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Brian Woodbury

Eternal Damnation

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— Scroll down to watch the video for “Eternal Damnation, feat. Joe Moe” —

I’m not a Christian, but I love Christian music. I don’t just mean Bach & Handel. I’m a sucker for Christmas carols, Gospel, Protestant hymns, Gregorian chants. I find so much of it incredibly moving, both music and lyrics. 

Even the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) you hear all over the radio dial on long drives anywhere in the US. It’s always a cut above the pop and rock that it’s trying to convert you from.

There is a lot of anguish in CCM these days. The most common theme is about getting through hard times and loneliness with the knowledge and assurance of Jesus’ love and forgiveness. The songs are often addressed to Jesus/God Himself. It’s very powerful stuff.

And while some CCM invokes in ecstatic terms a life everlasting in Heaven, basking in God’s glory, eternal salvation, etc. there is not a lot of talk about Hell. I can see why. Hell has always been a hard sell for me. The afterlife in general, but particularly Hell. Why would a God of Love devise a place to punish and torture people for eternity? 

So, I decided to write a Contemporary Christian song about going to Hell. I know it’s perverse. I’m not a Christian, I don’t believe in Hell. But the song takes Christian theology at its Word (as best as I can figure it). And Hell’s the place where people like me – who work on Sundays – are supposed to end up. 

Now, I realize it’s easy for a secular agnostic like me to write a snarky song about Christian mythology. But I hope it doesn’t come across with smug reassurance. For while I’m dubious of the particulars of a Christian Hell, there is a larger philosophical question that Christianity is grappling with: Trying to reconcile the seeming unity of the universe with the multiplicity and antagonism of existence. Or why is there good and evil? And, to my mind, there is no satisfactory answer. 

Christian archetypes are still very potent, demonstrated not only by the power of CCM, but also by the power of its counterpart, death metal. There are plenty of death metal songs that evoke Hell and Satan, and they are hair-raising and otherworldly. I can’t say where the energy for these archetypes comes from, but to deny them in the name of secularism feels like a cop out. 

Given their power, the last thing I would want to do is make a song about going to Hell to glorify evil. So I endeavored to keep the music for my song very much in the light. I tried to be funny, but also make it uplifting. (I told you it was perverse.)

You may notice that my song is a bit more ornate than the usual CCM fare. I wanted it to be fancy and melismatic and beautiful, with fun churchy chords. And soaring strings and heroic French horns and a righteous choir!

To sing it, I knew it had to be Joe Moe. Joe is a beloved longtime collaborator. We go back nearly 40 years. We’ve written musicals, made records and lots of music together. He has a beautiful voice, and he’s a brilliant writer, artist and director. Also he has an equally perverse sense of humor.

Go in peace.

When I Think of “In My Life”

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— Scroll down to watch the video for “When I Think of Love.” —

My song “When I Think of Love” was prompted by a line from the Beatles — a couplet from “In My Life” that always puzzled me: “And these memories lose their meaning/When I think of love as something new.” Was John Lennon thinking of love as something new, or just experiencing new love? And, more importantly, do the memories truly lose their meaning? The music belies that assertion. And does the love object, introduced in the second half of the song, undercut the strong mood of nostalgia and longing established in the first half?

Like a dog deconstructing a bone, I worried all this down to the nub. Eventually I stole “When I think of love as something new” and made it into a new song. But what began as an intellectual exercise soon became a personal and cosmic meditation on romantic love.

Like a clip from “An Affair to Remember” showing up in “Sleepless From Seattle,” quoting a beloved song in a new song invites the listener to find the many ways the new song falls short. In my defense, the purpose of my song is altogether different. “In My Life” is a nostalgic look back from the perspective of a young man in the throes of new love; my song is a look back from the perspective of a much older man at a long and lasting love.

The music for “When I Think of Love” does draw its inspiration from the Beatles, but also from the Beach Boys and the Association, with rich vocal harmony and counterpoint, mixed with murky baritone guitar and tinkly vibes. The structure nods to early ‘60s pop songs, with a literally repeated “middle 8.” To sing it with me, I brought in Sean Altman and Paul F. Perry. In addition to the harmonies, Paul doubles me in the verses, giving it a timbral ambiguity, and Sean provides the high vocal obbligato in the last verse. 

Also, there’s a harpsichord solo. 

Old Time Prog

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— Scroll down to watch the video for “Old Time Prog.” —

When I was in high school and college, I listened to progressive rock. Not exclusively, but a lot. Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull, and especially Gentle Giant, were my jam. Later on it was Henry Cow and Hatfield and the North.

