Tao Jones
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4/22/2010 4:57:06 PM
Collaborating With Tom O'Brien
Tom and I have been friends since college. Way back then he took a class on African polyrhythms. Ever since then he has had a pretty amazing ability to play two beats at the same time in each hand. Like he can do 3 beats to the measure in the right hand against 4 in the left (actually I can do that one now, but it took some learning). Anyway, I was always pretty fascinated with those rhythms, so back in our twenties we started trying to write some music on these types of rhythm ideas, but we wanted them to be extremely catchy and harmonically developed even though the rhythms were a bit mind bending.
We have done a couple things over the two decades plus, but somehow life intervened and left us with very little collaboration in this area compared to what I had wanted to do.
I'm real pleased that due to the miracle of Skype, we are now working pretty steadily at this long put away project.
We have a song in the making right now called "Broken Wing," that just trips me out. But what really is so intoxicating for me is our method of working together is so back and forth that there is not a single element to the song that wasn't filtered through both of us.
He started with a polyrhythmic thing of notes he shot to me, and I had him do some shifting of the notes but retain the same pattern but shift it along through time into other notes, and then I added a chorus melody, and then he underpinned that chorus melody with chords that shifted the ground of it dramatically, and then we built a bridge together so much that I really can't say who thought of what.
Then when it came to lyrics I told Tom not to worry on this one because I had something. But what he didn't know was what I had was a pile of lyrics he had sent me a few months before. I had been revising his own lyrics, so when I showed him what I had, it must have seemed awfully familiar to him.
Also, when I got down to laying my vocal out I ended up throwing another set of chords on top of the musical intertwine we had going. Couldn't really say what chord is being suggested when you add it all together, but it works.
Anyway, it's a blast to write in this way, and when Matt came for Easter I just ran the tape and asked him to do whatever he saw fit to it. So he made it even more mind bending with his drums. These songs are not African in any way at all, they are just rhyhmically strange. It's just very new ground and when you work with someone else, you just don't know how the ground will shift.
Love this. I wish this was how I made a living.
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Tao Jones
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4/22/2010 5:22:32 PM
I have often heard it said that no one actually collaborates on anything, they just string their contributions together, but each part can be attributed to one or the other writer. That is not at all how we are doing this, and that is the thing I find electrifying.
I guess The Beatles often wrote sections for each other but rarely worked right up in the same section together, but for me that is the process that is most interesting.
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Tom O'Brien
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4/25/2010 4:25:01 PM
This really is an amazing meeting of minds going on here. That's the trippiest part. Neither of us could have written this alone - it's only like a train wreck where you took all the usable parts from both trains and made a better, faster supertrain! I think the complexity of this song is hidden in the smoothness of it, and that's a good thing. This is not like a Lennon/McCartney collaboration (blessed be their names) it's more like a McLCearnntnoney thing. Can't wait till we have an album of this stuff.
Wish there were an easier way to work together, though, Like actually being in the same room. We both have matured on our own as musicians through the years, and have been inspiration to each other that whole time. It's a musical friendship like I've never had before. If anybody wants to produce our record in a real studio (and pay for it) I'm there. I know we'd be a musical force to be reckoned with.
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