Episode 7 transcript

Note: this transcript is AI-generated, and as such, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.

Chad (00:01.538)
Greetings and welcome back to the Aural Mess podcast. I'm joined this week by composer, performer, singer, songwriter, and my niece, Cal Meadows. Hi Cal.

Cal Meadows (00:11.484)
Great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Chad (00:13.782)
Absolutely. Loving having you on. I'm so glad you were volunteering to come on and talk to me. And we have to get this out of the way since you are my niece. We've been teasing you, I've been teasing you forever about the whole Dead Kennedys reference. They've come for your uncool niece, but I can't call you that anymore. Ha ha ha.

Cal Meadows (00:29.704)
Suede Denim Secret Police. No, we can't. Especially now since you turned me onto the dead, Kennedy. So we'd be in deep trouble if the Suede Denim Secret Police were to come take me tomorrow.

Chad (00:42.512)
Well at least you're cool now, so you know, there you go.

Cal Meadows (00:44.42)
Oh, well, I appreciate that I finally have a stamp of approval. It's taken me long enough.

Chad (00:50.798)
You've always been cool. So yeah, I thought we could talk about, since you mentioned getting people into music and that sort of thing, I thought we could start off talking about influences, just influence in general. So you're a musician. I know you've been working on a little private project to sort of get some songs out there out of your head and into the world, which I think is fantastic.

Cal Meadows (00:52.197)
I appreciate it.

Chad (01:14.934)
You know, I'm a reformed guitar player. So...

Cal Meadows (01:20.668)
What church does that go to? Is that Eric Clapton or is that a little less cream side?

Chad (01:25.43)
No, it's a little less cream side. I feel like if I had to pick, it would be the, if I had to pick from that era and that sort of oove, I would say the Church of Jimmy Page. Sloppy but soulful, you know what I mean? The dude is just unreal.

Cal Meadows (01:36.54)
Jimmy, I mean, you can't go wrong with that pun. Yeah.

Cal Meadows (01:43.644)
The sonic worlds, I want to talk, I want to go back to that. I want to put a pin in that because the sonic worlds that man creates are masterful.

Chad (01:47.009)
Okay.

Oh, for sure. Oh, we can definitely talk about Zeppelin. Okay, excellent, yeah. So influences and, you know, not only you as a musician, but just in general, your musical taste and how you growing up got to where you are. You know, I know you and I always had music in common.

Cal Meadows (01:51.76)
Oh, we're going to talk about Zeppelin, I feel like.

Chad (02:12.794)
Both your parents are very musical people. You know, your dad, I think, plays, your mom doesn't. Obviously my sister, hi, if you're watching. But she was also responsible, and I've said this in almost every episode so far, she's been responsible for a lot of my musical upbringing between her and my brother. Me as a kid, I listen to what they listen to, right? And back in the day before the, you kids and your internet.

Cal Meadows (02:20.625)
Keep watching.

Chad (02:42.03)
It was all radio or you had to go buy records, right? So it was a whole different world and you were a little bit more limited, I think, a lot of what you listened to. So what were some of your earliest memories of music and hearing songs that you liked? And what was one of the first artists that really caught your ear and you wanted to hear more of their stuff? And how did that start to shape some of your musical taste?

Cal Meadows (02:51.848)
Thank you.

Cal Meadows (03:02.885)
Yeah.

Cal Meadows (03:06.372)
That's a great question. I was raised on a steady diet of the 60s and 70s and 80s radio hits. My father is radio pioneer Pete Sillant and my mother started her career as a broadcaster herself and also an aficionado of all kinds of hits and beyond. So I was raised on a steady diet of the Beatles and the Beach Boys from my dad and then, you know, getting to know my mother's taste a little more with America, Dan for sure.

things like Archivist Diver Steve Winwood, she's a big fan of that song. She's turned me on to a lot of Luther recently that I've been really into. So just a lot of a lot of really heavy radio hit influences. So starting off with some more open track, more like common Beatles songs, like, you know, your Hey Jude, your Blackbird, and then, you know, growing up with those around me and then taking some time on my own to learn. You know, when I was a young teenager and when I was a preteen.

listening to things like Long is my favorite Beel song and that's like a really great like no you go to a party like yeah my favorite Beel song is Long and they're like the whole album is like

Chad (04:11.338)
Long long what?

Cal Meadows (04:14.444)
You like the deep cuts from the white album? All right, you're gonna go back to the psychiatric hospital. But, so I actually ended up making a mixed CD for my father of my favorite Beatles songs. And he's like, these are some really deep cuts you got there. And I think it's because I was started on that journey of learning that sonic grammar, learning what made those pop hits really successful, those chord changes that sell really well, the interesting lyrics, the form and all of that. And then really getting into, okay, now that I have a working,

of this stuff, I'm really into the stuff that breaks those rules a lot, especially when an artist like The Beatles, I mean, obviously we're talking like ground floor with this, but when they can get really experimental and still have it, have some reference to that grammar that they once had, I mean, you know, I don't wanna be here listening to Revolution Nine all the way through every time I listen to the White Album. I don't, you know, we are all trying to avoid our nightmares in this day and age, but when you can still hear hints of this is what made these people really big.

and they're more B-side and more experimental work. I'm really impressed by that. So for example, we'll take like Pet Sounds, which is the Beach Boys most iconic work and probably has influenced in some way or shape or other, every successful indie or alternative artist in my generation, whether consciously or not, is another question. But my favorite song from that is I Just Wasn't Made for These Times. Cause it takes so much of like that harmonic grammar of the Beach Boys that we've come to know and love.

your major seventh chords that are stacked to heaven and beyond, but it's kind of like a proto-emo song. I wouldn't be out of place to hear like Mitsuki covering that, you know? OG sad boy music. But there's still that sonic grammar, that harmony and what makes the Beach Boys the Beach Boys is still present in that more offbeat work. And I think that really got me. And now when I listen to music, I find myself drawn to some of the hits.

Chad (05:50.82)
Yeah.

hahahaha yeah

Cal Meadows (06:12.588)
And you know, perhaps deeper hits than people, you know, I'm going to be 29 in April, spoiler alert, would really get into. But I'm really into B-sides, I find. And growing up with A-sides has gotten me into the B-sides more.

Chad (06:30.022)
I am also a B-side kid, always was, you know, because growing up playing records especially, they were actual B-sides, right? So, you know, yeah, listening to the hit, but then being like, okay, you know, I paid, I don't even remember what 45s cost, $1.99 maybe, you know, I paid, I paid $1.99 for this song, and there's something on the other side, so.

Cal Meadows (06:36.86)
Whoa!

Cal Meadows (06:46.416)
dollar 99.

Chad (06:55.842)
damn straight I'm gonna get my money's worth and flip this thing over and see what it is. And you know, some of the B-sides were, I remember having a 45 of Atomic by Blondie, total disco bop, great song. But I remember on the B-side was a cut called Die Young, Stay Pretty. I don't think it was a hit. I believe it was, if I'm remembering my 45, yeah. So that, like you said, sort of got me into this, like, okay, well.

Cal Meadows (06:57.896)
That's what we do.

Cal Meadows (07:05.316)
Oh my God, it's an amazing song. Yeah.

