Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

Transporting Song

Transporting Song

I love that a transporting song can take you so quickly to another time and another place.

A short reel of a long and distant memory plays clear again, if only for a short time.

Other memories play louder and more frequently in our minds.

I have said this before and I will say it again: It’s peculiar what memories endure as time goes by.

We all smiled, and drank the Pouilly-Fuisse for the rest of the table and the red Bordeaux for the Duke, and all the while the men with the guitars kept playing, until finally I realized what they were playing, what they had been playing all along: ‘The Red River Valley” and the theme from The High and the Mighty. They did not quite get the beat right, but even now I can hear them, in another country and a long time later, even as I tell you this.

-Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Behind The Music

Behind The Music

Gosh we want the recording artists we love to be behind the music we listen to, don’t we?

Well. If you you still are enjoying that delusion, then don’t read this book!

Because most popular music is made much like laws are made. It’s sometimes ugly. And dozens of people often have their hands in it.

Discovering this reality feels something like learning that your favorite musician can’t read music…

I mean, this book was a superb peak behind the curtain at songwriting, but Seabrooks’s son gets it right.

“Disillusioning” is the perfect word for it.

But he does sometimes seem nostalgic for those golden days before I got interested in the songwriters and producers behind his music (thanks in large part to him)—those salad days when he innocently assumed that the songs were created by the artists who sang them. “I sort of wish you hadn’t told me this stuff,” he said, when we talked after the book came out. “It’s kind of disillusioning.”

-John Seabrook, The Song Machine

Sterling Terrell