In a wide-ranging discussion about music, songwriting and the creative process, local author and musician Lawrence Lanahan shares the gifts of a great song with Nestor and the passion for his new podcast series, “Rearranged,” exploring the concept of song arrangement and its significance to how we enjoy music.
Nestor Aparicio and Lawrence Lanahan discuss music, songwriting, and the creative process. Lanahan, a local author and musician, shares his journey from education research to journalism, highlighting his passion for music. They delve into the evolution of music arrangements, the impact of technology on sound, and the influence of artists like Gil Evans and Miles Davis. Lanahan’s new podcast, “Rearranged,” explores the concept of song arrangements and their significance. They also touch on the legal and cultural aspects of music, including copyright disputes and the role of technology in shaping modern music. The conversation emphasizes the joy and importance of music in personal and cultural contexts. Lawrence Lanahan discusses his upcoming visit to the Big Ears Music Festival in Knoxville, highlighting his tendency to explore new experimental music despite his preference for classic rock. He shares a story about his 50th birthday trip to Austin, where he played classic rock covers with his friend and encountered a talented young musician, Wyeth Miller. Lanahan also mentions his band, Glad Pulses, which is releasing a new album in the spring, and describes their sound as a blend of guitar pop, country, and blues. Nestor Aparicio talks about his love for music and upcoming events, including concerts and reunions of various bands.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
music fest, crab cake tour, football season, political author, songwriting, music podcast, crack the sky, Fleetwood Mac, songwriting process, music technology, recording history, copyright lawsuits, AI-generated music, music listener, concert experience, Big Ears Festival, experimental music, classic rock covers, open mics, Wyeth Miller, Lawrence Lanahan, guitar pop, songwriter influences, music podcast, Baltimore Positive, Glad Pulses, Jason Isbell, music theory, song arrangements, music festivals
SPEAKERS
Lawrence Lanahan, Nestor Aparicio
8
Nestor Aparicio 00:01
Welcome home. We are W, N, S T, am 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We are Baltimore positive. Yes, it’s spring training. Yes, it’s the NFL off season. And yes, we got lots of things to do. We’re gonna get out of the crab cake tour, the Maryland crab cake to represented by the Maryland lottery rule. Resume on March the sixth at Faith lease, I might have some monopoly scratch off. This isn’t a real one, but I’ll have real ones by then. And we do appreciate all of our sponsors coming along, Jiffy Lube and a whole bunch of others, wise markets, Royal farms, for getting us into March. And you know, I get once I get into football season, I do football, and then had politics, and then this felon is running the country. So I do politics when I can, and whatever. And I’ve gotten off the beaten path the last couple of weeks where I have a bunch of people who’ve reached me, new books, new projects, different things, old guests, returning guests, different ways that I want to get onto the program. Lawrence land hands one of those guys. He’s a local author. He joined us on a much serious issue, the lines between us a book a few years ago about racism, the city politics, all sorts things like that. This isn’t going to be nearly that heavy, although I will fight you about music and about songwriting and about all this stuff. So first things first, and welcome you back on. You’re one of the many who just reached me and say, hey dude, I did a thing, man. I’m like, hey dude, come on the show. What’s going on? So when it has to do with music I had two weeks ago, I had Grammy Award winning percussionist MB Gordie on the program because his sister is a listener of mine. So anytime I can do music around I’m trying to chase down Getty. Lee Rick Emmett from triumph is coming on next week. So you knew this was my lane, right? Lars,
Lawrence Lanahan 01:46
yeah, yeah, yeah. Get Getty, this guy, he’s got a autobiography, doesn’t he? Well,
Nestor Aparicio 01:50
that was last year. This year, he’s doing the baseball history. Oh no, he’s doing a whole baseball thing. Because he’s the world’s biggest collector of of memorabilia. Like he has, he has the most Negro Baseball League autograph things. He has the most President baseball signed in the world. Yeah, idea,
Lawrence Lanahan 02:09
8yeah. Well, multi talented guy.
Nestor Aparicio 02:14
Man is what he is. He rush live only probably 100 times. Yes,
Lawrence Lanahan 02:19
I was like his foot synthesizer not enough to be playing all that bass, but he’s got his feet going too. Here
Nestor Aparicio 02:25
you go. Here’s where you nerds get going. And I told this story to one of my musician buddies. Last week. I went to to see the black crows with Gina shock down at mg, whatever, National Harbor house, you know, like we’re so we went down Christmas time, and I’m with a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, right? And she’s very innocuous. Nobody recognizes her. She’s short, she’s blonde, she’s beautiful, she’s a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer. She’s my Dundalk girl, and I get to a show with her concert, and we got front row tickets, and it wasn’t anything about her or me. I just clicked online and bought them. They just dropped, and I’m like, let’s buy and let’s go. We jumped in the car, and the first thing she did when we got down there in the front row is she’s up. She’s all nerd now on the kits and the like, the tech and all that rush the go. Goes, right, no, yeah. Rush was the original band that when Why was a kid, and I was not a musician, I was a wannabe. I was a baseball I played sports, but I had a base, and I wanted to learn how to play it. I never did to this day, right? Like learn in Spanish. I didn’t learn it, but they were the original band that Getty would write liner notes about all of his equipment, every synthesizer he discovered, and he was early into the proggy side of exploratory. And Neil Peart would write tunes about all of the the percussionist things he had. So this is right in your range of music, right? You’ve as
8Lawrence Lanahan 03:50
a gift to us heads, isn’t it, when they put all the all the technical details in the liner notes. Well,
Nestor Aparicio 03:55
what is your like? I know of you as like a political author. Like, Wait, where do you get off doing all this music stuff. Lawrence,
Lawrence Lanahan 04:00
I always have, man, when I first got into journalism, I was an education researcher for seven years in my 20s, I kind of broke into journalism, and the first stuff I did was all half, I would say, half music. I wrote a 5000 word profile on this guy who was an artist from New Orleans, and His thing was sketching, sketching musicians live. He’d sketch jazz musicians. He’d improvised the sketch while they improvised music, sort of that Louis Armstrong kind of thing that, well, yeah, he was, you know, those famous families, New Orleans, the music families. He was good buddies with James Andrews and his, I think, his nephew, trombone, shorty. So Katrina flushed them out, and they came to New York, and I was living in New York, it’s like, wow, is New Orleans going to regrow in New York. And there was one bar in Alphabet City where that all the musicians from New Orleans kind of started hanging out at and so they would push all the chairs and tables to the back, because in New Orleans, you danced to the music. I. And Kurt was there. And I thought, now I’ve already profiled James Andrews, this famous New Orleans musician gets flushed out to New York. But this guy, Kurt, was so passionate about music and art, I ended up profiling him. I did a profile of this young gospel band playing their first gig at the gospel tent at the New Orleans jazz and Heritage Festival. Like it is a big deal to play the gospel tent if you’re a gospel group, so I kind of follow their first thing, you know, like this music. I’ve been playing guitar since I was 14. I’ve always been in to music. My sisters are 10 to 12 years older than me, so I was, you, my friends were listening to wham and New Kids on the Block, and I was like, getting cassette tapes and dubbing my sister’s crack the sky LPs. Oh, I knew that was gonna get you come
Nestor Aparicio 05:45
8on. Now you saw crack the sky when you come on. You’re making this up. They played Saturday night. I was like, where they they played in the basement at the fallston barrel house on Saturday night. Um, Palumbo is coming on, brother. Palumbo is coming on the show this week. Yes. Oh, wow. No, no, I can’t believe you just I, you
Lawrence Lanahan 06:04
know that dude, crack the sky shirt, the black one with every time I wear that, people come up to me. Oh, man, I did sound for them in the 70s, like everybody I always get I took, I wore that shirt to a music festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. It was a four Night Music Festival, and three or four people were like, crap. The skies was not just a Maryland thing,
Nestor Aparicio 06:23
so my wife didn’t know about them. Like, full on. And last Wednesday, Brian from the band threw me a note, and it was the sweetest thing. Like, I mean, nobody invites me to do stuff. Like, honestly, I’m not prying the blues, but, like, it was kind of an out of the Hey, um, the band wants to invite you to the show. It’s a 50th anniversary, and I’m like, I wrote about them in the 80s. I was the music critic at the sun and from 86 to 92 okay, how old are you? That always defines you. Said something about, wham, how old are you? I turned 50 on Okay, so you’re six years younger than me. Okay, so I mean, we’re at a different point into the 80s with MTV and music and British rock and the Sex Pistols and poison and like all of that. But I’m a classic rock nerd. I I collect the 1970s Pacifica belt buckles. They’re kind of my nerd. Them of that classic rock Kansas sticks Zeppelin kind of era. And I saw the zeppelin movie two weeks ago from my finally doc. Yeah, finally got a movie theater. It was unbelievable. It was so good, and it was sound good, or I was just everything was good about it was just great. I mean, it was just great. So but crack the sky, they invited us out Saturday night. We went up to falls. It was cold, it was packed, and we went in, and it was a timepiece. Dude like my wife doesn’t know the music, and everybody in the room knew the music. Don’t tell your mother. I’m here. Don’t tell your mother.
