Jeremy Warmsley

Jeremy Warmsley is a bit of a Muso’s Guide favourite, at least round these parts. How We Became is such an inviting record, so full of sonic variation yet with this very real, wholesome core of honesty. So it was our pleasure to speak with its purveyor on the phone for this very interesting conversation on opinion and such like. It went a little like this:

What are your favourite albums?
The Dreaming by Kate Bush. It’s a great example of someone who’s moulded as a key pop artist, someone who’s really tried to make something completely confrontational and difficult, and in fact very beautiful. A lot of people would’ve written Kate Bush off. Another one would be Richard D. James by Aphex Twin. People got used to the idea that Aphex Twin was difficult, but then he came up with this album which is really melodically good. It’s just so simple and beautiful. Recently I’ve been playing the Fanfarlo record a lot – it’s produced by Peter Katis, one of my favourite producers, it’s got great songs, great arrangements. And I’m going to be joining them on guitar on the tour coming up. Another is John Martyn’s Grace and Danger.

When you’re trying to convince people to listen to your favourite music, how do you go about it?
Sometimes music is good not just because of the music, but because of the context. So for instance, take The Dreaming – it must’ve been incredibly exciting when it came out, because you thought you knew what to expect but then she came out with something so all over the place. It made it more exciting. I’m quite sad so I like to look at Wikipedia quite a lot and talk about that. It’s funny, because it should just be about music, shouldn’t it?

Do you think there’s a place for reviews, then?
People don’t read reviews and say “I want to know if it’s any good” so I’m going to see if it’s any good, it’s more like “I wonder what’s been reviewed this week”. Be Here Now by Oasis got great reviews… I think it’s strange but not a bad thing. It promotes awareness of new music and that’s the main point, it’s just a shame that this way of getting to the music comes with the whole “this is good” and “this is bad”. That’s the way a lot reviewers write, they’re really laying down the law about things, and that’s a shame.

And press releases?
Again, you need a reason to want to check out this band – you’ve got to have some way to be able to quickly judge it. You need to see things that’ll make you interested. Bands that get noticed often have a really interesting story behind them.

What’s your take on the long term – do artists need to broaden their sound to succeed or is the best way forward to stick with what you’re good at?
It depends on the artist, really. If someone really can only be one thing, then they should just do that. It’s strange that it makes more difference than the actual artistry. People say “ooh have you heard the new album, they’ve gone really prog”. But it’s not really important. Or “it’s not as good as the last one so I’m not going to bother”.

If we go back to when say, Leonard Cohen first started out… do you think people are now more impatient?
The difference between now and 40 years ago is the amount of time artists take between albums. But does it make it harder to progress? Maybe not, maybe it makes it easier to progress. When you take The Beatles’ first few albums, they’re all identical. They didn’t have any time to develop. But now you’ve got a lot more time to test songs, to get them out there. With my last record, I’d written all of the songs around two and a half years before it came out.

How and why did that happen?
Well I wrote all the songs before the first record came out, and then recorded and mixed them at the beginning of the year. Problems with the label meant that it took another nine months after the initial six for the album to come out. It’s quite common really. Look at Animal Collective – every time they release an album they then tour with the songs from the next album. That’s one of the biggest problems with the music industry at the moment.

What’s your favourite way to listen to music?
On headphones in the dark is the ultimate way.

Do you think the levels of accessibility would have changed your musical influences if you’d have grown up in 2009? What did you listen to in your younger years?
I didn’t really get into music until I was 16 or 17. And it was the standard “hey, have a listen to this music it’s amazing” way that I found about things. It’s a lot easier to get hold of music, but…

You still have to know what you’re looking for?
Exactly. Someone has to tell you. You still have to develop an ability. If it doesn’t sound different and raw, you can’t appreciate it.

Let’s get personal. Do you ever second-guess yourself lyrically? Do you worry that you aren’t going to get across what you want to say? That is, if you want to make people understand something…
You do always worry about people misinterpreting your lyrics, though I actually really enjoy it. It’s one of the joys of being a songwriter, giving your thoughts to the world.

Visit the MySpace now or forever live a lesser life.