Cal Meadows (07:12.86)
Die Young State Purdue is a B-side? That's an amazing fact.

Chad (07:23.606)
what else does this artist have to offer, right? Because it's not just what I'm hearing on the radio and you buy the album and take it home and there might've been one hit, but there's nine or 10 other songs to explore, right? Yeah.

Cal Meadows (07:33.348)
Absolutely. And it's often when you give those songs a chance, I mean, sometimes I'll be listening to a fresh album and there'll be a song that doesn't really capture my interest the first time, but when I'm in the right like head space or in the right physical space, it just hits different to borrow a phrase. And I really enjoy that. And it's actually been very surprising to me what has been besides.

Chad (07:49.251)
Ha ha

Cal Meadows (07:57.56)
And you just saw a good example of that, because I wasn't really around during the record era. A lot of people of my generation collect vinyl, but I don't have collect vinyl kind of paycheck. So, or kind of space. So I prefer, I'm a Spotify nerd trying to branch out, obviously, because Joanie's not on there anymore, which is traffic.

Chad (08:16.11)
I know, and Neil Young's still off, right? He's still doing his own thing.

Cal Meadows (08:19.48)
Yeah, I mean, it's for principle reasons, but I'm... Joni, if you're seeing this, come back, we miss you. Come home, we miss you. But also, God, I had a point with that.

Chad (08:24.156)
Hahaha

Cal Meadows (08:31.292)
We're talking about, oh, and also when you read the memoirs of a lot of these musicians, they say, oh, my best work was buried in the albums because the record companies really, and I'm a big Wilco person, and Jeff Tweedy talks often about how some of his best work on albums like Yankee Hotel, Foxtrot are the songs that the record companies hated the most and didn't want to promote the most. And a lot of ways I feel like by engaging with this less popular music, we're really getting to the heart of what the artists really wanted

convey. And as someone who's aspiring to that, that's really meaningful to me.

Chad (09:06.386)
Oh, I agree. And I think you kind of said this, but I think a lot of these artists are pressured by their management or the record companies to write hits, right? So the writing stuff that they really want to get out there and that really expresses what they're feeling or what they're thinking or, you know, a concept or whatever. But it's like, yeah, I'm not hearing a hit. So they almost sometimes have to go back and write something that's commercial or popular or whatever.

Cal Meadows (09:27.909)
right.

Chad (09:28.318)
I think especially in the 70s and 80s, I think that was a pretty big thing. And you know, in today's world, you can record a song on your laptop and release it without a record company, so nobody can tell you what to do. Right?

Cal Meadows (09:39.416)
If you're trying to, if your goal isn't commercial success for sure, or if it's any success. I mean, obviously there's a lot of roots to success and that there would have been. I mean, I like to think that, you know, Fast Domino would have loved TikTok, but because he was always improvising stuff in bars.

Chad (09:42.443)
Yeah.

Chad (09:51.107)
hahahaha

Chad (09:57.374)
I never thought of that. Wow. I'm trying to picture Fats Domino on TikTok and I've got a mental picture. So I love it. Ha ha ha.

Cal Meadows (10:04.472)
It's vivid, you just gotta go there. Or anybody, any musician who is known for doing a lot of improvising, I think would have done well on like TikTok Live, getting all these, you know, gifts from these teenage kids, being like. Do you know about, imagine if Ninja got a low taper fade? Do you know about this?

Chad (10:18.347)
Definitely.

Chad (10:23.432)
No.

Cal Meadows (10:24.456)
Oh my gosh. Um, there's, oh, I can't remember his name. I'm terrible. There's, and I didn't know about him before this happened, but there's this guy who went on TikTok live with just his like auto-tune microphone and just started like improvising songs about his life and started getting like really deep into his like history with his grandfather who gave him his first guitar and they started crying online. So to distract himself, he sang some line about like, um,

streamer, I guess he's a streamer, I'm not hip with this stuff, Ninja and he's like imagine if Ninja got a low taper fade and that like became a meme and after this guy like spent hours on live just pouring his heart out and I'm like that's dumb and I would have been really into this.

Chad (11:02.021)
Fat Samara would absolutely have been a meme. Yes, a thousand percent.

Cal Meadows (11:04.228)
would have crushed it. But yeah, those I think those influences really led to my love of what could, you know, ungenerously perhaps be called dad rock now, your fans, your welcos, your 70s radio writers.

Chad (11:15.234)
Hahaha

Chad (11:21.218)
So why did you, I mean, if you remember, when did you kind of cross over from listening to your parents' music to like really discovering stuff on your own? And, you know, one of the things that we talked about leading up to this was I used to make you mixed CDs, like, you know, years ago, right? Like when you were younger, because I felt the need to impress upon you some of my musical favorites because...

Cal Meadows (11:36.668)
Yes.

Cal Meadows (11:43.272)
Here's some good stuff to listen to.

Chad (11:45.522)
Yeah, but like when did you think, when do you think that kind of happened where you started to get away from, okay, Beach Boys, Beatles, America, Steely Dan, and how did you get into discovering stuff? Because again, you came up pre-Spotify also, right? So it was a little bit harder to discover new music. So how did that happen?

Cal Meadows (12:02.785)
Yeah, so there are a few ways. First of all, your influence cannot be understated or overstated. It was very... you put some just very esoteric tracks in front of me. There was like My Impilot by Splashdown still, I listen to all the time. Brand New Heavies, and also Ruby Vroom by the Soulcoughing is an album that is a big favorite of yours that will take with me forever.

Chad (12:16.118)
Yes.

Chad (12:23.462)
Oh yes.

Cal Meadows (12:30.212)
and I just love that album. And so that kind of stuff kind of had me thinking about what I might be looking for. So I got a lot of influence actually from Starbucks used to do this program where they put out like a free Apple music, like a iTunes download of the week card. I...

Chad (12:44.074)
Yes. Yep.

Cal Meadows (12:46.532)
I've done that shit. So I always downloaded those right away. And also I'd hear people talking about music at school and I'd write it down and I put it into iTunes and I'd try to, you know, stock up when I had the iTunes gift cards and I would like Google around for stuff like, oh, I like this. I'm gonna Google this person's name and see what else they did. And soon as some other artists would come up, the algorithm was the machine learning level was like much more primitive than it is now, but it was out there in its nascency.

it was doing its thing. If you go on YouTube and search this music, there was also comments suggesting like, oh, if you like this, you might like this. So I definitely built a lot of that up. But as soon as there were kind of more discovery avenues, like I remember using stumble upon to find music back when stumble upon was a thing, rest in peace, Comrade Stumble Upon. I remember using like YouTube radio, Pandora was a good way to find music.

Chad (13:16.351)
Yeah, it was there.

Chad (13:34.415)
Mm-hmm. Ha ha ha.

Cal Meadows (13:43.296)
before Spotify's algorithm fed you breakfast. And then when Spotify's Nescent algorithms started up, it helped a lot more like playlist sharing and it was an easier way than just like, you know, mailing your niece a compact disc. How many people under the age of 20 now have seen a laser disc? Makes you wonder like, you know, what is that icon on the save button? There's a floppy disc is heaven for a friend.

Chad (13:58.05)
Right.

