{"id":3376,"date":"2010-09-25T05:47:02","date_gmt":"2010-09-25T13:47:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=3376"},"modified":"2010-09-25T05:47:02","modified_gmt":"2010-09-25T13:47:02","slug":"hollow-talk-by-choir-of-young-believers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2010\/09\/25\/hollow-talk-by-choir-of-young-believers\/","title":{"rendered":"Hollow Talk by Choir of Young Believers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Hollow Talk by Choir of Young Believers<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This video does a disservice to this song.<\/p>\n

I think Robin Millar and I are on the same page.\u00c2\u00a0 But you wouldn’t know it by the e-mail he sends me.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s frustrated over change, he’s worried artists are being lost in the shuffle, he’s worried we’re going to someplace worse than where we’ve been.\u00c2\u00a0 I used to feel this way until a month ago, when I had a revelation, I now know the tide has turned, we’ve experienced the bottom of the dip, where indie intersects with major, when the chorus of oldsters telling us it’s over is eclipsed by the creations of those building the new world.\u00c2\u00a0 And this new world is so chaotic that there can be a pure gem that eludes you, even though it got reviewed in "Rolling Stone", even though it’s out there in the marketplace.\u00c2\u00a0 Then again, do you know the names of all the stars?\u00c2\u00a0 I can pick out the Big Dipper, maybe Orion, otherwise it’s just an endless miasma of light, which if I think about it scares me.\u00c2\u00a0 If the universe is infinite, what’s outside it?\u00c2\u00a0 I used to be troubled by this when I was in my single digits, lying on the hard tile floor wondering if I was significant or not.<\/p>\n

Now I know I’m insignificant.\u00c2\u00a0 Literally Kansas’s "Dust In The Wind".\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what getting older yields, perspective.\u00c2\u00a0 You stop trying so hard to leave your mark and start focusing on enjoying your time on Earth, it’s so brief, we’re only here for a short time, and what makes it enjoyable is the smell of fresh air on a fall morning, a good meal and a great record.<\/p>\n

Robin sent me an article lamenting the fact that today you just can’t be an artist, you’ve got to be a social networker:<\/p>\n

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Behind the music: The winners and losers of social networking promotion<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Just another opinion on the Web…\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what I love about the modern universe, no one’s got any power, no one’s steering, not even Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs.\u00c2\u00a0 Trying to corral the public into following a certain path is like herding cats, everyone’s going his own way based on his own information, everyone’s on his own trip, people are suddenly free.\u00c2\u00a0 You even see this in repressive regimes.\u00c2\u00a0 How long can Iran and China repress technology?\u00c2\u00a0 Give the public Twitter and YouTube and…you can no longer control them.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s the problem the oldsters have, they’ve no longer got a monopoly on mindshare, they can no longer ensure a hit.\u00c2\u00a0 And everybody connected with the old system regrets this.\u00c2\u00a0 But the new system allows all these moments of excitement, like hearing "Hollow Talk".<\/p>\n

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"I recently heard a Danish band called Choir of Young Believers, who fall into that category. They may never get the Twitter retinue of an Amanda Palmer – who has nearly half a million followers – but their song Hollow Talk (which only has 23,000 views on YouTube, at the time of writing) completely stopped me in my tracks, sounding like a melancholic Arcade Fire doing the soundtrack for Wallander. I don’t want them to write blogposts; I just want them to be able to keep writing songs that transport me to a much more beautiful place when I’m enduring the London underground at rush hour. And no, I don’t own a typewriter."<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I didn’t care about typewriters, I did check to see if Amanda Palmer truly has this many Twitter followers, she does, but what hooked me was the poetic description of listening to a track I’d never heard of, never mind heard, I didn’t care about the point about technology, but I recognized the passion about the track, I clicked through.<\/p>\n

And I was stunned.<\/p>\n

"Hollow Talk" will never be on Top Forty radio.\u00c2\u00a0 Nor Hot AC.\u00c2\u00a0 It probably won’t come up in Pandora either, what does it sound like, why would the genome suggest it?\u00c2\u00a0 But a human being can convey what it sounds like and make you want to hear it…AND WHAT A RIDE!<\/p>\n

Stephen King wrote about the intro to "Gimmie Shelter" today.\u00c2\u00a0 He talked about hearing it for the first time.\u00c2\u00a0 I remember this too!\u00c2\u00a0 In Marc Goloff’s bedroom late at night, in the dark, I too got the lyrics wrong, but the sound!\u00c2\u00a0 And even back then, "Gimmie Shelter" was not the song they played on the radio, but it was the song we played at home… It made us feel connected to something bigger than us, humanity.<\/p>\n

I feel the same way listening to "Hollow Talk".<\/p>\n

My favorite music is not what connects me to people at the club, but that which soothes me at home, alone, when, as James Taylor said, my mind goes to places it should not go.\u00c2\u00a0 Then I need someone to take my hand and lift me up, show me that there’s beauty in the world, and it’s worth sticking around to experience it.<\/p>\n

Not that I’m always depressed, not that I’m always contemplating suicide, but to be human is to have more questions than answers, to, as Joni Mitchell sang, be so close to that line and so far from satisfaction.<\/p>\n

Listen to this song.\u00c2\u00a0 A certain percentage of you will dismiss it out of hand, e-mail me that my taste sucks, that I’m an idiot.\u00c2\u00a0 But there will be others, a significant number, who will be touched, whose day will be made.<\/p>\n

And that’s how it works in the Internet world.\u00c2\u00a0 The music is out there.\u00c2\u00a0 It just takes someone to find it, to champion it, to the point their amazement, their pure elation, is conveyed to someone else and eventually there’s a tipping point, and a whole slew of people now know this track, a bunch of people’s lives are changed.<\/p>\n

What has this got to do with careers, getting paid for making music, social networking TopSpin and Ticketmaster? NOTHING!\u00c2\u00a0 That’s just the point, the music comes first, sometimes all we’ve got is the music.<\/p>\n

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Hollow Talk by Choir of Young Believers This video does a disservice to this song. I think Robin Millar and I are on the same page.\u00c2\u00a0 But you wouldn’t know it by the e-mail he sends me.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s frustrated over change, he’s worried artists are being lost in the shuffle, he’s worried we’re going to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,2,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-music-business","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-Ss","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3376"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3377,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3376\/revisions\/3377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}