James Brown

You don’t often hear anyone calling hiphop ‘meaningless’, which is a neat rhetorical trick – steering the debate away from the pivotal function: to demonstrate ‘lyrical skills’ even in the absence of a band, musicianship, or originality. Hiphop is profoundly democratic in its most basic (and affordable) formula: not even two turntables and a microphone, but one. Effectively, Hiphop is supremely meaningful in its central gesture: to assert the validity and audibility of its underprivileged, under-represented voices, which is why the main line of attack for critics must be on the musical front, where old soul records are recycled. (Arguably, there are complex semiotics here, too: using the records themselves suggests a knowledge of cultural history, unlike white musicians passing off black music as their own.)

Public Enemy

Music aside, to be meaningful is threatening: Public Enemy’s snapshots of black history made them targets for FBI phonetaps, although NWA’s exhortations to comparatively random violence (albeit in response to police brutality) made them inadvertent agents of normativity. Admittedly, Hiphop shades into meaningless (or inaudibility) when it adds to the chorus of black and white voices normalising consumer-capitalism. In the 1960s, black-owned record labels were at the vanguard of black businesses (see Peter Doggett, There’s a Riot Going On), but the current commodity fetishism of mainstream hiphop is a massive debasement of the (already problematic) ‘Big Payback’ demanded by James Brown, referencing Martin Luther King. Is it subversive to make ‘art’ that’s so openly about making money? Or is it defeatist?

WEB DuBois

Still, there’s an underlying urge toward significance (or ‘being taken seriously as public speakers rather than entertainers’) that can be traced back to figures like Booker T. Washington, WEB DuBois, and MLK. White mainstream pop music has no qualms about meaninglessness in lyrics… although try telling that (as an adult or parent) to a teen or pre-teen who then complains “you just don’t understand”. I’d argue that the inanities of manufactured pop music are strangely comforting to parents who actually shell out for the stuff – contra David Cameron and others, there aren’t really all that many exhortations to flaunt your teen sexuality, spend lots of money, let alone challenge the values of your parents: just irritate them, which you’re bound to do anyway. (The day after writing that, I dug up a quote from Mick Jagger – in Doggett, 2008 – claiming that rock’n'roll was never about protest, just winding up your parents, and even that’s pointless when they listen to the same music as you; it’s possible, of course, that he wasn’t being cynical, but despairing of the failure of the counter-culture.)

Finally, what about the pseudo-meaningful? Take the post-Radiohead generation of bands, who intersperse their morbid or self-regarding lyrics with the odd high-register word, and reference to modern technology – little signifiers of sophistication. Risking similar charges of pretension are the bands aping Bowie in their surrealism-lite without any real interest in psychedelic exploration, subversive sexuality, or the difficulty of navigating the modern world; it takes a certain amount of imagination to throw together all those images on records by Placebo, Bush, Pavement but a distinct lack of reflection on why they came about. Personally, I don’t buy the argument that ‘it’s only rock’n'roll – now that’s meaningless.

Does Definitely Maybe (1993) really give you more of a visceral rush than Never Mind the Bollocks (1977), with its endlessly resonant social criticism? The same goes for creative arrangers, and so on. In this series of columns, I’ll be looking at those artists who act as conduits for the avant-garde – not so much (or not often) presenting their experiments as ends in themselves, and sometimes pushing music forward by collaboration rather than personal experimentation (the Bjorks and Bowies), but in any case proving there’s no real separation. I’m specifically interested, here, in the occurrence of “meaningless sounds and words” in avant-garde music; just why do singers (and musicians armed with samplers) record sounds and lyrics that are openly gibberish, beyond what we might recognize as surrealism’s slow release of hidden meanings?

Meaningless As Avant-Garde Strategy

Sigur Ros - ( )

With its intuitive soundings and lack of “real” words, the parenthesis album by Sigur Ros – ( ) – stands out as an extraordinarily democratic gesture; its dozen (or fewer) distinct vocables sound like innumerable phrases in Western European languages. Doubtless it has emotional resonance for listeners from many other cultures, however guttural their consonants. If you want to get technical, it exploits our innate “pattern recognition” faculty the same as a Rorschach test; we’re more inclined to see meaning than meaninglessness, and in doing so, we learn about our needs and desires.

