Tag: Pop Music Evolution

  • Joy of Creating Popular Music

    Joy of Creating Popular Music

    The saying says that the man who does what he loves for a living will never work a day in his life. For me I get the joy of creating music as my living. Which is meant to say that I don’t apparently work.

    If I were to tell other musicians that I’ve played with or produced, that I don’t work, they’d call bullshit. More often than not the most common phrase I hear is that I work super hard and I expect the same from them.

    Wasn’t Always Pop

    I wasn’t always into pop music. Before I became a musician I actually avoided pop music like the plague. There was a terrible belief that it lacked authenticity and real talent. Both concepts couldn’t be further from the truth.

    I can’t give you the exact date when I dropped that bullshit theory into the trash. However I can say it didn’t happen overnight. It took months. Possibly even a year or two.

    New beginnings

    The first song the really started going into a more pop route would be Falling In. One of the more popular songs from my release Practical Insanity. Though it’s not a pop song in the traditional sense. Not buried in synth sounds, which is a common falsehood.

    There’s a simplicity to the underlying music that took me a long time to make sound super fluid. I have posted about the impetus behind how I created the song, but the hard part was making it sound fluid and dynamic. That took practice and to sing it at the same time – took even more.

    Next steps

    The next song in my catalog that really started me on the path of wanting to sound more accessible and popular was Hero Unexpected. This song went thru over nine re-writes before it settled into the finalized form it got recorded into.

    I should specify that it was not the chorus that got that many re-writes. No, that pretty much was nailed in the first draft. It was the verses and some of the musical content that got all the tweaks. Got all the parts of the music tracked then worked with my buddy George Leger who played the producer for recording my vocals with me.

    Tracking done, I spent a good deal of time working on the mix making sure it was delivering the song in a fashion that powered the song beyond anything I had created prior. Fortunately for me I had also recently befriended Gavin Lurssen who is a major mastering master. We had a good long chat about the goal of the song and its sonic destiny.

    The fork in the road was complete. Once I released Hero Unexpected I was fully on the road I never that thought I’d find myself on.

    As I continue making all kinds of music, I do find myself doing additional turns in the road but always keep coming back to the pop world as it seems to lack boundaries of what can be done sonically. That lack of boundaries is what allows me that joy to be creating popular sounding music.

  • Rock May Be Dead—Here’s How Pop Music Gave My Sound New Life

    Rock May Be Dead—Here’s How Pop Music Gave My Sound New Life

    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.

    trendy music

    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!