Cal Meadows (14:10.628)
I used a lot of that technology though, very early on. And I was also, my friends and I would trade mixed CDs in high school sometimes. I went to an arts high school part-time and that's how I got into introduced to like the shins and the Arctic monkeys because I had a friend who was really hip to them. And of course I was spreading your gospel at school and got some questions about like what Babylon mystery, mother of harlots, for example, meant. So that was some fun Google searches that were done in high school.

Chad (14:27.277)
Hahaha

Chad (14:33.486)
Ha ha ha!

Cal Meadows (14:37.264)
from Ruby Vroom and we would trade jazz recommendations as well because I still am to some degree, but when I was in high school I was a very devoted jazz musician, a jazz flute player. So we would trade like, oh the solo one, this is really cool and I'm really inspired by this lick or this riff and I got to know, you know, again, there's your Fats Domino, your Cannonball Adderley.

and all kinds of other amazing artists from just like talking to my friends at that school. I feel really blessed to have had that opportunity because otherwise I don't know what I might be, still be in Beatles Beach Boys America land. And so yeah, sometimes on a hard day at work, it's kind of like coming home to listen to those artists again. But definitely, like you said, I didn't have to resort to going to some grungy record store and listening to like some.

some randos recommendations, but I also had friends at my academic high school that I went to part-time who were more like metalheads. So in high school, I definitely got my Metallica, my Black Sabbath fixes, Opeth, a lot of people into Opeth. Yeah, I really like them. Lamb of God, mostly Black and Thrash. And then as I got into college, a lot of my friends were into like Black and Death metal and I'm like, this is a little too intense for me, but I get what you're going.

Chad (15:40.138)
Wow. Yeah.

Chad (15:53.381)
Hehehehehehehehe

Cal Meadows (15:54.872)
I appreciate the musicianship for sure. And I would say that undergrad and college, when again, these algorithms were a little kinder and a little more well-developed, was when I started to really break away and have like a really, really robust library. And even still I'm trading music with friends. My friends and I send music to each other every day, probably multiple times a day.

Chad (16:14.41)
Yeah, oh yeah, same. And I'm always sharing playlists or getting playlists or discovering new playlists from people that I talk to online and stuff, and you know, kind of see what they're into. Couple things that you mentioned that I wanted to sort of circle back on. So A, Ruby Vroom by Soulcoughing, still one of my favorite albums of all time. I finally got around to reading, M. Doughty wrote a book. My, he's Mike Doughty, I think he's going by now, but he wrote two memoirs. One was called like,

Cal Meadows (16:36.662)
No kidding.

Chad (16:43.69)
life of drugs or something with drugs. I forget the title of it. But he basically just sort of gives a little bit of a, it's like a little bit of an autobiography, but he talks a lot about how slow coughing came about and how he wrote some of the poetry to some of the songs. And of course, you know, lots of drugs involved as the title would suggest. But you should definitely read it. I haven't gotten around to the second one yet. I think he wrote like a follow-up or like a sequel, so to speak. So I'm gonna get that soon. And

Cal Meadows (16:59.613)
If you hear those lyrics, you know.

Cal Meadows (17:04.572)
them.

Chad (17:10.934)
dig into that one too because it was just mind-blowing like you know seeing how the band came together and you know it's kind of the crazy adventures I think that they kind of had you know for the few years that they were kind of the indie darlings you know the other thing is you mentioned like not going to grungy record stores I had to go to grungy record stores but I have this

Cal Meadows (17:13.785)
It is.

Cal Meadows (17:29.916)
I'm just curious about that. Can you tell me a little bit about how that went down?

Chad (17:33.546)
Well, you know, it was really a lot of the corporate stuff because, you know, when I was younger, I worked in the mall in summertime and stuff like that. So it was like Sam Goody and, you know, that sort of vibe. So it was totally commercial music, but there was a little indie CD shop in Margate, you know, a couple of towns over from where I lived. And there was a guy from Philly who owned the store and he was...

Cal Meadows (17:41.231)
working at them.

Cal Meadows (17:54.539)
Oh, yeah.

Chad (18:02.638)
Probably, I mean, we thought he was like an old guy, you know, back in the day. He was probably my age now, like 50 or 50 something. And he just was like just this cranky old bastard. Like he, but he had the most developed ear for music and he carried a little bit of everything, but he really focused on alternative indie. We're talking, this is like, I don't know, 93, 94 probably.

So I think he turned me on to The Breeders' first album because I don't think I was aware of who they were and what was going on. And then obviously X Pixies and all that. But he was really famous for, you'd go in, you'd ask him for a CD, like something that was a little more mainstream. And he'd be like, ah, you don't want that crap here. Listen to this instead. Like, and he'd hand you something and be like, look at the liner notes for a minute. Okay, give it back to me. I'm gonna put it on, I'm gonna play it for you. And he would like open the shrink wrap and like throw a CD on.

And be like this is what you're taking home. I'm saying, you know, you're here I'm gonna bag it just you know, give me ten bucks and you'll take it home with you today like he was that kind of guy and he Over time I kind of got to know him a little bit because I used to go there all the time and I would just spend like an hour in the store just listening to stuff and you know bullshitting with him about music and I got a lot of Really cool recommendations and a lot of discoveries through him He was actually able to order me stuff too. So like if I went someplace and you know, I wanted the specific

single that I knew how to B-side that I was interested in or something like that, you know, he could get it for me. So that there was that part of it. Yeah, pretty much. It was like, you know, first one's free. But and there was something else.

Cal Meadows (19:27.408)
Music dealer. Back alley. Yeah. Absolutely. I feel like everyone your age has a story like that. Like, oh, my guy was named Pete and he made me listen to Sex Pistols 45 times before he'd sell me a Clash album.

Chad (19:46.119)
Well, my friend Amy and I, and I mentioned her I think in a previous episode also, but we used to just make each other tapes of stuff. We'd make mixed tapes, we would just copy albums for each other, whatever we decided that the other person needed to hear. And she was probably a big influence on me in a lot of ways because her musical taste was just way beyond her years. I mean, we're talking, we're in high school and she's listening to Velvet Underground.

Which, you know, I mean, wasn't really a cool thing, I guess, in the late 80s or whatever. Oh, it totally is now. You know, they're back in the in the limelight, I guess. But, you know, she would make a mixtape with like Velvet Underground, Tom Waits, and then she would go into like The Waitresses and then back to like Depeche Mode and then over to some other, you know, random ass like, you know, I think she put like Mac the Knife by Bobby Dern on a mixtape one time just, yeah, like, I mean, crazy stuff, right?

Cal Meadows (20:18.904)
It is now.

Cal Meadows (20:41.576)
Really esoteric, yeah.

Chad (20:43.118)
And so not only did she give me the inspiration by adding specific songs and artists, but I learned the art of making esoteric mixes from her and realizing it doesn't matter. You don't have to follow a theme, you don't have to stick to a certain kind of music like anything goes. And she used to make the best covers, and I used to make them for her too, but we would just chop shit up and cut and paste. Yeah, but you didn't get to have any of my covers that were handmade. All of mine were digital by the time you were born because...

Cal Meadows (20:55.752)
Great.

Cal Meadows (21:02.024)
You make great covers, I remember them well.

