Beauty, Art, and the L'Enfant Metro Stop

Someone recently drew my attention to a 2007 article in the Washington Post -- written by Gene Weingarten, it recounts what happened when world-famous violinist Joshua Bell busked for 43 minutes in DC's L'Enfant Metro station. I think I have some vague memory of this, but I clearly never read the whole thing 'til recently.

There are so, so many reasons why the article is worth your time; this small selection is just one of many nuggets from the article, about one of the few passerbys that stopped to listen:

When Picarello was growing up in New York, he studied violin seriously, intending to be a concert musician. But he gave it up at 18, when he decided he'd never be good enough to make it pay. Life does that to you sometimes. Sometimes, you have to do the prudent thing. So he went into another line of work. He's a supervisor at the U.S. Postal Service. Doesn't play the violin much, anymore.... Does he have regrets about how things worked out? The postal supervisor considers this.

"No. If you love something but choose not to do it professionally, it's not a waste. Because, you know, you still have it. You have it forever."

The article was incredibly popular, not to mention well-received -- it won the author a Pulitzer Prize.

If you skim through the chat Weingarten hosted after the article came out (note: if you think the article is long, just wait 'til you read the chat), there are some negative comments, but I'm much more in the "criers" camp. I didn't actually cry, but the idea that beauty is all around us, every day, and it's hard for us to notice it sometimes struck home. ("A thing of beauty is a joy forever. My man John Keats said that!") As did the idea that performing music, at whatever skill level, is a lifelong gift. As did the idea that I've been through more than my fair share of Metro stops in my life. Oh, and I still play the violin (very rarely).

I'll stop babbling. Go read. If you'd rather watch video (cant' seem to get the Post's unedited clips to work), here's a small (edited) clip...

Making Music With Your Kids... and Others...

I spend lots of time talking about people who are making kids music for a living (at least part of the time), but I spend quite a bit of time making music with my kids. Longtime kids music friend and Fids and Kamily Award co-coordinator Amy Davis is spending some time these days writing for Atlanta's Savvy Source outpost, and she was nice enough to ask me to write about making music with the preschool set.

The result is my thoughts on preschool music programs such as Music Together and others. If you're so inclined, do check it out...

Kids Music That Hasn't Been Written -- Or Covered -- Yet.

I got an e-mail from a kids' music artist asking the following question:

"I'm looking for some song ideas that people like you (you're basically a kidsmusicologist these days) have wanted to hear, but haven't yet heard on a kids' CD. I can always write more songs - but I really like to dig up obscure songs that few people have heard of and lately it seems like I'm having a hard time finding just the right song that hasn't been done by a million kids' artists."

Now, I must have been thrown off by the phrase "kidsmusicologist," because I completely misinterpreted the question. What the artist was looking for was, well, what they were asking for -- "that old song that your grandma used to sing to you that no one has heard for 35 years."

What I answered was something else entirely...
What I provided were song topics that really haven't been written at all. (Or they've been really obscure. Or they've been done in an overly educational way that proved painful to listen to in a non-educational environment. Or there's maybe one decent song and could certainly use some company.) Here's my (abbreviated) list:

1) Songs about emotions: There are great songs about numbers, alphabets, colors, but emotions are an important topic for preschoolers, and there really isn't anything I've heard that isn't completely didactic.
2) Songs about sports that aren't baseball: Admittedly, baseball is the most important sport ever, but you'd think soccer or basketball might deserve something.
3) Songs about pets dying: There aren't too many modern kids' songs that deal with "sad" or "serious" issues, but that's a topic that might be worth tackling.
4) Songs about babysitters: I like Uncle Rock's "Rock 'n' Roll Babysitter," but, like I said, some songs could use some company.Clearly, my memory is failing me... plenty of such songs to go around.

So how about you? Are there long-lost songs you'd love to see re-worked? Are there song topics screaming for a song? Are there gaps waiting to be filled?

How Do We Make Money? Volume.

