Carol Off of As It Happens in conversation with Simon Napier-Bell
Thirty years ago in China, no one listened to Western pop. Young people wore drab Cultural Revolution style clothes. They didn't go out to clubs because there were none. The nation was just beginning to wake-up from decades of strict repression and isolation. So the Chinese who went to see Wham! play in Beijing in April 1985 were mostly bewildered.
Carol Off, host of CBC Radio One's As It Happens, spoke to the band's manager Simon Napier-Bell about he how he broke the band in the Chinese market, one dinner at a time.
This week is CBC Music's Science Week, and all week, we will look at tech innovations that changed music, bring you the best science songs, find out how to design the perfect concert hall, meet music-making robots, check out the latest studies about music and more.
We're also going to answer questions about how much works. Can an opera singer break a glass? Can sound physically knock someone over? Why do some sounds, like nails on a blackboard, cause pain? How do horns make sound?
So today we're going to kick it off with a question that anybody who has gone to a loud concert can appreciate: What's the best way to protect your ears at a concert, and still hear the concert?
Here is your answer:
Every year, millions of people flock to concert venues around the globe to see their favourite acts; but if the shows are loud, they may also be losing some of their hearing along the way.
So how can you protect your ears and still hear the show?
If you’ve ever tried those inexpensive foam earplugs, you’ve probably noticed that they do a great job of blocking out the noise—but they also block out a whole lot of the music. Great if you’re operating a circular saw, not so much if you’re watching your favourite band.
According to Susan Small, assistant professor of audiology at UBC, foam earplugs cut out more sound at the higher end of the scale, where our hearing tends to experience the most damage. It’s also where a lot of music resides, so that’s why you get that muddy sound.
“They’re industrial noise plugs, and if properly inserted, they provide up to about 40 decibels of attenuation of the sound, which can bring it down from a damaging level to non-damaging. But the problem is, the fidelity is affected because it’s not a flat response,” she explains. “So earplugs are completely effective, but the enjoyment of the music is dampened because you don’t hear the high pitches.”
So what to do if you still want to check out the show and save your hearing? The answer is you’ll need to shell out a little extra cash, see an audiologist, and get fitted for musicians’ earplugs that cut the sound evenly across the high and low end—often by 15 or 25 decibels—rather than disproportionately cutting out the highs. That way, you hear all the same sounds, but less loudly.
Small emphasizes that the length of exposure to loud sounds is also a huge factor.
“So 85 dBA, that’s good for 8 hours. But if it’s louder than that, you would have to reduce the number of hours you’re exposed to it. And then really, really loud sounds like jet engines, any length of time is probably not a good idea,” she says. “But for more regular loudness, you just have to reduce the duration as you increase the loudness.”
Small says that even musicians’ earplugs can sometimes be tricky for people who have already experienced hearing loss—a 25 dB cut may knock out too much of the sound, especially at the high end where most hearing loss happens—but that doesn’t mean that people with hearing loss shouldn’t protect their ears.
“It’s a compromise between what you need to hear and what you’re protecting. More is always better in terms of protection; but then if you can’t function you’re not going to use it,” says Small, who adds that sometimes a smaller cut is the best option, especially for people like conductors, classical musicians or band teachers who still need to hear the full range of sound for their work. “So you have to figure out what works for each person.”
It's Science Week here at CBC Music, and we've lined up a ton of fascinating stories about the physics of sound and the age-old musical questions. We're kicking the week off with the best science songs ever!
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to write a great song, but you should know a few things if you're going to write a song about science. Some of our picks use music to illustrate scientific principles, some use science as a lyrical metaphor and others just say a bunch of scientific-sounding words as quickly as possible. We've assembled 20 favourites in the gallery above.
Check them out and let us know if there are any science songs we missed. Tweet us @CBCMusic. And check out the Science Week page for more updates throughout the week.
This week, you get five new songs including ones by ex-Civil Wars woman Joy Williams, Great Lake Swimmers and Ron Sexmith. Beth Moore jumps high and Whitehorse bump into the number two slot.
What do you think of Joy Williams's "Woman (Oh Mama)"?
