagerness to move beyond their quirky slacker pop “golden days”.

“This is the first time I sat in my spare room in Bexley and just went, ‘Right, every day I’m going to sit down and make myself available to write songs.’ So for about three or four weeks, five days a week, I’d just sit in the room and make stuff up.”

Source: From the ’90s to now, Custard haven’t lost their common touch by Bronwyn Thompson

In contrast, Respect All Lifeforms feels like a return to the ebbs and flows of We Have the Technology and Loverama. Unlike Come Back, All Is Forgiven and The Common Touch, which both open with slower more somber tracks and a touch of country, this albums kicks off with a bang with ‘Couples Fight’. The album then bounces around from there. Gone is the lap steel and harmonica. It also does not wear the criticism of ‘Adult Contemporary’ made against their last two albums so well. Noel Mengel argues that what makes a Custard album is this ebb and flow throughout.

But what is so enjoyable about Custard’s music is not that it can be defined in any neat way but that it can’t. Pop-rock with guitars it might be, but there is a lot going on that rewards play after play. And it always sounds just like them.

Source: Respect All Lifeforms. Custard by Noel Mengel

In addition to sounding like them, there is something to be said about their lyrics throughout.

In an acceptance speech for the Nashville Songwriters Association International award for Songwriter-Artist of the Decade, Taylor Swift shared three genres associated with her lyrics.

I categorize certain songs of mine in the “Quill” style if the words and phrasings are antiquated, if I was inspired to write it after reading Charlotte Brontë or after watching a movie where everyone is wearing poet shirts and corsets.

…

Fountain pen style means a modern storyline or references, with a poetic twist.

…

Frivolous, carefree, bouncy, syncopated perfectly to the beat. Glitter Gel Pen lyrics don’t care if you don’t take them seriously because they don’t take themselves seriously.

Source: Taylor Swift Explains Her Three Types Of Lyrics In Nashville Songwriters Association Awards Speech by Tom Breihan

Thinking about Custard, I feel that there are possibly three types of Custard lyrics:

  • Songs that capture a particular topic or situation (i.e. ‘Apartment’)
  • Songs about a person (maybe auto) (i.e. ‘Lez Pinball’)
  • Songs about … songs (i.e. ‘Hit Song’)

However, the more I listened with this framework in mind, it felt somewhat contrived to fit the songs into such rigid categories.

Noel Mengel suggests that what ties Custard’s songs together is an eye for the normal everyday:

You could say Custard have been writing about normal lives and everyday situations since 1990.

An easy hook but not entirely accurate. As with any songwriting the key to such local observations is to create something interesting and lively rather than banal. Or in Custard’s case, interesting, lively and sometimes outright hilarious. Which is in keeping with all the exuberance and energy at the heart of their pop-rock musical style

Source: Respect All Lifeforms. Custard by Noel Mengel

I feel that this is what Cowell was touching upon when referring to ‘anchovies’ in his discussion of Custard on the Take 5 Podcast.

Another element to their songs is that they always seem to enter halfway through a story or a scene. I remember reading something similar from Bono talking about U2’s song ‘One’:

“I like to start a song halfway through a conversation,” Bono says. “As with a lot of dialogue, you very often find yourself talking around the subject rather than through it.” The first lines came quickly: “Is it getting better or do you feel the same?/ Is it any easier on you now that you’ve got someone to blame?” The chorus emerged from an exchange between Bono and the Dalai Lama, who had invited U2 to contribute to a benefit concert called Oneness. Bono politely declined, signing the letter: “Lovely to correspond. One but not the same, Bono.”

Source: Why U2’s One is the ultimate anthem by Dorian Lynskey

For Custard, it is always a conversation, but where the listener is often left scrambling for any semblance of context. It is often akin to a story stripped of everything deemed as superfluous. Sometimes this can be disorientating. As Cowell touched upon with regards to ‘Nice Bird’, when McCormick sings, “Trey’s got the feathers and a 12-gauge shotgun.” We are left wondering who Trey is and why does he have a shotgun? As McCormack touched upon regarding ‘Min Min Lights’ with Lindsay McDougall.

