PASSING “SUP NOD”, GRAVITY SLAVES!
Where notes may form the flows of music, musicians are the bones of those bands. Having an assortment of people from all kinds of different musical walks of life tends to create the most “flavourful” results. However, today, I’m going to drop the curtain on the other 75% of the band and only talk about the frontman/woman and how singular individuals can be inspirational driving forces, sometime accidently overshadowing others.
Take for example Jeff Buckley. Listed in Rolling Stone as one of the their top 50 greatest singers, and it is quite hard to argue with the candor in his voice. Buckley’s vocal tone carried such an honest view into his own trauma and scarring, that it was like watching a painter lay down brushestrokes. From his self-titled ’94 release, I give you “Grace”:
Now, not everything comes up aces for front-people. As a matter a fact, I’d say they are some of the most cycled through band members out there, but those like Jeff Buckley who are lucky enough to be able to represent themselves with their own names become irreplaceable. The other side of that coin is where the frontman WAS the band without focalizing the attention. Take for example Nirvana: Everyone and their cousin Sandy will jump immediately to Kurt Cobain despite the other obvious talent that was in Nirvana. This happens time and time again either through fan-favoritism or even personal bravado, where standing centre stage creates a unavoidable craving for attention.
Our second track comes from one of those bands with a frontman that accidently outshone them all, Steelheart. You don’t get pipes like Miljenko Matijevic unless you work some seriously unholy magick. By virtue of practice and vocal “care-exercises”, warming up before shows, and assumedly being touched by an archangel at birth, Matijevic is/will always be one of the most goosebump-giving singers to tread this dismal soil ball.
Uno mass, class. Allow me to serenade you to the piece that has been stuck in my head since I heard it the first time 17 years ago, word for word, beat for beat.
Bill Withers didn’t need to do anything flashy or fold in disco-era synth to make his music, he just tried to make it understandable. Connectable. Everyone has been downtrodden when a loved one passes or is distant for too long, that’s just a key component to being human. The things that makes music speak to us can be so infinite and unending that it’s nice to know that you can fall back, sit down, take a breather, and take the time to comprehend it all. What drives me to music is the conveyed emotion, be it brutal or blubbering, I want to know that someone wrote something for a reason, not just because they were blow’n through the roof.
Don’t buy sex dice.
– Bear