Huffington Magazine Issue 26 | Page 86

Exit Well, it had a different value to them. It didn’t exist in the same saturation. Nowadays it’s difficult to escape music, and to think there were people who, if they didn’t play it themselves or weren’t in earshot of people playing it, never heard it. Yeah. They didn’t have portable radios until 50 years ago or so. And there’s something different that happens to the song when you learn it, it’s not the same song that you listen to passively on a record. It changes. And it becomes a part of you. And it’s not like many other things. It’s not like playing a sport, or knowing a code in a video game or something. I feel like it’s one of those few things that is unique to the art of making music. It’s true. One other thing I would say about the book is that putting [it] together we knew that most people weren’t going to be able to play these, but there’s a pretty substantial visual element to the book, too. I think a lot of what people will take from it is the visual element. I don’t know, I think you’re underestimating the population of people who are going to be psyched to play and interpret and arrange these songs. You go back and you think about how the Stones used to play Beatles songs, and you’d never go to shows and see that, but now you could MUSIC go to a show and have somebody be like, “Hey, this is one of those new Beck songs. You haven’t heard it.” I would love that. And one of the things I thought about was the fact that some songs over the years have been written in completely different eras and didn’t find their definite version until much later. There’s a song called “Lovesick Blues” by Hank Williams that I learned as a teenager, and I found out later it had been written in the 20s as sort of a Tin Pan Alley song. But he turned it into this classic country version. He really made it his own, and I think that’s happened over and over. I think that’s what you were saying before about making the music your own, but still leaving it open enough so that when someone does add their own style, it doesn’t impede that interpretation. Yeah, and people are getting much more direct access to songs, so there’s less of an ability to be able to have a song be an extension of a pop personality. People are gravitating to a song whether it’s by Adele or a country artist or Deerhunter. I find, more and more, younger people just care about the song. The song will prevail as time goes on. HUFFINGTON 12.09.12