Timbre — the terroir of sound — is crucial to how we hear music. But we don’t talk about it much because, unlike pitch, it has so far proven to be immune to measurement. The fine folks at Hazlitt, the excellent digital publication, have posted a Bad Singer excerpt that explains timbre’s role in music.
Yes, my new book is called Bad Singer. No, I won’t sing at the launch party.
That’s because I am part of just 2.5 percent of the population that suffers from amusia, the technical term for tone deafness. Amusia is a brain disorder similar to dyslexia. And if I’d written a book about being dyslexic, no one would respond to my invitation by saying, “I’ll come only if you read for us.” Apparently, singing is different. Maybe people want a laugh. Maybe they get off on the humiliation of others. Maybe other bad singers want to say, “At least I am not as bad as he is.” But I suspect many of my friends simply don’t understand how hard it is for an amusic to sing and I don’t want to make them feel bad for asking, even if their asking makes me feel bad.
Yes, (spoiler alert) my book ends with a house concert. Even to sing badly in front of people, though, I had to work intensely with the world’s most patient singing coach, Micah Barnes. And now, alas, my short, happy public singing career is over.
Frankly, my guests should be relieved about that. I want people to have fun at my launch, not be horrified. (If you really must hear me sing, you can listen to “The Ballad of Tin Ears,” the radio doc I helped make for CBC Radio’s Ideas.)
Bad Singer: The Surprising Science of Tone Deafness and How We Hear Music is a passion project and I can honestly say it’s the best book I’ve written. I first had the idea in 2007 and, initially, no publisher was interested. But instead of giving up, I wrote a piece about being amusic for Maisonneuve and kept working on the book proposal. Fortunately, Sarah MacLachlan and Janie Yoon at House of Anansi took a chance on me. And the result is a book on much more than singing. As the subtitle suggests, Bad Singer is, ultimately, about how we hear music.
I think every book is worth celebrating. If you agree and want to come to a fun party — where I will be signing books, not singing songs — I’ll see you on May 11.
I spent 2015 finishing up a book called Bad Singer: The Surprising Science of Tone Deafness and How We Hear Music. So while I thought a lot about how we listen to music, I didn’t have as much free time to actually listen to it as I usually do. Sure, I always had songs playing, but too often only in the background. Maybe that’s why a lot of my favourite albums this year were slow burns: I didn’t realize how good they were for a long time. So, with that in mind, here’s my listical-free look at the music I loved in 2015.
Admittedly, Courtney Barnett’s Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit was not a slow burn. I loved it immediately. Ditto Waxahatchee’s Ivy Trip. But Sufjan Stevens’s Carrie & Lowell sure was. Everyone else raved about it from the beginning, but while I liked it, I wasn’t clear what the big deal was about. Over the year, though, as songs from this album popped up as I kept my iTunes playlist called Recent Additions on shuffle, they slowly worked their magic.
The same goes for Wilco’s Star Wars, which was a surprise free download. My initial reaction was: fun, but a bit of a throwaway, perhaps something the band had released while working on a more serious and substantive project. But the more I listened to it, the more I realized how wrong that arrogant attitude was. Sure, it’s not Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or Being There, but it’s a really good album.
Some other really good albums initially suffered not only from a lack of attention, but also from the way I compared them to the artists’ previous career highlights. That includes Jason Isbell’s Something More than Free (as good as it is, I’m still partial to Southeastern); Beat the Champ, an album about wrestlers by The Mountain Goats that’s another fine album by John Darnielle’s band, but obviously everything suffers in comparison to The Sunset Tree; and Calexico’s Edge of the Sun. Fortunately, I kept listening to these records.
Still, the slow burn didn’t always work. Certainly it didn’t with Father John Misty’s I Love You, Honeybear. I know this album made many other best-of lists — and I was a fan of his previous release, Fear Fun — but the more I listened to it, the more I found it annoying. (Conversely, Tame Impala’s Currents started off annoying, but by the end year, I’d come to appreciate its charms.)
A few other albums I enjoyed this year: Beach House’s Depression Cherry; Bjork’s Vulnicura; Ought’s Sun Comes Down; and El Vy’s Return to the Moon. And while I didn’t love all of B’lieve I’m Goin Down…, Kurt Vile’s new album, “Pretty Pimpin’” is a fabulous song.
Finally, a shout out to something that shouldn’t work, but does: Public Service Broadcasting’s The Race to Space. It combines electronica and space-race era sound clips (a JFK speech, NASA communications, news broadcasts). Not nearly as weird as that description makes it sound, it’s quite compelling.
I hope to devote a lot more time to listening to music in 2016.