Lawrence Lanahan 07:45
I saw them at the Rams Head live in Annapolis. And I mean, crack the sky fans are fans, man. And so there’s this guy sitting at the table next to me, and they’re like, we’re gonna play a song from our 2008 album, right? Not a song everybody’s gonna know. And the guy next to me is just, oh, singing along to every word,
8Nestor Aparicio 08:03
every word from the greenhouse. I’m blowing up. I’m blowing up Detroit. Like, I’m into it. And my wife’s, like, really getting off on how much fun I’m having. And then the band can’t, well, we’re all way in the back. Brought us up to the front, and now we’re like, gonna say I got a bad back, so I had to sit. And I didn’t want to sit. They made me. They gave me a seat so good that I had to, like, all right, I gotta sit here now, you know, like, but we were five feet from John. He was almost spitting on us by the time they were doing the end and ice. And she’s, she’s a dancer,
Lawrence Lanahan 08:32
yeah, so that’s heart. He’s a Beatles guy. You know what I
Nestor Aparicio 08:36
mean, very Froggy. Like, when my wife and I, I said to her. She’s like, Pink Floyd dude, like she was hearing Genesis. She was hearing Yes, and then all of a sudden she hears like, which she loves hot razors. And that’s very 80s. That is a perfect song. You know, it’s a per Yeah, Lawrence Lynn answer. He’s done a book on music. It’s called rearrange. He is asked to be on the show, which I would flippantly say, invited himself on. But I love great guests. I love when people do great things and they have a passion for what they’re doing. Give me so you love music. You love crack the sky. I even text John Allen, my dear rock star buddy. I said, you had a crack the sky shirt in 81 and I remembered it was black with a white jersey, almost. Look, look, look, this is right. And I see he’s like, I don’t remember that. I’m like, I remember you had a cracked sky shirt. So you always remember I never had one. I should have worn
Lawrence Lanahan 09:27
8it. I should have worn it. I’m wearing my shirt for I just got back from Austin, and I’m wearing my sandstown point shirt. I saw it. Had some amazing musical I
Nestor Aparicio 09:34
had a great Austin experience. Last year. I went to see Springsteen, and I went up at a corner bar, and I saw one of the greatest bands ever. Seen them all. And I have video. I was two in the morning streaming back to my wife like you won’t believe that. And I gotta go back and the barbecue and all that, because you give me the deal. You’re a music dude. I know you sort of, you live here, right? You’re, yeah, Baltimore, right here
Lawrence Lanahan 09:53
in Hamilton, northeast Baltimore.
Nestor Aparicio 09:54
So give me the exit. You know, the exits from New York to here, and how you wind up. Doing this really interesting. And it’s not about any specific music, right? It’s about music
8Lawrence Lanahan 10:04
your it’s about the Joy of listening to music by listening to the arrangements. So it’s a podcast, so you’ll get to hear lots of cool stuff. And so I’m sorry
Nestor Aparicio 10:14
I keep saying book. I think if he’s an author, I’m an
Lawrence Lanahan 10:18
idiot, that’s an okay,
Nestor Aparicio 10:19
8don’t buy the book, listen to the podcast. Yeah. So
Lawrence Lanahan 10:23
I just, I mean, every you know, music has just been my family and my friends. You know, that’s, that’s why I live for a long time. And, you know, I’ve played in bands. I studied, you know, Carl Philippi Act, the jazz guitarist. Sure, I took lessons from him in my 20s. I would, I would come out of, he lived right up here in Chesley and Hamilton. I would drive two rush hours. I lived in cabin John in DC. I would do two rush hours to get up here by seven. If I was too early, I’d go to Kelly’s pool hall for a while, and if I was one time, I’d go right to Carl’s house. I would get through lessons that I’d be pumping my fist when I came out of his house. He loved music so much and was so good at teaching it. So I learned jazz theory, and then for my birthday, in my 30s, my wife had heard me talking about, oh, I want to learn how to compose. I want to do composition lessons. She got me lessons at the Peabody with this incredible composer and teacher, Judah adashi. And so I learned a bit about composition, and started writing, like string parts for my songs, horn parts, that kind of thing. And so the at the heart of this podcast is what is the song really right? Because you and I, we love songs. We got our favorite bands. I could
Nestor Aparicio 11:27
never got our favorite song. I think about it all the time. Yes, you could like writing songs like my friend Johnny Allen is one of my best friends in the world. John and I are very we’ve just grown close. We’ve known each other since we were 10 years old, and it’s just all these years in, and I always marvel at it, because he was a drummer, became a singer and songwriter, and, you know, he’s written hits and, like all that kind of stuff. And Mitch Allen and that group that wrote songs the other night, I’ll give you something that’s an interesting thing. My wife, this is about songwriting, right? I went to pee at the crack the sky show, and I’m literally in the bathroom, and I’m here in Palumbo. Start to tell a story, and I’m like, he wrote the kicks hit. He wrote, don’t close your eyes. He did. He did. And I’m an old music critic, and I interviewed him both 30 years ago. I know him, whatever. I don’t know the story of that. I don’t even want to know, because Palumbo is coming on this week, and I’m going to say, How did you and Steve Whiteman get like he sang it the other night, and I pretty sure everybody in the room knew it. My wife knew the song, the Venn diagram of crack the sky, right? I mean, in Hagerstown and Pittsburgh and whatever, witch kowski and like all that. And I’m thinking to myself, they wrote that song 40 years ago was a hit single, and it’s out of Palumbo range. It was very awkward. I mean, I didn’t even put it up because I’m like people might, but I I can appreciate Tom Waits writing a song and not being able to sing it nearly as well as the Eagles did.
