March 31, 2023

Fall Out Boy mondegreens, Beethoven, and a Succession soundtrack theory

Sharon's Weekly Head Dump

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For the past several months I have been actively and experimentally figuring out how to handle the day-to-day aspects of juggling multiple concurrent projects, which is not a new problem to anyone by any means and is something I am well aware that many smart capable people have already figured out for themselves. Annoyingly, it seems that the key to finding a way to manage these things is to know myself, which I have to say is incredibly aggravating. I don’t want to know myself. “Myself” is a chaotic mess of competing motivations, overly complicated about simple things and overly simplistic about complicated things.

One of the more stymieing issues for me with multiple larger-scale projects is that when so many of them involve practicing and learning or refining music at the piano, there is an element of unknowingness that is endlessly frustrating to someone with control freak tendencies. While I have a decent idea of how long it takes me to properly get music into my fingers, it is impossible to pinpoint when any given work is going to “gel” or how much everyday maintenance a piece may require to stay in the zone of peak performance, and most days it’s hard to have faith that the tiny dust motes of progress I’m making will add up in time. All of this makes planning a super-stressful prospect for me. Again, I know this is a problem so many musicians have figured out, but my problem is that I haven’t figured it out yet.

Against all of this self-inflicted anxiety, it has been revelatory yet intensely shame-inducing to realize that in order to function for long stretches, I need periods of time every day in which I do literally nothing. This is not special or new; “build in rest to avoid burnout” is just common sense, and also something I advise people to do all the time! And yet putting it into practice feels wrong. I have tried so many strategies and hacks to force myself to be doing, doing, doing nonstop through the day and none of them work. The only thing that does is actually scheduling 30-minute blocks for myself that are written down as “do nothing time.”

The rules for “do nothing time”, worked out through much trial and error, are as such:

1. Reading and writing emails do not count as doing nothing. (I’ve tried.)

2. Exercising/yoga do not count as doing nothing. (I’ve tried.)

3. Doing chores or running errands do not count as doing nothing. (I’ve tried.)

4. Studying recordings of pieces I’m working on does not count as doing nothing. (I’ve tried.)

5. Mindlessly scrolling through social media, while not as mentally or physically taxing as the above activities, is not great for one’s mental health during “do nothing” time and is not recommended. (I’m trying to be better.)

I usually spend my “do nothing time” drinking tea or water, snacking, and reading (actual books) or playing little puzzle games, and I’ve found that scheduling “do nothing” blocks after practice sessions or working out does wonders for resetting my energy levels and prepping me for the next stretch of work.

Again, this is nothing new. This is the basic concept of “resting” or “taking little breaks,” which is something we teach preschoolers to do. The thing that makes “do nothing time” so hard for me to commit to is the fact that in addition to the general culture of the American-Protestant-capitalist work ethic telling me that rest is for the weak, years of strict classical training have hammered into me the idea that I should not, can not, must not ever stop. I have had teachers extol the importance of “pushing through” tiredness, illness, resistance; every day when I start “do nothing time” there is still a little voice whispering, “If you do nothing right now when you could be doing something, you must not actually care enough about what you do,” and I still can’t get that little voice to shut up.

I genuinely wish—especially with deadlines and performances looming on the horizon—that I could just go-go-go from morning til evening without needing to take a break. Unfortunately for me, having daily “do nothing” time has been the only thing that’s worked for me in a while, so I guess I just have to get used to it.

(Yes, I have read How to Do Nothing. Looking at everything I just wrote, it’s clear I may need to reread it for my own good.)

On mondegreens and stardust, and Beethoven somehow

The new Fall Out Boy album, So Much (For) Stardust, dropped last week, and I had a good time going through it a couple of times while waiting for Apple Music Classical to come out.

First of all, Fall Out Boy songs never fail to deliver on delightful mondegreens—I’ve previously mentioned how to me, “This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race” has always been about an educated Lysol weevil.

My favorite mondegreen from the new album is one in “I Am My Own Muse.” The actual lyrics in the chorus are:

Smash all the guitars
'Til we see all the stars
Oh, got to throw this year away, we got to throw this year away like
A bad luck charm

However, someone pointed out to me that this is what they hear:

Smash all the guitars
'Til we see all the stars
Oh, got to throw this year away, we got to throw this year away like
Bad luck, Sean

And now I can’t unhear it:

This is a mondegreen that makes the song so much more delightful. It transforms the track into a story where someone from Fall Out Boy is talking about their year to their friend Sean. Massive improvement.

I also have no idea what is happening in “Flu Game” but the bit starting at 0:44 below made me go, “Did Fall Out Boy scoop up one of Panic! at the Disco’s songs on the way out?”

The bit that goes “I've got all this love I've got to keep to myself / All this effort to make it look effortless” just straight up sounds like a Panic! hook. There are multiple songs it reminds me of, but vibe-wise it has whiffs of Panic!’s “Crazy = Genius”:

My standout favorite from the album, though, is the eponymous track, “So Much (For) Stardust). It’s mostly because the song is melodramatic and suffused with despair and sounds exactly like something I would have rocked out to in high school (and whose lyrics I would have put in my AIM profile). It’s also partially because of the way the chorus repeats “thought we had it all, thought we had it all” (see: suffused with despair) over what I’m pretty sure is a Major III chord and I am a sucker for III chords in minor key pop songs.