I just got this sketch of an idea. The more mysterious it is the better

Source: Dave McCormack and Custard Respect All Lifeforms by Lindsay McDougall (SoundCloud)

Inspired by McCormick’s comments in their 90’s zine about reading Cormac McCarthy, I was intrigued by Graeme Wood’s comment that “characters are what matters.”

The Shakespeare is no coincidence—and of course Shakespeare, too, was weak on plot; as William Hazlitt and later Bloom affirmed, the characters are what matter. McCarthy’s Sheddan is an elongated Falstaff, skinny where Falstaff is fat, despite dining out constantly in the French Quarter on credit cards stolen from tourists. But like Falstaff, he is witty, and capable of uttering only the deepest verities whenever he is not telling outright lies. Bobby Western regularly shares in his stolen food and drink, and their dialogue—mostly Sheddan’s side of it—provides the sharpest statement of Bobby’s bind.

Source: The Incandescent Wisdom of Cormac McCarthy By Graeme Wood

I think that in some respects that the same could be said about Custard. Although McCormack and Thompson may not be William Shakespeare and Cormac McCarthy, it does feel that they do have an eye for character and description over plot.

It is a strange experience slowly listening through a bands oeuvre one album at a time, I feel it is impossible by nature of the exercise not to judge each album against the previous. Sometimes I wonder if you start to hear ghosts after awhile, with one album bleeding into another. For example, I would find myself making assertions, such as this album is more straight-forward or has a different feel when it comes to instrumentation, only to then question myself as many of the ingredients are present in their earlier work. I think that this maybe what Caroline Polachek was touching upon in regards to the challenges associated with album reviews:

Music criticism is not a review of the album you just made, its a review of your career up to that point.

Source: This Generation’s Caroline Polachek by Switched on Pop

Growing up, I remember buying a copy of We Have the Technology at Cash Convertors. My guitar teacher was encouraging me to play the surf rock tune ‘Memory Man’ as a part of my Year 12 group music performance. I knew the singles, such as ‘Anatomically Correct’, ‘Nice Bird’ and ‘Music is Crap’ and feel that past me probably skipped to those tracks on my CD player or computer, but I fear that I never gave the album the patience it probably deserved or needed.

In a review of Loverama, the comment was made that if something was bad it was meant to be.

If something’s bad, that’s what they meant to do, it’s them having fun.

Source: Custard – Loverama (album review) by blueyxd

Maybe this comment is as much about the tendency for the band in the 90’s spending hours and hours perfecting their early albums in the studio. However, I also think that this could probably be read as “if something seems bad.” I feel you have two choices with Custard, you either accept them and their music and come to respect it for what it is or you do not. Younger me never quite reconciled with who they were, therefore I never quite respected it.

This left me wondering if Custard are one of those bands that are best considered as something of a Rorschach test.

The Rorschach test is a projective psychological test in which subjects’ perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both. Some psychologists use this test to examine a person’s personality characteristics and emotional functioning.

Source: Rorschach by Wikipedia

The music never gets too serious, but is serious none the less, while it never gets too silly, but is silly none the less. The interpretation of the music can then be considered a reflection of the listener. Some listeners take away with them the distorted rock, some the steel string, some the jangly pop. (Thinking about my group music performance, I feel that I could have just played Custard songs and I would have been able to tick all the requirements for my set?) With so much often going on all at once, there is always so much to take in.

I am glad I dived back into the music of Custard. It left me thinking differently about what music could and maybe should be. In the end, I learned to stop worrying and love Custard.

