Stefanie Joyce – Blindfold
How does a songwriter know when they’ve written a classic? I suspect that, among other things, listening back to the song makes them feel uncomfortable and makes them consider erasing the recording before anyone else gets a chance to hear it.
Yeah, the greatest artists overshare. But this is precisely what we all need as a collective audience. The vast majority of us never open up at all, or, when we do, need to pay someone to be in the room with us and referee us.
Imagine Stefanie Joyce sitting in a room with a couple of other songwriters and trying to pen tunes for some famous pop star. The moment “Blindfold” would start playing, Joyce’s colleagues would warn her that such honest, dark material is more than even the biggest pop star can sell an enamoured audience.
But they’re wrong. “Blindfold” constantly surprises the listener. It first does this through the sinister lullaby being sung and the lyrics behind it. But the song ends up being even more striking by the time that the conflict gets resolved musically.
And, after all, if all of that can make sense when putting notes and words together, why wouldn’t it be resolved in the listeners’ souls as well when they hear a tune like this?
Jon Hood – Primrose
There’s a real obsession right now for old pop-rock music and for the equipment used to make it. Modern musicians scramble to find deals on the internet and in pawn shops, zooming in on descriptions that contain words like “warm” and “ambiental.”
Still, if you ask me, most of the oldies had a bit too much of the performers on there for my liking. Even the most synthetic-sounding records, Italo-disco or weird dudes from Dusseldorf making believe they were robots, still sound like people running around a studio knocking over mics and dropping guitar picks on the floor.
The good thing about modern production is that music can sound entirely artificial. The likes of Jon Hood use this to the band’s advantage and create a kind of fairytale world where the artists are barely even there, just moving objects around from another dimension.
Listen to Swiss band Jon Hood and their single “Primrose” on a Sunny autumn day, and you’re bound to convince that you’re brain just made the whole thing up. Cleverly layering sounds and using the vocals as a way to add colour to this modern, aural impressionistic work, Jon Hood makes dreamy music that is very much of the time. Why ever go backwards?
