No more new services, plz... and a music review!
Hopefully last stop on the "Why-Is-Tech-Always-Breaking" train
Hey there,
Hope you and yours are safe and healthy at the moment.
I don’t know if you remember but my last newsletter service (TinyLetter) just up and went kaput on me, so I have settled on one final option (Substack) that I hope will stick! If you have since tried to unsubscribe in the past, feel free to send me an angry screed (or just unsubscribe), otherwise, you’re (hopefully) receiving this because you signed up on my site or from a long ago campaign—I hope you stick around for some thoughts on music or technology (and sometimes both! or neither. we’ll see!). Also, if you have heard about Substack’s model, don’t worry—I plan to continue to keep this newsletter free, or at least some significant portion of it.
What’s New, Pussycat? (Whoa!)
As you may know, I released an EP earlier this year, Retroject. That was pretty neat—I had a lot of help from my friends, Arc Iris, and experimented with my sound quite a bit. Give it a listen and tell me what your favorite track is?
I’ve got a couple more projects I’m producing for other artists that aren’t quite ready to advertise yet, but will let you know as soon as they are! One new project I can talk about: given how impossible it is to play shows right now (or even really socialize much), I’ve started a livestreaming music channel.
If you’re ever interested in the production process, I do a Saturday Sound Design Session, where I work on producing a song. This past weekend I was workshopping a wintry song for a compilation album coming out this December, and my lovely audience even got involved in the composition process! I’m planning on introducing a few more series, including a songwriters roundtable/group exercise, some audience-prompted musical improv and doing some reviews of up-and-coming amateur songwriters. Oh, and some Minecraft in there, for good measure (it is Twitch, after all).
You can check out my livestreams here: twitch.tv/milesmakesmusic (do it, it’s a lot of fun!)
Words, words, words
Lastly, I’m starting a new series of reviewing upcoming or just-released singles—with one parameter: the review must be 500 words. Here’s the first one! Enjoy.
The Five Hundred Word Review: “You Slipped Away” by Andy Shauf
How do you say “nostalgia” with just a four-chord vamp? For Andy Shauf, the answer: opening with what sounds like a typical resolution, with a surprise around the last corner. The fourth chord is augmented—a chord type known for creating a mysterious or unsettled sound. In “You Slipped Away”, Shauf intentionally perplexes his own architecture, while crooning on the post-heartbreak shock where one can still see the shadow of the happiness they’ve just lost with such clarity that its absence just feels like a joke.
The song also exudes nostalgia on an aesthetic level. Shauf’s production style has always been reminiscent of the 60s, the beginning of the golden age of recorded music: subtle production, organic instrumentation, even the florid songwriting of the time. Upon listening to the clear but warm mix, I encounter two seemingly incompatible thoughts. First, I wonder how Shauf gets so few instruments to sound so full. Then, I’m struck by the details: a pad of earthy clarinets arise from what felt like only sustained piano, delicate backing vocals braid their way around the lead.
The key to this trick is quietude, I think. Even on his prior, more energetic songs like Try Again (You Slipped Away is more of a ruminative shuffle), none of the instruments are crushed to death with compression, they instead find a comfortable position next to each other—shoulders bumping here and there, perhaps—but not one is fighting for attention at any given moment.
There is a certain fetishism of vintage sound in indie pop music, but usually artists who borrow such ideas limit themselves to sampling from the purely aesthetic or rhythmic, e.g., a tremolo evoking psychedelic rock, or an infectious disco beat underlying a song with otherwise modern sounds. Shauf seems to also pull as much from vintage songwriting cues as he does from production, instrumentation. His use of the unstable-sounding half-diminished chord as first in the verse is one such pop anachronism. Paired with the dominant chord, the piece then revisits the pair again, evoking a drunken see-saw motion. One gets the impression that the narrator might be drinking their sorrows away. This heartsick pair returns again in an instrumental bridge while a defeated bassline trundles lower with each repetition.
It’s a sort of bittersweet sound, at times reminding me of "Tears of a Clown" or the genre of crooner ballad in which the foolishness of love was highlighted in a sort of self-deprecating way. This retro composition functions as a throughline that makes the aesthetic choices adhere in a more serious way. The line directly following this wistful motif gives the song its emotional gravitas when all instruments drop out minus piano. We feel as solitary as Shauf does, left smoking his last cigarette, before dossing down into the familiar push-pull of the final verse/chorus. Lastly, we revisit the introductory chords again, but this time, our augmented chord absent—does this final resolution represent acceptance, or further recognition of what’s lost when love ceases?
Conclusion III: The Conclusioning
That’s all for now! As always, I don’t write these just for myself—if there’s anything you found interesting, cool, or annoying in this newsletter, or if you have any ideas for a livestream, please reach out!