Today’s post will combine a few things: there will be a link to a video of a new odd cover version of a song “Young People Scream,” written by someone who’s not Bob Dylan, and I’ll continue the behind-the-scenes story of how I’m making new musical pieces, but first I’ll explain why posts and interactivity from me has been low since the last part of June.

I’ve been sick for over a week with some kind of respiratory bug, and for a big chunk in the middle of it I was about as sick as I recall being for decades. At the worst, I was feverish and my stamina was very low — walking to the bathroom was a chore. I slept off on through a few days, and when awake I was foggy, unable to deal with any complexity.* Things have been improving over the past couple of days, though I still have a cough and tire easily. My wife preceded me with the same crud, and she’s still got her cough, so I’ll likely be dealing with that for a while yet.

I’ve been exploring some changes in how I record with my long-time friend, poet, songwriter, keyboard player, and alternative Parlando vocalist Dave Moore. A combination of things is suggesting those changes, part of which is that Dave’s playing skill-set has become constrained with age’s infirmities. I wrote last time that MIDI will give us new options to ground the pieces’ chordal cadences within modern computer recording software. Will this work, or do I even know exactly how I’m predicting it will work? Don’t know yet. I’m getting some more cabling next week that I’m thinking will offer some additional audio routing in my studio space for Dave, but today’s cover song recorded in June is an example of a way MIDI was used to shape a recording.

Super-quick intro: MIDI is a way to record things, but it doesn’t record audio. Typically, it records what actions happen when someone plays a controller — in Dave’s case, a piano-style keyboard. If Dave presses the C, E, and G keys on that keyboard, MIDI records when he pressed each of them, how hard he struck them, and how long they were depressed. The sound of that C Major chord we hear when those notes are playing together is created as a separate step. As he plays, a sound is heard, just as if he was playing an organ or conventional electric piano, but this sound is generated by software with only a small fraction of a second delay. An entirely conceptual composer could even play MIDI with no sound, but aside from Conlon Nancarrow humans naturally want to hear sounds when they use the controller keyboard.

As Dave played today’s piece live with me a few weeks ago, he heard a combo organ sound as he played and sang his part. There was a drum loop going to give us a time reference, and I played the electric guitar part you will eventually hear live with Dave and the placeholder drums.

Afterward I listened analytically to what had been played live. His without-a-net, one-pass vocal worked — and as I’ll talk about in the next segment, I discovered that I loved the song he chose to sing. My guitar part was meh, not good enough to feature, but not totally dire. That organ part? It had a few stumbles, but the greater problem was that the vocal had a nice laid-back groove, but the organ’s characteristic timing, attack, and timbre didn’t mesh with that feel. How to fix?

I extracted the MIDI from what Dave played, stripping things back to the chordal structure divorced from the sound. I used that chordal structure laid bare to guide an upright bass part, and using acoustic drum sample patterns I created a Jazzy-sounding drum set track. Having the drums, bass, and guitar grooving together, I used the program that extracted Dave’s chords for me to play that chord information derived from the live performance with a grand piano sound instead of the small combo organ Dave was hearing as he played them live.**

The resulting piece is here in this video.

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Now what about the song that all this work was done to present? I suspect “Young People Scream” speaks to something some young people are feeling. Hell, I’m not young people, and I’m feeling this! Given that it was first released in 1982 by a still in his Twenties singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock, there’s a lot of ambiguity and context shifting when we experience the same song today — probably was so from the beginning too, because Robyn Hitchcock has a long career that I’ve admired of writing songs that are attractively elusive. He may do this using surrealism’s tactic, the remixing normal to seem strange, but in this one I sense asides to irony and satire.

Hitchcock’s own version on his Groovy Decay album was performed with a rock-a-billy arrangement. This would have been then a 30-year-old musical style, but one that had been revived by young musicians spinning off from the Punk and New Wave musical rebellion — and so, “Rock This Town” by the Stray Cats was a 1982 hit. Conscious or not, I suspect a certain slyness on Hitchcock’s observation and choice there: young people in 1982 using their parents’ youthful rebellion’s mode — a mode they’d largely abandoned with embarrassment as those thirty-something Boomers moved on to the modern Rock and pop sounds or the “Greatest Hits of the Sixties, Seventies, and the Eighties.” As the first verse has it, tweaking those younger rock revivalists by telling them “It all been done before” could get a “don’t care” reply.

Despite the upright bass in this current LYL Band version, it’s not hot-tempo rock-a-billy. Instead, I wanted to let the tension-releasing satiric vitriol delivered with a dry “just the facts” attitude by the singer come through. Even if he’s not literally screaming, I think the singer, to a degree of undercurrent, has to appear driven around the bend with their disgust at the older generation — and while I don’t know the author’s intent, I think Hitchcock’s words convey that indignation. The video ends with the on-screen statement it does because I’m “older people” and I’m disgusted, though my throat is still too sore to scream aloud today.

*It was difficult to read when awake, though I had some intense fever dreams while sleeping for entertainment. I did catch up on some episodes of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, which are outstandingly detailed and interwoven. If you like the surprising stories and unlikely connections I do here, and would like that sort of thing done at greater length and intelligent confidence within the world of Rock and popular music, you will like this too.

**The program I used for this, Toontrack’s EZKeys, does a pretty good job of automatic transcription. I’ve also used the Capo transcription app for this, but I think Toontrack’s chord detection may use some musical context information that Capo doesn’t in order to get closer to a useful chord sequence right off. Something that EZKeys clearly does: it allows one to apply music grooves or feels to the chord cadence it extracts, which saves considerable time. Those with good harmonic ears could of course do this by hand (with one’s ear? Musicians, we poets will dock you for mixed metaphor!)