1. Of Monsters and Men, "Crystals"
2. Whitehorse, "Baby What's Wrong"
3. Joel Plaskett, "Credits Roll"
4. Mumford and Sons, "Believe"
5. Yukon Blonde, "Saturday Night"
6. Terra Lightfoot, "Never Will"
7. James Bay, "Hold Back the River"
8. Beth Moore, "OK OK"
9. Gabrielle Papillon, "With Our Trouble"
10. Ron Hawkins, "Saskia Begins"
11. The Weepies, "No Trouble"
12. Great Lake Swimmers, "I Must Have Someone Else's Blues" *NEW*
13. Decemberists, "The Wrong Year"
14. Death Cab For Cutie, "No Room in Frame"
15. Elliot Maginot, "Monsters at War"
16. Ivan and Alyosha, "All This Wandering Around" *NEW*
17. Joy Williams, "Woman (Oh Mama)" *NEW*
18. Ron Sexsmith, "Can't Get My Act Together" *NEW*
This week is CBC Music's Science Week, and all week, we will look at tech innovations that changed music, bring you the best science songs, find out how to design the perfect concert hall, meet music-making robots, check out the latest studies about music and more.
We're also going to answer questions about how much works. Can an opera singer break a glass? Can sound physically knock someone over? Why do your ears ring after a loud concert? How do horns make sound?
We'll have all the answers starting tomorrow, but here's a taste:
Why are certain sounds, like feedback or nails on a blackboard, so painful?
Just the thought of it probably makes you cringe: the dreadful, hair-raising screech of nails on a blackboard. For some people, other sounds are just as terrible, from feedback at a concert to the squeak of Styrofoam to the sound of a fork scraping on a plate.
So why do certain sounds bother us so much?
According to scientists, it likely has to do with the frequency of the sound, the fact that it happens quickly, how it's processed by our brains, plus a little conditioning.
A team of researchers at the University of Cologne studied which frequencies cause people the most pain, and what they found was surprising. It wasn’t extremely high sounds, or extremely low sounds, that hurt us most; it was the sounds that fall between 2,000 and 4,000 Hz, so still well within the range of human speech, and within the range that the human ear hears well.
Michael Oehler, a professor at the university, says our ears actually amplify sounds in that range, which may have been an evolution with a specific purpose — for example, to better hear a baby crying.
In other words, when those sounds enter, our ears actually turn up the volume.
He and his colleagues also found that our hatred of those chalkboard screeches may be partially psychological, because listeners in their study reacted less adversely when they were told the terrible sounds they were hearing were pulled from a musical composition.
What's more, a U.K. team found that the sounds tap into the part of our brains that's responsible for negative emotions, so that cringe-factor may be at least partially hardwired.
Susan Small, assistant professor of audiology at the University of British Columbia, also suspects that part of the problem is the short, sharp nature of the sound — that if our ears could have the chance to build up to it, we likely wouldn’t find it nearly as annoying.
"I think it has to do with the rise time of the sound — so things that rapidly rise to a peak seem to be more obnoxious," says Miller, who adds that short, sharp sounds also tend to do more damage to the human ear.
"What happens is we have the cochlea, which is fluid-filled, and it has the basilar membrane that runs through it, and the hair cells move with the basilar membrane. So if the basilar membrane is sharply attacked, that wave comes in with this rapid rise, it maybe sends a more concentrated signal quickly, and it just sounds more awful to us."
Make sure to check back to our CBC Music Science Week page all week for more answers, and more great stories about music and science.
With no fanfare or preamble, Great Lake Swimmers' Tony Dekker gets right to the point on the very first song of the band's new album: "Something like a storm coming in."
It’s not menacing. It’s not melancholy. It’s confident, certain and assured. Just like Great Lake Swimmers and the themes they explore on this, their sixth record, A Forest of Arms.
The Toronto-based band holds Dekker's songwriting and vocals at its core, with a rotating cast of players around him. Dekker has long been a keen observer of his surroundings, which continue to inspire his songwriting. A recurring theme is the idea of navigating his way through the city — an idea brilliantly expressed on “I Will Never See the Sun" on the Swimmers' self-titled debut album — and he explores a similar sentiment in "Shaking All Over":
"They're no lifeboats to heaven around here, Just misguided people, And Russian roulette, Mistaking kindness for weakness, Thinking like giants, Acting like children, Just strangers in a hurry."
On "Zero in the City," Dekker cleverly calculates the algebra of a crumbling relationship:
"Oh, but nothing’s the same, Minus two, No one to blame, Minus one in the street, A conceit in degrees, Minus two now we're gone, Minus you now we’re done."
