{"id":500,"date":"2011-04-28T05:30:42","date_gmt":"2011-04-28T10:30:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=500"},"modified":"2016-07-29T10:58:28","modified_gmt":"2016-07-29T14:58:28","slug":"to-the-lifeboats-with-thomas-dolby-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2011\/04\/28\/to-the-lifeboats-with-thomas-dolby-part-one\/","title":{"rendered":"To the Lifeboats with Thomas Dolby, Part One"},"content":{"rendered":"

To many music fans, Thomas Dolby<\/strong> is best known as the guy with the popular early-80s MTV hit \u201cShe Blinded Me With Science.\u201d But Dolby\u2019s career has taken many other interesting twists and turns since then, including an extended hiatus from the music scene; that break actually found him busier than ever. He\u2019s now at work on an ambitious new album, A Map of the Floating City, <\/em>due out later this year. Related to that project are a pair of EPs and an online game.<\/p>\n

One might consider the three-song EP Oceanea<\/em> something of a teaser for Dolby\u2019s upcoming full-length, but he argues that\u2019s not the case: \u201cIt\u2019s very much designed to stand on its own,” Dolby asserts. “The [upcoming] album has three continents, and each one of them has a very different flavor. So the Amerikana<\/em> and Oceanea<\/em> EPs are representative of those segments of the album. Hopefully the whole thing hangs together as a single piece, but there is very clearly a different atmosphere to each section.\u201d<\/p>\n

The opening section of the EP\u2019s title track employs vocal processing that is reminiscent of the popular Autotune effect. Dolby chose that texture because he believes it \u201cmakes the vocal very vulnerable. The emotional content of the lyrics is very powerful. So to hear the vocals contained like that seemed like a juxtaposition that was very interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n

For an artist whose early works are often pegged as electronic sounding, Dolby\u2019s Oceanea<\/em> is relatively non-electronic in its approach. \u201cI think it\u2019ll be seen that way,\u201d Dolby muses. \u201cIt\u2019s interesting, the tricks history plays.\u00a0 I\u2019ve had a few comments from people; somebody posted on my YouTube video today, \u2018Thomas Dolby playing real instruments! What\u2019s the world coming to?\u2019 And I thought that was interesting for a number of reasons. Even going back to my first album [1982\u2019s The Golden Age of Wireless<\/em>], there were songs on there that were completely done with synths and drum machines. But there were also ballads like \u201cWeightless,\u2019 for example, which is a three-piece band with me on piano. Barely a synth in sight. And the whole The Flat Earth<\/em> album is very organic; it\u2019s got things like \u2018I Scare Myself,\u2019 which has got an almost lounge-y jazz feel. So I\u2019ve always had this more atmospheric side, which I view as being very organic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLike everybody else,\u201d Dolby continues, \u201cwith a range of production techniques available to you, you try and use the best of all worlds. But to me the distinction is that music that gets the label \u2018electronic\u2019 likes machines to sound <\/em>like machines. It has a fondness for the quirks of a machine playing music versus a human playing. And in most cases — even when I\u2019m using electronics \u2013 I\u2019ve always used them in an electronic way.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are certainly exceptions,\u201d he admits. \u201c\u2019She Blinded Me With Science\u2019 is almost a lampoon of that sort of approach. But that was almost a one-off. In a lot of cases I don\u2019t think I am very electronic. And I think that on Oceanea<\/em>, you\u2019d almost have a hard time picking out the electronics in there. The song \u2018Simone\u2019 has a Theremin, and things like that, but they\u2019re fairly few and far between.\u201d (Speaking of Theremins, the instrument used on \u201cSimone\u201d is a rare vintage RCA model belonging to Bruce Wooley<\/strong>; Dolby notes that it\u2019s one of few with a built-in speaker.)<\/p>\n

Dolby explains that the Latin musical flavor of \u201cSimone\u201d serves the song\u2019s story, one of \u201ca woman escaping her rather grim Ohio situation. And we assume a partner who is not sympathetic. It\u2019s a bit like the film Shirley Valentine<\/em>; a bored housewife leaves her husband and goes off. But in this case it turns out to be bittersweet: she gets there and has the drink with the umbrella in it, and the samba music\u2019s playing, and the waves are crashing on the beach. Suddenly she says, \u2018My god, what have I done?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI love to use musical idioms like that to illustrate parts of a story,\u201d Dolby says. \u201cIn \u2018To the Lifeboats,\u2019 you\u2019ve got two acoustic guitars, and organ and some congas playing the verses. Then it gets to the end of the second verse — \u2018There are no fuckin\u2019 lifeboats\u2019 \u2013 and suddenly a full-on grunge band comes in. The lyrics go, \u2018There\u2019s a freak storm blowing in,\u2019 and there\u2019s these massed Def Leppard<\/strong>-type backing vocals. Then it blows over; it\u2019s like a squall at sea. You return to calm, but a sense of uncertainty and resignation remains.\u201d He adds with a hearty laugh, \u201cIt would be very challenging in a live setting. You\u2019d need a serious<\/em> stomp-box. But we\u2019ll figure out a way to do it, I expect.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo the Lifeboats\u201d has a heartbreaking atmosphere, but Dolby says that the finished song developed over time. \u201cWhen I came up with the verse, I didn\u2019t have any lyrics for it. I sent a very rough version of it to Paddy McAloon<\/strong> [Prefab Sprout<\/strong>] because I was thinking about seeing if he wanted to co-write it with me. He wrote back to me, \u2018I don\u2019t know; nothing springs out at me. It doesn\u2019t have a bridge, does it? It\u2019s just the same melody going \u2018round and round.\u2019\u201d Dolby chuckles good-naturedly. \u201cI thought, \u2018Screw you, Paddy!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

continued<\/a>…<\/em><\/p>\n

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To many music fans, Thomas Dolby is best known as the guy with the popular early-80s MTV hit \u201cShe Blinded Me With Science.\u201d But Dolby\u2019s career has taken many other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interview","cat-41-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11308,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500\/revisions\/11308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}