Over-Tuned

Two tuning-related links for your consideration:

One, Terry Gross talks with legendary country music songwriter Bobby Braddock (one of my favorite songs of his is Tammy and George’s “Golden Ring”). He discusses among other things the effects of vocal tuning on country music and country stardom. He’s particularly insightful about image often trumping musicality, which of course is not unique to country music. Gross is doing a whole week of country music shows, collected here.

And also on the topic of digital tuning, NPR takes up the question of the too-perfect performance.

Open thread

While everyone waits for NQC, some stuff worth nothing in a mostly quiet month.

  • Everyone seems to be pretty twitterpated about the 100 Years of SG Celebration at NQC. I predict that there will be a few acts in a very crowded menu of performers that everyone will want to have heard a lot more of, and a lot of acts that we will in retrospect think might well have been left off the list. Which is pretty much a decent description of almost every NQC multi-artist showcase, no?
  • Speaking of this showcase, an outfit called the Gay Christian Movement Watch is very upset about Reba Rambo McGuire appearing at NQC. Very, very upset.
  • Roy Webb is out as Gold City pianist.
  • How the sausage is made in the studio … via Daniel Mount, an Irish trio recently signed with Crossroad lays down vocals for single on their debut album.
  • This came up in a discussion thread while I was gone, but I’ll just note that there is a petition afoot to get RCA to re-release the Weatherfords 1959 classic, In the Garden. I’ve got more to say about this spectacular album, but you’ll have to wait for the book. In the meantime, it really would be nice to have a remastered version of this wonderful record available.

What have I missed?

“Stupid” rumors

As you might have noticed today, KPNR was in a vehicle accident (good thoughts to them) … and David Phelps was not.

In a post debunking the latter, Mark Lowry concludes by whining about the “stupid” rumors that people start, as if this came from someone who got up this morning and said, “Gee, I think I’ll start a big fat lie about David Phelps dying in a car wreck so I can piss Mark Lowry off.”

I don’t doubt that these things have to be annoying to people in Lowry’s and Phelps’s position. But I also suspect the origins of this sort of stuff are as often as not pretty benign.

Celebrities generate some pretty strong attachments among some fans, whose enthusiasm can lead to stories and bits of misunderstood gossip getting jumbled up in an imagination fueled by strong desires for opportunities (like car accidents or other Major Life Events) to express superfan concern and support for the beloved performer.  You’d think a guy like Lowry, who’s spent nearly his entire life in entertainment (and actually been in a really serious accident), wouldn’t default to such an ungenerous set of assumptions about the people who have made him a household name in Christian music.

Two thoughts on stracks

While I was away, the evergreen debate about stacks and tracks resurfaced, and I had two thoughts:

One, there’s got to be an apocryphal scripture out there somewhere that says, like the poor, tracks and stacks (and the stracks debate) will always be with us.

And two, though I’ve spent a lot of time criticizing the use of stracks, if I’m honest with myself I gotta say that I don’t have that big of a problem with tracks and stacks …. so long as they don’t draw attention to themselves (and in my defense, the times I have criticized them is when they are abused or overindulged). We all know that most groups do polish their sound with background stacks and tracks, and frankly we’d probably not like the music much these days without stracks, given how unmusical so much of the music is in its unguarded or trackless moments. But if you’re in a small country church and you’re singing with a 50 piece orchestra, or when you sound like a million bucks in the ensemble but most of you struggle to sing a solo with even a modicum of tunefulness, or when the same voice can be heard singing more than one part on stage … well, it’s hard for the mind sustain the suspension of disbelief that this is a genuinely live experience.

And with that, I would be happy to never have to discuss the track/stacks issue again.

Annnnnnddd, we’re back

Sort of, anyway. Classes have started (including a reprise of the Gospel Music course at the graduate level!) so posting may be light for a bit still. For now, it’s enough to say thanks for keeping the conversation going in my absence. Perhaps there could have been no better sixth bloggiversary gift than seeing the discussion sustain itself civilly and interestingly (for the most part) without my having to do more than click “approve.”

August Recess

I’ll be away for a few weeks for some pleasure and a lot of work, which means I’ll probably miss Avery’s sixth anniversary on the 15th. I’ll still try to muster some thoughts shortly after I’m back but in the meantime, thanks for six interesting years.

PS: Consider this your sandbox while I’m gone.

Recession busters, and other forms of whistling in the dark

So as you may have heard, last week McCray Dove announced that the Dove Brothers were cutting the price of their product to $10 a piece. According to the press release, the move is a response to the economic crisis:

[T]he Dove Brothers have decided that until our nation is over this recession and the economy is back on its feet that all of our cds and dvds here on our web store and at our product table at a concert near you can be purchase for ten dollars each.

