I always get a little anxious when someone asks me to put on music at a party or something. The music I listen to most isn’t usually the most hip or popular – or if it is, it’s hip and popular among fellow tender souls who retreat to their bedrooms with headphones because it’s music that’s best suited for such solitary situations. I listen intensely and intensively and get lost in the details and emotions of something that for many people is just pleasant noise in the background – and I don’t always like pleasant sounding music. Don’t get me wrong, I listen to mostly very middle of the road stuff, but I don’t often listen to the most popular music of our day, and there’s always that inevitable moment on a road trip in my car where a friend finally breaks down and asks if we can put on something “more upbeat.” I don’t think that anyone really knows what, specifically, they mean by that, but I think really what they’re looking for is music with a modern pulse.
Most popular music these days involves electronic drum sounds of some form or another. I promise I do not stand in any sort of BS, hipster judgment of those sorts of things[1]; in fact, a lot of my favorite artists rely heavily on elements of modern dance and pop music – 808s, programmed beats, samples, synths, weird computer sounds, you name it. I need “upbeat” music, but me, I’m already at a high enough anxiety level most of the time just being alive, so I most often tend toward music that grounds me, that brings me warmth, that leans back, makes me lean in – music that’s just a bit less “upbeat” than what most people have on most of the time.
You see, much modern pop/dance music relies on hard, heavy, pounding beats to drive the rhythm and make people move. We live in a digital age and at a faster, more stimulated pace than ever before – so it makes sense that our music pulsates, hits hard, and blends the man-made with the technological. And, at least as far as the people in charge of mass media are concerned, it makes sense that those “upbeat” elements of modern pop would then go and incorporate themselves into all forms of broadly-distributed music – because that’s what’s visceral, that’s what’s popular, that’s what’s going to reach the most people with the most certainty and efficiency. And that’s why now we’ve got these weird blends of “country pop,” “country rap,” “rap pop,” “dance rap,” etc.[2] bleeding out of whatever speakers are meant for wide appeal. The trappings of whatever genre that music used to be have now been layered on top of generic beats that could just as easily be Imagine Dragons, Mumford & Sons, Katy Perry, or Florida Georgia Line.
I know, what does any of this have to do with rock & roll? Well, where I’m leading with all of this is that you pretty much don’t hear anything that sounds like rock & roll on the radio anymore, and I feel like people have kinda forgotten what rock & roll is and that rock & roll is totally about making you dance.
Spend time in the sweaty moshpits of the average college dancefloor and I don’t think you’ll ever hear anyone request Fleetwood Mac from the DJ. But put “Dreams” on good and loud in a room full of folks who’ve had a few and challenge them not to dance. Cuz guess what? When “Dreams” came out, that was pop music. You can hear the influence of disco, the steadiness of the beat, the early use of synthesizers and the way all that would lead into the ‘80s music that’s now so back in vogue.
And it’s not just Fleetwood Mac. Rock & roll is a blend of soul, jazz, rhythm and blues[3]. The Beatles and The Stones weren’t listening to music that made you sit still. Before the E Street Band were selling out stadiums, they were playing barrooms until four in the morning, playing to those same late-night, sweaty moshpits of their day. David Bowie is about as rock & roll as they get, and my favorite Bowie record is probably “Let’s Dance.” Saxophones, syncopated bass lines, the groove, the beat, the organ – they make you move if you let them. Ya think Tom Petty didn’t want you to have some fun when he played?
Of course, often in my own artistic endeavors I overindulge in the pain and pathos often associated with “serious” work. The genius must be tortured. And while it is authentic, it’s also an impulse that I’m working to curb as I mature. Most artists turn to whatever their art is because they simply can’t handle whatever the hell is hurting them and have no other suitable means of expressing it. But, for as much as I love to play the part of the singer-songwriter in the small listening rooms of Rockwood Music Hall and the Hotel Café, what I love even more is to get people up and moving. And before I blame too much of people’s lack of movement at live music venues on a fear of looking foolish in someone’s Instagram story (which is definitely a thing), I think it’s also got to do with the fact that we haven’t made rock & roll for our times, for our generation. We can find a way to express the very unique brand of pain, depression, anxiety, and fear that comes from living in today’s day and age – but we can also have some fun doing it! They danced a little bit at Woodstock, ya know, and those weren’t exactly peaceful, easy times.
However much any given millennial loves The Beatles – which can be a whole lot – that millennial will never love The Beatles in the same way that a person alive for The Beatles loves The Beatles. Some things can only be experienced. Our generation can only take this older music as something of the past, as an artifact, and we can embed it deep, deep down into the core of our beings. But it only lives there as a relic of past times, as something we gained secondhand.
So, what’s our rock & roll look like? Well, it’s probably got a hard-driving beat, something that pulsates, that’s intense, and loud, and full of sounds and stimuli and a blend of the man-made and the technological. But it also has that groove. That swagger. That thing that only a funked-out drummer and a badass guitar lick can do to you – something that feels like a freight train straight to freedom that makes your ass move and your head bang if you let go of your ego enough.
That’s what I’m looking to make. That’s modern rock & roll.
The first single from my record comes out on March 5th. It’s called “Do I Seem Okay?”[4] It’s about feeling overwhelmed by the pressures and expectations of being a modern boy in a modern, living too much by the reflections we see of ourselves in other people, the way we see ourselves only through the way other people see us. I was real fucking anxious when I wrote that song, and I often spoke of wanting it to “sound like someone was about to throw their laptop out the window.” But when it comes out, put it on kinda loud. See if you don’t feel your foot tap just a little.
[1] 23-year-old David TOTALLY did though...but we all grow up eventually
[2] I will stand in BS hipster judgement of mass media, however, for distilling art into humanless, modular components that are repurposed and repackaged into things that sound like someone made their own fountain drink at the movies by mixing all the sodas, except the sodas are “Old Town Road + Pop Punk + Billie Eilish.”
[3] (ya know, plus white people music).
[4] That’s just a live recording...the studio version has ALL sorts of weird sounds in it.