Posted on by Ian Hanchet

Authenticity

I love discovering music and musicians that are new to me. This week I stumbled across a video of a song in a style that I really love. My first listen to ‘Another Day Old’ was thrilling. The voice and appearance of this artist snagged me, the topic (aging gracefully) perfect for my age group. The style of mid-sixties Memphis soul is a favourite of mine. all the instruments supporting the song were perfect. I immediately dug a bit deeper to find more about Eddie Dalton (the handsome, fit, singer in the video). I wanted to purchase any albums he may have made.

The web site offered not much besides variations on the video I had just watched. Glossy edgy black and white photography too good to be true MSG for the eyes. My spider sense awoke the seed of doubt in me that what I was watching was unreal. AI. My disappointment could not have been greater. It was like striking gold and finding out it was Iron pyrite (fool’s gold). Needing further info to prove me wrong I sought out more. A Facebook page offered many more songs all in the same style with the same or similar images I had already seen. There was no Wikipedia entry, no biographical detail. This Eddie Dalton appeared on the scene fully formed as an artist. Manufactured.

Part of me is impressed that AI was this advanced that I was initially fooled. I felt like Deckard in Blade Runner running tests to see if a subject is a replicant or not. The other (larger) part of me abhorred this as a betrayal of the quality I admire most in popular music which is authenticity.

I could imagine all the criteria fed into creating this: attractive middle aged soul singer; style of Memphis Soul; cross between Sam Moore; Al Green; Ben E. King; Bill Withers; Charles Bradley; etc. each new criterion sculpting closer to perfection until there was nothing left to refine. The difference is this is not a sculpture of a sculptor created by a sculptor. Nor is this a collage of different elements creating a whole. Maybe it’s like mixing a smoothie by adding ingredients until the desired balance is achieved. 

Why? 

I recently heard a term that resonated with me. The term is  the “attention economy” which covers bums in seats, eyes on screen, time spent, etc. I assume that there are royalties to be collected and money to be made from this song. Attention paid to this fictional singer means that less attention will be paid to other things. 

Nothing wrong with fiction per se. I read fiction for diversion and entertainment. The written fiction I have read I assume originated with an author. The author may have a pseudonym or an alias but I believe to my core is a human. Most of my teacher friends have read ‘work’ created artificially that is essentially plagiarism. I have a friend whose workaround for his severe dyslexia is to dictate narrative and edit it using artificial means. His stories do not suffer, in fact they might not have been shared but for this technology. I don’t think he asks the computer to write it for him, he puts in his words and the computer assists in his syntax and spelling, punctuation. If I had not been told, I doubt if I’d know. 

I have another friend who paints portraits. I have sat for a portrait and he created a near perfect image of me in several hours. My wife is a photographer who takes my portrait in seconds, sometimes manipulates the image using filters or erases some “noise” or smooths out a zit. Various art forms with different limitations but similar results. Not about the skill, or the effort, it is about being human. 

Artifice has always been an element of all the arts. Acting is completely phony. What is the difference? 

I am a songwriter. I love creating something that didn’t exist before, but is still recognizable as a song and hopefully is not derivative but complementary to all the music I have heard before. My music is a reflection of my humanity. Most music I love has this quality. Flawed human foibles are the root of songs I admire. 

I wanted so much to love Another Day Old as much as I love To Ramona by Bob Dylan or Into The Mystic by Van Morrison. I can’t. What the song has brought to me is an existential disturbance but also a determination to assert my humanity through my art. Be real!

Free advertising for someone who doesn’t actually exist.

Posted on by Ian Hanchet

Monday Musings

While out shopping for groceries on the weekend my ears were assaulted by some adenoidal tenor on the sound system singing ‘o sole mio’ at the top of his lungs. Sounded to me like he was passing a kidney stone while sliding down a razor blade. I recently had a medical procedure to flush earwax, so perhaps my hearing is too acute at the moment. Nah.. I just hated it. Now, I used to shop at a Trattoria in Rivière des Prairies and there was a butcher there who burst into song every now and again which I absolutely loved, Same type of voice, but not squeezed through a shitty sound system. The cavernous space of a grocery store (supermarket) provides a nice reverberation for a solo voice, but the recording was not designed for this environment.

I don’t mean to disparage the tenor, or the composer, but it got me to thinking about how different people perceive music. It is a subject that intrigues me. Some people cannot stand Bob Dylan for example. I love Bob’s voice in all it’s different presentations and permutations over his 60 year career. I don’t like Elton John’s voice. There is nothing the matter with it, and he has written and performed brilliantly for almost as long as Dylan. I just don’t like it. There was a time in the seventies when you couldn’t turn on a radio without hearing Rocket Man or Honky Cat etc. Maybe I overdosed on it.

