A Welcome and an Explanation

Welcome to The Hidden Chord, a quest blog if you will, dedicated to uncovering and understanding the magical moments that popular music has to offer. I was thinking about calling it "The Moment", but that one was taken and really I wasn't too thrilled with it. Then I thought of the line in the Leonard Cohen song "Hallelujah" that goes, "I heard there was a secret chord..." The Secret Chord!!! How mysterious, yet enticing! But not surprisingly, taken as well. The Hidden Chord will have to do for now. I think it says something about my objective, though--the uncovering of something thats maybe un-uncoverable. The moments of magic are often fleeting and hard to describe to others. Kind of like when you hear a joke for the first time and you and everyone else think it's the greatest thing ever, but when you try to recreate it for someone else, it just doesn't work. Maybe it was the particular place or time or group of people. For whatever reason, the moment passed.

Here's the inspiration for this blog/podcast. There are a few inspirations actually. A colleague of mine told me that everytime he goes to SXSW he always has a particular SXSW moment. A particular performance will move him to want to buy the artist's whole catalog. It will become a sort of marker for the whole experience. SXSW is a great venue for magical moments. This year, I had a few. They're the type of moments that you audibly say to yourself, "wow". They make you want to remember all the little details of the experience--what things look like, smell like, feel like, who you are with, what you are drinking/eating--just so you have a reference point later on to try and relive it, even if you know you can't. For example, I don't even know the name of the band that was playing, but it was a perfect moment. It was near the end of the week in Austin and I went to one of the more interesting venues I've ever been to: the top of a parking garage in downtown Austin. It was a typically hot day and there was plenty of free/cheap booze to be had, which is also typical of SXSW. I was with a band who I consider friends, and with a new friend I just met during the week. There was something about the music this band from Brooklyn was playing, combined with the hot sunny day, the wind in people's hair, and the amazing view of Austin that just made me feel like, "Yeah, this is what it's all about". The image is engrained in my mind.

Live music has the greatest potential to create moments like this, but when I stop and think about it, there are plenty of times recorded music has evoked a similar reaction. I like keeping the iTunes library on shuffle and occasionally something will pop up that I haven't heard before that makes me stop in my tracks and really listen. It's so easy to have good music as a backdrop, but sometimes a song will just have a certain pull to it where whatever it was you were doing no longer matters. What is it exactly? Or I think of hearing The Beatles "Love" album in the 5.1 digital surround sound for the first time and feeling like I was hearing The Beatles again for the first time. All I wanted to do was sit there and soak it in. The Beatles have created a lot of those musical moments for me. And somehow, have done so for many others as well. What is it about them?

What are these moments? Why do they happen? Who are the bands/artists out there that are eliciting those types of reactions? What are their "wow" moments? To me, this is what popular music is all about. I think of why I first started liking rock music and it was about the music. Something about those guitars and the beat and the voices. And it has spread for me into not other genres too: alt-country, trad country, folk, hip-hop, jazz. Occasionally something just has the right combination to make things click for me, whether it's the music, the lyrics, or something totally unexpected. But that's what it's about. I once was under the delusion that maybe I could find a way to make money from being involved in the music industry. But that's not what it's supposed to be about. For awhile, the corporate world owned music and had a firm hand over what we were buying and listening to. But thankfully, things have been changing. Rightfully so, the corporate music industry is crumbling and the means of distribution are in the hands of indies, the artists, and we the listening public. Some will cry and fret about how it's all changing, but it's about damn time! My only worry is that the artists who create these great works can find a way to make a living. But the great thing about creative people, who care more about their art and less about the money, is they find ways to make it work. There are plenty of people out there to help support them as well, who carry the same music-centric view. The majors never cared about the music and that's why their empire is crumbling.

So this blog will exist to highlight those amazing artists and amazing moments. I hope to get a monthly podcast going very soon as well that will give an "every-fan" view and give an extra spotlight to the bands that matter. I want to eventually take submissions from people too, that document their own "moments" with music. Things are all really pretty rough right now, but the proverbial ball is now rolling.