By the time I started making music “professionally,” prog had fallen very much into disfavor. Never a favorite among American critics, by 1980 prog was lumped in with “corporate rock” by punk genre purists and “authenticity” seekers. Though I never renounced the genre during those purge years, I had to sneak in anything I’d learned from it under the guise of post-punk, art-rock or quirky pop.

Johnny Unicorn is a generation younger than me, and probably faced less genre partisanship when he acquired a taste for classic prog, while also being corrupted at an impressionable age by music from the likes of They Might Be Giants, “Weird Al” Yankovic and – of all people – me. He’s developed as a songwriter a distinct style that’s an amalgam of the above and much more, retaining a fluency with progressive elaboration married to a whimsical sense of humor.

Johnny and I have collaborated on smaller projects here and there over the years. But writing “Old Time Prog” was the first time we sat down – he in Seattle, and I in LA – to write a song together. The assignment was to come up with something funny, since I was working on an album of funny songs.

I’ve always found songs celebrating genres of music ridiculous and risible. And therefore ripe for comedy. When we hit on the idea of a nostalgic genre paean to prog, we knew that was where to go. It was Johnny who convinced me that to be true to the genre, it had to be over 6 minutes long, with lots of sections. Our approach was to try to evoke the sounds, and musical and lyric styles, of certain key bands, but never to pastiche any particular songs.

Of course, prog has continued and developed in many different ways since the ‘70s. There seem to be more fans and practitioners of the genre now than there ever were back then. This song draws its inspirations from the early classic period, but is no way meant as a diss to those bringing the genre into the future. Prog on!

You Are Not Your Brain

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— Scroll down to watch the video for “The Brain.” —

We’ve grown accustomed to headlines breathlessly intoning the latest claptrap from neuroscience: “Brain study shows grandmaster chess players think differently than amateurs do.” “Your brain is like 100 billion mini-computers all working together.”  “Scared of the dentist? This is why, say neuroscientists.”

Of course, neuroscience has made amazing discoveries. But the popular ideas drawn from it are often foolish and, I think, dangerous.

Sure, it’s neat that an fMRI of your brain lights up in a certain way when you order Chinese takeout. But when your “ordering Chinese takeout” neuron is isolated, will that really give us any better understanding of how and why you order Chinese takeout? 

There’s no disputing that when you do stuff, your brain is involved. But the fact that your brain is involved doesn’t mean your brain is the proper focus for understanding that behavior, nor that your brain is the “cause” of that behavior.  

To say that some process in your brain makes you order Chinese takeout so that it can activate the brain’s pleasure centers sounds foolish because it doesn’t explain anything. It posits a theoretical something – yet to be observed – to explain a subjective experience we all are familiar with. 

In the Pixar movie Inside Out, the mind is portrayed as a sensory input – behavior output device. The data from the character’s senses combine with a small number of discrete emotions to somehow control the character’s actions. This is the rugged individualist concept of mind. Mind as an autonomous internal organ. 

But the mind is neither completely internal nor completely autonomous. The mind exists in the context of the environment. You know about Chinese takeout because there is such a thing as Chinese takeout to be known. You’ve learned of it, you’ve eaten it. Your mind is also something that happens in the environment of other minds. You come to consciousness through recognizing other consciousnesses. 

The problem of subjectivity and objectivity is a longstanding one in philosophy. Simply because advancements have been made in studying the brain doesn’t mean subjectivity – the experience of consciousness – can be discounted. Objectivity itself is a concept conveyed and grasped subjectively. 

The neurocentric perspective is a mechanistic and, ultimately, a solipsistic view of the world, where human agency is immaterial, and consciousness is an inconvenience explained away as a byproduct of biological processes, or, worse, as an “illusion” (illusion to whom?).

With all that in mind, I wrote this song. It’s a comedic reductio ad absurdum, each verse portraying a different straw man in the argument. It’s also an homage to the great comic songwriter Tom Lehrer, who was my teacher in college, and remains an inspiration to this day. Peter Lurye made and played the piano arrangement, in his most Lehreran manner. 

To give the song even more levity, for the video, I worked with animator Matt Lintschinger, who created another layer of absurdity with personified brains as foils to my Mr. Science character. 

Let me know what you think.

Further reading: William James, Varieties of Religious Experience; Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads; Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Let’s Build a Future, While Supplies Last

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A going-out-of-business sale for all time.

The degradation of the natural world began at a time we were more beholden to nature than it was to us. I won’t call it an innocent time, because man’s innocence has long been in question, and was anyway always placed at a time before now. But, working against the elements, and sometimes against our fellow humans, we brought homes, townships, cities, and a new civilization to this new-to-us old world.