I have a book by Carl Wilson (not the Beach Boy) called ‘Let’s Talk About Love (Why other people have such bad taste)’. I bought the book ostensibly to reinforce my rabid dislike of Celine Dion’s overwrought and melodramatic music. He puts the phenomenon of Celine in a social and cultural context which actually helped me develop empathy for people with less sophisticated taste than me. Who am I to say it sucks if others derive enjoyment from it? I recognize my snobbery and it opened up not only empathy, but awareness that other people may have the same visceral abhorrence for music I love. One of my music professors at University used to paraphrase a familiar quote:”Beauty is in the Ear of the Behearer”, or my dad, who often quoted: “chacun à son goût”.

Tastes change. When I was a boy, the mere mention of asparagus or liver would make me dry heave. Turns out it was my mother’s culinary inadequacies that I didn’t like. It’s not like I now wake up craving either of these foods, but I will eat them if presented. I used to wear bell bottoms…..

Many people approach subjects as if there is one way to view them. People like to lump things in categories as if they are a monolith. “I hate Jazz” is one. I used to respond that “the person who says that just doesn’t know enough about it”which is both true and arrogant. The term Jazz refers to styles of music that originated in the late 1890s and contain as many disparate styles as one might expect in over 100 years. Some of the original styles are kind of museum pieces now. Dixieland music, Boogie Woogie and swing music have been displaced by more modern styles. I still like Satchmo, Fats Waller and the Dorsey brothers, but their music fits a sub genre much like Bach is Baroque and Debussy Romantic. The jazz that I am most drawn to is post bop and soul Jazz and even more modern modal and free styles and world music. They all have their place and are as different to each other as human beings are to each other, yet retain enough similarities to be recognized as belonging to a genre. An orange is a fruit, but it is also a citrus fruit and can be found in a section called produce.

Monoliths exist in other areas of life as well. Books: Is it literature, mystery, self-help etc.? Religions: Say the word “Christian” and believers as different as tacit monks to emotive bible thumpers in mansions to humble church goers to self serving hypocrites and everything in between. As much disparity as commonality.

When it comes to pop music, I am of a demographic where the music of my youth is no longer the dominant social guidepost. I am less a consumer of new things and my tastes reflect a different era from the present. I still love protest music and counter cultural music but there is no unifying popular culture like the human rights and anti war etc. like the sixties generated. I dislike much of what I hear in new music these days. The few exceptions are artists that are still writing in a style that has humanistic meaning and reflects an earlier time. I loathe generic country music, auto tune and gimmicks. I change the station.

I care passionately about art and music, and I guess what I am trying to express here is that I care less about what others think if they are not themselves on the path to knowledge and enlightenment. Who cares what I think anyway?

“Some people feel the rain; others just get wet.” -Roger Miller

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My ‘Kids’ on my 70th.

I am fortunate to have reached a milestone. 70 years is a long time to be around. One of the best things I ever did was to become a dad. Best gig ever. Even the toughest times weren’t all that bad. We love each other. I am blessed. My daughters are Ema Jean and Nicola. Tepper is my son-in-law and the violinist is my BFF Jeff. The ‘kids’ prepared three lovely songs appropriate for such an occasion. I transcribed Nic’s “Eulogy”


“I had a small speech that I had written down, but I don’t really feel like reading it. A lot of you know my dad as a big jokester, but he was also a really great dad, and particularly when we were especially little.

He shone not only in the big moments but a lot of the small moments just running errands, you know: in the car; going to the hardware store; listening to The Debaters and Vinyl Tap on CBC radio… and the thing that is special about my dad is: we’d go along and a lot of kids would be bored but we wouldn’t because we had such imagination because that is something he really instilled in us and in the students that he taught over decades.

Sometimes our imagination’d got the better of us and we would be playing in the grocery store, we’d have all these little games going on and we’d lose track of him and we were never scared because all we had to do was listen…. And we would hear …without fail … somebody laughing , three aisles down… in the milk department and we would just go over there and he would be just making a stranger’s day and they would throw their head back with abandon and laugh.

Beyond that, another moment he really shone, was that, most kids grow up dreading their bedtime and I never thought I really had a bedtime, but looking back on it I realize that we did, but it was really more of a three act show. It would start on my parents’ bed, Ema and I flanking my mom, and she would read us library books while my dad was doing the dishes, and then he would come and give us each a shoulder ride to our beds and when we were there he would take requests for jazz standards and just play the most ridiculously beautiful complex music …”Daddy could you play ‘Just Fwiends’? It didn’t stop there, because after that he would tell the most creative stories that would put all of your streaming services to shame… and not only that, they would be stories that had recurring characters, it was like a series that we would tune into every single night and you know he spent the whole day entertaining a whole bunch of kids and he still took that time and did that for us.

Sometimes he’d fall asleep and we would say “daddy you’re drifting” because we knew that the story wasn’t over, and he would finish every single story the same way. He’d say “and THAT’s the end of the story!” So, I celebrate you dad, today and every day, and I’m proud to be your daughter. Happy Birthday!”

