paulmurray.net
Paul Murray's weblog, with news you may have missed and my $0.02 worth on a number of topics.

"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."
- Art Buchwald

I bet you don't have a friend who's an acupuncturist

E-mail me: pmurray [at] despammed.com

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Friday, October 09, 2009
A surprising collaboration.
This certainly sounded intriguing when I read it this morning:
In a surprise union of two quintessentially American composers from different eras, one the 1960s mastermind of "Good Vibrations," the other the Jazz Age creator of "Rhapsody in Blue," former Beach Boy Brian Wilson has been authorized by the estate of George Gershwin to complete unfinished songs Gershwin left behind when he died in 1937.

He plans to finish and record at least two such pieces on an album of Gershwin music he hopes to release next year.

The Gershwin-Wilson project may strike some as an odd coupling: one New York musician famous for sophisticated 1920s and '30s pop songs including " 'S Wonderful" and "Someone to Watch Over Me" as well as such expansive, classically minded compositions as "Rhapsody"; the other the driving force behind Southern California beach culture hits such as "Surfin' U.S.A.," "I Get Around" and "California Girls."

But their career paths and evolution of their artistry have common threads, noted people involved with the project and some independent scholars, and that gives the proposed collaboration logic.
I like both halves of this collaborations, so hopefully it will turn out well.

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Sunday, December 30, 2007
End the loudness war!
You know how everybody thinks that commercials on TV are louder than the programs? (I'm not talking about what can happen with cable TV, which is unregulated; I'm talking about broadcast over the air TV.) That's because the producers compress the dynamic range. It's not that the loudest parts are any louder -- what would have been the quiet parts are compressed and made louder.

Since the early 1990s, music producers have been using this tactic as well. It's gotten to the point that a lot of experienced producers hate listening to new recordings -- or even remastered versions of old ones. From Rolling Stone:
Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. "They make it loud to get [listeners'] attention," [producer David] Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applying dynamic range compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a song. Like many of his peers, Bendeth believes that relying too much on this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue. "I think most everything is mastered a little too loud," Bendeth says. "The industry decided that it's a volume contest."

Producers and engineers call this "the loudness war," and it has changed the way almost every new pop and rock album sounds. But volume isn't the only issue. Computer programs like Pro Tools, which let audio engineers manipulate sound the way a word processor edits text, make musicians sound unnaturally perfect. And today's listeners consume an increasing amount of music on MP3, which eliminates much of the data from the original CD file and can leave music sounding tinny or hollow. "With all the technical innovation, music sounds worse," says Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, who has made what are considered some of the best-sounding records of all time. "God is in the details. But there are no details anymore." ...

... even most CD listeners have lost interest in high-end stereos as surround-sound home theater systems have become more popular, and superior-quality disc formats like DVD-Audio and SACD flopped. Bendeth and other producers worry that young listeners have grown so used to dynamically compressed music and the thin sound of MP3s that the battle has already been lost. "CDs sound better, but no one's buying them," he says. "The age of the audiophile is over."


The Austin Statesman had a similar article in October 2006.

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Monday, December 24, 2007
The story behind the song.


The Washington Post tells the story behind a modern Christmas classic recording: Bing Crosby and David Bowie singing "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy."
Bowie, who was 30 at the time, and Crosby, then 73, recorded the duet Sept. 11, 1977, for Crosby's "Merrie Olde Christmas" TV special. A month later, Crosby was dead of a heart attack. The special was broadcast on CBS about a month after his death....

The original plan had been for Bowie and Crosby to sing just "Little Drummer Boy." But "David came in and said: 'I hate this song. Is there something else I could sing?'" Fraser said. "We didn't know quite what to do."

Fraser, Kohan and Grossman left the set and found a piano in the studios' basement. In about 75 minutes, they wrote "Peace on Earth," an original tune, and worked out an arrangement that weaved together the two songs. Bowie and Crosby nailed the performance with less than an hour of rehearsal.

And that was almost that. "We never expected to hear about it again," Kohan said.

But after the recording circulated as a bootleg for several years, RCA decided to issue it as a single in 1982. It has since been packaged and repackaged in Christmas compilation albums and released as a DVD.

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Friday, April 27, 2007
You never give me your money.
Good heavens. Paul McCartney is only the third richest musician in the world? Even weirder: I've never even heard of #1.

LONDON (AP) - Paul McCartney is ranked third in an annual list of Britain's richest musical figures, with a fortune estimated at $1.4 billion.

The Sunday Times' annual Rich List, released Friday, said the former Beatle's fortune was down $200 million from last year, due to the estimated cost of his upcoming divorce from Heather Mills.

Clive Calder, the former Zomba records label boss whose acts included Britney Spears and 'N Sync, was at the top of the music list, with a fortune estimated at $2.6 billion.

Andrew Lloyd Webber was in second place at $1.5 billion. The composer has had a good year thanks to his role as producer of a West End revival of "The Sound of Music," whose star was chosen by a reality TV program.

The list also includes: theater producer Cameron Mackintosh; "American Idol" impresario Simon Fuller; pop queen Madonna and her husband, Guy Ritchie; Elton John; Mick Jagger; entertainment entrepreneur Robert Stigwood; crooner Tom Jones; and Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.

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