Lawrence Lanahan 12:55
I’ll tell you Nestor, if you can tell a story, which you’re very good at, you can write a song, and the first line of your song is, I was peeing at the crack the sky show, no, no, no, no. I think you could do it, yeah, but I think you could. But, um, anyway, so, so you know, all right, think about it this way. All right, somebody, you realize, oh, I didn’t know that person wrote that song, right? Did you watch the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary thing pieces? Yes. Did you see my Osiris and Brittany Howard do nothing compares to you. I did not. Okay, so it’s the two of them. Do you know who wrote that song? You know? Wrote that
8Nestor Aparicio 13:28
song? Prince wrote that. I’m a music guy. So, yeah, yeah, okay,
Lawrence Lanahan 13:32
the way that sinead o’connor did that song and arranged it, isn’t it kind of her song, too. Yeah. Okay, so Brittany Howard, well, they would say, taking a song and making it your own, right, right? So, mile, Miley Cyrus and Brittany Howard get up there, and the band’s kind of in the shadows, but there’s a lot of guitars up there. And they just, there’s this one guitar, like every four measures, and, you know, it’s like, oh, this sound. This song sounds different. It’s been rearranged. It’s been made very guitar centric. And what happens? They’re doing a duet. They’re going back and forth, singing back and forth, and Brittany steps up. She’s got this blonde Telecaster. Looks an awful lot like one, the guitar that GE Smith played later two, it looks a lot like Prince’s guitar, all right? So she comes forward and just slays this guitar solo. Sinead O’Connor, I don’t think, had a guitar solo in her song, right? So by rearranging a song, you you can make it your own arrangements. Covers are technically called derivative music. It derives from someone else’s creation, right? That’s sort of a pejorative term. Oh, it’s derivative. That music’s derivative. It’s not to me. Well,
Nestor Aparicio 14:47
that’s where the zeppelin movie came in. Everything they did was, you know, Muddy Waters, Delta Squad will it literally, literally, right? And where it came from. Well,
Lawrence Lanahan 14:56
8that’s the thing. Or when, when people start arranging, when the. Of conventions of arranging start emerging, oh, we’re going to do it this way. And another band’s like, I’m going to do it that way too. That’s where you get genres. That’s where you got yacht rock. You had the same session players on all these albums, and they’ve got a way of playing. And somebody says, Oh, yeah, we’re going to start every song like that, whether it’s Hall of notes, it’s Kenny Loggins, you got the same session players, you got the same guy range in the horns, all of a sudden, all that music sounds similar when you had all the songwriters in California like Linda Ronstadt, Warren, zvon Randy, all the Eagles, like that, all as a documentary. Or Linda Ronstadt says, I’m a little worried that we’re all because that all the music we make is going to converge into one band and one song, because they were so influenced by and nobody wrote
Nestor Aparicio 15:42
him better than John David south. Or, anyway, we all know that great. John David south, yeah, absolutely.
Lawrence Lanahan 15:46
So the first, so the first episode of this podcast is about my favorite piece of recorded music, which is Moon dreams, as on Miles Davis’ album, the birth of the cool as arranged by the jazz Ranger Gil Evans, right? It just stops the clock for me, okay? And I am just everything else disappears when I listen to that song, you know? And so I’ve listened to it a million times
Nestor Aparicio 16:08
now you can make me go listen to it again. Say it again for anybody in the car. Moon
8Lawrence Lanahan 16:12
dreams. Moon dreams on Miles Davis’ birth of cool. So I was at a residency when I was writing that book. The lines between us, right? It’s me and a bunch of really great authors that were giving me impostor syndrome. And, um, we were working, whatever, 14 hours a day writing our books. But, you know, we tried to take a little time to have some fun. I said one night, listen everybody we’re going to meet in this room. I got a speaker. Everybody’s going to play one song off their phone through the speaker that they love, and just tell us why you love it, right?
Nestor Aparicio 16:40
And I gotta move, man, I’m gonna have to you get me home. Do it? Do it sometime. Do you know Dave shining? Do you know Shining? Shining is a dear, dear friend. Shining covered the Orioles. He’s a long, 35 year Washington Post sports writer. He’s covered a dozen Olympics, and he’s one of my favorite but a musician and lives in butcher Hill, does his own music, like, look, S, H, E, I n, i n, he’s on my show all the time. We had a weird disagreement about this topic. Oh, two years ago. So this is your thing. Okay, go ahead. But, yeah, but go ahead.
Lawrence Lanahan 17:12
All right. So, so we do this, we talk about our favorite songs. I’m saying, like, listen, like the horn player goes climbs all the way up to this note, and the other instruments follow them all the way up, like they found some buried treasure. And, like, just being ahead and freaking out about this song. And then after this, my book’s over, I’m looking for something to do. And like, well, you know, like the sound of a song has, like, you know, if I love a song, the song draws me to the writer and the meaning they were conveying. And then I realized it was the sound of the song that drew me to the song in the first place. It was the sound. And so what? How do you create meaning for people just with the sound? Why do I love this gillavin song so much? And then I realized this is a Johnny Mercer song, and one of the greatest American songwriters of all time. And Johnny Mercer started Capitol Records. And the first session he did for Capitol Records, he had the singer named Martha Tilton sing Moon dreams. It was very sweet and sappy and Poppy. Glenn Miller with Army Air Force band and Johnny Desmond and the crew chiefs, they did Moon dreams. So I’m thinking, Oh, okay, well, let me listen. I love this song so much. Let me listen to the original kind of recordings. And they just fell flat for me, partly because of my age, right? Like swing music from the 40s, that’s what my grandparents listened to, and I was never interested in I wanted to rock, right? And so, well,
Nestor Aparicio 18:30
8you were 18, when in you were 1819, 93 Yeah. So your HF festival HFS guy? Yeah, I saw the 92 HF festival. Okay, so, I mean, I can call it like that, because, like I was told by my my bosses at the Baltimore Sun, my sports editor bosses, Mike Marlowe, specifically, who loved the Beatles and loved, you know, all of that. Dave Clark, five that, that era of music. He always said to me when I was 18 years old and he was my boss in 1986 he said, the music you listen to now will be the music you love the rest of your life. And it’s 40 years later, and I’m sitting here, and we go to lunch, and he laughs at me because he still loves the Beatles, and I still love Led Zeppelin, but that, but I want to give the Lawrence lanace here, and it’s not a book, it is a pocket. I just think of you as an author. Is that okay? That’s That’s great. People think of me as all sorts of thing. Usually it begins with an A or an F. And so I have the Dave shining story, and I want to give it to you, yeah, as a legitimate misunderstanding, okay, like, completely legitimate. And by the way, Hank Azeri is coming on this week. We’re going to talk about Springsteen and his love is so it’s a big Music Week here. I have Hank azerion. I have John Palumbo coming on. Rick Emmett from triumph is coming on next month. I am begging Getty Lee to come on and talk baseball me. At some point, I may be going to Toronto to stalk him. Don’t tell him. Might stay, who knows, a little while. So, so on June 27 of 2021 and don’t ask me what. Because we’re in the middle of the plague. Second summer of the plague, nobody could go out summertime, right? I put up for my music fans. What is the best song ever written and why? And it came to me, and I don’t know why I put it up, but pretty early on, someone answered triumph, magic, power always gets me going. And I’m like, so I listened to it. I’m like, that’s a really good song, and I sort of rediscovered triumph in a different way, and their music. And I invited Rick Emmett on. He wrote a book last year. He’s coming back on. I’m going to try to get him out to an Oreo game, because he loves baseball. So that begat that. But on that thread. I’ll never forget, this was four in the morning. I’m about to take a shower in my peaceful time. I think my wife might have been away, cranking music up. And I literally put this thread up the day before, and I made a pot. I have an old iPod. I’m old school, so I have most songs. I mean, I’m a I’m a dude. I was a music critic. I had 20,000 CDs. I was, I was a DJ before Apple Music and all that. I’m weird. So I had my iPod in my my bathroom, and my like setting in, and I looked down and they shine, and wrote on that. And Dave’s a musician and a guy I respect. He, he wrote one word, and it was, it was, it wasn’t. It was a the Fleetwood Mac song. I thought he wrote Sarah. He just wrote the word Sarah. And I’m like, I love that song, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Bucha. And they probably were kind of madly in love at that time when they wrote that. It’s kind of gypsy ish. And I remember, wait a minute, baby, stay with me a while. So I like, I listened it, cranked it up, and I showered that morning, and I’m like, Man, shining is a freaking genius. The I’m getting the great so I want to read you some of these songs. Can I do that for you? These are the songs I got that morning. Taxi by Harry shape, by Harry Chapin, Born to Run whiter shade of pale. John Lennon said it was the greatest song ever written. Tie between yesterday and God Only Knows. God only knows really good one, right? Each boys, yeah, stairway, yeah.