There was an old Saturday Night Live fake ad about some bank whose sole function was to make change. The spoof had the mixture of trustworthiness and responsiveness that is the hallmark of most ads for financial institutions, right down to the founder who, when asked how he could make money solely making change, responded in an eager tone, "Volume."

The ad came to mind as I pondered Radiohead's decision to release its new album, In Rainbows, as a digital (DRM-free) download on Tuesday, October 10th, just 10 days after announcing it. (There's a deluxe boxset to be released in December, with a physical version of the regular CD scheduled for sometime in 2008.)

There are probably countless bands who are giving away music for free, but none with 1% of the popularity of Radiohead. If you go to the site and ask to buy the download, you can indeed enter "0" as your desired price of the digital download of the album. But Radiohead is probably banking on the goodwill of its fans and the interest of other music fans to generate a fair amount of change.

Other music fans like me. I'm not alone in saying OK Computer is one of the best albums of the past 10 years, but most of the rest of Radiohead's post-OK work has left me cold. So it's safe to say that if In Rainbows was appearing at my local record store in a physical format next week, I would not be picking it up. Nor would I be scouring a bunch of torrent sites looking to download it for free -- it's just not what I do.

But this morning I went to the site and put down 2 British pounds (about $4 US) plus about a $1 service charge to download it next week. Why? Well, in part it's the musical equivalent of playing the Powerball lottery -- I always viewed $1 I paid when the pot got large and the office collected as entertainment, not as investment. This is much the same, no? It's also part of the giddy glee in helping to make major label executives nervous about whether they can continue business as usual.

So here are my questions to you:
1) Was I too cheap? A kids' musician e-mailed me last night saying he'd put down $10 -- a dollar a song. But I think he's a bigger fan than I am. It might be cheap, but $4 is $4 more than Radiohead would have received from me in the absence of this experiment. But if Spoon did something similar with their next album, I guarantee I'd've put down $10. Maybe more.
2) Is this a model that can at all work in the kids' genre? I've always pooh-poohed the idea of digital downloads because I think kids like the physicality of things, and mp3s don't have a lot of physicality, know what I mean? But if somebody like, say, Dan Zanes did something similar, I think he'd probably make a fair amount of change. (Though I'd certainly miss the album packaging, which has always been top-notch with his work.) Of course, he's already reaping all the profit from his CDs, something that Radiohead, while they were on a label, did not, so perhaps his incentives to do so is less...

Readers, musicians, thoughts?

The Stuff of Kids Music

I have, in the past, babbled on regarding the need for artists to improve their album art and overall packaging.

Why? Because unlike many other genres of music, children's music is still very much reliant on physical modes of distribution and, as a result, the physical products counts, and far more than just about any genre.

Children's music publicist/all-around-good-person Beth Blenz Clucas' recent newsletter offers the thoughts of some of her clients on this very issue. It's worth a read, and not just because it agrees with my world view. There are some very good reasons given for why actual CDs won't go away, but one of my favorite has to do with cassettes. A couple people make the comment that cassettes, which I would guess many of us haven't purchased a cassette since, oh, buying that Erasure "A Little Respect" cassingle, took forever to go away in the kids' music industry. It's a technologically lagging genre. That does not indicate the dominance of downloads any time soon.

Frankly, because the parents are buying this music, not their 3-year-olds, and because the parents who are interested in this music grew up in a time before downloading, we're still comfortable with the physical product. Don't get me wrong, we still get music from iTunes and eMusic and elsewhere, but we like the physical product, too. We like to give the physical product to friends when they're having kids, and to the kids themselves at the birthday party. Face it, it's hard to wrap a download.

I realize that eventually CDs will go away even in the kids' music genre, but it won't really start taking hold until our 6- and 10-year-olds, who will have grown up in a downloading world, become parents themselves. And even then, their parents will still give their grandkids physical CDs.

(For whatever it's worth, here are more of my thoughts on 21st century kids music.)