Performing Portable Songs

For me, an ideal quality in a song is portability. Can you pick it up in your hand, carry it with you easily and use it in all kinds of circumstances? Can you sing it unaccompanied, can you sing it with just a guitar, just a piano, with a small band, with a big orchestra? I like songs that don’t just look good in a certain light.

I like performing. I like composing songs. As a performer I have only a slight interest in my own songs. Most of them aren’t that good and they make me sound a bit rubbish. Also, and this will sound weird, most of them aren’t really me as a performer. One or two work for me, but most don’t. I guess it could be that they don’t work that well for anyone. So what songs do I have an affinity with?
There are some songwriters whose work just sounds too easy for me, whose work seems to artificially tailored to work with my voice. For me it’s mostly Hoagy Carmichael. Cole Porter usually fits pretty well, but these days sometimes it needs a bit of letting out at the waist. And sometimes there’s more trad stuff that just seems to wail out of something inside you.

I don’t mind some slightly less easily fitting stuff it it’s worth the stretch, but some things are just too specific in their requirements, too un-portable, to be addressed by a solo performer. What’s the point of doing ‘the man who sold the world’ if you don’t have that guitar riff? what’s the point of doing ‘Water Fountain’ without that bass line? Even so, sometimes you find that something that you thought was essential wasn’t really essential at all. Like when KT Tunstall did ‘I want you back’ without a bass. I thought ‘this can’t possibly work’. But it did.

If we’re talking self expression, I think I’d be expressing myself very badly if I concentrated on only performing stuff I wrote myself. It would give a very skewed impression of what I’m all about. There’s lots of stuff, that people don’t know about or under value, that people need to know about, and it’s not me.

Rather fancifully I claim to believe that good portable songs have an ideal socratic form that can’t be tied to any particular specifics of a particular recording or performance. Not even if a recording was made by the composer. An ideal portable song can, in the right hands, have many things changed and still retain its original character. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the only sort of valid music is portable song. Some good music isn’t at all portable. It has all kinds of requirements to make it work. I don’t want to hear your Mozart quartet arranged for solo banjo, although if the rest of The Punch Brothers turned up, I’d be willing to entertain the idea. However, even with highly constructed work, where the portability isn’t so obvious, a really clever interpreter can mine deeper, study harder and sometimes find an essence that is still totally that work and yet has relatively few of the original’s extraneous features.

To me there are two sorts of authenticity that have to be present in a good performance. The performance has to be the authentic voice of the performer and it must convey the essence of the song. It’s quite possible for a performer to imitate the superficial characteristics of a well known performance and not only totally miss the point of the song but also hide their own voice. Words that give me the fear are ’this is an Ella Fitzgerald song’. To the best of my knowledge, Ella never wrote a song. You’ll hear me saying things like ’This is a song by Bernice Petkere’. And if you don’t know who that is, well you’ve got google haven’t you? Ideally, as a performer, you give yourself to the song. You disappear. For the listener, ideally they only hear you. The composer and the previous performers of the song are forgotten. But the song is remembered.

So when did performing songs that you didn’t write yourself become such despised activity? When did it happen that you couldn’t be a serious artist unless most of the material you performed was your own work? I think it’s to do with the idea that an authentic performance of a song imitates a previous known performance. As I said earlier, I think this does a disservice to both the performer and the song alike. Neither survives the process. No wonder people don’t like it. Partly it’s to do with choice of repertoire, people will choose songs that are popular, but only really work done one way. Find a song with good bones and treat it freely and fairly.

The SoundCloud Summer of Love

I don’t think it actually was a summer as such. It was longer and, as it involved people from the northern and southern hemispheres, the idea of linking a season to a time seems meaningless. When exactly was it? 2010 2011 2012? Where did it happen? Nowhere, and all over the world. It happened on a web site called Soundcloud that started off as a very community-oriented music site and ended up as a rather poor sound hosting site.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t a youth phenomenon, at least not from where I was standing. It was mostly people in their 30s 40s 50s and 60s who shared a lot of characteristics. Once upon a time they were nearer to their perfected selves, back in their teens and twenties they’d made a bit of a noise somewhere, some on a very small scale, some right on the agonising edges of the Big Time, mostly somewhere in between. Nearly all felt dispossessed of this perfected self, all felt themselves cut off from the people who were like them, denied an audience, denied a scene.