Certainly you can’t say this decision was made with the bottom line in mind! (I guess this could be seen to make bidness sense viewed as an effort to get more music in the hands of more people. Presumably, the more people who own your music, the more likely they are to become repeat customers. Presumably.)

But I confess, this whole “helping the nation during tough times” feels a wee titch gimmicky to me. I mean, just two years ago Dove announced that - lo! - he was hiking CD prices to $23 per, and actively solicited other groups to do the same. Hard to imagine that that move is paying off for him, and so now he’s overcorrecting in the other direction with the sg equivalent of the “recession buster” lunch special that’s been running at the Applebees down the street from me most of the summer.

Make what you will of this as a bidness decision. But it’s pretty much guaranteed to annoy many of Dove’s peers (not that I have any reason to think this matters to him in the least). I mean, imagine if you’re, say, GV, L5, BB or the Hoppers. In each of those cases, you’ve just dumped a lot of cash into a Lari Goss recording, which means it will take you a lot longer to recoup on the project, even at regular CD prices of $15-$20. And along comes Dove and undercuts you by $5-$10 per unit, and immediately fans start praising him for giving the industry a much-needed jolt. There might be some satisfaction in telling yourself you’ve put out a Lari Goss album of superior quality to DBQ’s stuff, but among sg consumers, “quality” production has never been a reliable way to move product.

Mind you, I know of no law that says sg is immune from price wars, but unless Dove starts moving more than twice the product he was selling before the price cut, or starts producing projects that cost substantially less (both unlikely in the long run), it’s hard to see how this will be a financially sustainable move. Then again, that’s what I thought about the price hike a few years ago, and I assume this latest move will work just about as well, until Dove decides the economy has turned around sufficiently and re-reprices his product.

But really, the issue here isn’t what the next “bold move” from DBQ’s pricing department will be. Rather, it’s that all this to-ing and froing about CD pricing ignores the underlying problem that no one really seems to be grappling with: namely, that selling CDs is rapidly becoming pretty much the best way to go broke in the music business. Just because your CDs might be making a joyful noise for the Lord doesn’t mean you too can’t go broke selling them - whether they’re produced by Lari Goss or now available at a new, reduced, recession-friendly price.

“Get the bleep outta here”

A day in the life of a BMI exec on collection rounds.

Quote of the day

I had meant to post this a bit ago but it lost in the shuffle of my auto-publish queue. No matter, from David Bruce Murray: “Most groups don’t sing a cappella for the same reason most people don’t go naked in public.”

The Cats, their Kittens, and the strange case of Danny Funderburk

So ya’ll have had fun, I see, debating how well/bad Ernie Haase does/doesn’t cover “I Just Started Living,” and why this and other of Danny Funderburk’s signature songs weren’t on the EHSSQ Cathedrals tribute album. I guess it could be that those are “Danny’s” tunes and have somehow achieved sacred-cow status, but it’s not like EHSSQ has had any qualms about doing their own versions of George and Glen’s songs, so I’m not sure why they’d shy away from Funderburk’s songs out of deference or whatever. Which to say, I wonder if there isn’t a simpler answer. I’m just guessing here, but I bet you’ll find that most of the tunes on the Cats tribute recording are songs that the Cathedrals own the publishing too.

No matter, it’s hard to see the point of a Danny vs Ernie Cage Match given that Funderburk was at the peak of his career and Haase was just starting out. So let’s talk about something else: namely, why it is that after Funderburk left the Cathedrals, he never managed to capitalize on his George and Glen connection (and the overwhelming affection fans felt toward him) the way pretty much every other member of the Cathedral has since the 1980s, when the group really began to dominate?

As you no doubt recall, Funderburk quit the Cathedrals in 1989 to join the newly formed Perfect Heart, which had its moments (including at least one pretty decent live album) but ultimately dissolved (I seem to recall that it’s since been revived, though I’ve heard nothing from this more recent iteration). And of course, at the time he left the Cats, Funderburk was flying high in the late 80s on a string of hits with the George and Glen and a trademark tenor voice.

What was his appeal? Some commenters say it’s because he sounds like a man even in his upper ranges, which sounds kinda silly. Being generous, I assume this kind of thing is meant to refer to his ability to sing in full voice in ranges where most tenors lost depth or warmth in their voices (the “manly” thing might also have something to do with the fact that Haase tends to bring S sounds to the front of his mouth, which many people automatically and somewhat ignorantly construe as fey or less “straight acting“). At least this is the technical explanation, but it’s pretty dissatisfying, especially considering Kirk Talley, just to take the other obvious Cathedrals tenor example, sounded almost exactly opposite of Funderburk in terms of coloration and texture and tone and he had no trouble launching off on his own after the Cats.