Our vaunted frontier spirit became a national creed. Through these simple, natural, rural, down-home, out-in-the-country, back-to-the-land impulses and exploits, amid our seemingly endless bounty, we have slowly and inexorably taken much of the non-human world to the brink of extinction.

I had two realization a few years ago: First, that to end our destruction of nature, we’re going to have to abandon a lot of it, to not live in it. To not build a house in the middle of a forest and a fire zone, or lay a road through a wildlife sanctuary. Let alone tear it up for mining, or put a pipeline through it. It became clear that living in nature was not always congruent with honoring and worshipping it.

Second, I saw that to transition quickly off fossil fuels is ironically going to take a lot of fossil fuels. The infrastructure for a sustainable world will need massive energy inputs. And I saw that in both these ways, it was a race against time. It’s like when you realize, just after you’ve poured yourself a second bowl of cereal, there’s barely enough milk. Except the cereal just keeps pouring.

“While Supplies Last” is an attempt to take this subject on. John thomas Oaks is a brilliant, versatile, musically restless and incredibly prolific songwriter I met in the BMI Lehmann Engel Musical Theater Workshop in the late ’90s. He is a Christian who writes both religious and secular songs. Though I’m not religious, I respond deeply to Christian music, and I think Jt’s background brings a deep spirituality and a rich Americana to his setting of the lyrics.

Disruptors. Are we over them yet?

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We live in an age of disruption. Both in technology & politics. The exploitation and corruption rival the Gilded Age. Tech giants and startups alike make end runs around hard-fought labor rights and democracy. Political opportunists go all in on accommodating them. Meanwhile, we are told that disruption is not only an economic necessity, but fashionable and beautiful. This ethos goes beyond advertisers purring reassurances and TED talks’ restatement of the blandly obvious. It is the full-scale repackaging of capitalist exploitation as a benign — nay glorious — form of consumerism. People with power changing the rules to suit themselves is nothing new. But packaging it as a liberating force for humankind is.

Like many of my songs, “If It Ain’t Broke, Break It” attempts to make its point in the negative. It is sung from a the perspective of an unsavory character. He’s boasting, and glorying in, his ability to change the rules as it suits him. He is essentially advocating the opposite of what I believe. I use this technique enough to know that it can be a challenge for the listener to discern. I contemplated singing it in a more charactery voice, but opted to sing it straight, and let the words and music succeed or fail in their mission.

Alfred Johnson is a songwriters’ songwriter with a feverish, fertile imagination, whom I deeply admire. We made several stabs at collaborating on various song ideas. At one point I presented him with a list of titles, many of them clichés with a twist, which he termed antithets (thus providing me part of the title and concept for my 4-volume magnum opus, Anthems & Antithets). This song was one of the antithets that we worked on.

Though the concept was mine, Alfred contributed a lot to the lyrics and the development of the ideas. Much of the music originated with Alfred, including the feel and the piano part of the intro, verse and bridge, with me occasionally chiming in with a melodic idea. I came up with the chorus, after more than a dozen failed attempts. I bore you with these details not for their sake alone, but to demonstrate that it is harder to build something that to tear it down, but infinitely more worthwhile.

Small Penis – a Feminist Take

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Feminism – for want of a better term – has been a liberating force for women and for men. What started with challenging received notions about femininity and women’s roles, has blossomed into a framework for human liberation. First, rape jokes were questioned, then, prison rape jokes. First, female circumcision was opposed, then, male circumcision. (Patriarchy cuts both ways.) Obviously, the pushback to feminism has been enormous and fierce, but the ideas continue to spread. Awareness of gender stereotyping, body-shaming, gender fluidity and consent now inform our thinking and behavior. 

One cliche that’s been stubbornly resistant to a feminist rethink is the small penis joke. On the political left, a small dick is the hilarious putdown that explains macho behavior like driving sports cars, collecting guns, and authoritarianism. On the right, a small dick is the cause of male sensitivity and the dreaded liberalism. More than just a joke, this casual body shaming is used figuratively and literally as a key to understanding a man’s psychology. 

A large part of what’s called toxic masculinity is exercised in the enforcement of destructive attitudes among men. Trying to live up to unrealistic body images is a form of repression, but that feminist insight hasn’t made much of a dent in our thinking. The belief that the size of a man’s penis should determine his manliness and his worth is an unspoken cultural assumption, whether one subscribes to it or not. It’s a destructive ideology, largely reinforced through jokes.

But how much can feminist thinking actually change something so seemingly biological? That remains a topic for another day and another song. “Small Penis,” the song at hand, takes equality and justice as worthy aspirations.