Chad (21:10.658)
everything was on CD and it was all mixes from iTunes and stuff but we used to literally cut stuff out of magazines and glue stick it onto the cassette sleeve and hand write stuff with a Sharpie. It was just like. Right, exactly.

Cal Meadows (21:23.405)
I'm not 15 minutes in Canva anymore.

Cal Meadows (21:28.296)
going, oh this font is slightly different from the other one. Yeah, I mean there was a real art to that and I think a lot of people my age are interested in getting back to that kind of DIY ethic. Obviously like the means are less cool now that physical media is starting to decline but I have a lot of friends who are physical media heads um still and would probably like die for a chance to have a CD like that. I mean in so far as you can play a CD in a computer.

Chad (21:31.426)
Ha ha ha!

Chad (21:53.282)
Ha ha

Cal Meadows (21:54.584)
Now all the lab cubs don't even have CD drives native anymore and I'm like, where do you put the disk in this thing? I'm the whole-

Chad (21:59.638)
They don't, and most cars don't even have CD players anymore. They're slowly phasing them out.

Cal Meadows (22:03.624)
I don't know. I don't know that mine does, actually.

Chad (22:07.314)
Yeah, I think our car does, but you know, I'll be damned if I'm gonna put CDs in a case and bring them in the car with me, right? Like, it's just... Yeah, oh, I used to have the one that went on the visor, you know, the little like, 6 CD thing that clipped to the visor and you just slide them out of the slot, so whatever, so you could do it while you're driving and, you know, not wreck. So that was, that was, that was good.

Cal Meadows (22:15.792)
You can sing album or books, your hymnal.

Cal Meadows (22:22.244)
Oh wow, yeah. I remember that.

Cal Meadows (22:28.368)
Absolutely. Yeah. You know, I was thinking about Zeppelin again, though. My mom actually turned me on to Led Zeppelin. She said, I heard all of my love on the radio one time when I was with her and I was like.

Chad (22:33.527)
Yeah.

Of course she did.

Cal Meadows (22:40.968)
is this? And you know, I'd already known Zeppelin from like Black Dog was really popular when I was growing up with my in my family. Granted, of course, I had no idea what it was about. I was like, yeah, this is a really cool song about a dog, rock on. But after that, I kind of took my own initiative, and I'm really into No Quarter by them. And I think the sonic worlds that again, that they're able to create on

Chad (22:50.75)
haha

Chad (22:58.766)
Mm-hmm.

Cal Meadows (23:02.94)
just Houses of the Holy writ large and also Led Zeppelin Four really influenced my writing a lot. Just that like really ambient, so in music we call it an ostinato, it's a repeated pattern that repeats throughout.

So that the da da. I use that a lot in my compositions. And I think I was heavily influenced by that because I was like, oh, this repetitive motif is really what's the glue that's holding this like freaky song together. And like, you know, The Rain Song and all of that. And even in Kashmir, I mean, the iconic da na na, da na na, the really driving beat. I think I just took that really personally. I like all of my art.

Chad (23:28.714)
Hehehehe

Chad (23:39.276)
Hahaha

Chad (23:43.313)
Oh.

Cal Meadows (23:43.452)
So it comes to unexpected places. I mean, you know, I think he's, all of them are kind of geniuses in that regard. And I also...

Chad (23:49.834)
Yeah, I think all four had a level of genius, you know, that they all sort of were equal, you know, in that aspect. I mean, people...

Cal Meadows (23:55.588)
Yeah, John Bonham was an influence on me too as I started learning bass.

Chad (23:59.086)
Oh yeah, big time. I mean his playing was heavy in light at the same time. Like he was so powerful but he had feel. And that's really hard to pull off as a drummer. Yeah.

Cal Meadows (24:08.976)
pocket is rare. Yeah. And I would just play with his drum tracks when I was playing bass and I was like, you know, he's not even I might he's influencing my bass playing so much from even back here and I'm just the pocket they have is so and the other band I was really into when I was growing was guns and roses.

Chad (24:25.994)
Hey, don't discount Guns N' Roses!

Cal Meadows (24:28.356)
I saw the Appetite for Destruction t-shirt all around my school and I'm like, what are they on about? And of course this is another band where in early high school I had no idea what they were singing about until I read Slash's autobiography and I was like, suddenly I know too much about what this is about. But their best album, in my opinion, isn't even Appetite for Destruction, it's User Illusion too. Yeah, they also, speaking of some fun...

deep cuts and also some more songs with driving riffs that repeat throughout the whole song. So I remember, you know, hearing his stuff and when I found out that Slash did, I think it was Slash that did the solo and beat it. Where's that Van Halen? Yeah. Okay. Well, I was going to say, to segue into Van Halen, when I found out that it was Eddie Van Halen who did that, there was also an iconic picture of me somewhere on the internet wearing my 5150 shirt.

Chad (25:08.986)
No, Michael Jackson? That's Eddie Van Halen, yeah.

Chad (25:15.217)
Hahaha

Cal Meadows (25:22.588)
with my hair like puffed really big because I thought that was like the new hotness when I found out about like 80s hair. I was like, I must have this, even though it's 2009 and I'm in high school. I got really into, I'm definitely more of a David Lee Roth person than a Sammy Hagar person. Yeah.

Chad (25:27.94)
hahahaha

Chad (25:37.866)
Oh me too. You can't, I mean Sammy Hager's version, Van Hager has its merits but Van Hale and to me will always be David Lee Roth a thousand percent. But Guns N' Roses, it's funny you mention that because I wrote them off as another LA hair band and you know again I was-

Cal Meadows (25:43.322)
and hangar.

Cal Meadows (25:53.32)
as well. You know, they got their moments of that, I think.

Chad (25:56.278)
They do, but the funny thing was I wasn't really gonna give them a chance, I don't think, and I was friends, shockingly, in high school with this girl who was, I can't even remember her name now, but she was like a punk rock girl. She had like a leather jacket with the spikes, and I think she had a partial shaved side of her head, and super cool. Wish I could remember her name now, but it's escaping me. Anyway, she, one day we were talking about music in the cafeteria, and she was like,

You mean like those hair metal guys? And she's like, no, no. She said, on the surface, yes, okay. But here, take the tape, I have it, she had it in her backpack, take it home, give it a listen, make a copy if you want, come back and tell me what you think. And I went home and listened to it. Yeah, it was Appetite, and they just had like a punk aesthetic underneath the metal, yeah, for sure. So I was like, wow, cool.

Cal Meadows (26:40.776)
Was it apatite?

Cal Meadows (26:46.332)
They look like ethos to them. Yeah. They do.

Yeah, they did a lot of garage recordings back when they were the LA roses and the guns and before they came together. So I think they really took a lot of that with them. And there's a lot of like heavy distortion. In particular, Duff McKagan, their bassist, uses a lot of distortion on his bass lines and also chorus pedals on the bass line, which like you're really only hearing like the upper octaves for the most part, but that those kinds of tactics feel directly taken from like a lot of the like Hammersmith UK punk scene bands.

Chad (27:10.827)
Yeah.

