This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)
Since my kids continue to be obsessed with David Byrne’s American Utopia, I have Talking Heads on the brain. Here’s one of their best songs ever, produced by the band members themselves. Here’s the...
View ArticleOnce In A Lifetime
Here is what might possibly be my single favorite song in the world: Here’s a red-hot live version from The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads: Here’s the even more outrageous live version from Stop...
View ArticleBurning Down The House
Here is the closest Talking Heads ever came to a legitimate pop hit, their only song to crack the Billboard Top Ten. It isn’t as conceptually or musically groundbreaking as “Once In A Lifetime“, but...
View ArticleMaking Flippy Floppy
Somebody suggested that I transcribe all the Talking Heads songs. I won’t do that, but I do seem to be in the process of analyzing all of my favorites. There are a bunch! Here’s one. I assume that the...
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I Wanna Be Your Lover
In addition to drumming with the Roots, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is a brilliant DJ, and he wrote a Twitter thread about his top ten most reliable dance floor fillers. Prince figures heavily in the...
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Groove: an aesthetic of measured time
As I work toward my future book on the theory of groove-based music, I’m reading up on the existing literature. There is not a whole lot of it! Most of the scholarly work about groove is about the...
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What’s Going On
For a discussion of musical form in Contemporary Music Theories, we talked about Marvin Gaye’s classic “What’s Going On.” The multitrack stems are in circulation, and they are quite a revelation....
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Blues harmony primer
For a more detailed and scholarly version of this guide with a bibliography, see my Blues Tonality treatise. How do chords and scales work in the blues? Is there a “blues scale”, and if so, what notes...
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My year in writing
I wrote a lot of stuff this year! First, let’s talk about the big projects that I started in previous years but finished in 2022. The biggest one was my doctoral dissertation. Read the story of it...
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Althea
Here’s a Grateful Dead song that I loved as a teenager. As with many things I loved as a teenager, I did not know why this spoke to me. Now I do, so I get to share that knowledge with you. “Althea” is...
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There Was A Time (I Got To Move)
Being a fan of James Brown can be a challenge, because his classic songs have all been recorded multiple times in different versions with different names on different labels. “I Got To Move” is a case...
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Building the Funky Drummer beat
I’m developing some groove pedagogy for an upcoming Soundfly course and an instrumental method book I’m working on with Heather Fortune. The Soundfly course is for producers, while the book is for...
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God Make Me Funky
Herbie Hancock’s band on his classic mid-70s funk albums went on without Herbie as The Headhunters. Their biggest hit, “God Make Me Funky”, has been sampled in several hundred rap songs, and rightly...
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Groove harmony outline
I recently got involved in some music theory pedagogy discourse on Twitter, about which you do not care. There was some discussion of the fact that I’m planning to write a teaching resource for...
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Baby, I Love You
Sign up for my new harmony course on Soundfly I continue to be severely stressed out about the state of America and the world, and I continue to reach to Aretha Franklin for emotional support. This...
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I made a new track for teaching swing
I just finished my Groove Theories book proposal and sent it out, that was about twenty years of very slow work followed by two weeks of very fast work. So fingers crossed on that. I included two...
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New Orff arrangements with Heather Fortune
Heather Fortune and I are delighted to announce the publication of 5 Pop Grooves for Orff Ensemble, available now from the good people at F-flat Books. If you teach elementary music, you should check...
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Polymeter vs polyrhythm
As I continue to build groove pedagogy resources, I want to clear up some persistent confusion about polymeter and polyrhythm. If you don’t feel like reading the whole post, it can be summed up in...
View ArticleLove Rollercoaster, Genius of Love, and nonsensical chord loops
I have a hypothesis about harmony in loop-based music: if you have a good groove going, then any repeated chord progression at all will start to make sense and sound good after a few repetitions. In...
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Things I wrote in 2023
This year I wrote a bunch of groove pedagogy, including a book proposal and related materials aimed at future publications and teaching. So far, the only published part of all that work is 5 Pop...
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