Nothing to Get Hung About
We haven’t been able to play any farmer’s markets for three weeks in this stormy cold weather in Sacramento. Today is beautiful, and I expect we will play this Saturday, March 9, 9:30-12:30 at Historic Folsom Market, the spirit willing and the creek don’t rise. This venue is great for classic cover bands—it gets really crowded sometimes, and parents and their children dance in the generous space in front of our equipment. Young parents know these songs from their parents; many times a grandpa or grandma cheers on or dances with the children and grabs a video. We both enjoy the family energy and are always amazed that people of all ages love these songs.
I am still struggling with my essay drawing a historical analogy between the science of measuring earthquakes and the science of measuring reading comprehension. My thinking has grown from asking “What am I talking about here?” to “Damn, there’s something cool going on” to “I’m missing a big piece of the puzzle.” I thought I was stuck. Then I found it, the piece, and it is truly the key similarity between earthquakes and comprehension. I hadn’t taken the last step across the bridge from structural to functional grammar. There is an analog for this bridge in the history of the Richter scale. Maybe a week more and I’ll have it right. I just hope I am able to express it viscerally as I feel it.
Sometimes I get hairbrained ideas that have a shelf life of three days maybe, sometimes longer, then I wake up and smell the coffee. I worked and worked for maybe six weeks on a piece illustrating that the construct “dyslexic” isn’t synonymous with “inadequate phonological processing capacity” examined across transparent, opaque, and non-Western orthographies (it isn’t so clear cut). Different orthographies present different psycholinguistic challenges in the domain of recoding graphics to sounds, putting capacities like phonemic awareness on a sliding scale.
This argument logically changes dyslexia from solely a biological phenomenon to a cultural and historical phenomenon shaped by the orthography one is born to learn. Of course, interactions with more expert others as these are linked to symbolic and material capital are highly significant. But so what? History has already determined that biology and neural loops come into play in the policy arena. I can’t answer the so what question on these grounds; so the essay sits swollen and bloated in a draft folder. I don’t regret the work because I learned a lot from the reading on a question I’ve had since at least 1980.
With that said, we’ve been rehearsing most days in the afternoons, and my habit is to record takes for reflective analysis. It’s helpful in a lot of ways, but especially for fine-tuning levels of gain, compression, distortion, and EQ on the individual tracks and then primarily compression and EQ on the master track. I need to hear how our live performance of a song mixes with the backing tracks, an ongoing process of perfecting the presentation over time. Two tracks popped up as solid enough to offer you in lieu of “Scaling the Depths,” which is I’d say 80% baked.
Strawberry Fields (John and Paul by agreement)
“Lennon deliberately chose to obfuscate the meaning of his signature song, even the title Strawberry Fields Forever was, in its day, controversial and ambiguous. Lennon simply took the name from a Salvation Army children's home in Liverpool called Strawberry Field (singular) which existed until 2005. The site has now been closed since 2011.
According to Wikipedia, Lennon's iconic lyric was inspired by a childhood memory.
For the refrain, [...]: the words "nothing to get hung about" were inspired by Aunt Mimi's strict order not to play in the grounds of Strawberry Field, to which Lennon replied, ‘They can't hang you for it.’”
Landslide (Stevie Nicks)
“Nicks told the New York Times that she wrote ‘Landslide’ in 1973 when she was 27 years old. ‘I did already feel old in a lot of ways,’ Nicks told the outlet. ‘I'd been working as a waitress and a cleaning lady for years. I was tired.’
Nicks — who has said she wrote the song in approximately five minutes while looking out her snowy window at the Aspen mountains — wrote, ‘And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills / Til the landslide brought me down.’”