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In a world that moves too fast, and in which myriad exhausting decisions must be made at every turn, the small ceremony is, it seems, making a comeback. A new generation is discovering how soothing it is to blow imaginary dust from a beloved record – and a dozen other everyday sacraments besides. Observer ‘LPs are the antidote to a frenetic digital world’

I have given up smoking, well at least that is the excuse I give for my new found addiction, buying vinyl records. I feel that the use of the word ‘addiction’ might be hyperbole, but there is something about vinyl that feels like it is a want, rather than something of a need, especially when I often own copies of many of the albums on CD or am able to stream them. However, there is something about vinyl that has really captured my me.

I remember reading Doug Belshaw’s post a few years ago involving a letter to his future self.

You’re 23 years old now and this is you in 10 years time writing to yourself. I want to give you some advice and general pointers. Having already been you, I know it’s likely that you’ll read this and then forget about it, but I’m going to do it anyway. For better or worse, I’m still as stubborn as you are now.

Source: A letter from the future by Doug Belshaw

It is something that has haunted me since, what would I say to my past self that would make a difference today. I think I would probably say would be “don’t give up on your music.”

Saying I “gave up on music” seems strange, it is not that I completely stopped listening to or playing music, rather I feel at some stage in life I stopped engaging with music in a certain way. (Maybe Daniel Levitin might say this is normal, I really should read This is Your Brain on Music.) I have always listened to new and old music alike, but not in the same manner. I also sold a lot of my music equipment – MicroKorg, Roland MC303, audio mixer and reference monitors. In part, I think it reflected a change in life. On the one hand, Aphex Twin’s Drukqs is not really something I would be inclined to play with sleeping children around, while tinkering with music seemed like an indulgence. In addition to this, concerts and late nights no longer seemed like a priority.

I started buying back my my music equipment. This has included a Arturia MiniFreak, Roland MC101, Roland JX-08, a new mixer and monitors. I also started going to concerts again. With my effort to collect my crumbs, I started being more deliberate with my music listening, intentionally listening to albums and making notes of what I listened to. I also started purchasing some music via Bandcamp. However, I had not really returned to purchasing physical music. A part of this related to the fact that I simply do not get out my DVDs and CDs anymore, I was even challenged about whether I needed them anymore, whether they still ‘sparked joy‘. I do not think that this is anything new, as captured in a post from Rolling Stone from 2018:

As streaming gives the music industry its biggest profits in a decade, the CD business continues to plunge. CD sales have fallen 80 percent in the past decade, from roughly 450 million to 89 million. Since Tesla began manufacturing cars without CD players, other companies like Ford and Toyota have recently followed. Downloads – once seen as the CD’s replacement – have plummeted 58 percent since peaking in 2012, their profits now even smaller than physical sales. Artists have taken note; Bruce Springsteen released his latest box set, The Album Collection Vol. 2, 1987-1996, exclusively on vinyl, with no CD option, unlike 2014’s Vol. 1. “It’s a streaming world and a vinyl world with a quickly diminishing CD,” says Daniel Glass, president of Glassnote Records, indie-label home of Mumford & Sons and Phoenix.

Source: The End of Owning Music: How CDs and Downloads Died by Steve Knopper

One impetus to start listening to vinyl came when my dad gave me his record collection. I had always enjoyed trolling through his collection of crates when growing up, finding what felt like the weird and wonderful, whether it be David Bowie, Frank Zappa or early Cure. However, I soon realised that I wanted more than somebody else’s collection, I wanted my own music in the collection.

Over the years I have incidentally purchased some vinyl records, such as Radiohead’s In Rainbows and The King of Limbs, as well as Go-Go Sapien’s Love in Other Dimensions. I had some friends who bought vinyl. However, I never really appreciated them. I think I was caught up in the debate about audio quality, rather than how I actually listened to music. I spent years listening on poor headphones, it seemed a moot point to be arguing about the difference between streaming and vinyl records.

Another other inspiration of sorts has been Jim Groom’s VinylCasts, where he would play vinyl on internet radio. I think this may have planted the seed for vinyl being about more than just audio quality. Associated with this, Damian Cowell spoke a lot about searching for records and his love of listening as a part of his podcast for his album, Only the Shit You Love. Also, Austin Kleon often talks about playing particular records in his studio.