No, I actually think Funderburk’s appeal was as much his astonishing ability to sculpt the line of a musical thought so carefully and bend the curve of his melodic phrases so skillfully that his voice interacted with audiences almost as if he were in a personal musical conversation with his fans (as opposed to the David Phelps virtuoso wall of sound model, for instance). Indeed, I think what most people are hearing in the difference between Haase and Funderburk in the “Living” clip is the way Haase sings his words mostly on the beat and Funderburk … well … he doesn’t.

Lots of singers get in front of the beat (esp in vocal jazz) or behind it (Willy Nelson, the Greenes). But Funderburk has a knack for singing all around the beat (and here for the sake of ease, I’m going to refer to his version of “Living” from the Cathedral Reunion), as in the way he sings the line “oh and it’s totally indwelling” – “ohhhh” gets strung out in a bit of tone painting to emphasize just how nearly beyond regular words the spirit’s indwellingness is, so that that the rest of the phrase gets pushed to the end of the line, except that he scrunches up “and it’s” (the most ancillary words of the phrase) in almost a single beat so that he can give “totally indwelling” just bit more space in the measure, communicating the musical thought with a finely calibrated sense of evocative phrasing.

In other words, he speeds up and slows down the rhythm of singing not unlike the human voice in ordinary speech, which provides a felt human presence that can be lost in metronomically regularized vocalization of lyrics where every word falls in perfect rhythmic positions.

It shouldn’t go without saying that Funderburk often sacrificed diction to his vocal style (if I didn’t know that the word was “gloom” in the second verse, for instance, I probably wouldn’t have a clue what he’s saying because he basically turns the word into a gaaaaaahhhhh, … that is, feeling comes at the expense of intelligibility … though I also get the sense on the Reunion video that he’s out of shape vocally and so attempting to let style cover where lack of stamina can’t take him). But sloppy or lazy though he could be, there was such confidence and brio to his style of delivery that it was hard not to be captivated by it – there was an urgency and immediacy there that a lot of people simply wanted a lot more of.

But clearly the key to his success (and decline) had as much to do with the context in which people encountered his voice – that is, as part of the Cathedrals – as it did with Funderburk himself as a performer. And unlike Talley, Trammell, Wolfe, Bennett, Fowler and especially Haase, Funderburk simply never figured out how to make it work without George and Glen. What is “it”? I think it varies from performer to performer, but it might have had something to do in Funderburk’s case with leaving to undertake an endeavor that wasn’t really “his,” the way it was (or seemed to be) with Wolfe and Trammell, or Bennett and Fowler, or Talley, or Haase. Each of these guys in their own ways launched enterprises that were either explicitly undertaken as continuations of George and Glen’s legacy or implicitly seen to be such.

But not Funderburk. Instead, he hooked up with what was, by any objective measure even at the time, a longshot proposition for someone to sign on to at the pinnacle of southern gospel success. Perfect Heart was bankrolled by someone else other than a former Cathedral, and Funderburk was pretty clearly joining up as the hired gun or the franchise star or whatever. In all this, and unlike the other former Kittens who left the mighty Cats, Funderburk never really positioned himself as a disciple or protégé or descendant of George and Glen. That doesn’t necessarily amount to an overweening view of his own ability, but it certainly was a strategic blunder. Operating out from the under the auspices of the Cathedrals, Funderburk seems to have been viewed as just another tenor we really used to like to hear when he was a Cathedral. Which is why Funderburk has spent the past two decades being a fringe figure beloved for stuff he sang a quarter century ago.

Compare that to Haase and it’s hard to see how a debate about who sings a few songs from the 80s better isn’t of the “angels on the head of a pin” variety. To be sure, Haase has a trump card – he’s family by marriage to the Younces – but still. Credit where it’s due and all that. Musically he has done a lot more with a lot less than Funderburk. Vocally, Haase is basically high and loud – and mostly the latter, which gives off the impression of being more of the former than he actually is, as some of you have noted. IOW, you wouldn’t necessarily have heard a young Ernie Haase twenty years ago and say, “that guy has the voice of someone who will wind up headlining his own enormously popular quartet someday.”

All smart entertainers have to figure how to minimize their weaknesses and maximize their strengths, but Haase has taken this maxim of showmanship to an altogether different level of branding genius in Christian entertainment. This probably shouldn’t go without saying, even or especially coming from someone who, as you know, is at best periodically pleased by EHSSQ’s music.