The current Great Lake Swimmers lineup of Dekker, Erik Arnesen (banjo), Miranda Mulholland (violin, backing vocals), Bret Higgins (bass) and Joshua Van Tassel (drums) power up A Forest of Arms' deep, introspective compositions.
The tight rhythm section of Van Tassel and Higgins drive tracks like "Something Like a Storm," "Zero in the City" and "I Must Have Someone Else's Blues," while Van Tassel and Mulholland take turns leading the waltz on "Shaking All Over." The longest-serving member of the Swimmers' rotating cast, Arneson (he's been with the band since 2005), makes "A Bird Flew Inside the House" shine with his subtle banjo playing.
A Forest of Arms is arguably one of the most dynamic and focused Great Lake Swimmers records to date.
The new album will be released on Nettwerk Records on April 21. You can stream the album in its entirety until April 20 by clicking on the player above.
Tracklisting:
1. "Something Like a Storm" 2. "Zero in the City" 3. "Shaking All Over" 4. "Don't Leave Me Hanging" 5. "One More Charge at the Red Cape" 6. "I Was a Wayward Pastel Bay" 7. "A Bird Flew Inside the House" 8. "A Jukebox in a Desert of Snow" 9. "I Must Have Someone Else's Blues" 10. "The Great Bear" 11. "With Every Departure" 12. "Expecting You"
It’s a theory that dates all the way back to 1848, when a German professor published a book about the soul life of plants, and London’s Royal Philharmonic even recorded a special album called The Flora Seasons: Music To Grow To.
But can sweet serenades really lead to perkier plants?
Turns out that, in the science world, it’s a heated debate.
The best-known experiment was in 1973, when a researcher in Colorado named Dorothy Retallack put groups of identical plants in two separate laboratories: one where the plants got a steady diet of rock music, the other with easy listening.
Retallack found that the ones that were raised on easy listening fared much better than their rock 'n' roll counterparts, growing tall and healthy, leaning in toward the speakers. The plants that got rock 'n' roll leaned away from the speakers and died prematurely.
Another study out of the University of Arizona involved sprouting seeds in four strictly controlled environments — one silent, one with music, one with "healing energy" (administered 15-20 minutes a day by an energy healer) and one with pink noise (like white noise but with more low frequency) — and they found that the seeds that got the music sprouted more quickly and more reliably than those that were not exposed to music.
And a paper out of South Korea’s National Institute of Agricultural Biotechnology asserted that even conversation-level music — they used Beethoven — actually alters two genes that are involved in plants' response to light.
But a study out of Penn State says it’s unlikely that music will help your plants grow. The researchers argue that plants definitely respond to external stimuli, so things like wind will induce changes in their growth — but that, for a plant, music is basically just another source of vibration. The Penn state researchers added that the most effective way to have your plant grow is to "provide them with light, water and mineral nutrition."
In other words: it might help, but not because it’s music. You could blow on the plant and it might just have the same effect.
It’s the stuff of legend — and even of vintage TV commercials— but can an unamplified singer really break a glass using his or her voice alone?
The answer is yes, but it’s not easy.
In short, every piece of glass has a natural resonant frequency — that is, the speed at which it will vibrate given a particular stimulus, such as a sound wave — and wine glasses are especially resonant because of their hollow shape. (That’s also why they sound pleasant when they’re clinked.)
But here’s the secret: it’s not about singing a particular high note, like the legendary "high C." It’s about finding the same note as the glass’s natural resonant tone (also what you hear if you flick the glass with your fingers, or wet a finger and ring it around the rim), then singing loudly enough that the glass vibrates to the point where it will fail.
The key, though, is the glass itself: cheap wine glasses from the dollar store won’t cut it, because they don’t have the same resonance as crystal. It has to be the expensive kind.
Don’t try this at home, though, because you can hurt yourself. Just take our word for it — or watch the phenomenon in action in these videos:
A car pulls up beside yours, and the driver has the bass thumping so loud the windows on your car rattle and vibrate; or you’re at a concert, and the bass is pounding so hard that you can feel you clothing twitch.
So what’s happening? And why does it only happen with the low notes and not the highs?
According to Chris Waltham, a University of British Columbia astronomy and physics professor who specializes in music acoustics, it has partly to do with the limited powers of the human ear, and everything to do with air pressure.