One of the things that is often said about records is how good the artwork is and how this is often lost in a world of streaming.

Album artwork today has a comparatively minimal role. It no longer serves as the focal point of an artist’s release, instead, it is one part in a much broader visual whole. Creating consistency between an artist’s social media posts, press photos, tour posters and any other visual elements serves the same purpose that album artwork once did: to build a world around an artist and contextualise their music for the listener. However, I can’t help lamenting what we might have lost. If less people are looking at album artworks, less resources will be allocated to them, and less people will put effort into them.

Source: The Lost Art of Album Artwork by Max Bloom

This is something that Damian Cowell discussed in regards to Roger Dean’s design for Osibisa.

Osibisa is the self-titled debut album by British afro rock band Osibisa
This is the cover art for the album Osibisa by the artist Osibisa.

Covers are often references as being the stimulus for purchasing a record. (This is something that my dad said that did.) For me though, this side of things is an added bonus. Of course covers look better blown up, but it is not what draws me to an album. (Although, I did spot Methyl Ethel’s Triage while flicking because it is such a unique cover.) Other than a handful of occasions (The Fauves Driveway Heart Attack and High Pass Filter’s Nice Coordinated Outfit), I have not bought a record without having already listened to it a number of times first.

When I buy a record, I do not necessarily want surprises. Even though I can connect my headphones to my turntable, I usually listen while doing things, therefore it is a very public medium. I am more inclined to listen to a range of music online, but when it has reached vinyl, it feels like a statement of intent. On the Take 5 podcast, Ed Droste discussed how it usually takes five listens to form a judgment on an album. My purchases can therefore be understood as a confirmation of my judgment. (Ironically, Droste felt that growing up with vinyl and being unable to skip helped with that judgement process.)

A strange thing I like about listening to vinyl is that it forces you to listen to a whole album. I like this constraint. There is no skipping and no pauses. If I have to stop an album for some reason, then it means I need to start that side all over again. In a world where being interrupted has become standard, missing a part of an album makes this more concrete. (I have actually taken the album approach to long drives. Instead of worrying about playlists and/or individual tracks, I have started queuing albums, one after another.)

Here is a list of my vinyl purchases so far:

  • Methyl Ethel – Oh Inhuman Spectacle
  • Methyl Ethel – Triage
  • Methyl Ethel – Are you Haunted?
  • The Panics – Cruel Guards
  • Sarah Blasko – Depth of Field
  • Massive Attack – Blue Lines
  • Portishead – Dummy
  • Portishead – Portishead
  • Jeff Buckley – Grace
  • The Avalanches’ – We Will Always Love You
  • DIANA – Familiar Touch
  • Joseph Shabason – Anne EP
  • Beach House – Teen Dream
  • Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
  • The Fauves – Driveway Heart Attack
  • Damian Cowell’s Disco Machine – Only the Shit You Love
  • Client Liaison – Divine Intervention
  • Montaigne – Complex
  • Washington – Batflowers
  • Kimbra – A Reckoning
  • Kate Bush – Hounds of Love
  • Depeche Mode – Violator
  • Radiohead – OK Computer OKNOTOK
  • High Pass Filter – Nice Coordinated Outfit
  • Tortoise – Standards
  • Autechre – Tri Repetae
  • Boards of Canada – Geogaddi
  • Lorde – Pure Heroine
  • Lorde – Melodrama
  • Taylor Swift – 1989
  • Tame Impala – The Slow Rush

I must admit, I have not started buying vinyl that maybe scratched to have on the shelf. I know some buy some albums just to have them in their collection, whether they are playable or not. I am also circumspect about buying expensive second hand records or expensive records in general. For example, I saw a used copy of The Triffids’ Born Sandy Devotion for near on $100. Although I love the album, I feel there needs to be a limit. (I am not buying four versions of the same record for four album covers.) I have bought many of my records when on sale and would rather have three different albums than one really expensive one. (If Jamie Lidell is right in his desire to purchase and play an original Can record, then I might be wrong about listening to original recordings. However, for now I will live with that.) I also prefer albums that a single records. I accept that some albums are actually quite long, but there are others that end up with on a couple of tracks on each side, which just seems frustrating. Oh, then there are albums like Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi which is three records.