Mogwai - Young Team

This kind of ironic “meaninglessness” is also important to another post-rock band, Mogwai. Opening their debut album (Young Team, 1997) with the translation of a foreign language review, Mogwai demonstrate colossal hubris by implying they’re ever after going to live up to the claim: “If the stars had a sound, it would sound like this…” The significance of that phrase has been overloaded, with time: Yes, Mogwai strive to evoke natural forces, something beyond the human, but it’s in the use of other translations and transformations that they foreground the textural qualities of a voice, and the paralanguage that is tone and rhythm; check out the Japanese vocals on ‘I Need Horses’ (Mr Beast, 2006), the words vocodered to unintelligibility on ‘Hunted by a Freak’ (Happy Songs, 2003), the numerous backward vocals and partly submerged narratives (Young Team, 1997), and – most provocatively? – the sample of the voice saying “please hold the line” (CODY, 1999) that is a kind of metonym for failed, or endlessly thwarted communication.

Mogwai - Ten Rapid

Sometimes this is playful – see the decontextualized conversation about Marvel comic villains (Ten Rapid, 1996) that makes you wonder why someone’s laughing about “killing millions of people…!” Elsewhere – ‘Dial:Revenge’ (from Rock Action, 2000) is an endorsement of Gruff Rhys of SFA’s own project to reclaim languages that are considered beyond the purview of popular music; and by extension, the dominant Anglocentric culture. If Welsh is “un-pop”, and “exotic” (e.g. sub-Saharan) languages only titillate our ears for connoting great distance and difference, how much are we limiting ourselves?

Is “post-rock” avant-garde? Most people would say not, knowing how quickly its crowd-pleasing formula became stale. Are these strategies avant-garde?

Mogwai - Rock Action

Well, they’re not new – if that’s what you find yourself objecting to – but it’s still at the outer limits of normal practice, and I’d argue that any artist makes the choice to push themselves to re-discover old things as much as they push themselves to discover genuinely new things; whether you then consider those artists (e.g. Mogwai) avant-garde in themselves (rather than avant-garde sounding, on occasion) may simply be down to how enthusiastically they explore the legacy available to them, and/or recombine those old strategies… even if they haven’t gone so far as to devise an entirely new tonal system, or exploit the possibilities of new instruments in new ways. (There’s another potential tangent here, about what’s meant by “dated” – presumably, when a musician takes new instruments or techniques and uses them like the old ones, rather than experimenting to discover which tones fit which part of the composition…)

Faust - The Faust Tapes

From The Beatles’ White Album (under the influence of Yoko Ono), through The Faust Tapes, to DJ Shadow and then a whole generation armed with samplers, “meaninglessness” often takes the form of “decontextualized” snippets. ‘Revolution No. 9’ is composed of fragments too small to construct much of a narrative, but it’s a lullaby compared to the deliberately irritating or abrasive sonic collage by Faust. Somewhat less random, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing (1996) presents samples of varying degrees of obscurity, or various shades of meaning, diving on some putative graph towards pure sensation: the movie character protesting about his arrest… to the sample of “the clock on the wall says a quarter past midnight…” later looped and distended into a DJ’s battlecry, “a quarter past midnight… midnight… muh-muh-muh-MIDNIGHT!”, which acquires an almost mythic resonance, referring to some mysterious witching hour neither today nor tomorrow, but between the days. Other artists have made this gradual shading into meaninglessness the closest thing you’ll find to a narrative arc on their “difficult” / Wire-friendly albums: Scott Walker’s The Drift (2004) provides historical notes as clues for some of its lyrics, and other quotes on the sleeve hint at a free-association of ideas around “silver”, “horses”, and so on, but as the clues become more scarce we’re plunged into a turbulent subconscious not our own. With deep irony, Walker credits only one line to another artist (in spite of the lines marked as dialogue), ‘JA-DA / JA-DA / JA-DA, JA-DA, JING-JING-JING’ sung with a jauntiness and smoothness that suggests it’s meant to be seductive. To what species?!