Lawrence Lanahan 22:11
We talk about Pet Sounds on the because the arranging on that album is everyone loves
Nestor Aparicio 22:15
Pet Sounds, right? Timeless American Pie. God only knows, man in a box, Alice in Chains, like a stone by audio slave just I’m getting all Welcome to the Jungle. Hey, Jude, we are the world a day in the life God only. I got a lot of God Only Knows. Man, I bet you did. I got any Did you get any Caroline? No, I don’t know. I got Stairway to Heaven. I’m just watching the wheels. John Lennon, Star Spangled Banner. Amazing Grace. I’ll hear that that’s the guy that told me to go F myself on Facebook a couple of weeks ago. That’s not graceful. Imagine with or without you, you too. Imagine Limp Bizkit, Nookie. There’s a good one for you. Elvis in the ghetto. For those about the rock the center field, um, baseball. Song, center field. Black bird, black black bird. Revolution. Oh, my God. I mean, they have a lot of people songs, right? So, um, Ray Bachman was the one that gave me magic power, and that’s before he had cancer. Love you, Ray. So Ray’s doing okay. Ray’s the one that gave me magic power, and he even realized that. So it turns out, I discover, not only that, that, and this is when Christine McPhee still lives. I’m listening to some Fleetwood Mac, and it’s getting me going all these songs. Layla, the great, great Batman of Ocean City, Mike Beatty, who’s still alive, said Layla, because he loved the passion with which it was written for. Was a love breakup song with Eric Clapton and involved, another Beatle. There you go. Both George Harrison
Lawrence Lanahan 23:43
and they snatched up a song that somebody was playing in the studio to pitch on the end. And here’s a fleet with Mac little piece of trivia. My band covers blue letter from the fleet with Mac self titled album. That’s another, another song where, like, they were at a studio, and these two guys were writing a song in the next studio over, and they were like, Whoa. And so they were, that’s not a fleet with Mac song. You song. Well, this sounds just like that. Boy, yeah, but you know, so that, so is that their song. It sounds just like them. So the with the Gil Evans song, the moon dreams, I go and listen to these kind of swing versions of it, I’m like, oh, that’s they’re just selling records. That’s what pop sounded like in the 40s, Gil Evans is transcendent. It turns out that you know that Johnny Mercer’s cousin is the one who signed Gil Evans to make Moon dreams. It turns out that Capitol Records that put out Martha Tilton put out Gil Evans. So the whole art, commerce thing is not as a dichotomous as you think it is. And so I started listening to Gil Evans Moon dreams. Martha Tilton and Johnny Mercer’s Moon dreams, Glenn Miller and the Army Air Force man’s Moon dreams. And they start informing each other in my head, right? There’s not one, there’s not three versions of a song anymore. There is a song, or a song world or a center of gravity. And I realized that what a song is is a place that you go like whoever writes the song, they create the center of gravity. But. There’s this huge orbit of like all these different notions they were exploring in the lyrics, melodic themes, this and that. And a great arranger can go to the orbit of the song and take some of that and go away and create something that is truly original, even though derivative. So Johnny Mercer is one of the best songwriters in the history of Earth. Accentuate the positive. Moon River. I mean, just amazing stuff. So how is it that somebody like Gil Evans can take something he wrote and create a version of it that would that would include things that that the songwriter himself, Johnny Mercer, wouldn’t even recognize, wouldn’t even thought to do. So what is the song even and so that there’s five episodes. It’s three and a half hours in total. And it’s really about like, what is a song? What is creativity? What is originality, through the lens of what is possible when we start with an existing piece of music and create something of our own. And so I ended up going back all the way to the 1830s in Germany, when suddenly people had pianos in their houses. Suddenly you could publish compositions on paper, you know, and mass produce them. And people started pirating music. You think that was a Napster thing in the 1830s in Germany, these, you know, bad boy printers, you know, publishing houses would just print some composers music and sell it, and the composer would get nothing. So these composers were like, hands off our compositions. And so the publishers got together like, we got to stop this. We’re going to fine each other if we ever do this. Like, 50 gold coins. One melody is property. 50 gold coins if you reprint one of our things, and then they were like, Well, wait, what if somebody rearranges it? What if you take an aria from an opera and use that to create just a solo piano piece, you know, based off of that. So they commissioned a music journal in 1832 to write this long Talmudic article about what constitutes a creative arrangement versus what’s just a reprint, what’s just piracy. And it’s they have like little snatches of sheet music, like, this is original, this is not and so that’s 1832 you know, 180 years later, hip hop comes along, and people start sampling. And sampling is literally arranging. You are taking a chunk of music out of one song and moving it around. And I
8Nestor Aparicio 27:19
remember when Vanilla Ice said that he didn’t steal under pressure. He’s like, mine went, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, versus Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, like, like, literally, right? I mean, and and led zeppelins fought, this was their way to have like, like, literally, right? All of these songs that get under dispute to some way, yeah, but it’s all in the modern era, right?
Lawrence Lanahan 27:40
But what’s original? So, you know, public enemy would have, like, dozens of samples in one song. They would use samples like an orchestra. They put so many together that it creates a new sound. And so, you know, when people thought hip hop was a fad, like nobody sued over it. Though it’s a fad, it’ll go away once they realize there’s money to be made in it, then people start suing over it. So the turtles Happy Together get, you know, they get sampled by De La Soul. And the guy from the turtles is, like, sampling is theft. Anybody that has a creative bone in their body that, you know, sampling is not creative. And it’s like, the Turtles happy together. The chord progression for that song, you know, it’s the Andalusian cadence. Basically, it’s descending chords, and the last chord you think is going to be a minor chord, and they switch it to a major, W, n, y, C’s classical music show called it the most used musical progression of all time. And it’s like you guys are arguing about originality and whether sampling is original, and you just use the Andalusian cadence for the 5,000,000th time, and you’re making a pop song with bop. Bop like it’s you’re not as original as you think you are. But then Gilbert O’Sullivan, who did that song alone, again, naturally, he sues Biz Markie, and wins, and the judge cites the 10 Commandments, Thou shalt not steal. And it knocked sampling out of hip hop unless you had a lot of money and could license everything, because, you know that’s that’s stealing. But Gilbert Sullivan stole his name from Gilbert, and Sullivan, who did the Mikado, which stole from Japanese culture. So like, now you’ve got the Marvin Gaye’s family suing Robin Thicke over, Blurred Lines, suing Ed Sheeran over. You know that sounds too much like, get it on. It’s like, what? What can you sue over in music what constitutes originality. And for the longest time it’s like, you can only sue over melody, right? That that is what’s still what’s property. But now they’re suing over like, the vibe, like, oh, that kind of sounds like Marvin Gaye. And so we’ve got all these disputes about when you use all music uses notions we’ve all explored. All music uses musical tools that we all have access to. So what is it that constitutes originality? You know, like, like with jazz, bebop, you know, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, all that stuff. The reason bebop exists is because of copyright law. If you wanted to as a jazz band cover, I got rhythm by George Gershwin. And you just play the melody. And everybody improvises. You play the melody again. You had to license it. It was a cover, right? But they what the jazz guys did. Said, All right, I’m going to write a new melody. We’re going to use the exact same chord changes, right? Just change the bridges, right? So, like, you know, like, like, uh, ornithology by Charlie Parker is the same chords as how high the moon, but he didn’t want to license how high the moon, so he writes a new melody, and he’s soloing over the same chord changes. And it’s called a contra fact. There’s a name for it. So you’ve got this genre, the sound that that comes out of arranging around the copyright law, and it changes Jazz. Jazz was jazz was dance music. Now it’s like this intellectual thing with bebop, where you sit down and you listen to it, and it’s all because, well, we want to, we like this song, but we can’t play it exactly like that. So, you know, you could mess you could you could steal the harm. You just couldn’t steal the melody. Now that people are getting sued over everything, you know that the reggaeton beat, these two guys in 1989 had a hit with that beat. They’re suing daddy Yankee, they’re suing Luis fonza. They’re suing everybody because they know they’ll get some money, but it’s because reggaeton uses the same beat. But it’s like man that beats been around, god knows how long. You can probably find it in Latin music, 100 years ago.