I am kind of proud that I have such wonderful children who appreciate what they have and who they are.

Posted on by Ian Hanchet · 1 Comment

Refuge

I was driving home the other night after dark, but not yet night. I was looking in the windows of the homes in Montreal West we were passing through. The houses were probably built between the two world wars or perhaps even earlier as Montreal’s suburbs were expanding. 

I was reminded of my own home growing up in Town of Mount Royal which was of the same vintage. Both neighbourhoods at the time were inhabited by middle class professionals in a society that was more nine to five and regimented. Churches were active and important back then. Children joined Boy Scouts or Girl Guides and on our street most moms were educated but could afford to stay home and raise their children. 

Bliminal spaces like this have always interested and attracted me. I was struck by the soft yellowish low watt lighting in empty dens, living rooms, front hallways. Lit for the inhabitants not yet home. I was comforted by this idea of refuge. Imagining walking in the door and being greeted by a warm living space with unmoving air from cast iron radiators.

As a youth, When I would return home from choir practice I would walk several blocks from the downtown commuter train (now part of the REM) and see similar homes waiting, dimly lit by perhaps a wall sconce or a table lamp. Perhaps the invisible kitchen was a hive of activity, someone preparing dinner in a brightly lit aromatic back room, but the rest of the house just waiting. Houses I would probably never enter, but I recognized the feeling, recognized the layout. Refuge. A quiet place to shake off the day and perhaps relax in an easy chair with the paper and a sherry or vermouth (like my dad did). 

I have been in many older homes in TMR, Montreal West, NDG and Westmount and I recognize the vibe. Clean, orderly, filled with loved objects and favourite books in neat bookshelves. Different homes with a sameness about them. These glimpses in passing are comforting to me. 

I am also reminded of a similar feeling I have driving on older highways and looking in windows of rural homes. My family used to travel between Montreal and Ottawa frequently. I had grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins in Ottawa. This is before the 417 was completed. The 417 bypasses everything and could be any highway anywhere with few landmarks or personality. The older highway took longer, but it passed real places where people lived.

Returning from Ottawa on a Sunday night the route offered glimpses into lives different from mine. I enjoyed the cold blue light from fluorescent lights in kitchens. I could imagine the hum from the fridge and the swish swish of a dishwasher in the after supper hour. The glow of a TV in another room, the scrubbed kids in their pjs staying up to watch Ed Sullivan. Some of the houses seemed plunked there randomly like a monopoly house dropped on a carpet.  There didn’t seem to be any reason for a house to to be there unlike the rambling farm houses which were large and had many out buildings.

Sometimes the route passed abandoned homes. Each former refuge transformed by life stories and hardships unknown to me, the casual observer, and lost in time.

As I write this in my comfy office I imagine someone walking their dog on the street glancing in here and seeing my computer screen and the back of my body as I sit here typing. Perhaps one day they will write about their impressions of this, my refuge.

Posted on by Ian Hanchet

I Wonder

I recently retired from my music teaching career. Amid the awfulness of the pandemic and other life drama that crops up I have been fortunate and able to continue writing songs.

One of my concerns with aging and limited outside contact and reduced activity is maintaining my health and my mental acuity. I tried to put these meditations and concerns in this song.

A few months ago a blood relative, someone very close to me who I have weekly contact with, was diagnosed with early onset dementia. The song was freshly written when I heard the news. I thought the song was about me, but I guess this song is about her, me, everybody. It is about the road everyone will eventually travel towards our eventual demise. 

I wonder where the wonder went
So many miles travelled, they came and went
 Our Wonder years already spent
 Wondering what anything meant
 -Oh-oh-I wonder
 
 I wonder Who I was meant to be
 If I’ve seen all that I was meant to see
 Or was this all just a fantasy
 I wonder if I’m really me
 -oh-oh-I wonder
 

 I wonder what this is all about
 If anybody anywhere could have bailed me out
 If I ever bought in, Or did I drop out
 Hey, Alfie, what’s it all about
 
 I wonder when I can feel it again
 If I’ll ever be relieved from residual pain 
 If I ever figure out what’s been driving me insane
 And where I’ll get off this runaway train
 
 I wonder where my my serenity went
 The worries in my head should be paying me rent
 All of my joy has already been spent
 I wonder where everybody went
 Oh, oh, I wonder
 
 I wonder how I’m going to cope with these things now
 If I’m going to wear a smile or a furrowed brow
 I wonder where I’m going to point my prow
 Am I going to take everything that life will allow
 
 I wonder why this all seems so strange
 Why all of my targets are out of range
 I wonder if I can face the change
 Pretty sure something can be arranged
 
 I wonder why things turned out like they did
 Some things in the open, some things hid
 I wonder was my offer the winning bid?
 I wonder if it’ll be the same for my kids

https://ianhanchet.bandcamp.com/track/i-wonder