California

What this episode covers

This is my attempt at writing a pre-Dylan era folk song. The only exception is the A-minor chord: it would have sounded folkier if I played a C there, but I like it better this way. The backup vocals and melodica don't necessarily sound folky either, but I can differentiate between what I think of as the "song proper" (the Platonic form of the song) and the arrangement. Music is one of the few areas where I think it actually makes perfect sense to think about Platonic ideals (geometry is another) -- when we hear someone cover a song or perform an alternate version of a song, the extent to which we identify it as the same song as "the original" is the extent to which the two versions conform to some template. For most songs, that template consists I think more or less entirely of the chord progression and the melody (although different songs have different aspects that are fundamental to them), so when I think about "the song," that's really what I'm thinking of. Specifics of instrumentation and arrangement like the picking pattern or the harmony line are just incidental -- they have to be some way or other in any given instantiation of the song, but the ideal form does not dictate which among infinite options should be chosen. So when I say that this is supposed to be like a folk song, I mean the Form of this song, not this specific instance.

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