Cal Meadows (27:21.034)
giant cabinets that you never would guess that they're using the same stuff that the punks used. But the setup was incredibly impressive. And once Izzy Stradlin actually responded to me on Twitter and it was amazing, and I was like, oh, I'm a big GNR fan. And he's like, oh, keep playing. You're so, good job being a youth fan. So I have that saved to my computer somewhere, but that was really cool. He was their rhythm guitarist.

Chad (27:33.548)
Really?

Chad (27:47.158)
Yeah.

Cal Meadows (27:47.436)
in the pre-Chinese democracy slash whatever fresh hell Axl has made of the band since we all know Chinese democracy is never going to come out.

Chad (27:53.991)
I met I know it's like it's a lost cause at this point

Cal Meadows (27:59.096)
It's a weird album. I don't know if you've ever listened to it. Shackler's Revenge kinda goes off though.

Chad (28:01.862)
No. I have not listened to it, maybe I should. Yeah.

Cal Meadows (28:06.52)
Maybe usually just for the lols, but there's definitely some, again, some probably not hits that I'm a big fan of that just make really dynamic use. Again, of sonic spaces, that's another big thing in my art is I just try to evoke places and take the listener on a journey in a space that might not be where they are right now. So just taking them into, fully enveloping them. And I think that's one of the few, one of the very few things that 20s Democracy does well because it ain't the lyrics.

Chad (28:34.423)
True story, by the way, I don't know if I ever told you this, but I met Izzy Stradlin. Yeah, I won't tell you the whole story on the pod, but I can tell you the whole thing offline. But long story short is that I was working security at a Rolling Stones concert in 89 in Atlantic City. And of course, I had like, you know, backstage access the whole time. And it was the couple of nights on the Steel Wheels tour where they brought in a bunch of guest stars. So it was...

Cal Meadows (28:37.933)
No shit!

Cal Meadows (28:44.136)
amazing.

Chad (29:01.074)
Izzy Stradolin and Axel were there. I didn't meet Axel, I don't think he was like hanging out in the backstage. I think he just like came on stage and then left or whatever. But Clapton was there, I met Clapton. I actually escorted Keith Richards out of the venue. Like I walked next to him on the way to their security detail to go to their cars and the, it was crazy. It was like, you know, and I was like, I don't know how old I was, I was 18 or 19. It was nuts, it was like just unreal.

Cal Meadows (29:12.262)
Oh wow!

Cal Meadows (29:20.284)
He wasn't getting kicked out. Not that time.

Chad (29:30.37)
And Izzy was like the coolest person. Like I was afraid to go say hi to Eric Clapton because I figured he'd be like, who the hell are you, get away from me. And he was just cordial. He shook my hand and he was like, oh yeah, hey, nice to meet you, whatever. And then he kind of turned around and kept doing what he was doing. But Izzy took a minute and signed an autograph. And he was like, oh, hey, it's so great that you love, yeah, I was like, I love Guns N' Roses. He's like, oh, that's so cool, thank you so much. Like he was just like so genuine. It was great, it was refreshing, you know? Yeah.

Cal Meadows (29:33.212)
Peace, folks.

Cal Meadows (29:55.664)
He's a real guy. He was definitely the least addled of them. Uh, kind of by a long shot.

Chad (30:00.096)
yeah did you ever hear his solo album

Cal Meadows (30:04.476)
Oh, is this the acoustic album, Fire?

Chad (30:06.246)
No, no, oh not solo, but with the Juju hounds. Oh, you have to get that album. Yeah, I'll have to send you that. Okay. Yeah, definitely. No. He pretty much apes Keith Richards as a singer. I feel like he's going for that raspy, you know, sort of. Yeah. Ha ha ha.

Cal Meadows (30:09.22)
No, the juju hounds, no, I have to get, you can send me that. Okay, and I'll send you his acoustic album, Fire. It's really good. He's not much of a singer, but it's got some really cool riffage on it.

Cal Meadows (30:28.056)
It doesn't, it's not a COVID, it fits everyone, it's just not. And that's okay. I barely fit Keith Richards at times.

Chad (30:35.442)
Yeah, and then he's still kicking so more power to him.

Cal Meadows (30:38.624)
Yeah, honestly. But yeah, that was that was how that developed. And now I'm all over the place again. So

Chad (30:40.658)
So...

Chad (30:45.234)
Yeah, well, you know, same. I mean, and, you know, we were kind of coming back around to, you know, modern times and Spotify and algorithms. And, you know, I've said this a few times in previous episodes, but it bears repeating. I find Spotify to be a blessing and a curse because I love being able to have a song in my head and okay, I can go play that now because I don't have to go dig it out and put a CD on or go buy it in the store. I can literally just go to my phone or my computer and dial it up in like 10 seconds and it's playing and I'm happy.

But on the other side of that equation, I feel like I kind of have a little bit of musical ADD. So like I'll be listening to a song and it'll remind me of another song. So I'll skip to that song and I'll put a playlist on. And I'm like, I don't feel like listening to this right now. So I'll skip half of the other songs on the playlist, even though I made the playlist on purpose to listen to all the songs. And it's just like, it's terrible. But at the same time, it's fun because, you know, it's.

Cal Meadows (31:25.917)
Bye.

Chad (31:40.278)
I'm using it for not only discovering new things, but also for revisiting old things because, you know, yeah.

Cal Meadows (31:45.092)
I am too. Things that I completely have forgotten about until the algorithm serves them to me sometimes like, what was it? I'm going to, excuse me for being rude, I'm going to pull my phone out and figure out what it was that I heard once on the radio at a grocery store once. And now it's become like half of my personality.

Chad (32:05.742)
I have a whole stop and shop playlist. Every time I go to stop and shop and I'm bopping around and I hear music coming over the PA system, I will whip out my phone and put, yeah, it's what you'd expect, but they pull out some deep cuts, like some stuff that you wouldn't think would be in store. Oh, okay.

Cal Meadows (32:12.632)
Is it like a bunch of Sheryl Crow and stuff?

Cal Meadows (32:19.024)
They do. It's always the Sun by the Stranglers. And that goes nicely with the rest of that stuff. They do play some deep cuts because that's not a radio hit in any way, shape or form. I don't know any of the Stranglers other work, but I swear to God, I heard that once like a big wide world class market in New Haven County, Connecticut and like and I was like, Oh man, here I am back in, you know, 2000 whatever with a song but they do play some deep tracks in supermarkets if you care to listen to them.

Chad (32:30.445)
Right.

Cal Meadows (32:49.46)
lot of folks have their podcasts on these days during that. But yeah, I was like, I'm gonna add this to my playlist immediately. I like music.

Chad (32:51.798)
Yes.

Chad (32:59.102)
I wish they would play The Clash, Lost in the Supermarket, like at least once a day. Like it should be like required, you know? Ha ha ha.

Cal Meadows (33:04.648)
But then we could no longer shop happily. They should do that though, but that might be a little on the nose. And I think now they're starting to integrate a lot more top 40 stuff as if anyone follows top 40, you know, in this 2024th year of the common era. I have no idea. I wouldn't know anything about what the hits are like if I didn't have some like adjacency to TikTok, so.

Chad (33:26.654)
Yeah, me too. And, you know, having my daughter and her being 18, she just turned 18 and, you know, her basically living on TikTok for the last few years.

Cal Meadows (33:36.659)
My wife and my friends are all really into it.

