Liner Notes #6: Just Prog Rock Thoughts
Hello, and welcome to Liner Notes #6.
I'd like to start with a correction from Liner Notes #5, where I asserted the person who stomped on the Club Q shooter was a drag queen. She is not; she is a trans woman.
I've been back in the progressive rock space for a while, as evidenced by my last newsletter, where I was listening to the Dear Hunter. I'm an old hipster who loves prog rock because it's more cerebral than some other genres but still goes hard. I'm nowhere near as insufferable as a Rush fan, though, and I do listen to things that are not prog rock, so there you have it: I should be acceptable as a human being.
What's really attractive about prog rock is how each song has multiple sections, sometimes quite disparate from one another, and how the band navigates these sections is a source of fascination to me. So, naturally, I began thinking about writing and pace while listening to Native Construct's debut and only album, Quiet World, which you can access here on their bandcamp: https://nativeconstruct.bandcamp.com/. They are--of course they are--out of Berklee School of Music and have melded what feels like a dozen different genres in their songs. I really need to get away from these Berklee kids. Surely someone's out there making non-classical music who came from Manhattan or Curtis or Indiana? Right?
Anyway, "Your Familiar Face" came up in my Discover Weekly playlist a few weeks ago, and I listened, fascinated by the meld of piano-driven stadium rock, Queen specifically, musical theater, and very interesting harmonic and structural decisions. Their drummer especially is rather in love with blast beats and fills and I'm pretty sure "more is more" is his motto. This track is an easy listen for me, as the band leads the listener securely through the first section and into the . . . breakdown? Is there a prog term for this? by changing how they play around the beat. But the beat remains the same, which allows the listener to keep in touch with the drive of the song.
This isn't the case for the other songs like "Chromatic Aberration." And I readily acknowledge this is in large part a me thing; I prefer to get in the pocket and stay in the pocket, and prog rock gives you, like, eight pockets and asks you to jump between them at under a moment's notice. If I need to jump out of a pocket, I need some lead-up time or a thread that remains the same between the pockets, which is why "Your Familiar Face" works for me and "Chromatic Aberration" does not. Variety, ultimately, is the spice of prog and math rock.
The same can't be said about a novel's pacing, and this is where Just Prog Rock Thoughts really came into play: Your experience of pace in a novel, or even in a song, is deeply experiential and unique to you, and that influences whether or not you're going to like a work. Clearly, in "Chromatic Aberration," all the band members are with one other and their experiences are compatible. They're not necessarily compatible with mine, which makes the finale song on this album fall flat for me. Each section is great, but the lead-up to each section is not as great. Some transitions flow and some do not.
(Maybe the short story collection is a better analog for a prog rock song and not a novel?)
Most of my thoughts are preformed and don't fully congeal, so don't expect Athena leaping out of Zeus's head, here. I just ended up listening to this album, plus the Dear Hunters, and thinking about how transitions aid or hinder pace and what micro-pacing details you can get away with in a novel. Me, I like chapters to close out and I'm not a fan of cliffhangers, and I prefer to layer elements of tension and conflict and build the pace rather than burst out the gate at the bell like I'm running the Derby. But no matter what I think I'm doing, a reader brings their own experiences to the book, so what I think of as "good" pace can be their "terrible" pace. I'm reaching a point where I think pace is totally fake and that I'm going to write a book via my gut, but even then, my gut is guided by my experience. Sort of how a baby's gut microbiome mirrors the mother's microbiome, the microbiome of the music and books I love dictate in part what I want to hear and see in music and writing.
(Unlike writing, I know in music when I've messed up the pace and lost my listeners because the students quit moving or start looking very confused in Dalcroze class, and then I have to stop or back up and try again.)
Specifically, I started thinking of pace as totally fake when I was revising Key & Vale and decided to let my id rule and throw in a scene I very much wanted to happen, though I already had plans to edit the scene without it. Turns out, that's exactly what the chapter needed and it's some of my favorite writing, so good job, id. and good job, inherited gut flora! No one told me I needed to change pace here or inject conflict into the chapter to keep the pace running. I simply let my lizard (prog rock) brain rule. And I think letting the lizard brain have what it wants is a good thing for pace. Which itself is a societal and cultural construct. Do what you want, y'all. Indulge.
Speaking of the musical maternal microbiome, yesterday I retweeted a thread about Karen Carpenter and her excellent drumming, which she much preferred to singing. Karen Carpenter singing "Only Yesterday" and "Superstar" are my earliest musical memories. Nothing before that time exists. Only sunlight filtering in through curtains in a dark room and Karen's voice coming from the tape deck. I love the Carpenters, all the bad things notwithstanding; John's lush harmonies and Karen's singing are guaranteed to give me goosebumps. But Karen's singing is so effortless; her melancholy, velvety tone just spills out of her. And her breath control is incredible. Try singing along, and only breathe when she does.
Here's the Carpenters' "Goodbye to Love," which I think is my favorite record of theirs.
Until next time--I'll see you on the B-side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LVfpGe3p4E