In short, humans tend to hear best at higher frequencies, so when a sound is higher, it requires less amplification for us to hear it. But head into the lower sonic reaches, and our hearing ability drops off precipitously, which means the bass needs to be pushed out with far more pressure in order for us to hear it.
“To hear bass at all, you really have to move some material—shake the cone of the speaker or the soundboard of a guitar,” he explains. So to get a thudding bass sound, you really have to move some serious air.
“That’s why bass speakers have to be so big. At a 1,000 Hz you can deafen somebody with a one-centimetre square speaker, whereas at a bass frequency you need something really big,” he says. “And you’ve got to move a lot of air, which is why things start bouncing and car bodies vibrate.”
Here is that bass effect in action, Canadian style:
Most people use it all day every day — we speak, we sing, we laugh — and yet many of us have no idea how our voices work.
It’s an amazing system that operates much like a wind instrument and is roughly divided into three parts: the power source (your lungs), the vibrator (your voice box) and the resonator (your throat, nose, mouth and sinuses).
In short, when we inhale, the diaphragm — the large muscle that runs across our abdomen — drops down and the lungs expand as the air travels in. When you go to speak, which happens courtesy of a signal from your brain that travels along your laryngeal nerve, you push the air back out through the trachea, or windpipe. (Think bellows.)
Your larynx sits on top of your windpipe and contains two folds, or vocal cords, and they open and close when you speak or swallow. When you are breathing normally they are open and relaxed; but when you speak, the two vocal folds come together and the air passes through them.
In the process they vibrate rapidly—from 100-1000 times per second—depending on the pitch (faster is higher), alternately trapping air and releasing it. Each little puff of air is the start of a sound wave.
The pitch is controlled by the length and tension of the vocal cords, which are controlled by surrounding muscles and cartilage. When the vocal folds are lengthened, they’re also thinner and more taut, like a rubber band.
Check out this incredible, and slightly creepy, video of vocal cords in action:
In general, most men’s vocal folds vibrate at 90-500 Hz, and average at about 115 Hz in conversation. Women’s vocal folds tend to range from 150-1000 Hz, and average around 200 Hz in conversation.
On their own, vocal folds produce little more than a buzzing noise, like the mouthpiece on a trumpet; it’s only once the sound travels through the resonator, your mouth and nose, that the voice takes shape, using your jaw, tongue and lips to form the sounds.
If you’re like most of us, your singing voice hasn’t quite reached star quality—but when you step into the shower, you sound like you're ready to hit the stage.
So why do we sound so much better in the shower?
In short, your shower works like a very low-tech sound mixer in several ways, each of them helping your voice sound fuller and richer.
First, most showers are small and lined with hard, smooth tiles which, unlike softer surfaces such as fabric, barely absorb any sound waves—so when you sing, the sound waves reflect around the small space before dying off, which makes your voice seem louder and more powerful.
Ask most vocalists, or karaoke singers, and they’ll tell you that a little reverb can also go a long way toward that achieving a fuller sound, as well as blurring those sour notes—and that’s another way your shower stall is helping you out.
When the sound is bouncing around the shower, some of those sound waves travel a shorter distance to your ear; other sound waves travel farther before you hear them. Because you’re hearing these multiple reflections in a short sequence, it stretches out the sound, and makes it seem richer.
Finally, your shower also gives you a bass boost. In the average shower, the resonant frequency is 100 Hz, which is at the low end of the range. (Human speech ranges from roughly 85-255 Hz.) So your shower stall naturally amplifies those bass tones, making your voice seem deeper and fuller.
So hop in and belt out your top songs, because it's probably where you'll sound your very best. (Warning: some roommates, spouses, children and/or pets may disagree.)
It’s a now-legendary movie scene: in Back to the Future, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) plays a single guitar chord through an amplifier that’s cranked up so loud, it slams him against the wall.
But can a loud sound really knock somebody off their feet?
Not only can it bowl people over, says Chris Waltham, a University of British Columbia astronomy and physics professor who specializes in music acoustics — it can actually kill people.
According to Waltham, the sound waves that we hear are actually tiny fractions of fluctuations in air pressure. Just how tiny? Air pressure is 100,000 pascals, and the human limit of hearing is roughly one-100,000th of a pascal—or one-10 billionth of air pressure.
In fact, Waltham says an undamaged human ear can hear sound waves where the air is barely moving the width of an atom.
