SONG:
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: This isn’t based on research It’s a cover of this vaguely scientific song by Coldplay.
ABSTRACT: There is this grouping of artists – it’s not really a school, and maybe only sort-of, kind-of a genre – who I think of as scorned singer-songwriters. They’re too popular to have any kind of edge, at least in their public appeal, and a little too earnest to be considered camp or ironic or “manipulating their image” as part of their art. They’re just about all men: someone like Aimee Mann is definitely edgy, and someone like Taylor Swift is too aware of (and fluent at manipulating) her public image as part of her gesamtkunstwerk. I’m thinking of people like Dave Matthews, Jars of Clay, David Gray, and, yeah, Coldplay. Magnets for the sneers of hipsters.
I first became aware of Coldplay in the early aughts, after something like 10 or 15 years of consciously avoiding top-40 radio and cable TV. I was helping a much-cooler friend DJ at a club/restaurant called Dada; he handed the CD case over to me, pointed to the controls, said, “Watch out for requests,” and went to the bathroom and the bar. Within the space of the first song I’d put on (probably something by Sneaker Pimps or Goldfrapp), at least two couples around my age had come up and requested Coldplay. My friend came back from his break about 20 minutes later or so, and I told him, said I couldn’t find any in his CD case, and he gave a sigh, rolled his eyes, and said, “Good. They’d never stop.”
The band next came onto my radar about a decade or so years later, when I had a kid about 12 who seemed to need some sort of creative outlet. His sister was very into dance, which wasn’t really his thing, and he wasn’t really into picking up any of the instruments I leave lying around the house. His mom tried vocal lessons – that’s not really an instrument, right? – and the one song the teacher tried on him was … not this one, but “If I Ruled the World.” Learning a song takes a lot of repetition, you know, especially if it’s not one you’ve already heard a lot. “The Scientist” would be the song he’d learn next – we’d gotten sheet music and everything – but he basically put the kibosh on that. Music was not his thing.
So right now, he’s 18, and is doing something he worked really hard to get to do, which is basic military training at the US Air Force Academy Prep School. I dropped him off there in Colorado Springs on July 7 and won’t be hearing from him until sometime next week. I’ve seen some photos the AFA Webguy (literally a proper name) puts up online, and the ones I’ve found him in he’s not really smiling. He’s doing a lot of lunges, and drill exercises, and shouting in unison with a bunch of other 18-year-olds – and some, like, 21-year-olds; there are prior enlisted at AFA Prep too. Going through old papers for security-clearance forms and references for his application, the sheet music to “The Scientist” came up, and it was a weird hit of nostalgia. I’d only ever heard the song when trying to teach him something he didn’t want to learn.
What he wanted was this.
Nobody said it was easy. But no one ever said it would be this hard.
It’s a pretty good song, for all that it’s sort of vaguely about a relationship that isn’t going so well.
Recording this has consumed my whole month. It’s a super easy chord progression, but it’s sort of native to piano. I figured out an organ part and was briefly tempted to go in an early 00’s indie rock direction, but nah. Two-note minimal fingerpicking, an unadorned voice, and lots of beeps. I think the only thing I’m missing here is a sequencer doing Alan Parsons-style quick arpeggios, but once I’d got all the sonar and engine noises in under that portamento sine-wave synth, there wasn’t much room. The outro is layers of Apollo recordings from NASA with a couple moments of a Tale Spinners for Children album of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in there. The song, to me, I think is about some kind of leaving, or liberty at cost, and, well, lifting off.
The sound is something I think some of my closest family would find incomprehensible, but I love it. I love the majesty of cacophony as it barely coheres into a structure: the rhythms of speech, the textures of radio transmissions and electric crackles, the clank of locomotive engines and panhead motors revving out a polyrhythm.
It’s difficult, but it’s there, all around us: music in the noise. Nobody said it was easy.