Living of Love
Due to coming across a number of their videos and links over the last few days, I’ve been listening to The Avett Brothers a lot lately. I first encountered them via a Starbucks pick of the week iTunes card featuring “I and Love and You” a few years ago, and have loved their sound ever since. Their performance of “Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise” at last year’s Grammys alongside Mumford and Sons and Bob Dylan is well worth checking out.
Anyway, I was just washing dishes to “Living of Love” and thought, why not share a song on a Friday afternoon? It’s the first time I’ve heard this one, and both the music and the lyrics speak to me today:
For just one chance to find Love was someone that you loved to find For just the sense to try To walk ahead and leave the pain behind If the days aren’t easy and the nights are rough When they ask you what you’re thinking of Say love, say for me love Say love, say for me love Your heart says not again What kind of mess have you got me in But when the feelings there It can lift you up and take you anywhere But the gravel beneath you and the limbs above If anybody asks you where your coming from Say love, say for me love Say love, say for me love Say yes we live uncertainty And disappointments have to be And everyday we might be facing more And yes we live in desperate times But fading words and shaking rhymes There’s only one thing here worth hoping for With Lucifer beneath you and God above If either one of them asks you what your living of Say love, say for me love Say love, say for me love
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Thanks for the links. Enjoyed the music. The more digitally performed and enhanced music becomes, the more extravagent the productions, the more I appreciate artists who simply take the stage and play from the heart.
….and I said nothing overtly critical of U2. :)…..
How kind of you… 🙂
Thanks for the link. I liked the first two bands better then the last guy. I never have been able to like Bob Dylan although I have tried on several occasions. My original opinion of Mumford and Son’s was along the lines of this review http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13906-sigh-no-more/ Lately though I think I am being suckered in by there catchy tunes. So maybe I will give there album a chance now.
The argument against digitally enhanced music vs more raw or heartfelt performances reminds me of that segment on the documentary “it might get loud” where Jack White tells us technology can harm art and Edge tells us that it has always pushes music forward. I agree with Edge more then White. I have feeling there are plenty of bad songs sung with the accompaniment of an acoustic guitar as there have been with digital music enhancers. White is also a little hypocritical because while the Silvertone amplifier and Montgomery Ward guitar he used in the White Stripes maybe considered old school in the short life of Rock and Roll… there was a day not too long ago they were considered new. Also that POG on his board is only 5-7 years old. Did the acoustic guitar have similar detractors when it started to be used widely in music? I am not sure why there has to be a split that people arbitrarily make between new technology used in music and old technology.
I would forego my weekly pint for the opportunity to sit in a room and listen to Jack Black. Edge without digital delays and sequencers would need to buy my beer for me to stick around. Two pints of “Steamwhistle” and I would probably be enthusiastic…I’m just sayin’…
If there is no difference between actual and virtual, then yeah, my distaste for digitally enhanced musical performances is arbitrary.
lol..Jack White. Although I think I would still prefer Tenacious D to U2. 🙂
Yeah I am not going to try and convince anyone of Edge’s genius. Musical taste is highly subjective. I just find it hard to imagine how songs like where the streets have no name, paranoid android, comfortably numb could have been accomplished through non-enhanced methods of producing sounds from a guitar. I can appreciate the use of a well placed delay, reverb, phaser, etc in a song. Its a question of if the song sounds good in the end or not. That being said I would appreciate it if Thom Yorker would put away his Mac Book.
Cheers to the subjective nature of musical taste.
My criticism though is about processes, not outcomes. Just like photo chopping makes something or someone look better than it actual does, the technical treatments you reference make someone sound better than they can actually play. I can agree with you then that this makes a for a better sounding song, just not a particularly honest one.
I will always affirm and support those musicians whose work can be honestly expressed and experienced through an unfiltered and unedited live performance. Those like Edge, who either don’t or can’t, can talk all they want about “pushing music forward”, I’m not buying.
To me, and I would throw Roger Waters on the same scrap heap (but never David Gilmour 🙂 ) these guys exploit technology to make up for what at best, can be described as primitive and minimalist, musical talent. They push themselves and technology forward.
Like Jack White, I think they do music a great deal of harm.
For my part, I will happily continue to enjoy the “dishonest” and “harmful” sounds of “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “Paranoid Android,” and “Comfortably Numb” (and others) and the “primitive, “minimalistic” talents that produced them :).
We can agree on “Comfortably Numb”, at least insofar as Gilmour provides music and melody….what an overwrought train wreck of an album “The Wall” would be, and still mostly is, without this cut. Then again it is probablly a step up from the other Waters epic, “Animals”. Waters killed Floyd. His obsession with concept and technology left very little room for the musicianship of Richard Wright and Nick Mason and in the end, even Gilmour abandons ship. Thankfully Gilmour reclaimed the group and the bands last work “Division Bell” stands as one their better works. I think Gilmour himself described the album as an attempt to reclaim a better balance between musicianship, concept and technology, but to be fair I cannot find the quote.
Given that this post starts us with a Celtic flavour, if your not familiar, “Floyds”, “On the Turning Away” from the “Division Bell” is a really enjoyable song. Lyricly, I prefer it to the angst that is “Numb” (read Waters) but admittedly the song is nowhere near as popular.
I know it may be hard to believe but I actually like U2, kinda sort of. I think they are highly over rated, particularly with regard to them being a great rock band….great folk band maybe… but to the extent jc’s arguement about song outcomes sways me, U2 have a bunch of good songs.
I dunno maybe kids today listen to Edge and wonder how he made that sound and it inspires them. If that leads them to pick up a guitar, then it is a good thing. For me “sans technology” Edge’s play sounds ordinary and limited, more percussive than melodic. Some interesting bits and pieces but no unified whole.
As for “Radiohead” I have absolutely no grievence with them. U2 can open for them anytime. 🙂
However they use technology, the band and particularly Johnny Greenwood, can play.
Apologies and correction. “On the Turning Away” is a track from Floyd’s second last studio effort, “A Momentary Lapse of Reason”, not the from the “Division Bell”. It had been a while since I had listened….it is nice to listen again. More than just a group of songs, it reminds me of people and experiences, I had long forgotten. Thanks for this.