Chad (33:39.454)
Yeah, and it's gotten me into it. And same thing, like she finds a lot of old music on TikTok, like she...

Cal Meadows (33:46.357)
Like Xanthobar by Billy Joel had a moment on there.

Chad (33:50.526)
She loves that song. It's a great song. Oh yeah, who's playing trumpet on that? It's actually, I can't think of his name. It's actually a famous jazz trumpeter that does that solo. Yeah, go ahead and Google that, please. So she'll come downstairs singing some obscure or semi-obscure thing from the 70s or the 80s and even like 90s alternative.

Cal Meadows (33:53.372)
great song. The Chet Baker kind of breakdown in the middle.

Cal Meadows (34:03.61)
We can... we can find out. I'll blow it right up real quick. Yeah. It's a fantastic song, though.

Chad (34:20.49)
My wife and I are like, where did you hear that song? And she's like, TikTok. Ha ha ha.

Cal Meadows (34:26.618)
Yeah, my dad said, how do you know all of this music? And I'm like, the internet.

Chad (34:30.494)
Hehehe

Cal Meadows (34:31.996)
Freddie Hubbard, it's Freddie Hubbard. It doesn't surprise me though, he did some other studio work for Billy Joel around then, so it doesn't surprise me. That's a really good one. And also like Hand in Pocket got really popular on there. And what else was it? I'm smart but I'm stupid. I should know this. Yeah, I mean, I know what it's Atlantis, but I was like trying to remember the name of this.

Chad (34:32.942)
It's Freddy Hubbard, right, right.

Chad (34:41.066)
Yeah, well...

Chad (34:51.873)
Oh, Alanis Morissette.

Chad (34:56.556)
It's called Hand in My Pocket, right? Is that the title?

Cal Meadows (34:58.788)
Yeah, so Hand in Pocket by Pretender Club Popular, and then Hand in My Pocket got popular by ALA.

Chad (35:03.039)
Right.

Cal Meadows (35:03.708)
So a lot of kids in their pocket, but not the kind of rhythm section pocket we'd like them to be getting into. And I also think that it's a really good platform for a lot of indie creators to share their work. I would never do that because, you know, barring things like this, I hate being on camera. So I don't think that would be a platform that I would distribute on necessarily. But I do think it's a good way for young, charismatic bands and stuff to get noticed. And in a society where promoters aren't as big of a thing and, you know, getting booked as an indie band seems like it's a little more difficult.

Chad (35:06.764)
Hahaha

Cal Meadows (35:33.762)
since I was in college, but soon, hopefully, soon. Yeah, I'm thinking about getting this right again.

Chad (35:37.13)
Wow, really, okay. So, nice. And what's driving you that way? And what are your plans? Like, what are you thinking?

Cal Meadows (35:45.696)
Yeah, so.

I've been just reminiscing a lot about how much fun I had. I played in an indie band called Accidental Ghost in undergrad. Our music is on Spotify. I am singing, singing on some of it, but I mostly play bass there. And I just miss making music with other people. I was at a point in high school and in college where I was performing with somebody pretty much every day. Um, and I haven't gotten a chance to do that very much, be it on flute, which is my primary instrument or bass or anything like that. I'm really grateful that I married a classically trained soprano who also loves to sing and we sing together and jam.

all the time, but I wanna get back on stage. I miss that a lot. So anybody out there in the Richmond, Virginia metropolitan area who likes all of this crowd that I've been talking about and wants to be the next Boy Genius, maybe with less drama, call me.

Chad (36:31.479)
hahahaha

Chad (36:38.967)
Nice. I will link Accidental Ghost on Spotify in the show notes. Yeah, for sure. I love that stuff that you did. I remember, I forget the name of the song. I think it was maybe the first song on the, it was like an EP, right? It wasn't a full album. Yeah.

Cal Meadows (36:42.156)
Oh wow. Yeah.

Cal Meadows (36:51.532)
Yeah, yeah, I was in EP. My friend Sam recorded it for his capstone project, Sam Krauss. What was the first track on it? I don't even know what the track was. Oh yeah, You and Me. That's the one, oh Any Other Way. That's one of the ones I wrote. So I wrote Any Other Way, You and Me, and I wrote the melody for what I thought I had.

Chad (36:56.991)
Right, right.

Cal Meadows (37:11.832)
The last recording, Loud and Clear, on this EP is not the best recording of it. But yeah, I miss writing songs with other people because one time, my friend Sam just wrote a riff and I'm like, give me like 15 minutes and I'll write some lyrics for that. And it ended up being You and Me, which is one of the tracks on there. I mean, it was pretty good. Definitely lyrically a product of me being 20.

Chad (37:31.53)
Hehehehehehehe

Cal Meadows (37:32.512)
I have since advanced, obviously, in my craft, that I look forward to sharing that at some point. Maybe I'll come on again in the future and I'll have some wicked new EP to show you that I've done.

Chad (37:42.327)
Yes.

Cal Meadows (37:43.508)
But yeah, I've been trying to, my original idea was to write a song every two weeks and send it out to some friends, but I decided to make it monthly until May just to accommodate my increasingly chaotic schedule. But I've been trying to be more generative this year, and I've been trying to, one of the things that, so I also am loosely following this Coursera class by Pat Pattinson, who ghost writes a lot for folk and rock artists especially, and he has this Coursera course, he teaches a Juilliard, I think it is.

about how to write lyrics and I've been kind of loosely following that and some of his books and Jeff Tweedy's book How to Write One Song, which I cannot recommend enough. It is a fantastic book. All of Jeff Tweedy's books are wonderful including World Within a Song, which she talks about the song worlds that a lot of his favorite songs transport him to. So definitely check that out.

Chad (38:32.93)
Yeah.

Cal Meadows (38:34.008)
All three of his books are delightful, but I've been trying to just put some words out there, put some music out there, and try to get back in the game because I have not had skin in the game for far too long now. And it's things like the pandemic and, you know, my restless bits that have made me want to get back into that. Have you been playing at all since?

Chad (38:47.586)
Yeah.

Chad (38:53.474)
little here and there, you know, not as much as I'd like to. And I also at some point, you know, need to just get a couple other old guys together and, you know, find like a weekly jam session or something because I'm itching to play with other people. My problem is I can absolutely just sit and plunk at the guitar myself, but it's just not as much fun. You know, yeah, so I just need to, and you know, I can play bass too, so I mean, I'm not sold to playing guitar, so I feel like I just need to find...

Cal Meadows (38:57.)
get them.

Cal Meadows (39:07.78)
Yeah.

Cal Meadows (39:13.028)
It's not a fundraise.

Chad (39:23.062)
a guitarist or bassist or both and we can switch off and a drummer, you know, and somebody who can just sing or I can sing a few songs. Just something, right? Just some sort of outlet, even if we just do bad covers, you know, and even if, yeah, we used to do bad covers in my old band, it was great.

Cal Meadows (39:26.332)
Yeah.

Cal Meadows (39:40.588)
Next time I come up your way, I'll have to bring, I have a five string that I'm really fond of. I'll bring her up your way. But I just think that music as a communal outlet is so important. And in a world where there's this like, you know, purported loneliness epidemic, what better way to, you know, navigate that than to start playing more music together? Even if it's like bad art, better bad art than no art, right? I mean, like, people, bands like Crass still put music out and people love Crass.

