Jody Whitesides

Category: News

You Don’t Choose Trendy Music, It Chooses You

Trendy music is always a topic on year-end lists.

Goodbye To A Lousy 2016

Looking back on a year that for a lot of us was probably not our greatest glory is a hard thing to do. I think the one thing that got a lot of people down had to be the deaths of a lot of entertainment icons. Musicians, actors, and creative types that many, if not all, of us are familiar with. Its sad to see icons pass away.

Sizzling Trendy Music

While I didn’t really grow up thinking about pop music, I have come to embrace it pretty hard in the last year. But it doesn’t mean I wasn’t aware of many of the popular musicians who passed away this past year. The main reason for the embrace isn’t to be chasing trendy music, but rather to spread out and create more interesting music. Rock feels like a dead subject – especially when most rock isn’t being overly adventurous in sonic terms. Pop music on the other hand is ingesting so many different vibes that it becomes really hard to ignore.

Fantastic Spotify

Spotify encapsulates the beauty of finding out what is trendy music. Streaming music and especially Spotify makes it incredibly easy to listen to more music than you can shake a stick at. For me it means taking time to listen to what is topping the charts. This in turn gives me the ability to tear apart the instrumentation and the concepts that led to the creation of the song. That in turns improves my writing, my arrangements, and my production skills.

An Inspired Past

While I don’t spend a ton of time dwelling on the past, I did spend time appreciating the music of many who passed away this year. Part of what has stood out is the timelessness of the music created by artists like Prince, George Michael, David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Leonard Cohen, and producer Sir George Martin. That’s an incredible list of people who redefined the music industry in decades long before I started playing an instrument.

Impact With The Now

Newer music like Daya, Shawn Mendes, The Weeknd, Alessia Cara, Bieber (yes, I’m putting him in this list), and DNCE shows how I can incorporate a variety of styles and make them something new. Looking forward into 2017 I’ve got a line of singles I’m excited to get released. Every song is different from each other. There’s even some that are a serious departure from my normal concept of releasing music. Think someone like DJ Snake or Calvin Harris, more trendy music and I’m looking to keep people on their toes.

Demolish Your New Year’s Eve

So on this final day of 2016 I want to wish you a fond farewell to a poor year of entertainment deaths and welcome you to an exciting year of new music. Wherever you end up partying tonight, I hope you’ll have a seriously mind-blowing time. I also want to see you survive any experience you use to ring in the new year.

See you on the flip side with new music to play for you!

Happy New Year!

2016-12-31
Cooking Up A Storm For Christmas

Cooking

Cooking up a storm over the holidays. That is the modus of my Christmas vacation this year, which is extremely fitting based on the kind of year entertainment has had. Unless you’ve been under a rock its patently obvious to me that its been a horrendous year for legends and icons of music and film.

Hell within 48 hours of Christmas we lost George Michael and Carrie Fisher.

George a musical icon that created some amazing music and of course Carrie who was part of one of the biggest movie franchises in cinematic history.

Cooking What

Beyond the strange string of deaths that lined 2016, I spent a good portion of the year creating. There’s been a new design on the website. There’s been over 60 new songs in production for various co-writes and other things. I’ve been writing new music for release. But my favorite thing this Christmas is the cooking lesson I got as a gift from my sister.

She’s got some great connections in her little spot of the world and its led to us having a nice lesson in cooking last night with Chef Veronica.

Chopping & Cutting

The menu started with crab cakes – so very tasty. It was followed by the group of us chopping up all the ingredients for the main dish Duck L’Orange with ravioli.

The beauty of all the chopping is that I received a super amazing chef’s knife. So sharp that I barely had to drop the knife on the item I was cutting and it would cut itself. Like a hot knife thru warm butter. Drop.

Seriously, having the right tool in your hands makes doing something so much more enjoyable. Like in music, having a great instrument can help you sound better, having a better knife and help you cook better. I’m sure of that assessment. Its probably a lot like getting access to a top end compressor while recording.

One cooking technique I learned was called supreme. Supreme is the art of cutting out citrus so that you don’t have the membrane to deal with while cooking. Yet another reason to have an amazingly sharp knife.

Sharp Knifes

Speaking of sharp knifes tends to remind me of a guitar teacher I had who refused to have any glass or knifes in his house. His reasoning had to do with having an incredible fear of severing his hands – which would mean an end to his ability to play guitar. Aside from rock climbing and bowling, I never shared that fear. For me, rock climbing is super rough on the muscles for my guitar playing. Thus I don’t have a problem with glass or knives, but I don’t do rock climbing and I bowl with my right hand (so I don’t waste my left hand for days on end). BTW – I suck terribly at bowling.