So here’s our final word on the meaning of soul, coming at you via this here link. It’s a link to download ‘Duk Koo Kim’ from iTunes – a track by Sun Kil Moon which for me, defines soul more than any words ever could.

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading the columns as much as us! And feel free to drop us a line at musosguide AT googlemail DOT com if you feel you’ve got something to add to the breadth of opinions we’ve thrown at you.

Tomorrow’s final meaning of soul comes at you at 12 pm – in the form of a definitive mp3!

It’s a different spin then that the Reverend Vito Aiuto offers to our soul series… and here’s what he had to offer:

“The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual. The biblical account expresses this reality in symbolic language when it affirms that “then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” Man, whole and entire, is therefore willed by God.

“In Sacred Scripture the term “soul” often refers to human life or the entire human person. But “soul” also refers to the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him, that by which he is most especially in God’s image: “soul” signifies the spiritual principle in man.

“The human body shares in the dignity of “the image of God”: it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit:

“Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity. Through his very bodily condition he sums up in himself the elements of the material world. Through him they are thus brought to their highest perfection and can raise their voice in praise freely given to the Creator. For this reason man may not despise his bodily life. Rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honour since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day.

- from The Catechism of the Catholic Church

Tomorrow’s meaning of soul comes from Laura Izibor.

Lee Malcolm: “The meaning of soul: listening to ‘Hurt’ by Johnny Cash and remembering you have one.”

Martin Teff: “”Soul is the where science, philosophy and death all converge.  It is the water between the meals of existence.”

Tomorrow’s meaning of soul comes from Rev. Vito Aiuto of The Welcome Wagon, whose Welcome To The Welcome Wagon album was produced by Sufjan Stevens.

Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Rosetta Tharpe, Mel Torme, Guitar Slim, Lee Baby Simms, Bernard Hermann, Leonard Bernstien, Paganini, George Gershwin, The Knack, Murder By Death, Julie London and Billie Holiday.

Tom Allalone, of Tom Allalone and The 78s, that’s who. The music is fun, assured, and sounds like it’s part of the grass roots rock ‘n’ roll era it’s so clearly been influenced by. Here’s Tom’s truthful take on soul:

“The word Soul is often used quite erroneously in my opinion. It’s a word that artists use to give themselves an air of deep rooted one-ness or spiritual connection with their music. Oasis for example, use the term quite a lot. I’d imagine the only soul they’ve known would be a Dover Sole. Their music is so derivative and contrived that it is almost empty of all soul and no amount of Hammond Organs or Beatles’ rip-offs will constitute a soul number.

“Quite often, people take soul to mean ‘Black Music’. Soul does not mean a black man or woman with a microphone. It does not mean a white man or woman with a microphone singing a song that a black man or woman made famous 20 years previously. Barry White and Imagination are prime examples of acts who will have no doubt use that word in their press releases, yet have absolutely no soul in my opinion. Murder by Death have more soul in their little fingers than in the whole of Barry White. It has nothing to do with creed or upbringing or even having things to rebel against. Its all about being disarmed and dropping all inhibitions. Amy Winehouse has got it. So have Arcade Fire. And yet Lionel Richie wouldn’t know it if he cut his face on it.

“Soul, in my opinion, has one meaning. Its honesty between writer/singer and listener. If Etta James can admit that she was ‘Almost Persuaded’ to cheat on her beau with a handsome stranger, she is bearing her soul to the listener. If you can expose your demons in a song, to perhaps thousands of people who think you’re cool, even if you’re admitting that you have been a complete fucker, thats soul. Soul is music that has zero pretension or concern for what’s cool in the perception of others. Soul is therapy for the musician, and the listener finds solace in hearing their ‘heroes’ experiencing and dealing with the same trials as them. Life is a painful existence most of the time, and soul or blues music is the support group.

“Soul is an admission of humanity and all the flaws that go with it.

“Having said this, there is a mysterious band of soul, that even without confessional lyrics, can seem like the most honest and impulsive sound imaginable. ‘Green Onions’ has this. I can’t explain it. If I had worked out what the MGs were doing to create such soul, i’d be a millionaire by now. But I haven’t… and I aint.

“If I ever get some soul, it’ll allow me to write sincerely about how unhappy I am. And on that day, I’ll be a happy man.