Chad (39:45.151)
Yeah, definitely.

Chad (40:07.702)
Hahaha

Cal Meadows (40:09.688)
No, I mean, I like some of the deep crass cuts, but I mean, if they can be hits making music that I think Pitchfork would probably hate, then I mean, Pitchfork will hate anything, but still.

Chad (40:21.806)
Pitchfork gave Steely Dan albums like, you know, ones and two, so I still have beef with Pitchfork. Then they went back and revised them, so you know, I think they've absolved themselves. They did, yeah.

Cal Meadows (40:25.9)
top shirt.

They better have. I also went back and revised like Taylor Swift reviews though. So I mean, the arbiters of tastes that people my age would have you think it's all about the need, what do you think about the needle drop that guy?

Chad (40:33.752)
Hahaha

Chad (40:42.555)
Oh, I don't know the needle drop guy.

Cal Meadows (40:44.472)
I don't, I can't remember. I'm so bad with these guys' names. But there's this one music influencer, he's actually on Connecticut Public Radio. And he, what is this guy's name? I'm so bad about this. Anthony Fantano. Yeah, he's a music critic. And he mostly talks about alternative and also kind of like MC era hip hop and rap.

Chad (40:59.532)
Okay.

Cal Meadows (41:09.172)
And he's also harshly critical the way that pitchfork is, but he has more reasonable justifications and he likes to talk a lot to his critics. So you should check his stuff out. I'm surprised you haven't heard of him.

Chad (41:17.674)
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I haven't, but I'll definitely have to look him up. I've...

Cal Meadows (41:23.312)
definitely some of the stuff that you're into. You got me into some of the MC era hip hop stuff like LL Cool J and pink cookies in a plastic baguette and crushed pecker lollies of course. That was definitely that is definitely on one of the mixtapes you made perhaps for my mother and not so much for 11 year old me again.

Chad (41:32.618)
I fuck got you on to that so long. I don't have any recollection of that

Chad (41:44.999)
I would hope not. Yeah, I think that was on your mom's mix, not yours.

Cal Meadows (41:48.312)
Oh, she used to play that stuff for me all the time, though, and I'd be like, this is cool. I, this will not alter my brain chemistry. Yeah, I know she would always play the mixes you'd make for her for me too. Um, so I mean, whatever.

Chad (41:54.042)
hahahaha

Chad (42:04.291)
I think I tried in vain to get her more into hip hop and that sort of thing, but I think I gave up and just sort of putting more of the more radio friendly or not so hardcore MC type stuff on her mixes like LL and that sort of thing.

Cal Meadows (42:10.326)
See you tomorrow.

Cal Meadows (42:17.22)
Yeah. You'd be surprised though, she's very open-minded with like 95% of stuff. She just hates Sofian Stevens. She hates the lilt in his voice, I think. And also to be fair, like a lot of his, I don't agree with a lot of the mixing and mastering of a lot of his newer albums, but she just, we have like a running gag where every time I mention Sofian she like gags. I think apart from that, she's like very open-minded musically, so maybe you should show her like MC Ren and see what she thinks.

Chad (42:38.734)
Hahaha

Cal Meadows (42:46.524)
We're like, god damn it, show her, show her ex gonna give it to ya. Mom, I know you're watching this, open spot of...

Chad (42:51.296)
NWA. I'm sure she's heard X gonna give it to you. That song was everywhere.

Cal Meadows (42:58.117)
I mean, perhaps, but no, I do think that a lot of, and I think now that I'm an adult, she and I have been talking more about our musical tastes. I mean, like I said, I've been listening to a lot of, these days I listen to a lot of like Funk and Soul at work as it like helps keep me awake. And she's like, oh, you should listen to Never Too Much by Luther Van Ross. And I'm like, I know a little bit of Luther, but not a lot. And that song is again, like my entire personality.

Chad (43:13.088)
Yeah.

Chad (43:20.195)
Hahaha

Cal Meadows (43:21.348)
Not a day goes by when I'm not just like, a thousand kisses for you is never too much. And I'm like, that's how I mean.

Chad (43:27.826)
Nice.

Cal Meadows (43:29.4)
And I mean, I'm really into Teddy Pendergrass right now. He's like been getting me through Teddy Pendergrass. He's been getting me through my work days. So I have like three main playlists that play at work. I have my Funkin' Soul soundtrack that I curated. I have a Boston Ova playlist, and it's called like, it's like a Spotify, like easy 70s playlist. And it's got like Jim Crochet and like Gordon Lightfoot. And I know that you're more of a Carly person than a James person, but I've got lots of James Taylor.

Chad (43:32.891)
Ah.

Chad (43:54.006)
hahahaha

Cal Meadows (43:56.036)
my mom texted me, she's like make me you know you know he likes Carly more than James and I'm like

Chad (44:00.903)
I am team Carly a thousand percent. Listen, hey, I respect his music, it's just not... Yeah, listen, I like some of his stuff, but he just is not somebody I reach for to listen to. You know what I mean? Like, if he comes on the radio, I'm probably going to switch the station. If Carly Simon comes on, I'm probably going to listen. You know, I'm not going to lie. Yeah.

Cal Meadows (44:02.368)
I'm team James, I'm sorry.

Gorilla is one of the best albums of all time.

Cal Meadows (44:14.544)
Yeah, I know I get it.

Cal Meadows (44:19.528)
That's fair. Boys in the Trees is a masterpiece though. And a lot of And You're So Vain is like probably one of the if you were to study the art and craft of songwriting, And You're So Vain is like definitely a song you should study but

Chad (44:31.382)
Oh, it's up there. So wait, that's an interesting thread we can tackle. What are some other songs that were popular, dare I say hits, but are like lessons in songwriting? I have one, and you're probably gonna hate it, but I have to say it.

Cal Meadows (44:47.738)
Ooh. Let me check my playlist. Okay, I'm listening. Tell me what yours is.

Chad (44:52.126)
Uh, Baby One More Time by Britney Spears. I don't care what.

Cal Meadows (44:54.764)
No, but it is for pop songs, it so is. It's got the 451. No, you're so right. Speak your piece. I'm sorry.

Chad (45:01.454)
I don't care what anybody says and everybody can hate on Britney and hate the whole, it's not just a bop, it's a master class in songwriting. And I think Max, I can't think of his name, I think he wrote it, the guy that did like a lot of the pop hits in the 90s. Just the structure of the song. And I had this revelation with the song when I was in the band in the late 90s because I had bought myself a Korg keyboard.

Cal Meadows (45:04.76)
It's a bob.

Cal Meadows (45:15.016)
See you soon.

Chad (45:31.57)
that was like a semi-professional performing, well, professional, I guess, performing keyboard. And it had this very ancient MIDI interface on it. And we were getting into songs that we didn't have instruments for, and we wanted to be able to do more stuff that we could get better gigs with in bars, right? Because nobody wanted to hear like Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam and, you know. Yeah, but the kind of places that we wanted to play.

Cal Meadows (45:39.725)
Oh man.

Cal Meadows (45:52.817)
I want to hear that. Tripping on a hole in a paper heart, doing a MIDI cover. I love that song.