Nestor Aparicio 31:13
Well, once we start recording music, right, it’s not live anymore. And, you know, live, I can get up and play cover songs and do whatever you do. Lawrence lanahans Here, he is an author by trade. I’ve screwed up three times and called him a book guy. This is a podcast thing. You should write a book on music, by the way, on the Sarah thing, just so you know, Dave shining wrote the S, A, R, A, I think is what was it? Hollow notes. That’s your smile. Hang on. Worse than that, I had Chad weasling out who is the the NFL agent for Josh Jacobs. He’s a local, but he’s a heavy metal rock and roll, Guns and Roses. FNA, you know, recent maiden kind of loves, yeah, loves that music. Shredder. He’s a shredder, right? So we’re on the set and like, I’m about to kiss shining his ass and say, Dude, you got me listening to Fleetwood Mac and Sarah and I had and I went through the whole thing. I just went through with you, with all the all these Beatles songs and different songs that are great songs and songwriters, composers and songs that I love. And I said to him, you know, I don’t, where did you pick this? This the Fleetwood Mac song. And he said, No, no, no, no, no, Sarah by Dylan. Bob Dylan this year, so he meant, and then Chad says, no, no, I thought you meant, like the Jefferson Starship song, Sarah, like Mickey Thomas, Grace, slick. And I’m like, Man, I just complete. And I for six months, I waited that shining on and I was gonna kiss his ass about this Fleetwood Mac song. And he didn’t even meet Fleetwood Mac he meant Bob Dylan. And
Lawrence Lanahan 32:44
8you went down the rabbit hole in the Fleetwood Mac song, everybody wins. And
Nestor Aparicio 32:49
you went down Hall and Oates, yeah. And I’m sure there’s another Sarah out there that I don’t know about some country song or something like that. But I mean, that is, um, I love music, and I think sports is such an argument about winning and losing and tribal and this and that, and you can have your thing like me, where I really never like Jethro tall or the Grateful Dead. I can’t make excuses for country or rap or like stuff that I don’t like. I’m a pop rock nerd, although I move in all sorts of different directions for music. But um, music is this one incredibly universal thing that like it never it. Never has a bad day, never has a losing day. And if you feel it down, you can pick it up. If you’re feeling up and you want to be down, you want to feel melancholy after the third drink and cry your eyes out, you can get some blues. You can use, yeah, like there’s just, it’s there for you all the time. And at 56 I say this, and I’m not kissing your ass about I would had you on either way, if I didn’t love music as much as I do, but like, music is my thing now, like, I don’t get off on sports in the way. I’ve never been a gambling guy, sex, drugs and rock and roll all still work. They’re all really good things, some in moderation. But the music thing for me, dude, it’s my go to you know what I mean? Like, it’s my thing. And as my bands are drying up and bands are dying off, and the stones are getting old, like, whatever. I don’t know that concerts are going to be my thing, but I had a great Talking Heads experience, and I’m going to tell you about when you tell me more about the podcast is five so five pieces, three and a half hours. And what is a lot of this more like your range of weirdly, Tchaikovsky, beethovenny, or is it more modern in your
Lawrence Lanahan 34:21
it is everything, okay? Everything, because it’s just about it’s about how we listen and like, why it all means so much to us, but about why the sound does that to us, rather than the lyrics or the lives of the musicians or anything like that. So I’ll just walk through the real quick. The first episode is about my favorite piece of recorded music, Moon dreams, and because Gil Evans did so much with somebody else’s song, well, what is the song? I also talked to Gil Evans biographer Larry Hickok and about like, Well, what about his life made him arrange music the way he did. And there’s a lot of interesting stuff there. The second episode is about how arranging got such a bad rap starting 200 years. Ago. Oh, it’s derivative. You know, people are just, you know, they’re stealing from other people. And, you know, I talked to the the 90 year old guy who wrote a biography of a three part biography of the composer, Front’s list, France list, took all nine Beethoven symphonies and rearranged them for solo piano. Imagine 80 musicians playing some of the greatest art humans have ever made, distilling it down so one person can play it with two hands. And so I also talked to a pianist who’s played all nine
Nestor Aparicio 35:31
and music wasn’t recorded then it was written on paper. But
8Lawrence Lanahan 35:35
what Liz did was basically the equivalent of a phonograph. You are a poor person out in the country, in Europe, you’re never going to see a symphony play Beethoven. But if somebody can come out there with lists, transcriptions for solo piano, you can hear it. So it was a way of democratizing Beethoven’s music and so. So the second episode is just about, you know how, how much originality is possible in derivative music. The third episode is so much fun. This is woman, Susan Schmidt Horning. She’s a historian at St John’s College. She wrote a book that’s a history of the recording studio from Edison to the LP. So I talked to her about how, you know the sound of popular music changes over time, right? You know, and so much of that has just to do with recording technology. You were, you were recording into a giant acoustic horn, and you had to stand 20 feet back so your trumpet solo didn’t destroy the equipment.
Nestor Aparicio 36:26
I always saw that, like in the Three Stooges and little rascals, like back in 2030 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lawrence Lanahan 36:31
That’s etching the song. Then you get microphones, you know. You get Bessie Smith, you know, and she’s singing to the microphone. Then you get better microphones. And what happens is you get Bing, Crosby, Rudy Valley. They can get real close to the mic, and they can sing very delicately, languidly. And that brings in the Coronavirus. That brings a whole new you know, Rudy Valley suddenly is getting 10,000 letters a week because people are so in love with them, because this quiet voices. Well, the radio also brought that to life, right? Yes, the radio Absolutely. And so, so the microphone changed the sound of music, and then multi track editing. That’s why, you know, good vibrations by the Beach Boys was done in a bunch of different studios over the course of six months with all these different musicians. That was that used to be the studio captured a performance, and then the studio became sort of a sonic laboratory, and the studio itself becomes part of the arranging. Then you get hip hop. Now everybody’s got enough tools on their phone to write and arrange their own music, so the sound of the popular song changes with recording technology. Fourth episode is about copyright lawsuits, how copyright lawsuits shape the sound of music, because people are always fighting, from 1820s Germany to Ed Sheeran and Marvin Gaye’s family fighting over what’s really original, whether you can sample, whether you can capture somebody’s vibe and put it in your own song, and so, and then, and then I get into AI generated music, because there’s a lot of formulaic music, and AI is just a formula. It’s just all formula. So I kind of relate, like arranging and these sort of conventions and trends and stuff we do to what the music that’s going to be coming down the pike. The fifth episode is super personal. I think about all four episodes, and it’s like, well, what, what is it that I love about arranging? What is a song? And I talk about what I think a song is, but also I realize my favorite arrangements, you know, arrangers, you know, like the bop, bop, Bonn, New York, New York. That’s an arranger. Don Costa, right? Arrangers add stuff to songs, and I realized that the songs I love, the arrangers sort of take things away and make space. Public Enemy would do all their sampling and scratches and drum machines and everything, live in the studio, and they would mix by muting certain things at certain points. They made all the sound, and the mixing would take things away. You know, wilco did Yankee hotel, Foxtrot, the same way, they added so much, and then, kind of like a sculpture, took parts away until the song was the right shape. And, you know, like Beck didn’t an owl called an album, but in 2012 Beck did A a release of music called Song reader. It was 20 pieces of sheet music for songs he’d written. If you wanted to hear his songs, you had to sing them yourself. So I realized that what great arrangers do is they they clear space for you. If a song is a place you go to, the great arrangers won’t just add and add and add. They’ll clear out some space for you to come in and be a part of the song. And I talk about a song by a songwriter named David Berman that does that, and then the lyrics of the song are about making space for you in his own song. It’s kind of a Trump delay, like a like a trick that he does to bring you into the song. So it’s deeply researched, like my book, but it’s also deeply personal. I got to play a lot of music in the background. And for me, it was just like, What happens if I just listen to music, my favorite songs through the lens of their arrangements for a few years? And this is what I came away with. And the kind of vibe I’m going for is, you’re a music guy, you’ve had, you ever have a really great hang with a good buddy, and all of a sudden you look up? It’s three in the morning. There’s album covers all over the floor, among other things. And so like that. That’s, that’s what I’m going for, like, like you and me talking today, just like, man, let’s listen a little closer, and let’s listen this way and realize, God, listen to the music is just the best thing in the world. And it’s not just we all love songwriters. And all this attention goes on songwriters and you know, I love Bob Dylan, all the towns, Van Zandt. I love Joni Mitchell. I love good songwriters. But that’s not all that’s going on. There is a sound that drills you in in the first place. One last story is that made me get into this is when my oldest son was in first grade. Is 2019 remember lil NAS x the the cowboy song? What was it called? Old Town road was inescapable in 2019
Nestor Aparicio 40:49
8and my kids be like, play old town road on Wednesday like a key Breaky Heart was when you were in high school. Yes.