Ravioli

While I’ve made regular pasta, aka spaghetti, in the past, I’ve never made ravioli before. Its a slightly different ballgame in the pasta field.

We got the filling, a mushroom and ricotta filling, finished and chilled first. Then we turned to the pasta dough where we spent time running it thru a pasta roller, over and over. Nothing new there. But when it came time to make the ravioli, thats where things took a turn.

First you lay out the bottom and then get your top half together (hoping that you get them roughly the same size and shape.) Once you have the bottom you dab out the filling in uniform spots on the flattened dough. Once there’s a line of filling, you place the top over it and press down.

I learned a cooking tip that its wise to use an egg wash to help seal both sides of the ravioli together. Meaning I had to do this prior to putting the top on.

Then I had some fun with a couple of different ravioli cutters that were laying around. A heart shaped one, a round one, and also with a pasta cutting wheel to make square ones.

Duck

This was the first time I had cooked duck as well. Chef Veronica showed us how to score the skin prior to cooking. Duck is not like chicken. Much like a Les Paul is not Moog. It requires an entirely different method to cooking. So we scored the skin with crosshatches. Then set it into a hot pan to start searing and cooking the fat side down.

Cooking-Duck

Once the duck was nearing completion…

Into The Water

That’s when the pasta took its turn dunking into a hot bath. What’s awesome about fresh made pasta is that it cooks in roughly 3 minutes.

Ding.

Out of the water came the pasta. The ravioli got covered with a brown butter sage sauce. The fettuccini was topped with the duck and a tasty orange sauce (made from the supreme’d oranges).

Eat Up

What a tasty and fun way to learn to cook something new.

It gives me an idea of how I could bring the idea of producing music into someone’s home…

2016-12-28
Hear Different Rhythms

Its late at night. I’m in the studio working on different rhythms for the vocal and lyrics in a new song.

Process

This particular song has been going thru a long process of rewrites. I had the initial idea for it a good long time ago. I laid down a demo of the song, then left it in a pile of 70+ other songs that were eventually going to pulled back out and tweaked for release.

Voting

Those 70+ songs got voted on in an effort to eventually do a classic example of a album. Voted on by a select group of fans. Then I wised up and took a look at how people consume music – they listen to streaming services and singles. Understanding that led me to switching spending time on each individual song as its own entity to be polished to perfection.

Rewrite

I was poking around my hard drive of songs and realized that recent events really dictated that I pull this particular song back out and give it some serious attention. I took it out of its original hard driving hard rock format and turned it into a pop bound rocker that is much more modern in arrangement. Keeping the same drive but really adding a slew of elements to propel the song in to a much wider audience of listeners.

Lyrics

After the arrangement was up to snuff filled with little nuanced tracks, it came time to work on lyrics. The track is flowing with such force that I felt the original lyrics were lacking. The idea was there but the focus was off. Not as laser sharp as it should be; and this was already the 3rd incarnation of the lyrics. I started bouncing rewrites off of friends. I removed two lines and replaced them with a better idea. Where my first idea was saying the same thing as another line in the song (but the second line said it better). Then I changed the title / hook of the song. The original title was apparently too passive and I wanted action!

Different Rhythms

Once the lyrics got tweaked, it required retooling the melody, or rather retooling the rhythms of the verse. Why would I work on different rhythms? Primarily, I had to get used to the new flow of the lyrics. Also I want to make sure I keep the song going in a way that the listener wants to hit that repeat button to listen to the song again and again. Which is where I sit right now. I spent a couple of hours trying various ways to play with the rhythm of what I was singing. I narrowed it down to two different rhythms that I really like.

What gets me is how people react. A first reaction can tell me if I’m really on the right track. Usually I don’t bring a lot of other people in on the process of my writing, but I felt like hey, I could use some help on which different rhythms I should go with for this verse.

I already know the chorus is an anthemic banger. Yet I need to make sure my verse compels you to get to my chorus. Its that simple. Once I have which of the different rhythms I’m going with for the verse, I can start going to town on the vocals and really make it fly.

End Run

My goal is to get this particular song ready and released by January 20th. There’s a significance to that date for this song and if you’re a U.S. citizen – you would be well to know why. If not, I weep. For everyone else, its still going to be an awesome song to bounce along to and play loud and proud in an arena or your party.

2016-12-20

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