Driving Music

Directed by Fabio Andrade and Francis Vogner dos Reis.

Driving Music will be heard in Toronto this week, as part of the NXNE festival. Unfortunately, not all of us will be there in person, but our music can be heard at the soundtrack of Superstonic Sound – The Rebel Dread Documentary as part of the festival’s film program.

Directed by our own Raphael Erichsen, Superstonic Sound is a portrait of the legendary DJ, musician and filmmaker Don Letts. Driving Music has written and recorded three original pieces for the score, that also features original music from Jet Letts, ManFame and Pama International. Superstonic Sound world premiere on NxNe is set for the 17^th, and will play again as a double feature with Letts’ Strummerville on the 19^th. To keep track of upcoming screenings, check out the movie’s website.

URBe has a piece on Driving Music, where I talk about covering New Order, The National and Daniel Johnston. Read the whole story here.

To celebrate the relase of The Day (the single), I’ve translated a piece I’ve written about it to my song-blog, Dissonata. Portuguese-friendly readers may read the lengthier original there.

* * *

Like most of my other songs, “The Day” is born out of a melodic pattern that comes to me in some sort of stimulated chance. I was walking down the streets of Porto Alegre, where I was spending a week covering a film festival last November, thinking about the recording I was planning to start once I got back home. As my obsession towards structure pushed me through a mental journey through all the songs that I had any desire to record at the time, I realized there were none that could properly open the album (an album that, eventually, shrank to be an ep). Almost immediately after such realization, I start imagining what would be a good way to start the record, and the song slowly starts to take shape in my head. I walk about 15 minutes to the hotel, and the song is finished by the time I get to my room. On the next day, I write the lyrics and do a first rough recording of the song – singing the words and the notes that’d go with them – so that it wouldn’t lose its way somewhere between Porto Alegre and Rio. I probably hadn’t written any song with such immediacy in at least five or six years.

All of that is the background story – the type of privileged information that can’t do more than confirm impressions that already existed well enough by themselves, and would be equally as powerful if remained unconfirmed. Melodically, “The Day” leads its way to the last line of the chorus of “Mr. Tamborine Man” (where there was the “jingle jangle morning”, now there’s “he’s been trying not to see her”). Such proximity made me take “The Day” to the extreme opposite of Bob Dylan’s song, replacing boredom with an ongoing daily excitation – which makes the song necessarily short, so that it fades while it’s still sparkling. To keep Dylan good company, I come up with the bass line borrowing off Bruce Springsteen’s horn section in “Old Dan Tucker”, and echo some of Tom Petty’s “free fallin’s”. Like documentary, pop songwriting is also fed by its relationship with its own tradition: three generations of singer/songwriters react to each other in one song.

But “The Day” is, also and mainly, a sequence of repetitions – a feeling brought with tongue in cheek to the song’s singular title. Said melodic repetitions – like one single chorus that comes and goes throughout the song – is what determines the lyrics to the music. The song theme is imposed by the melodic structure, where a guy that sees the same girl walking past him every day serves as a translation of how each unique verse inevitably ends up in the same chorus. That’s also what motivates the growing number of vocal tracks in the recording – at first, only two; but they multiply with each new verse, allowing wandering melodies to show up at certain parts (like the repetition of “he’s been trying not to see her” at 1:20), as if the act of thinking gave itself the right to leave its path and check out other possible deviations.

This structural arrangement is more spiral than circular: the narrative curve interferes in the meaning of each specific point of the song so that, every time we come back to a certain part, it’s only recognizable enough, but never the same. That’s the idea that imposes subtle melodic deformations to each repetition, and that’s expressed in the song’s motto: he’s been trying not to see her, so he can see her again (a sentence that also keeps changing along the way). One must try not to see one thing, so that he/she can experience it again as if for the first time; so that there’s still a chance to be stunned and amazed every day by the effects of the same object, the same path – which, in the end, is the path of amazement itself. The object that amazes is not as important here as amazement itself. This path – always the same (‘cause it takes you from A to B), but always different (‘cause you never know what you’ll find between A and B) is the actual theme of the song

Fábio Andrade

As you might have noticed, there’s a brand new tab at our home page linked to our Singles Club. Bachelors and bachelorettes looking for trouble might be disappointed, but our Singles Club has very little to do with matching couples or smoking cigars with your fantasy league buddies. It is, though, a nice little space where we’re going to start releasing a bunch of free music, so those who think love enters the body through the ears might actually have something to smile about.

Our Singles Club will be the place to release web-only singles, including exclusive cover songs, unreleased demos and other similar goods. To get things started, we’re now offering for free download the 4-track single zip file of The Day. It includes the original ep version of the song, a New Order cover song we’ve been often playing live, and two other versions of “The Day” that probably wouldn’t see the light of day otherwise. We hope you enjoy it and keep an eye on that page, as we’re planning to release a bunch of those. Get’em while they’re hot, ’cause they might not be around forever.

Thanks to the wonders of UStream, we’re working on setting up an experimental audio/video live stream of tomorrow’s concert at Rock N’ Drinks. As with anything that’s made for a first time and with no budget whatsoever, chances are we this road will be a little bumpy. But since we’re all about shaky experiences, that’s certainly not keeping us from giving it a try.

Those who want to join us in this first adventure may tune in here tomorrow at 9:15 pm, Rio de Janeiro time, or watch the video straight from our UStream channel. If you’re in a different time zone, this might be of use.

Live streaming video by Ustream

PuroPop had the nicest things to say about the Driving Music ep. You can check out the review here (portuguese only).

We’re playing another gig in Rio next friday, the 14th. It’ll be our first concert as a 4 piece band and also our official way of celebratin our own Melvin Ribeiro’s birthday. Everyone’s invited.

- We’ve just uploaded the entire Driving Music ep at SoundCloud. Feel free to follow, listen, download and share our songs with your friends over there as well.

- Driving Music was recently featured at Revista Noize, an online music magazine from Brazil. You can check it out here.

The Driving Music official webstore is now up and running. Check it out if you want to buy our ep, or other goodies such as t-shirts and posters. If any of you experience any problems using PayPal, please send us an email to let us know.