My next book, Bad Singer: The Surprising Science of Tone Deafness and How We Hear Music, will be out May 14, 2016. Here’s the cover.
Talking about how we want to die is not easy for anyone. But we do need to talk about it, as I argued in this piece for Hazlitt called “Bringing Death to the Table.” I wrote it in March 2015, a few weeks after the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that we have a right to die with dignity. As the dek to the article says, “A person’s right to die means the beginning of some difficult conversations. Here, a son on what patients, families, and physicians need to talk about.”
“I suck at math–that’s why I went into journalism” is a line I’ve heard for decades. And I’ve always hated it because journalism is no place for people who hate numbers and science to hide. After all, most good stories need numbers. So I wrote a little rant about it on the Ryerson Review of Journalism blog.
I’ve been doing an annual “middle-aged teenager picks his best music of the year” post for a while now. It’s always been a list, though I haven’t ranked my choices and the number of albums I picked varied. It wasn’t that I like lists so much — I don’t — but because lists are easy. Not just easy for the writer, but also easy for readers, who can quickly scan a list looking for the albums (or movies or books or whatever) that match their picks–and the ones that don’t, but sound worth checking out. Now, though, there’s a backlash against lists, which is a good thing, especially for the people who have to work in what New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum calls “the journalistic list mines.” Here, then, are some thoughts on what I loved listening to in 2014. (The links will take you to a song from the album on YouTube.)
When I first heard Lost in the Dream by The War on Drugs in March, I was convinced it would be my favourite album of the year. After all, it was the best album I’d heard in ages. And, sure enough, nothing else came close as month after month came and went. The album sounds fresh and inventive, yet owes so much to the past, to its many influences. Every time I talk to someone or read something about this album, I hear about different influences, mostly from the ’80s, from Roxy Music to Springsteen to Talk Talk and lots in between. I love listening to it.
So, yeah, I devoted a lot of time to that album and when I wasn’t listening to it, I listened to a lot of women, which is always a good thing. St. Vincent’s St. Vincent, Sharon Van Etten’s Are We There, Angel Olsen’s Burn Your Fire for No Witness are three albums that a lot of people talked about. But I was surprised that Lucinda Williams’s Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone didn’t receive more year-end praise. I think it’s an impressive return to form and her best in at least a decade. Meanwhile, Alvvays made an delightful debut with the poppy Alvvays, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings gave the people what they want with Give the People What They Want and Mirah, who I discovered when she made an album with Thao a few years ago, put out a fine solo record, Changing Light. Three albums by women or bands with female leaders were initially a bit disappointing — perhaps because I didn’t think they were as strong as their previous offerings (though in each case that may have been an unfair standard). But the more I listened to Stay Gold by First Aid Kit, Too True by the Dum Dum Girls and We Come from the Same Place by Allo Darlin’, the more I discovered their charms. (I see that some people added Courtney Barnett’s The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas to their 2014 list and I’d add it to mine except that it made my 2013 list.)
As for the guys, I have to admit I hadn’t listened to much Beck in recent years but people I respect were raving about Morning Phase so I checked it out. Turns out I respect the people I respect for good reasons. Leonard Cohen kept chugging along with Popular Problems. Now an octogenarian, he’s still in his salad days. Speaking of which, Mac DeMarco’s Salad Days was also excellent. Half the City from St. Paul & The Broken Bones gave me great pleasure while Spoon ought to change its name to Consistency because the band did it again with They Want My Soul. And speaking of ought, Montreal’s Ought put out a really fun debut album called More than Any Other Day.
There were others, of course, but I hope you find something new in these ones.
DNTO, or Definitely Not the Opera, the excellent CBC Radio show did an episode called “Raise your voice: why is singing so powerful?” on Thanksgiving weekend. I was part of it, talking about bad singing. The producer who did the pre-interview didn’t say anything about wanting me to sing, but once I was in the studio, host Sook-Yin Lee made me do it. Embarrassing, but good radio, I’m told. You can stream it or download the podcast on the DNTO site.
As part of my Bad Singer book project, I helped make a radio doc called “The Ballad of Tin Ears” for CBC Radio Ideas. It airs Tuesday, May 6 at 9 pm on CBC 1. If that’s not a convenient time for you, the show is available for streaming anytime (also available as a podcast for a limited time).
The one-hour show features culture, ethnomusicology, neuroscience, psychology and singing — some of it, admittedly, mine (let’s just say the shower scene is the scariest since Psycho).
I hope you will find it entertaining and that it will give you a better sense of what will be in Bad Singer, which will be out from House of Anansi Press in 2015.
Copyright © 2019 Tim Falconer.