Once you get up over the 100,000th of air pressure, you’re going to cause damage to the human ears. In principle, if you get hit with a sound wave where the highs of the pressure are double the air pressure, and the lows are a vacuum, not only will it blow out your ears, but it can kill you.
"If air pressure doubles and then it goes into a vacuum, you can do serious physical damage. It’s the same as if you’re in a spaceship and you suddenly open the door," says Waltham, who adds that, technically, sound is already used to cause harm — but not with a guitar and giant amps like Marty McFly's.
"Essentially that’s what a stun grenade is," he says. "Rather than fragments of metal hitting you it’s just the air pressure oscillating violently."
If you love music, you probably know the feeling. You’re listening to one of your very favourite songs, and there’s that amazing part that never fails to give you chills.
It's a phenomenon that's also known as "musical frisson." But why is it happening?
That was the question that a team of researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University decided to explore by monitoring people’s brains while they listened to their favourite music—and what they found was that the music stimulated the same reward circuits as food, sex and drugs.
According to researcher Valorie Salimpoor, the human brain has evolved to reinforce adaptive behaviours such as eating and reproduction; so when people eat or have sex, the brain releases the pleasure drug dopamine to reinforce that behaviour. Some drugs also cause dopamine to be released.
But when their team used Positron Emission Tomography, or PET, to watch what happened in people’s brains when they listened to music they considered “intensely pleasurable,” they saw the same chain of events occur.
And interestingly, when the participants were anticipating the most pleasurable parts of their favourite songs, a different area of the brain got in on the action.
“Right before people experience that peak emotional response, which in our experience was measured with chills, participants show dopamine release in a different region of the reinforcement circuit and this is the caudate nucleus,” said Salimpoor on CBC's Quirks & Quarks.
The caudate nucleus, she explained, is a region of the brain with strong connections to the prefrontal cortex, which houses complex thinking, and gives rise to the emotional pleasure we derive from music.
“It suggests that aesthetic stimuli can actually work on this system that’s there to reinforce biologically adaptive behaviours,” she says. “And the fact that an intellectual reward that’s housed in the prefrontal cortex can stimulate this part of our brain, it almost suggests that as human beings we’ve been evolved to appreciate aesthetic stimuli.”
In other words, humans may have actually evolved to appreciate music, and those chills you’re feeling are your body’s way of saying that's a good thing.
It's Science Week at CBC Music, and all week, we're going boldly into the area where science and music collide.
And to start, we're tackling your questions about how music works.
Why is it that your ears ring after a loud concert? Does playing music for plants help them grow? Can an opera singer really break a glass with voice alone? Why are some sounds, like feedback or nails on a blackboard, so painful? Why do some people get the chills when they listen to music? And why do you sound so much better when you sing in the shower?
Find answers to those questions and many more by clicking on the gallery above—and keep checking back all week, because we'll be adding more as we go. Got a question of your own? Ask it in the comments below, and we'll do our best to find you the facts.
And for more great science and music stories, check out our Science Week page all week, because we'll be adding new stories every day.
Most bands don't release 15-track records anymore, but most bands don't really look like San Fermin, either. On the surface, yes, they're another sprawling art-pop act out of Brooklyn. But that pat veneer belies San Fermin's penchant for complex arrangements and artful ambition. It's no easy feat to craft challenging music that's also playful, pretty and pleasing.
Jackrabbit, which you can listen to one week before its release in the player above and pre-order here, is a well-crafted, intricately layered world that's weird and enchanted, polished but never placid. Amidst those 15 tracks are shorter, instrumental-only interludes, as if Jackrabbit were an indie rock musical, not an album. There's no second child syndrome here, either: this is a bigger, bolder and, yes, even better album than San Fermin's debut.
Ellis Ludwig-Leone has the perfect name for a bandleader, but that's a somewhat rare title in the world of modern indie pop. Ludwig-Leone is a songwriter, composer and arranger, the beating heart of San Fermin's sound, but all of the touring musicians who bring Ludwig-Leone's songs to life on Jackrabbit, and on the road, deserve equal acclaim.
