Influences?

      As I was sitting down to dinner with my son tonight, I realized that we needed something different to listen to. What music goes well with pork chops, fettucine alfredo. and broccoli? No Doubt, no doubt. I was flipping through my cds (yes, I still have and buy the occasional cd) and came across Tragic Kingdom.It was kind of funny because a friend randomly mentioned No Doubt the other day. I haven't really followed but Gwen Stefani seems to have eclipsed the rest of the band in recent years. She's got a great voice and while I don't always dig some of the new stuff she's doing, she is a great musician.
     So I loaded the Tragic Kingdom onto the itunes and fired up the music. This album came out when I was in high school and I remember listening to it on the way to band practice. What blows my mind now as I'm listening to it is the orchestration. Yes, I really wrote that. The bass parts are simply impressive and the guitar parts that play off of them compliment them perfectly. I love the horns, don't get me wrong, especially the nouveau ska stuff going on with Spiderweb and I'm Just a Girl, but it's the rhythm parts that my ear went to first tonight. I'm not even listening to this stuff on headphones. Maybe I should. 
    Here's a question for all of you out there: Was this orchestration learned by the members of No Doubt or did they just happen across it? Did they know what they were doing or were they following Duke Ellington's old addage, "If it sounds good, it is good."? This question circles around in my head from time to time when thinking about music theory. I would say that I'm a borderline music theory geek. I like to learn songs in chord progressions rather than specific keys, so I can transpose them easier. I'm borderline, though, as I could care less about certain rules. I occasionally enjoy the random parallel fifth and I thoroughly enjoy the open fifths of the bagpipes, certain punk songs, and the A5 in The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (I also like open fifths of Gosling's Bermuda Black Seal Rum, but I put the cap back on so as not to spill any). I recently learned a Weird Al song (You Don't Love Me Anymore) and the best I can figger, it has a minor Vth chord in it. Right, I know, that's not really kosher but...do we really need to call it the ii of IV? Anyway, you real geeks can have all the discussion about it, I'm going to enjoy calling it what I do and playing the song while trying not to laugh. 
     Now let's get to the root of my blog today, connecting the title to the content. Ask yourself who are your influences? For me it's easy, Tom Petty, Tom Jones, Buddy Holly, The Kingston Trio, Arlo Guthrie, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Buffett, John Denver, and yes, Weird Al Yankovic. Listening to No Doubt tonight, though, is making me rethink, or at least add some. When I was learning to play guitar, I was listening to Green Day, Weezer, No Doubt, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Lisa Loeb, Jewel Kilcher, and a lot of the other good music that was being made in the mid-nineties. I am now thinking that I can't discount the influence these groups must have on me. The music is simple rock and roll, yet there's a level of musicianship that is pretty impressive. Now I'm not going to go back into my bit about music quality but the music of the mid-nineties makes me think of another good quality question. Let's think back to the mid-nineties. The economy was still recovering from the Reagan-Bush debacle years, and the art being made was very good. There's an old idea that when the economy is bad, the arts get good. So here's my question: Where's the good art now? Our economy is still in the pits after 2008 and yet, there's very little good music happening on the pop scene. What is up with that?
     Okay, so I went there in the last part of my last paragraph. I apologize, kind of. So a random mention and a listen tonight is making me reconsider the idea of influences. Not in a huge, revolutionary way, but in a hmmm, maybe I was hearing some stuff that was much better than I've given it credit for. Maybe it had more influence on me than I'd ever admitted, or realized. So pull out those old cds and give them a listen and see if they spark anything in you. Let me know if they do, or they don't. 

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