As always, comments welcome. Oh, and I only used giving up smoking as a reference. I find it interesting the idea that if I had given up smoking that it would be somehow justified.

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Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity, a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux. Walter Benjamin ‘Task of the Translator’

Each January, on the Sizzletown podcast, Tony Martin tides over the holiday season with an unplugged version. This involves going back through his movie diaries from the 80’s. Each listing includes the name of the film and a five star rating. The podcast is basically him making sense of these ratings. One of the things that I find while listening is how much the rating seems superfluous to the explanation as to why he provided the rating. Personally, I always find it hard while listening to music or reading books as to how you make a judgment call. Often I am more interested in different ideas and beginnings and how this all changes in time.

Back in 1997, I went with my step-sister to see Romeo and Juliet at Knox City. Before the film, we went to JB-HiFi. This was before it had been floated on the stock exchange and stores were still somewhat rare. In addition to inquirying about a mobile phone (something else rare at the time), my sister bought a Celine Deon CD. I on the other hand bought Double Allergic by Powderfinger. My sister was mystified. She had never heard of Powderfinger. As time passed, I am pretty sure she found out who Powerfinger were and for me they went on the back burner.

In her review of JP Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between, Ali Smith argues that ‘books are go-betweens’.

Books are, in essence, go-betweens, works which conjure rhythm and release across time and history, across places of familiarity and those foreign to us; and personally and individually, too, it’s all a going-between, for every person who picks up a book for a first, then a second, then a third time.

Source: Rereading: The Go-Between by LP Hartley by Ali Smith

I would argue the music is the same. Different music, touches different people, at different times.

In Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Task of the Translator‘, he discusses the purpose of translation. Instead of conforming to the reader, the translator should conform to the source and target language of the work. The purpose is to highlight the relationship between the two languages, and how they complement each other. In his discussion of this, he gives the analogy of the tangent touching the circle:

Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity, a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.

Source: Task of the Translator by Walter Benjamin

I wonder if there is something in this ‘tangent’? Each listener hears an artist at a particular point in time from a particular point of view, in some ways they translate it into their own world.

In Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature, he talks about the notion of the ‘dominant, the risidual and the emergent’. For Williams, culture is always in one of three phases. As WIlliam’ touches on:

By ’emergent’ I mean, first, that new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship are continually being created. But it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between those which are really elements of some new phase of the dominant culture (and in this sense ‘species-specific’) and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it: emergent in the strict sense, rather than merely novel.

Source: Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams

Thinking about this idea in regards to my purchase of Powderfinger’s Double Allergic, this was clearly an emergent practice. They were on the up. Although they were popular, they were not popular enough to be a household name. For example, I did not jump onboard when they released Internationalist or Odyssey Number Fiver, their ‘popular’ albums.

The question that remains with this is what about those who may have jumped onboard before? For example, what about those who bought into (as my friend’s brother did) the release of Parables for Wooden Ears or invested into them when they were playing covers in Brisbane?

As listeners, we are not only a part of a whole, but we are individuals as well. For me, we hear artists not only as a part of a particular moment in time, but also as a part of one’s individual experiences. Personally, I often find myself seemingly late to the party. For example, I find myself stumbling upon an artist only to become mesmerised by their next release. I did this with Methyl Ethyl’s Are You Haunted. I remember stumbling upon Jake Webb with the release of Triage, however Are You Haunted and I seemed to meet at the right moment. More recently, I had a similar experience with Kimbra. I had listened to and liked Primal Heart, but there is something about A Reckoning that met me at a particular moment.

So What about you? How do you go about ‘rating’ music or rating anything?