While there were a few professional musicians (who were very gracious), mostly they were people made a crust, pretended to be normal durning the day at work surrounded by people to whom they couldn’t reveal their true nature. Closet aesthetes pretending to be vulgarians.

Nearly all were adequately tech savvy. Most had been recording stuff one way or another since their glory days and had a frustrated backlog of totally unheard material. It’s as if they were teenagers stuffed with ideas and about to make their big breakthrough album. But of course for them there had been no prospect of an audience, no prospect of a scene and no chance of an album being anything more than a vanity project.

And yes vanity was a big part of it, but it was deeper than that. It was the longing to be listened to, to be considered, to be talked about, to be part of a scene.

How was this scene created? Well we know how it was destroyed, it was destroyed by the introduction of New Soundcloud in 2012. When it came in, people started behaving differently and losing interest, the community was broken. It was like in Awakenings when the L-DOPA stopped working, and one by one people fell back into their previous state or just died. Although people complained about what was wrong with the new version, very few had any insight into what was so clever about the classic version. All they knew was it didn’t feel the same. 

I believe the clever thing about Classic Soundcloud, was that it was a kind of general newsfeed. Whereas all you get alerted to now is postings of people you follow, what you mostly saw in the old Soundcloud was what people were saying about postings. If significant numbers of people that you were following were talking about something which had been posted, even if you didn’t follow the person who posted it, it would appear in your newsfeed. I never did figure out what the algorithm was, whether it was based on numbers of likes or numbers of comments by people that you followed, but at some level of activity a post from an unknown would appear on your newsfeed. It created a perfect online model of ‘buzz’ in the real world. Everyone else was talking about something and you had to know what it was.

Apart from appearing in your newsfeed, comments were much more prominent on the waveform as it was playing, so that you had a clear idea as you listened to it  who was saying what. There were also quite clear conversational threads visible.You got to know who was witty, who was crass, who was nerdy, and most of all who was just flaming weird. And the weird ran deep. Because of the tremendous openness of the site -you could see anyone’s entire activity history- phoneys were obvious. If someone was pasting a trite two word comment on thousands of tracks, it was there for all to see.

So it was all about the comments, all about the interaction and crucially, all about a clever form of almost accidental personal recommendation. 

If an old soundcloud hand visits their account now, they see numbers of plays that are in excess of anything they got in 2011 or 2012. They’ll see the occasional like or follow, but it doesn’t mean anything any more. The drug doesn’t work. If you want to see an incredibly accurate histogram of how many fucks a soundcloud user could give about soundcloud over the years, simply go to their stats page, select the range ‘overall’ and click on ‘Comments’

In a very subtle way, the souncloud classic was a focussed bit of social media. By and large people were the noises they made and the comments they made,. Only rarely did they know each other in a different context. I recall being somewhat freaked out when I found that someone I knew in the real world knew someone that I only knew from soundcloud. People’s visual presence on soundcloud was generally minimal, often totally obscure, occasionally outrageously fraudulent and always entirely in control of the account holder. There was none of this ‘tag bombing’ you get on Facebook where someone finds a picture of you looking particularly stupid or fat.

For myself, the real buzz was international co-operation with talented people I would never have otherwise met. I won’t name any names, because the list would either have to stop somewhere controversial, or be stupidly long.

I’ve always found creating music easiest and most effective when I have a clear idea of the audience I am trying to reach. Having that audience and those collaborators, I was able to produce this:

https://soundcloud.com/john-hollingum/if-you-never-change-your

In basic statistical terms, my 6th most played track but easily the most commented on. It was created by and for the soundcloud community. It enriched my life.

Since the social destruction of Soundcloud, there was a decamping of many connections to Facebook out of sheer curiosity. Facebook is a different kettle of fish and kind of awkward with its mutual friendship rather than follow (I’m sorry you may be interested in me but I was never that into your stuff), with its real world rather than music world concerns. Most people on FB turned out to be delightful, some kinda boring and some real assholes. And there’s an overall sense of having to behave yourself which you never got in the clubbish atmosphere of Soundcloud.