Charlene Kaye and Allen Tate trade off on lead vocals and each bring something markedly different to the tracks. Tate's baritone lends an air of menace to every track ("The Woods," "Emily"), while Kay's clear, fresh tones ("Jackrabbit" and "Two Scenes") are vibrant jolts of life. When they team up, as they do on the chaotic "Parasites" and the final track, "Billy Bibbit," it's never a simple call-and-answer but a layering of two perspectives that exist side-by-side, independent of each other. Throughout, the instrumentation from John Brandon (trumpet), Stephen Chen (sax), Rebekah Durham (violin and vocals), Michael Hanf (drums) and Tyler McDiarmid (guitar) is innovative and moving.
At times edgy and fraught, hopeful and yearning, Jackrabbit is a fantastical, escapist universe of Ludwig-Leone's making and a glorious second effort from San Fermin.
When a brand new band releases an EP, it’s usually for a number of reasons. Perhaps the label wants to introduce their new artist before putting all their weight behind a full-length album, or maybe the band doesn’t have enough songs yet for anything more than an EP. But when an established band releases an EP, it usually signifies something more — they’re in experimental mode. They’re pushing their sound in a new direction, having fun in the studio and want to share this next step in their evolution with their fans.
So it goes with Sam Roberts Band, whose new EP, Counting the Days (April 18, via Paper Bag Records, you can stream it below now), picks up from where their Juno-nominated Lo-Fantasy left off, a bold record in its own right that saw the band move from beyond its rock origins to embrace rhythm, incorporating genres like electronic and funk.
Now you can add psychedelic to that list, based on the sprawling, droning, almost eight-minute long title track — “It goes on and on 'cause it has no end,” Roberts sings — and the trippy, synth-heavy take on 1969 hit "Spirit in the Sky."
Then there is "Durban Days," a poppy, acoustic ballad that sees Roberts getting nostalgic for his South African upbringing, while "Chasing the Light (guitar mix)" takes the synth-pop Lo-Fantasy album cut and turns it into an upbeat rocker.
All tracks minus "Spirit in the Sky" were produced by Youth, the same guy that deconstructed SRB’s sound and put it back together on the last album. Counting the Days incorporates everything we love about EPs. Its ambitious and experimental, but more importantly, it sounds like a band having fun.
Counting the Days will be available on special red vinyl with black and white splatter on Record Store Day (April 18). For more information go to SamRobertsBand.com.
Counting the Days tracklist
1. “Counting The Days” 2. “Broken Teeth” 3. “Spirit In The Sky” 4. “Chasing The Light (Alternate Version)” 5. “Durban Days”
It's finally spring and we're in the midst of our annual Searchlight competition to find Canada's best new band. Some of our favourite new discoveries are making their way into rotation and on to this chart! This week we have new songs from Doldrums, Seoul and Supercrush and more excitingly, there is a brand new #1 song.
Pressure was high when it came time for Alabama Shakes to make the followup to their 2012 critically acclaimed, three-time Grammy-nominated debut album, Boys & Girls. Its lead single, the Southern blues-rock earworm “Hold On,” took the young band from obscurity to ubiquity, with the late-night TV appearances and the endless touring that goes with that. Rolling Stone even dubbed “Hold On” the best song of the year, helping to make the Athens, Ga., group — fronted by Brittany Howard, with her unhinged stage presence and explosive guitar and vocal delivery — everybody’s favourite rock revivalists.
They were young and energetic with all the buzz a young band could ask for, but they didn’t want to repeat themselves.
“We didn’t want to do something like Boys & Girls, Part Two,” Howard says in the notes to accompany their new album, Sound & Color, available April 21 and streaming above (pre-order it on iTunes here).
So the group took its time, expanding on that soulful rock sound to create an eclectic album that incorporates soul, R&B and the blues, but also psychedelia, punk, prog, garage rock and African polyrhythms. Sound & Color is gritty and powerful and soaked in soul, with an ebb and flow that highlights the band’s ability to absolutely floor you one minute, then make you jump up and dance the next.
They cite touchstones like the Super Fly soundtrack, Gil Scott-Heron, the Temptations and jazz composer/producer David Axelrod, but that’s just a cursory glance at the depths of Sound & Color, the rare sophomore album that not only meets all the heightened expectations placed on the band, but works to set new ones.
Take album standout “Gimme All Your Love,” an R&B song that plays with the the quiet-loud-quiet alt-rock formula, but then takes it for a complete spin with a time change and a coda built around a screaming organ and a guitar solo — a place where the only logical end to the ascendant refrain of “gimme all your love” is for Howard to let out an involuntary, vocal chord-shattering howl. There are even touches of William Bell’s “I Forgot to be Your Lover” in there, Stax Records being yet another undoubtable touchstone for the Shakes.