Lawrence Lanahan 40:53
And Billy Ray Cyrus did eventually join little NASS X for that song. And so. So the kids are like, let’s play old town road. So just put it on Spotify and drive to school. And I realized one day I’d go to school, come back, I’d be this, is this song 10 minutes long? Like, it’s still going after 10 minutes? What? Like, how, whatever. I don’t understand the 21st century, maybe a 10 minute song can be a hit. And then I it’s like, Wait a minute. I look, I’m like, where’s this song on Spotify? I can’t find it because there’s 18 different versions. There’s BTS for the little NASS X, there’s Billy Ray Cyrus, little NASS x. So for one, what is the actual song? Two, why is it 10 minutes long? It’s not the beginning of that song is a little plunky banjo, right? Which is a sample from Nine Inch Nails. It’s not bluegrass music. It’s a little plunky banjo. And then he does the song. And the end of the song is plunky banjo, the arrangement at the beginning of the end of the song are the same, and Spotify was looping it. I didn’t realize that. So it’s a minute and a half song, but I thought it was 10 minutes because of the arrangement, and it just made me realize, like, one, the song Never begins or ends. Two, there’s all these different versions of it. It’s just this thing and the culture that we’re all projecting things onto. Like, is it a white song? Is it a black song? Is it hip hop? Is it country? Like, Rapper’s
Nestor Aparicio 42:05
Delight came in two minutes, or it came in two sides on Sugar Hill, right? Like, literally, that music. And every time Zeppelin and those bands Jimmy Page talked about making an hour long piece of art, right? That they weren’t trying to just make something that was two minutes long. I mean, the industry’s been fighting that forever, right? Yeah. Forever, right? Like it’s got to be under three minutes, right? It’s Beatles song, Elvis. They got to be under three minutes. You know, don’t bore us. Get to the cores, yeah? And
Lawrence Lanahan 42:29
that’s a function of the technology, right? You know, you had the that time. It was only that big, right? Yeah, yeah. Once you start making, and we talk about LPs, you know, and magnetic tape to record on the way we got that was these guys were doing communications research during World War Two and trying to figure out what the Germans are doing with communication technology. This Lieutenant is like, it’s three in the morning. He’s doing his research, and there’s Beethoven, some Beethoven symphony on on German radio. And he’s like, recordings can only capture a few minutes. Are they? Are they broadcasting a Beethoven symphony live at three in the morning? Nobody’s playing Beethoven live at three in the morning. What the hell is this? And after the war, he goes to radio Frankfurt and discovers that the Germans have invented magnetic tape to record on. So he takes a couple of these are called magnetophones. He takes a couple back to California.
8Nestor Aparicio 43:21
Sure can make the radio play all night, yeah, play like long
Lawrence Lanahan 43:24
pieces of music. And so he takes it back to California. And there’s a company called Ampex, which makes radar gear for the war. But the war is over, so they need a new gig. So Ampex gets involved, and an audio file named Bing Crosby gets involved. And they Ampex starts making the tapes. This guy starts making the magnetic tape recording technology. And like, so, world industry was born, literally, like, like, everything, several industries. The technology came out of war, yeah, yeah. So, and that has to do with the way that music sounds over the next 10 years. So it was just, it was fascinating to go into do the research and like, what, what’s going on in the culture, what’s going on in the economy? What’s going on to make these songs sound the way that they do? And yeah, it goes from France list in the 1830s up to brand new stuff, like Ed Sheeran, there’s hip hop, there’s country. Like, I talk about country politan. Billy Cheryl was the arranger and all those when country got really sweet with a lot of strings in the 70s, like he stopped loving her today, those strings. That’s Billy Cheryl. That’s a guy that developed a really popular arranging style called country politan that sweetened things up with strings. And you know that that’s arranging, you know, it’s just it’s at every style of popular music. Somebody’s at it with the sound, and once you start listening to it that way, it’s hard to stop. All right. Lawrence Lanahan
Nestor Aparicio 44:48
is here. We probably go all night with this music. This podcast is out everywhere. It’s called rearrange. One word rearrange premieres this week, and it releases weekly as a five part audio. Documentary, and I’m sure the book will follow it. So you work in a book. Sure you done writing. What are you done?
Lawrence Lanahan 45:05
8The book was so exhausting. So for a couple years there, I just couldn’t even think about it.
Nestor Aparicio 45:11
Maybe, by the way, the book is the lines between us. You gotta promote your book launch. Oh,
Lawrence Lanahan 45:15
thanks. I’m so bad at that. Yeah, the lines between us, two families and a quest across Baltimore racial divide. But possibly there’s a book in this like, I think it would be cool to write a listener’s memoir, like a memoir of a music listener and just and, you know, maybe it’s got this lens, maybe it doesn’t, but if people enjoy the podcast, you know podcasts, you never know it’s, it’s digital, it’s, it’s a collection of bytes among trillions and trillions of gigabytes on the internet that it must compete with, it may just sink. I appreciate you having me on. I know a few people will listen now, and it means a lot to me that you have me on because people will hear it. You know, if it’s if people like it, if people like the way that I listen, and talk about how I listen, I might write a listener’s memoir or write some more about arranging. But, you know, ever since I took my when I was in seventh grade, man, I had a split end mullet out to here and Led Zeppelin t shirt with the sleeves ripped off. And my mom had a use, I know, yeah, and I love cashmere. And I grabbed my mom’s ukulele off the shelf and tried to get that den on that den on it, down on it. And ever since then, you know, they got me a cheap guitar for Christmas that year, and music’s just been a huge part of my life ever since. So if I can write a book about it, somebody wants to give me money to write a book about it, I will happily sit here and crank the Oh my. Here are
Nestor Aparicio 46:31
the crazy things that I this is. This is the Led Zeppelin Pacifica belt. This is the original Zeppelin belt that I got at East Point mall at KB toy. It’s the only belt I ever had. And my wife got me a rush belt, like, 10 years ago, and I didn’t even have a belt to put it on, or this on, right? And then she bought me a belt and got me a rush but it wasn’t original. It was a repress with the, you know, the band made it in the modern era, sold it on the website or whatever for a little while. Really hard to get to, but they’re all kind of hard to get. These are from the 70s. So if you look on the back of it, this is 1977 it says right on at Pacifica, California. So, so I have these belts, and I love them, and they’re kind of the fun little baseball card thing that I do, because I can wear them. So everybody, like, when I go out, people like, what belt you’re wearing tonight, you know, like, and it’s from a music perspective, and I listen to songs all the time. And like, when this segment’s over, I have a couple hours of downtime before Hank Azaria comes on, and I will inevitably press Play downstairs. Put
8Lawrence Lanahan 47:27
on highway patrolman by Bruce Springsteen for his area. You know
Nestor Aparicio 47:31
