This post is part of a series. You can read the introduction to the series here.

This is another song that perfectly demonstrates my “taste” in music: I can’t make out the lyrics very well and don’t try; it changes time signature a few times; it has an orchestral instrumentation and interesting harmonies and dissonances.

This song was first released in 2006, but I just ran across Anathallo a few months ago when someone who knows what I enjoy recommended the group to me.

This post is part of a series. You can read the introduction to the series here.

This song is a very good example of my odd focus on rhythms, riffs, less common time signatures harmonies, and less common instrumentation in music. It has it all. First off, there are no lyrics; all the vocals are just sounds. It starts off as a single melody backed by minimal instrumentation behind the voices, then it gets repeated with harmonies; other instruments and melodies are introduced until it’s a jam. Then in the middle, there is a pretty big shift in the B section, finally returning to a finale again for the A section.

Below is a Youtube video of a live performance of the song, and I enjoy that, but the album recording also features a trombone soloist which makes it better to me.

Paper Bird was released on the two-volume Carry On album. Here’s what the wikipedia page has to say about it. I’m going to have to see if I can find a video of the ballet.

In the fall of 2010, Paper Bird began working with Ballet Nouveau Colorado. The band composed the music for a ballet entitled Carry On. Their music was then combined with the choreography and films by Garrett Ammon, it thus became a multi-media performance which debuted at the Lakewood Cultural Center on February 4, 2011, and was played to sold-out houses in February. Carry On was released as a full-length, two-act live album on June 11, 2011. They recorded it live onstage with the ballerinas. Paper Bird hired Mark Anderson and Stelth Ulvang to perform the ballet. Anderson was inducted to the band’s roster after the ballet.

In the introduction to this series of posts, I claimed that I don’t really listen to lyrics. Well, now the second song that I post is a story song. My issue with lyrics has its limits; songs that tell a story clearly are an exception to that claim. I enjoy it primarily for the story that Dar tells in the song.

I have a friend of almost 40 years who was a huge fan of singer-songwriter Dar Williams back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and he turned me on to her. I’m not much of a live music fan, but we moved from Austin to New Jersey for a few years in the 1990s, and this long-time friend timed a trip to visit us with a live performance that Dar was giving close to us in New Jersey, so we saw her there.

Dar Williams a great songwriter and performer. This song is a brilliant example of both. It makes me happy due to the positive message of reconciliation in the story told in the song.

I’m not much of a music aficionado (the fact that I didn’t have a “music” category for my blog until now is a big hint). I have preferences, but I would not call them tastes. To me, having a taste in something implies that you’ve educated yourself in that subject and have opinions that you can describe using that knowledge. 

Due to some quirk of my brain, I don’t really listen to lyrics much, and I have a lot of trouble understanding them in many songs. What catches my attention mostly are patterns that I find interesting: catchy bass lines, percussion riffs, use of less common instruments, harmonies, and time signatures other than 4/4. I don’t consider that a taste. 

I know what I like when I hear it, but I couldn’t point to any specific type of music that fulfills my preferences. In fact, often I’ll listen to a playlist containing music I’ve never heard before, hear a song that I like, search out that artist and discover that the song is an oddity among their corpus. For this reason, my playlists often contain one or two songs by a variety of artists.

Tangential to the above, I’ve long had a Spotify playlist called “Stan’s happy place” which contains, as the it says on the tin, songs that make me happy. I was overwhelmed by the news the other day, so I played this playlist instead, and it had the desired effect: making me happier, or at least less stressed. I hadn’t actually listened to this playlist in a while, so the positive effect came as a mild surprise.

I thought I would share some songs on my playlist. I’m starting with “Do it anyway” by Ben Folds Five. I’ve long been a big Ben Folds fan (his music often hits my weird preferences above, and he’s a dang good musician), and I try to keep up with his new releases. Somehow, however, I overlooked this song until I ran across the performance of it on Fraggle Rock. It’s a rocking song, and the performance with Fraggle Rock makes it 10x better.

Ben Folds Five has also performed a mashup of this song with “Heaven on my Mind” from Jesus Christ Superstar. I can just imagine them in the studio, one of the band members notes some similarities between the two songs, and there it is. It’s pretty awesome as well, and listening to them jam this song live is a treat: Ben Folds Five – Do It Anyway/Overture-Heaven on Their Minds