I've long felt somewhat ashamed of this. But I find myself more inspired, or at least more healthily inspired, by very well-done writing about very good music than by the music itself. As I've said before, when I listen to very good music, I think I know what's good about it, and inevitably decide temporarily that I should be doing that. I rationalize it by thinking that really, I've been trying to do that all along, I've just drifted off course. But my assessment of what makes it so good is always too shallow, and I realize in the end that taking what others have done will never produce a good result--it has to be completely my idea.

Certain writing does a much better job of explaining what's really so good about this music. It's usually too general to even enable me to rip it off; instead I form my own ideas about how to create the same effects that are talked about. And I know some will scoff at this, but the main source of such writing for me thus far has been Pitchfork Media, linked at left. They may be snobs, and take full advantage of their position outside the mainstream to pan things mercilessly, but when they really like something the writers are able to express it in words a hundred times better than I ever could. My reviews of just about anything artistic are infamous among...well, me and a couple of other people.

It's hard to illustrate this with short quotes, so check out the first two paragraphs of the review of The Microphones' "The Glow, Pt. 2":

"It's an amazing thing when pop music expresses beauty through ambiguity. After being pummeled over the head for years and years with I Love Yous and You Are So Beautifuls, the most direct way of expressing images of love and beauty have pretty much lost all impact. Melodic tricks can wear thin just as easily. Hooks are all well and good, but when you've seen a hook enough times, you know not to bite.

"Perhaps the problem is that most pop music doesn't put enough faith in the listener. Everything must be laid out in the most obvious of terms, and eventually, that obviousness obscures whatever the music originally intended to convey. If you want to invoke the quiet beauty of the ocean, for example, you can write a pop song that says, "Hey, the ocean is really beautiful," or you can try to come up with a sonic approximation of that beauty."

This may seem pretty obvious, but it's an incredibly valuable thing to realize, and most songwriters out there are completely oblivious to it. When you feel strongly enough about something to write a song, you often have the urge to just come out and say it, and not risk obscuring things and keeping your message from the listener.

The first paragraph of the review of the re-release of Olivia Tremor Control's "Dusk At Cubist Castle" sort of captures the same idea from the other side (actually it is by the same reviewer, so perhaps it's really his style that I like):

"The world will never know just how many potentially great pop albums have been lost to misguided attempts at innovation. Though the implementation of unexpected song structures and ostensibly experimental sounds can make music quite a bit more interesting, it can also render it sterile, flat and emotionless. In many cases, the finest pop songs are those that transcend their form entirely-- songs so instinctually graceful that listening to them feels like a creative act in and of itself. Indeed, the best pop songs are often the most difficult to discuss rationally, those indispensable not for their formal inventiveness but for their ability to tap directly into the intangible realm of human memory and emotion."

This, I have to say, is a more difficult thing to really get a grasp on, but it's just as important. When I reread it I realized I hadn't totally gotten it yet, because when writing and recording recently I was still congratulating myself whenever I broke a formal rule of pop music, and criticizing whenever I wasn't breaking them. This is still a different matter from trying to break as many rules as possible at the same time, which can have even worse results, but it's still not the right way to make good music. The battle for me always seems to be convincing myself deeply enough that there is no scientific formula for good music.