I’ve been talking a lot about how rock & roll is a blend of things. It is quintessentially American music, born from a mix of regions, cultures, rhythms, and feels (plus a heavy dose of subjugation…).
I made a slide deck when I was beginning this recording process outlining my inspiration and purpose. My wife is an entrepreneur; we rub off on each other.
It was a bizarre exercise to turn music into a powerpoint1, but I had fun building this slide:
The point is that rock & roll originated with blues and country and bluegrass and ska — but it hit its commercial/cultural peak when it soaked up the folk music scene of the 1960s.
The music became more reliant on lyrics, more intentional with its powers of observation in a way that “Love, Love Me Do” or “Johnny B. Goode” were not.
One could argue that this then paved the way for the commercial success of conscious hip hop and other forms of music as social commentary. But, as our slide show reveals, things went downhill from this Folk Rock peak.
So, as I sit here talking about how rock & roll is this blend of things — having spent considerable time and brain space thinking about how to blend different elements into this “new” form of “Modern Rock & Roll” — I start back at the beginning, my beginning at least: a guy, an acoustic guitar, a damn good song.
And who better than the quintessential anodyne white guy with a guitar: Jackson Browne.
I love this song. It’s beautiful and melancholy, full of longing and hope all at the same time.
And apparently it’s about cocaine, so, yeah, there you go. It is rock & roll.
When you make a soup, you always start with the base2.
We’ll keep adding ingredients as we go.
What else should we add?
-David
Justin, my producer, referred to it as a “Manifesto,” which isn’t that far off. More on the nose would probably have been to refer to it as “procrastination” or “a mechanism to avoid what I really needed to be doing, i.e. making music rather than thinking about it.”
Mirepoix, en francais…
Jackson Browne: Something Fine