The thing that gets me the most, though, is a thing that I love whenever it happens both in classical multi-movement works and in pop music, and that’s reference to previous thematic material. I love a recycled theme, a lil “Hey, remember when we did this?” (The first example that comes to mind is how in the fourth movement of her G Minor Piano Sonata, Clara Schumann takes a little transitional passage from the first movement and takes it somewhere else entirely. Absolutely delightful to hear, a nightmare to play because I always worry I’ll brain-fart back into the first movement.)

In the very first song on the album, “Love from the Other Side,” there’s a bit you can hear (starting at 0:44, embedded below) that goes “You were the sunshine of my lifetime / What would you trade the pain for?” (at 1:54, a lil variation happens where “What did you trade the pain for?” is followed by “I’m not sure”).

In “So Much (For) Stardust,” the last track (in my classical-focused mind, the last movement to “Love From the Other Side”’s first), Fall Out Boy quotes that bit from the first track when, at 2:56 (embedded below), they sing “In another life, you were the sunshine of my lifetime / What would you trade the pain for? I'm not sure.”

I love a self-reference, a lil quote, some cheeky recycled material. I LOVE it. And prefacing the line with “In another life” before harkening back to that first song? Creating a deeper meaning to the question “What did you trade the pain for?”?? LOVE IT. God, I can’t believe I’m nerding out over a Fall Out Boy album.

Finally, I have to applaud Fall Out Boy for making it clear that when they say “Moonlight Sonata,” they are specifically referring to the first movement. What we need more of in pop culture is people acknowledging that there are multiple movements to the sonata misleadingly (imho) and retroactively nicknamed “Moonlight.”

Now that I’ve gotten myself on the topic of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 27 No. 2 (I hate calling it the “Moonlight Sonata”! I’m sorry!) I cannot leave without mentioning this amazing bit by Rowan Atkinson, aka Mr. Bean, in which he air-performs the third movement. (I’ve embedded the bit starting at 2:07 below, but if you want to watch the whole thing, in which he starts with the slow movement of the Pathetique, here’s the link.)

Obviously this is hilarious, an example of utterly impeccable comic pacing, but it also strikes me as being so accurate. I don’t mean in what his hands and fingers are doing, which, yes, is shockingly correct, but in that when I watch this video, I think, “My god, he did it, he actually depicted how it FEELS on the inside playing this stuff!!!”

I am always so astounded watching videos of myself playing, or even watching other pianists, because even when we’re flailing around we have a sense of visible poise that absolutely does not show what is actually happening internally which is…this. My inner monologue in performance exactly resembles Mr. Bean doing a comedic bit.

Think of the children

As you know, I am one who finds catharsis and comfort in satire, and I thought Alexandra Petri’s “We will stop at nothing to protect the children” very much summed up the tragic absurdity of our current moment so much better than anything else:

I can’t think of anything worse than children reading history and feeling bad. Imagine, children, going home alive to their parents and complaining that they were made to feel bad by reading about the horrible events of the past. Can you think of a worse thing? Imagine that happening to a child. Imagine being a parent, and seeing the door open, and your child come through it, unharmed, with a complaint about a textbook. Unthinkable. Awful. Frightening. We must pass legislation.

I can’t think of anything worse than children going to a library to hear a drag queen read a story. Children sitting there alive in a library, hearing a story, surrounded by books and glitter, laughing. Children having a pleasant time, feeling as though there was nothing to be afraid of and going home happy. Can you think of anything worse? No, no. We must stop this at once. There must be laws. We must take action. We must protect the children from this awful fate.

The best Succession theory

Like pretty much everyone else, I am obsessed with HBO’s Succession, to the point where last weekend’s schedule revolved around watching the final season premiere. I absolutely have to hand it to Emily Hogstad for her brilliantly insane Sherlockian theory about the show:

Composer Nicholas Britell is a character in both our universe and the Succession universe, he has known the Roy children since childhood, and he’s getting revenge on them by satirically scoring their lives.

According to Wikipedia, [Nicholas] Britell went to Buckley School in New York City. In the third episode of the show, Kendall admonishes his friend Stewy, “We’re not at Buckley anymore” after Stewy steals a donut, implying that the two characters were students there, too.

Britell also went to Harvard. Who else in the Succession universe went to Harvard? Kendall, of course, who, even twenty years later, loooves talking about what he did to the circulation numbers at the Harvard Lampoon. And Kendall’s father Logan refers to Stewy as Kendall’s college drinking buddy.

[…]

It is the easiest thing in the world, especially given the sarcastic, parodic nature of Britell’s soundtrack, to think of a fictional Nicholas Britell writing music to comment and try to come to terms with the brokenness of an old acquaintance: sometimes empathizing with him, sometimes mocking him through the music he composes.

I hear your protestation now: we can’t know if there’s a person named Nicholas Britell in the Succession universe!

Well, I’d argue that we can…because the characters in-universe hear his music.

You can read the whole thing here.

I’m now off to have some “do nothing time.” Have a good weekend, folks! 🎹