#Samuel listening ears craft update
#Samuel listening ears craft free

Or at least not gloomy.īE There’s always a tension in your music between pop’s basic sunniness and something more sinister that always seems to catch you. In the case of the song, “Cable TV,” I was actually challenged by Melissa Thorne, who was in the band at the time, to write a song about something un-unhappy. The lyrics are another story, because it’s too easy for me to be a drag. And some of that excitement spilled into the content. Then Julian and I began distilling that and keeping the things that were relevant to us and that didn’t feel like formalist clichés. Some of the earlier versions of the songs that ended up on the record were very straightforward pop arrangements.

#Samuel listening ears craft free

SB Yeah, it was exciting to feel free to make unabashedly pop music. So part of the challenge was to not replicate old sounds or styles and also not to make music that was in my comfort zone, not to just make more sad songs.īE There’s a kind of despairing optimism to it. SB But I wasn’t even trying! Certain things come naturally. Even when I used to work composing scores for adult films, sometimes the director would mention that maybe the music was a little dour.īE ( laughing) You were gonna bum out the masturbators. SB I also wanted to make fun music this time.

#Samuel listening ears craft update

So I tried to update the music that mattered to me, mainly British post-punk, without actually sounding like it.īE For a Samuel Bing project, it’s not particularly dark. That book helped me understand that if I wanted to honor all of that very adventurous music, the last thing I should do is make a record that sounds like something from a few decades ago. At around the same time, I was reading Rip it Up by Simon Reynolds, which discusses a lot of the music I first heard via my older brother blasting WLIR all day and night. So it caught me off guard that I felt devastated to the point where I was having dreams about it, and I felt compelled to explore that. Long Island doesn’t have much to be proud of, and I guess the idea that it was still out there broadcasting was comforting to me in ways I wasn’t conscious of. Samuel Bing On one hand, it was the genuine and very unexpected sadness I felt when I discovered that WLIR was off the air. What was in it for you? What was driving this engagement with the ghosts of pop’s past? But it never quite lets itself indulge in the kind of nostalgia that it’s grappling with. Not long ago, we met up in a rented house in Joshua Tree, California, where my dog ate his glasses, and we talked a lot, sometimes with a voice recorder on.īen Ehrenreich The first Fol Chen album takes on the topic of nostalgia very directly: formally, because it is an album, which is already a nostalgic form, and because it is musically and lyrically engaged with the music you grew up with, listening to WLIR on Long Island. I wrote mythological liner notes for the first album released by his latest project, the band Fol Chen.

His old band played at the book party for my first novel. We both grew up and moved to Los Angeles. Between Morrissey’s lyrics and Lou Reed’s pose, something like salvation seemed possible, if not survival, at least suicide with style.Įventually, something funny happened. We found common ground in Long Island’s now-dead new wave radio station, WLIR, and in the Smiths, Bowie, the Velvet Underground. My loyalties ran towards punk, his towards the finely crafted pop song: Cheap Trick, Randy Newman, Warren Zevon, Squeeze.

It didn’t seem cute or funny at the time. We pierced our ears and pegged our jeans.

We both wore long black overcoats and scarves and smoked a lot. He defended himself with self-mockery, quickness, wiseass artful dodges. Samuel Bing was even skinnier than I was. Sadists and demons prowled the halls in muscle tees and Z. I met the boy who would become Samuel Bing in a faraway land called High-School-on-Long-Island.