From: owner-navy-soup-digest@smoe.org (navy-soup-digest) To: navy-soup-digest@smoe.org Subject: navy-soup-digest V7 #60 Reply-To: navy-soup@smoe.org Sender: owner-navy-soup-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-navy-soup-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk navy-soup-digest Sunday, September 5 2004 Volume 07 : Number 060 In This Digest: ----------------- new article ["jessica weiser" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2004 20:40:20 -0500 From: "jessica weiser" Subject: new article http://www.chartattack.com/damn/2004/09/0306.cfm Sarah Slean Lets Her Body Move To The Music Alone in a rural cabin, blasting music through her headphones and dancing up a storm, Sarah Slean had an epiphany: rhythm is the key to the music she loves. "I thought it was so heavy when the bass and drums are right," the singer-songwriter explains, eyes flashing animatedly as she recalls the moment. "And once you get it right, you just feel it and you dance." Struck with this realisation, Slean decided she wanted to emphasise rhythmic elements on her new album, Day One. While the dramatic flair of 2002's Night Bugs is still in evidence, the new songs owe less to cabaret and vaudeville and more to beats and atmospheres. "I just wanted to capture that aspect," Slean says. "That's why I chose Peter Prilesnik [Sarah Harmer] and Dan Kurtz [The New Deal] as producers, because they both have bass and drums in their background. I was actively seeking grooves." Not that Slean wanted necessarily to bombard the listener with the bottom end. In fact, she sings the praises of artists who are judiciously economical in their use of the rhythm section. "That's the beauty of Radiohead," she emphasises. "They take the drums and they pore over it in reference to the song. They get it to be just right. There's no extra bullshit." The quest for grooves also resulted in another musical shift, with Slean's piano playing sometimes taking a bit of a back seat to other instrumentation. "Piano is such a dense harmonic instrument," she explains, "to get the space that I wanted to hear, to allow room to breathe, I had to take a lot of that out." To some extent Slean also wanted to distance herself from being viewed as yet another female at the keyboard. Although she loves her piano to the extent that she talks about it as a living being ("I promised her that I wouldn't move her again and then I moved her to a cabin - she was not very pleased."), she doesn't see it as her musical raison d'jtre. "To me the piano is not my calling card," she says. "When people associate too closely to their instrument, it drives me mad. I don't want to be that geek virtuoso. A lot of people do that and I respect that, but I'm a student of music. I want to write symphonies." - -John Teshima - ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- jessica weiser :: www.jessicaweiser.com AFTER SILENCE songs now available on iTunes! ------------------------------ End of navy-soup-digest V7 #60 ******************************