Then just six songs later is “Gemini,” a six-and-a-half-minute funk jam that takes place on another planet and sounds like something you would expect from Prince or even D’Angelo and the Vanguard.
“It’s even harder now when people ask, ‘What kind of band are you?’ I have no clue,” Howard says.
Fortunately, she doesn’t have to say anything. The music speaks for itself.
Every week, Rich Terfry looks back in our Rear-view Mirror at a great song from the good ol’ days. This week, Bruce Springsteen with "Born to Run."
"Born to Run" by Bruce Springsteen is the sound of a man with everything to lose and who's risking it anyway.
Listen to Rich Terfry tell you the story behind "Born To Run."
Before writing "Born to Run" in 1974, Bruce Springsteen had written and released two album which were popular with the critics, but which flopped commercially.
He figured that if he had any shot at making it in the music biz, his label would give him only one more shot. He decided to bet the farm on "Born to Run."
The song was Springsteen's epic, last-ditch, all-or-nothing attempt to shoot for the stars. It's a bigger than life song that tells the story of a hopeless teenage love. But Springsteen said it was also about something simpler; getting the heck out of his nowheresville neighborhood of Freehold, New Jersey.
Knowing the song might be his last chance, Springsteen fussed tirelessly over every detail of the song. He recorded take after take after take of his vocals and guitar parts, making the smallest tweaks with each pass.
Oddly enough, when the song was finished, he offered it to another band before releasing a version of it himself. Allan Clarke of The Hollies recorded a version before Springsteen did, but the release of his version was delayed and Springsteen's now-famous version came out first.
When the song was finally released, it did become Springsteen's most successful song, but it wasn't the giant smash he was dreaming of. It failed to crack the top 20 on the charts in the U.S. and did virtually nothing outside. But it was enough to convince the brass at Columbia Records to stick with Springsteen and the door to a legendary career was opened. And of course, time has been very good to the song. It's now widely regarded as one of the greatest songs in rock and roll history and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame named it one of the songs that shaped the genre.
Here's the sound of Bruce Springsteen running for his life - from his home town and all the way to rock superstardom. This is "Born to Run."
Here are some other great editions of Rear-view Mirror:
Each day, Rich Terfry and Radio 2 Drive wraps up your day with music and stories about the interesting things going on in the world.
Rich's Pick: "Ethiopian Girl" by Dur Dur Band
Junk In The Trunk:
A seal shows you how it's done
51 astounding animal facts
A chubby squirrel dines on cucumber
Rear View Mirror:
Every week, Rich Terfry looks back in our Rear-view Mirror at a great song from the good ol’ days. This week, Bruce Springsteen with "Born to Run."
"Born to Run" by Bruce Springsteen is the sound of a man with everything to lose and who's risking it anyway.
Listen to Rich Terfry tell you the story behind "Born To Run."
Before writing "Born to Run" in 1974, Bruce Springsteen had written and released two album which were popular with the critics, but which flopped commercially.
He figured that if he had any shot at making it in the music biz, his label would give him only one more shot. He decided to bet the farm on "Born to Run."
The song was Springsteen's epic, last-ditch, all-or-nothing attempt to shoot for the stars. It's a bigger than life song that tells the story of a hopeless teenage love. But Springsteen said it was also about something simpler; getting the heck out of his nowheresville neighborhood of Freehold, New Jersey.
Knowing the song might be his last chance, Springsteen fussed tirelessly over every detail of the song. He recorded take after take after take of his vocals and guitar parts, making the smallest tweaks with each pass.
Oddly enough, when the song was finished, he offered it to another band before releasing a version of it himself. Allan Clarke of The Hollies recorded a version before Springsteen did, but the release of his version was delayed and Springsteen's now-famous version came out first.
When the song was finally released, it did become Springsteen's most successful song, but it wasn't the giant smash he was dreaming of. It failed to crack the top 20 on the charts in the U.S. and did virtually nothing outside. But it was enough to convince the brass at Columbia Records to stick with Springsteen and the door to a legendary career was opened. And of course, time has been very good to the song. It's now widely regarded as one of the greatest songs in rock and roll history and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame named it one of the songs that shaped the genre.
Here's the sound of Bruce Springsteen running for his life - from his home town and all the way to rock superstardom. This is "Born to Run."
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