Tomorrow’s meaning of soul comes from members of band we love, Vessels.

Here’s what he had to say:

“Soul is a curious thing. It’s its own genre but weirdly, to me, most modern soul music lacks soul. The All Music Guide defines soul as “the result of the urbanization and commercialization of rhythm and blues in the ’60’s”. I imagine the term was born from artists possessing an obvious abundance of the quality. For me it starts with Billie Holliday, moves through Ray Charles, then James Brown, on to Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder.

“These days finding soul in an artist is not as clear-cut. For example, the retro-musings of Amy Winehouse are very soulful, while Duffy’s Dusty-style, cupcake R&B is not. Will Young and James Morrison have soul, while Leon Jackson and James Blunt are devoid. R. Kelly has soul to spare while Akon is the most soulless man in R&B (I heard him talking on 4Music about the ‘European Market’… any artist who mentions the word ‘market’ in an interview does not have Soul).

“I have a suspicion that Soul is directly linked to pain. The one thing an artist cannot fake is the experience bestowed by life from pain. An artist can show their experience of pain in my ways; in their voice, their dance moves, even off-the-cuff comments made on daytime talk shows. One thing I do know is soul is something you are born with. Artists and Labels can do their best to dress things up, but in the end, soul always rears its lonely, aching, wrinkled face, much like Miles Davis’ on that famous Montreux Jazz Festival poster.

“If you’re confused about who’s got soul these days and who doesn’t, below is a list fit to my standards: 

Justin Timberlake – a corporate, Disney puppet. But he’s got soul and he’s very, very, talented. Let’s hope one day he stops making cologne that looks like an MP3 player and gives us music chock full of the soul inside him. 

Chris Brown – more in touch with his soul than Justin, but still confused. 

Rihanna –She’s got it. Flaunted it in the beginning with ‘Pon The Replay’, but it got blurred somewhere along the way. She’s in a new video with Justin, maybe he had a hand in it. 

Beyonce – so much soul despite herself. Anyone who doubts it, watch the ‘Single Ladies’ video. 

Britney – she’s from Kentwood, Louisiana. The Deep South. She always had soul but didn’t know how get it out from behind Mickey Mouse programming. Somewhere between childbirth and attacking paps with umbrellas, she got in touch. I suspect K-Fed had something to do with it. 

Tom Chaplin of Keane – very white but soulful. 

Kings Of Leon – soulless. I’m sorry but they are. Anyone who names a record “Youth and Young Manhood” is too cool to have Soul. In a lot ways, Cool is the opposite of soul. 

Brandon Flowers of the Killers – still don’t know about him. The fact he’s a Mormon throws my radar off a bit.  

Coldplay – Chris Martin is in so much pain, I sometimes wonder. With one listen to ‘Yellow’ and you know the soul is there. Maybe it’s hiding beneath Gwyneth. 

Take That – great tunes but soulless 

Boyzone  – Ronan has a got soul. Met him and was proved right. To quote the man himself: “Life is a rollercoaster.”

Mika – no soul. Sorry. Imitating Freddie Mercury, perhaps the most soulful man in the history of Rock, still doesn’t give you Soul. 

Pink – soul, soul and more soul. A bit annoying how she rubs her Soul in your face, but she’s got plenty to go round. 

Alphabeat – the whole Danish thing is a tough one. A lot like Mormonism. But my girl Robyn is very soulful. With that in mind, I have to say Alphabeat are a bit soulless. Fascination is a cracking tune though. 

Katy Perry – she’s got soul. Can’t sing or dance, but has soul. It’s her best quality. 

Girls Aloud – I dunno about this one. Lemme get back to you. Does being extremely fit count toward soulfulness? They are my Achilles’ heel. 

“In conclusion, anyone having a hard time finding Soul in Pop music these days, take a listen to Kayne’s new album, 808s and Heartbreak.  Despite the blatant overuse of Vocoder and uber-80’s beats ala Phil Collins (who is completely soulless) that record is oozing with soul. Oh and this little known fringe act Julian Velard. He’s got it in spades. 

Tomorrow’s meaning of soul comes from our very own Sam Dufton.