Napiform

I’m very excited about this. I’ve been spending the last little while recording, using my Mac and GarageBand to try and get sounds running. For this album I’m trying as hard as possible to limit myself to really simple stuff: vocals, percussion, and a piano, because a piano’s the only instrument I own where making a note is as simple as hitting a key along the scale. I’m putting it all together in GarageBand because it’s simple and I don’t know what I’m doing. My hope is that the sounds in my head are beautiful enough that I won’t have to resort to weird tricks to making them, that if I tinker enough I can get it working right.

When I finally record I’ll be using the family studio equipment, but until then I’m using my Mac microphone, and I’m trying to emit the best sound I can despite that. The sounds I like I’m saving and using later with the crisper recordings.

This is a sampling of my playing a line on the piano, very poorly. (I don’t know if this is a line that will appear in the CD.) It’s played with four different renderings, then a fifth time of all four playing together.

The first rendering is my favorite one, because it sounds good and not very much like a piano. That’s the one that excited me. The second one is the original, unedited sound, the third one is tinny with bass removal, and the fourth is my current, unfinished attempt to get a very rich, clean sound from my original recording.

The Beatles - When I’m Sixty-Four

It’s hard to find a bad Beatles song. You could deliberately wade through their music, trying to pick out only songs that proved how terrible a band they were, and still have difficulty putting together an album’s worth of bad pieces, and that bad album would still outshine most albums by most other bands.

It wasn’t luck on their part that they probably had a good 100-120 songs that were outright masterpieces. They approached music in a way other bands didn’t. The Beatles were formed during years of playing long, tight shows in front of demanding and diverse crowds. By the time they released Please Please Me, they were a more experienced band than most of the big-name groups of the fifties, and they’d digested and absorbed an incredible variety of music. You can hear it very early on: Take the sudden opening to “I Want To Hold Your Hand” or the minor penultimate chord to that song, and you’ll find it easier to believe that it was inspired by a number of avante-garde musicians rather than just Elvis and Chuck Berry. The Beatles recorded music very quickly, quit touring to work in the studio, and had enormous standards. Paul McCartney and John Lennon were each raging perfectionists, and George Harrison wasn’t too far behind. For a decade they recorded the best pop music that’s ever been, then they split up and the four Beatles each had best-selling solo careers, three of which were at the pinnacle of various types of artistry.

Other bands have very defined sounds. The Beatles have none. Each Beatle was a multi-instrumentalist; each one had a different mindset behind production; each one could sing beautifully; they were managed by George Martin, one of the greatest studio minds that ever was. They alternated styles and blended them together and created types of music that never existed before they came. With single songs they spawned entire genres of music. Lyrically, they continued to push the form of the pop song outward. They never slowed down, never repeated themselves, and almost never wrote a song that wasn’t achingly perfect. Their music is unassailable.

“When I’m Sixty-Four” isn’t one of the best of the Beatles. It’s famous, and it’s perfect, but on the special Beatles scale where everything has to be compared to Something and Eleanor Rigby, it’s half a notch below the Beatles at their best. It’s a sheer delight nonetheless, from the clarinet duos to the light plucking guitar at the end. You could listen to this song a dozen times, as I am as I write this now, and hear something glorious and new every time: Ringo’s ever-changing drumming, the swelling vocal harmonies, the bass work, the sounding of tubular bells at the end of each chorus, McCartney’s artificially sped-up voice. It’s good on a plane that most songs ever even attempt to approach. The Rolling Stones never thought to attempt a song that’s remotely as ambitious as this one, which wasn’t particularly ambitious for the Beatles. It’s so good that there haven’t even been attempts to replicate its particular sound, or all the attempts failed miserably. It’s untouchable is how good it is.

McCartney was the Beatle responsible for pushing the Beatles’ arrangements forward. Lennon pushed the band forward emotionally and had quite a few experiments with his sounds, but McCartney brought on most of the complex music arrangements, and he also refined the lyrical prowess of the Beatles when they tackled pure pop. “When I’m Sixty-Four” isn’t edgy like Lennon’s music, and it’s remarkably straightforward lyrically, but it’s straightforward in a subversive sense, where you can’t quite imagine that a legendary rock musician would think to write a song asking a girl if she would love him as they got old together. It seems too passive, too focused on growing up. It’s shocking in the sense that you’d never expect a rock group to be a mature bunch of artists, or that they would score a song about aging with such exquisite music that somehow still managed to be pop. As such, it serves as a great introduction for the Beatles, especially for people who only know the band for Love Me Do.

I could be handy mending a fuse
When your lights have gone.
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday mornings go for a ride.

Doing the garden, digging the weeds,
Who could ask for more?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I’m sixty-four?

Mike Oldfield - The Bell

Oldfield’s oldest gimmick is that of the Master of Ceremonies, played at the climax of Tubular Bells and repeated here, at the climax of Tubular Bells II. The Master of Ceremonies is a wizened British actor (in this piece, Alan Rickman) announcing the names of instruments seconds before they play, culminating in the proclamation of the tubular bells.

It’s a statement of Oldfield’s composition style: For all he’s an impressive multi-instrumentalist virtuoso, he is first and foremost a studio musician who initially produces his pieces by playing every part on his own. That’s a common practice in the present, partly thanks to him, but when he released the original 40-minute-long Tubular Bells, a rock piece that was influenced by the likes of Saint-Saens rather than Elvis, it was stunning. The Tubular Bells pieces, after all, are not simply five-part rock pieces but complex pieces of music, all woven together with studio magic rather than with a proper orchestra.

The Master of Ceremonies is a bit silly, but at the same time it can be breathtaking, especially when you’re listening to the full piece and get fully into the music’s groove. Tubular Bells II is, in my opinion, a vastly improved composition to the original; its instruments sound better, its harmonies are more complex; its guitar solos are on occasion mindblowing, particularly seeing as they happen not separate to the rest of the music but as an integral part, so a guitar solos in harmony with choruses of people and the sounding of bells. Once The Bell, which ends the first movement, begins, the instruments drop back and a more repetitive groove begins. Then Rickman calls out one instrument after another, and every time the instrument sounds, unnervingly clear, first playing the piece’s theme and then dropping back into the harmonies of the piece. The tubular bells are the last instrument named, and they are astoundingly powerful. Then the music all fades away, leaving only Mike Oldfield playing an acoustic guitar piece. The entire movement is an effective dissertation on the nature of this compositional style.

It’s powerful because it directly addresses what’s so great about Mike Oldfield’s music: He makes magic in the studio, creates sounds that aren’t actually there. The Bells takes the listener closer to Oldfield’s processes than they are listening to the music without thinking. Certainly it’s magic. Listen to when the “vocal chords” sound, enveloping the rest of the music, and think about the fact that those voices never really sounded along with the rest of the instruments, and how beautiful the final result is, and you can appreciate the genius of Oldfield’s style.

When Mike Oldfield played Tubular Bells II on tour, he did so with an enormous band behind him. Watch it being played and you’ll see it has the same effect live. You start to realize, for the first time, just how many people go into the production of a single sound. Live you can see their faces.

The genius of Tubular Bells is not just that it is the product of a single man’s thoughts and performances. Oldfield himself has done notably better than the Bells series. The genius of Tubular Bells is that it is a piece of music about writing and playing music, about how music is created. It makes powerful music and then has you think at length about how that music is created. It’s a gimmick in the best way imaginable.