what? Man he was doing a cover of glory days earlier. I want to go deeper into the depths of my Springsteen them with him and Nils Lofgren has been on for hours with me talking music, because Nils is a friend of mine and a music guy and like all that. But music to me not just the escape and the place, it’s where I’m going to go the rest of my life. And I hope that I never lose my hearing in that way, or my even my vision. But like concerts and music, I’m going to leave you with this story because I’ve your music guy. And if anybody doesn’t know who the hell I am, and they’ve made it 45 minutes into this, I want this is my gift to you, because I gave this to a guy last week as well, because I sent him to the zeppelin documentary, and he loved it. It was great. I don’t go to movies much, and I love rock docs. I want to see the the yacht rock documentary. It’s wonderful, but I don’t have HBO, but I want to see it. So the talking heads thing came out last year, and they re released. Stopped making sense. It was the 40th anniversary of the shows at the Pantages, and everybody remembers the big suit and burn it down the house, right? I didn’t love the talking heads. Then I like them. They were fine, they but I was more poison. You know, sticks rush, you know, Zeppelin like into that in the 80s. And since then, the talking heads have become this ubiquitous. Stay up late, you know, all the songs that are the hits, the dozen songs, not to mention that Tom Tom club and the offshoot, right? Yeah, I have never seen the movie. The movie came out summer. Was last summer. It was last August. They actually all got together in the same room and was incredibly awkward and uncomfortable, just as you expected to be. I had interviewed in my day. I interviewed David Byrne as a Baltimore guy. He did an album, met him, played the lyric. I interviewed Jerry Harrison at one point, and I interviewed Tina and Chris when they did a top like I have interviewed all four of them separately. Have all the interviews, and I’ve been putting these out on my social and doing all that, but the talking heads are not even in my top 50 of my favorite but I love them, but they’re not in, you know? They’re just, I have a lot of music in my life, right? But my wife saw it, the Colbert thing, and I’m like, you know, I never seen that movie. And then I saw that. It was in D, box, D, B, O, X, never heard of it. Still, when I tell people, they’re like, What the hell is it? I don’t know. Okay, so Google it. This is where, this is your gift. Okay? Because I think this is where music’s going. Sounds like something I wouldn’t want to Google. No, no, no. This is This has nothing to do with Justin Tucker, um, no, anything like that. I do comedy here too. That’s what I’m going to do after I write my first song with. You which I’m I’m going to do comedy before I do songwriting, believe me, if I have to make one or the other to make a living, I’ll write comedy way better than I can write books. So the talking heads thing happens, and that week, I went online to as we kids do, and we’re going to click on our seat and all that. And I see this D box thing, and I’m like, what is it? It’s a motion activated motion picture seat that you pay an extra five bucks in. But the seat moves with the film. And I remember my wife was going to do this with Top Gun, the new one, and she didn’t, because she was afraid she’s going to get motion sick. Then she got sick on the super duper Looper Hershey Park a couple years ago, and she’s a little weird, so she didn’t do it. She went to the movie. She came home, and we didn’t talk about top because I never go to the movies. I went to see the talking heads movie on my own, all by myself. I booked one little seat in the middle of the theater, and I drove down on a Friday mornings only at a rumble mills in D box. It’s on IMAX. So they restored the movie. They did all this stuff. But here’s where the technology comes in, and this is where your theory of music and song, and even the things you’re talking about with New Orleans, of clearing the dance floor and AI and where we’re going with this, yeah, I think of every great movie from the band through the stones and and through the song remains the same all the you two And Rattle and Hum. Pick any concert movie you want, the Taylor Swift’s latest concert from last year. Whatever you want, right bear store and taking that visual and do what the stones at the Max did. Make it huge, make it you know, visual, do what my dear, late, great friend David Modell did with the 4d and the YouTube movie where Adam Clayton takes his base and feels like it’s going to chop your head off, and you duck, you duck on stage because Bono singing to you and making you back up. But this isn’t, this is 3d right? This was, I had 3d glasses for that. And that was God, almost 20 years ago now that they went down the South America and shot that YouTube film in that way. This movie had been redone. Was it Jonathan Demi, I think famous that did Fatal Attraction, did movies and stuff like that, right? Shot that as an art piece in 1984 on film and big, and they did two nights and they redid it. But here’s what they did. They did the music and the seat. The seat is, it has 200,000 haptic movements in it, including a kick drum in the back and things on the side. And it moves. And it moves. It’s a little bit like, Have you been to Epcot and done soaring? No Epcot. In Epcot, there’s this ride you get in that used to spend and you go around the world. And the sense you when you’re going through Africa, you could smell the the lemongrass and the dust hits you. And when you go over the water, you smell the salt water. And it’s like all of these experiential things. And I’m sure AI John Waters doing smell a Rama, once they figure out porn this way life’s it’s gonna be over for civilization, quite frankly, right? Um, civilization the eight what’s left of it, right? But the glasses, you know, where you can immerse and all of the, what’s that called, when you put the glasses on and, you know, the virtual reality, virtual reality, right? VR, right. Okay, so this thing was like that, but I’m in this movie theater and you are familiar with, stop making sense, the movie. Oh, I’ve seen it a few times. Okay? I had never seen it. I had never seen it. So the fact that you come out into the seat and burn drops the boom box and starts start, and so, so the seat starts to go with it’s made. The movie was made for the seat. And you know how it’s shot, where David Burns coming at you, and we’re on the road to nowhere, and and, and then you start, it starts to move, and you start to dance. And the music has this, this thing about it that takes you on a journey. It takes you to a place. And I’m in that seat, and I started giggling like a 12 year old girl, and, you know, like I started just giggling, and I’m in the theater completely alone. No one signed up for this at all, right, and I’m on my phone now in the second song, they haven’t even brought the stage out yet. Chris Franz hadn’t hit a kick that hit me in the back, and I’m giggling, and I’m texting every music nerd, every video Max Weiss, they all got texts from me saying, You need to come and do this, because this ain’t like nothing I’ve ever done. It’s a little like a Disney ride, but made for the movie, and I started to think about music. And the next thing, when there is no more YouTube that they could bring Elvis is 68 back to life and put you in a seat to go on a ride with him. You know, like those kinds of films, I just see it as something that’s really going to be cool. And I’m shocked that air that Taylor Swift didn’t shoot her movie last year on that huge tour, in that way. But I keep thinking of all the experiential music that we’ve had that has some sort of you mentioned nine inches. You’re mentioning things that are really moving. Mint oriented, to be able to be suspended in a chair that will take you there in a concert. It’s, I think we’re moving to another place where I’m going to enjoy music in a way that the first time somebody showed me an iPod, and I’m like, Hold on, I have 20,000 CDs. I used to go to Jamaica on vacation with a bag just for my CDs, just so I would have the music I want on my vacation, and when that all happened, and now, like we’re at a point now where music’s going to change, and I feel like I saw it in that crazy Talking Heads movie, because I thought this is a 40 year old movie brought back to life in it was so awesome dude, that I spent 23 bucks and went back two days later, and I took John Allen and I took rasig, and to this day they will still tell you, and nobody else is I told my wife, I’m telling you. I’m telling my audience I have never and I love concerts. I love I heard people behind me the way it was shot in the theater. You were in the theater in LA from the vantage point, right filmmaker, and you could hear the whispers of people talking around you like, holy, I’m in the club
Lawrence Lanahan 56:02
Dolby Atmos sound. It was
Nestor Aparicio 56:04
8insane, dude. And I’m just telling you, from a music standpoint, you start talking to me about the 20s and the 30s, and getting on the recorded music, I’m starting to think about the glasses and where I can go with a YouTube concert that I want to experience, or an Elvis, or a Beatles, or just anything in that world that’s been made, including the zeppelin movie, where they went, dude, that Zeppelin movie, they went back to 68 and 69 year olds born, yeah. And the whole movie is just Zeppelin one and two, and it’s restored. Incredible. I was blown away because they they brought six or seven songs back to life, in a way. Then there were songs you’ve heard a million times to your point, dazed. Not these infused the first album, good times, bad times the you know, but the first song Zeppelin ever did. And this gets back to an hour ago, when we started, when they got together and jammed as the yard birds, and they were trying to figure out who’s this guy, and John Paul Jones was a studio guy. Never played a short sour note they got to they played train, kept the rolling, yeah, yeah, the first song they ever played. And you talk about Aerosmith, the first time I ever heard it, I did this day.