The four-volume music project I’m working on is called Anthems & Antithets. An antithet, in my parlance, is a song that takes a cliche and turns it on its head. Volume 3, Antipathy & Ideology, focuses on the political. It occurred to me that while small penis jokes aren’t very funny, a song bragging about having a small penis could be both funny and political. An antithet was born. A new kind of small penis joke.

For the music, rhythm and blues struck me as having the right mixture of plaint and celebration. I didn’t have the patience for a 12-bar blues form, so I made it a 9-bar blues. It’s a little shorter than average but it gets the job done. 

The Invisible Hand is Broken

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[Scroll down to view video]

Adam Smith’s law of competition is supposed to create an optimal economy of consumers and producers. When a better product appears on the market, the consumer rewards the producer with his or her custom. This spurs the producer’s competitor to create an even better product, etc. ensuring a cycle of continual improvement.

But this law breaks down when it comes to bands. With the sheer number of musical acts these days, the competition should be fierce and the consumer should be able to choose from the very best available. But for three reasons, this is not the case.

First, because our culture has abandoned communal music-making, performing in a band is one of the few accepted ways of expressing our musicality. Group singing in classrooms, churches, bars, games, etc. is a normal part of most cultures, and used to be part of ours. Now music instruction has been cut from many schools, and recorded music has replaced singalongs. We no longer sing our national anthem. Most parties in restaurants can’t even manage to sing “Happy Birthday” all in the same key. Almost everybody of whatever ability enjoys making music, but the socially-encouraged path is only to perform music for others, to be a “rock star.”

Second, since the cost of music to the modern consumer is negligible, the value of any one band to the consumer is not very high. There is a glut. While each band is competing for the attention of the consumer, the consumer does not see him/herself as part of this economy. He/she can have essentially all the music he/she needs at any time, and has no reason to seek for anything more.

Third, the ubiquity of bands creates a bottleneck. The journalistic, academic and commercial forces that have traditionally provided some discernment and encouragement of excellence are overwhelmed, and have largely abandoned the task. Talented bands and untalented bands all end up in the same pool, never to be evaluated. And when a band is randomly elevated from this pool, it is more likely than not to be unremarkable, even as it becomes the talk of the town.

We have broken the invisible hand that used to feed us

Millennium Glitch

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In 1999, the year 2000 was going to be the end of the world. Because of the Y2K bug, our computer-dependent civilization would fall into chaos come New Year’s Day. “Two thousand zero zero/Party over/Oops, out of time.”

But Y2K was not a bug; it was a failure of imagination. Adopting a protocol that didn’t allow for more than two-digit years showed our disregard for consequences, our disbelief in the future.

Hand in hand with our cynical poseur nihilism, the fatuous punk-rock death-wish: “No future for me. No future for you.” Romanticized destruction by a generation who mostly hadn’t experienced it. But the spiritual crisis was real.

Yet the world didn’t end. The programmers fixed it. The politicians got on it. We did believe in the future after all.

Then came 9/11, our real Y2K. The Columbine killers’ ethos adopted as a religious war. The chickens we weren’t even counting came home to roost.

And 16 years on, we’re still stuck with that Millennium Glitch. Waiting for our future.

Conspiracy Theories are the False Flags

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In 1969, as an 11-year old Beatles fan, I learned that Paul was dead. The devastating evidence in the clues laced into songs and album art was irrefutable. My only nagging doubt was how they’d found someone who looked, sounded and wrote songs exactly like Paul McCartney.

Since then, the belief in far-fetched conspiracies and other preposterous notions has moved steadily from the fringes toward the mainstream. Many seemingly intelligent people can spout 9/11 Truth theories or climate change denialism, with a wealth of evidence at their fingertips, but with no apparent ability to consider likelihoods or judge human behavior.

Today’s conspiracy theories contain the hallmarks of the “Paul Is Dead” scare: The eagerness to use a few stray anomalies or unanswered questions to fabricate a highly unlikely scenarios; and the blithe dismissal of the preponderance of contradictory evidence as part of a cover up. These theories all posit unbroached secrecy and frictionless cooperation among hundreds or thousands of co-conspirators.

A healthy skepticism of authority has given way to a political program of paranoia, to the point where even genuine whistleblowers or speakers of truth to power, like Edward Snowden and Noam Chomsky, are dismissed as accomplices in a grand conspiracy.

It is almost as if some evil group were creating and spreading cockamamie theories as false flags to engender cynicism, in an effort to distract us and disengage us from the reality of politics, democracy and the hard work of thinking logically and carefully.

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