Lawrence Lanahan 57:12
Or is that a traditional that yarbers did? Well, I
Nestor Aparicio 57:15
mean, they kind of went through it and like, and it’s been covered a million times and by a million bands, but you experience it and feel it a different way. To your point, you mentioned nothing compares to you. Everybody the first time they heard it probably was Sinead O’Connor, but then everybody went back and got the prince version. And I think, you know, I think about that when I think of any song that’s been covered, I angle to a million songs that there are two ways to do it. Tracy Chapman’s thing last year being an incredible example of rediscovering
Lawrence Lanahan 57:43
us, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a gift, you know, that people create these things. But even Dylan, you know, I quote him, he says, you know, he said, If you’d played John Henry 1000 times like I had, you’d have written, how many roads must a man walk down to I just opened a different door in a different way. They’re not I say, this is a songwriter. They’re not all ours. Like I have a friend that covered my song, and he found a way to do it that was better than mine. It’s his song to me. Now, the whole the movie theater stuff, I’m of two minds about it, because and I’m guilty of it too. Music, our experience of music is so mediated. And this goes back to me saying, you know, Recording Studios used to capture a good performance, and now they’re the laboratory. I want to make sure that my kids and their kids have the kind of pure experience of of hearing and experiencing a musical performance right in front of them, and realizing that’s the core of it. Because there’s this place out in Vegas called sphere, you know, it’s got music coming from every direction. Your seat buzzes, you know, and that it’s nothing new. People took acid. Took, still take people have been taking acid, to me, but we all meet my podcast, super media. It’s, it’s me talking into a mic, onto tape that gets distributed as digital bites, like, I’m mediating music, and there’s a million ways into it, and there’s a million ways to get into the background, if it was made with like Rick beato and all these people, you know, and it’s all awesome. Like, as music nerds, we love this stuff and different ways to experience it. I’m a little scared of this century, and it’s technology back. Just don’t want us to lose sight of that primal connection that you and I know, like sitting up front and the band’s playing well when
8Nestor Aparicio 59:28
the performers not singing and his lip syncing, it’s just a whole different level of Dick Clark that I can’t roll with anymore. So however far
Lawrence Lanahan 59:34
it goes the century, I just I want that to be there, like I’m about to go down to Knoxville next month for the big ears Music Festival. It’s a lot of experimental, kind of boundary pushing, kind of music. I don’t know half the groups, and it’s my tendency. Like you said, we listen to music. I totally i i will always return to the music I love. When I was 17, teenage fan club, all that kind of stuff. We do that, and I’d have to push myself. What’s new, you know. And I go to this festival, and I make myself instead of going to see the bands I know, I make myself go see the bands I don’t. And some of it’s irritating, you know, but it’s
Nestor Aparicio 1:00:10
modern music. If you love teenage fan club and your kid likes that, you just put in Spotify, and 15 bands of sound like that, and whole will pop up. And, you know, all those bands of that era will just start happening. And I think that’s what makes these School of Rock kids go just in a general sense of it is derivative. I mean, my God, Zeppelin’s the most ripped off band ever. And anybody knows anything about Zeppelin, including them, will tell you they ripped
Lawrence Lanahan 1:00:35
8off other people, do you? I am encouraged. So my best friend and I are turning 50 this month. We went to Austin for three nights to eat too much brisket and see too much music. And we played music together. We played, we had an acoustic trio. We played all classic rock covers, you know, back in high school in the early 90s, we played it like overly crabs and beer. We played at the Emerald, you know. And so we go way back playing and singing harmonies together and all. And so he’s, his kids are old enough that he’s getting back into music, and he lives in Berlin, Maryland, and he’s starting to play open mics and perform. And he’s, it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful to see him like doing this. And he’s, like, was playing open mike in Austin, which, like, songwriter capital the world, right? And I was like, Okay, we need guitars. So we got off the plane, went right to the pawn shop. He bought two cheap guitars. What found it? Open Mike played that night, and there was some kid up there. He’s probably 23 and he plays this incredible song he wrote, and he comes off stage and we’re talking, and he’s talking about early rem and he’s talking about the Smiths kid who was born in the 21st century, probably, and he’s so smart about it, and his name’s Wyeth Miller. I think Wyeth something, or if anybody wants to look him up, but it was just like, okay, good,
Nestor Aparicio 1:01:51
okay, good. There’s hope for us.
Lawrence Lanahan 1:01:54
Yeah, he’s still coming at it the way we came anyway. We sold our guitars back to the pawn shop and ended up basically renting guitars for Austin for 50 bucks, and it was a
Nestor Aparicio 1:02:04
great time. Hey, dude, everybody should love music as much as we love music. Lawrence Lanahan is here. I only know him as an author. I didn’t know any of this music theory stuff. He’s got a podcast called rearranged. Everybody goes out and checks it out. And I will have this piece up at Baltimore positive for everybody check out as well if you find it on YouTube or whatever. Hey, thanks for coming on, man. I thank everybody out to you, and the book is the lines between us. He’s also a great author on lives here locally, because
8Lawrence Lanahan 1:02:28
I’m bad at promoting Can I tell you one more thing? I have a band called glad pulses, and I just finished mixing the album, and it’ll be out this spring.
Nestor Aparicio 1:02:35
What? So this is the typical douche bag music. What do you sound like? What’s your band sound like, what are you derivative of? Are you a little bit like rem and a little bit like Wilco?
Lawrence Lanahan 1:02:45
We it’s, I mean, like, put it this way, the band went together to see teenage fan club and Robin Hitchcock this year together down in DC. But it’s kind of guitar pop, it’s a little country. It’s a little bro. There’s three songwriters,
Nestor Aparicio 1:02:59
8Jason Isbell kind of thing.
Lawrence Lanahan 1:03:00
It’s not quite a great songwriter compared to anything exactly like Jason is. I want to be like me at this point. Just be like you. Our influences are on our sleeve. We just were bunch of dads that like good songwriters. And anyway, so it’s got some cool arrangements, obviously, but that’ll be out. That’ll be out later, later this spring. Alright?
Nestor Aparicio 1:03:24
Gil Evans arrangement of Johnny Mercer song, Moon dream. So there’s my homework, my Miles Davis album, birth of cool. I know the birth of Cool, alright. Speaking of the birth of cool, we’ll get cool after this. Plenty of sports ahead. Luke’s around, Justin Tucker still around, and then ravens are around, and the Orioles are going to play baseball, and I’m going to Toronto to do it with Getty Lee, whether he knows it or not, but we got a lot of music coming on this including the aforementioned John Palumbo during this piece, John Allen actually text me he’s back off the road with stone horses. I got to grab him and bring him out for a crab cake sometime soon, and before I know a Gina shocking, the Go goes getting back together, and I will be a partying with them out in Las Vegas as they put the band back together. So I gotta go so I got a good music here. I don’t even know what’s in front of me, whether I’m going to make the dead show at the sphere, whether I’m actually going to get to the Hollywood Bowl this year or not. I already turned down my chance to go to the Celebrity Theater this week and see sticks in the round. So But music is in my soul, and now it’s right, it’s not where it stays, and it will always be here, as long as I gotta hope I don’t lose my that’s
Lawrence Lanahan 1:04:23
a good thing to remember. That’s a good thing to remember. Help tell John Palumbo thanks for me and my sisters.
Nestor Aparicio 1:04:29
Thanks. I’m gonna tell John Palumbo a lot of things, and I don’t know what it’s gonna be, but it’s gonna be great. That’s all I know. Back for more on Baltimore policy to stay with the show.