Chad (45:58.258)
We did, well we did trip it on a whole like, you know, organically. Great song, but we had to start peppering in some disco, some clubs, like, you know, like some dance, not club stuff, dance stuff, right, that sort of thing. So we had songs that already had keyboard parts in it. I bought this fancy keyboard and I started teaching myself how to program stuff. And at the time, like, you know, with the internet sort of being relatively young, you could just download all these pre-baked MIDI.

Cal Meadows (46:07.387)
Oregon area.

Chad (46:23.35)
programs for like a lot of songs. And I figured out a way to download them, throw them on a floppy disk, which my keyboard had on board. Throw the floppy disk in, and then I would have to put the MIDI file into Cakewalk, if you remember Cakewalk. So I would throw the MIDI file into Cakewalk.

Cal Meadows (46:30.376)
The floppy disk comes back.

Cal Meadows (46:37.928)
I do remember keeping stone art, yeah I do. My dad kept stone art.

Chad (46:45.626)
make all the edits, right? And then assign all the instruments and look at the way things were structured. And then I'd have to download that into the keyboard and then go through and using the actual keyboard interface map everything, all the different tracks to the different sounds that I wanted, right? So, you know, horn stabs, I had to pick the one that sounded the most like the record. We would do, you know, whatever like synth parts or, you know, piano parts or whatever. And I have to pick the different instruments out of the banks of instruments on the keyboard.

And then when I have a relatively finished product, my drummer would play along to this with a click track and his headphones, and we were able to do like KC and the Sunshine Band and like all kinds of cool stuff that had like horns and keyboards and things that we couldn't play, right? So, and didn't have the personnel to do. So anyway, all of this to say is, I found a website that had like a zip file of like 30 or 40 MIDI songs that was all like current popular stuff or like, you know, pop songs.

Cal Meadows (47:23.321)
Oh wow.

Chad (47:41.118)
and the Britney song was in there. And I just threw it into Cakewalk to see what it looked like because I was joking with the band that we were gonna cover it. And I was looking at the song structure and listening to all the different parts and how it all kinda came together. And I was like, holy shit, this is amazing. Ha ha ha.

Cal Meadows (47:57.192)
It's really interesting. There are a lot of moving parts in there. I mean, there's like, there's a vocal harmony that you don't really listen to unless you really listen for the, the da-d I know, so just in terms of like, what makes a really effective catchy pop song with a hook that is really punchy and memorable. It's a bop, it works. It works. The best thing is it stands the test of time. It really does. It is. It is, it's true. They don't do a-

Chad (48:04.683)
Right.

Chad (48:14.178)
Hahaha!

Chad (48:18.73)
It does. It's evergreen. And when Fountains of Wayne covers it, you just know it's a good song because Adam Schlesinger is one of the best songwriters of our generation, I think.

Cal Meadows (48:29.156)
Agreed. I certainly agree. And you know, Katy Perry does a good cover of Hackensack of all people. I'm not her biggest fan, but I do think that's a good cover. cover. cover. She does it in the original key, which I respect because that's not an easy key to sing in, as I recently discovered. So I have two answers. And I like pop music that's kind of refrain heavy. My first one is I Saw the Light by Todd Rundgren.

Chad (48:34.238)
Yes, yes.

No.

Chad (48:42.516)
No.

Okay, great.

Chad (48:50.999)
Yeah!

Cal Meadows (48:51.82)
I think it's really effective having the chorus just kind of be two lines long and kind of a refrain that you come back to. The rhyme scheme is very simple, but you know, it doesn't have to be that overly dramatic when that piano, that really punchy piano sound is really in there and really guiding you forward and it's really driving. And the repetition of the, in my eyes part at the end, like that's just, it's such a gratifying experience.

Cal Meadows (49:21.994)
in the repetition, I think is really effective. And also in terms of refrain based music, which again is what I'm like really into right now, Ooh Child by The Five Stair Steps. That is one of my favorite songs. And again, it's just, it's very simple, but it's got that modulation halfway through the someday, that part, when like it changes the key, I'm being ridiculous right now. But I think that kind of does a similar thing to Hit Me Baby One More Time to help keep you engaged.

Chad (49:30.935)
Oh yes.

Chad (49:45.624)
Yes.

Cal Meadows (49:51.42)
where it just like it builds on the complexity as it keeps going. And I think that's what makes for a really interesting song writing, even though the lyrics might be a little more simple, the chords might be a little more simple. But there are other things to add that delicious complexity that I think that you really latches on to.

Chad (50:07.618)
For sure, and I agree. Like it builds into this sort of crescendo, if you will. I mean, not literally, but like, you know, just conceptual crescendo. Yeah, exactly. And then it just sort of, it just hits that release when you get to the chorus or the middle eight or whatever part of the song. So that's just the key to giving me chills when I'm listening. Yeah. Yeah, those are good examples. Steely Dan Song that...

Cal Meadows (50:16.966)
our lives.

Cal Meadows (50:24.422)
Yeah.

Cal Meadows (50:29.516)
It's just perfect.

Chad (50:37.374)
you think is the best in terms of not just, you know, liking, but in terms of songwriting and really? Huh.

Cal Meadows (50:41.34)
Turn That Heartbeat Over Again.

Well, okay, so when it comes to mind first, that and Midnite Cruiser is my favorite Steely Dan song, so I'll plug that one. But I really like, again, the refrain again, I like that it's just like this wacky ass one. Oh Michael, oh Jesus. I love the way they say that too. But in terms of actual artistry and songwriting, it's gotta be Midnite Cruiser. The fact that it opens with like almost not a condemnation, but like an invitation.

Chad (50:49.676)
Yes.

Chad (50:56.524)
Oh, Michael, oh, Jesus, yeah.

Cal Meadows (51:14.626)
long dead by the time this was being written um and just the wistful feeling that it's able to capture this like nostalgia for a place in time you've never felt before and I was taking this song really personally before i even knew what like loss was, it's like a strong emotion and i was like oh i just feel this like visceral grief from this song that like

Chad (51:32.683)
Yeah.

Cal Meadows (51:33.936)
I just feel like that you can take that on. And that's one of the things that Dan does really well is to evoke all these amazing emotions and stories that like you take that and make that a part of yourself. And I think that Dan does that in a way that not a lot of other groups are able to do. But I do think that Turn That Heartbeat Over Again is surprisingly good songwriting for being such an unpopular kind of like not as cool song from that album.

Chad (51:58.414)
There are so many deep, Dan cuts that just hit a certain way for me that people, you know, like, you know, not the hits are not the popular choices, I guess. But one of the more popular ones, and I think my personal favorite in terms of how the song is crafted and how things build is Gaucho. Just that soaring chorus when everything kind of kicks in and takes off. And yes.

Cal Meadows (52:06.524)
Yeah.

Cal Meadows (52:17.298)
Mmm. I love gaucho.

Cal Meadows (52:23.48)
It's that sonic world I keep talking about, it's just transporter in the same way that like, um, a lot of things on Asia are the same way. Like even Peg, which is just a simple, like linear song, tell a songwriting story. You get wrapped up in like the da, like that, that ostinato just, it just takes you and Gaucho does the same thing. It's just, you forget about your life for a few minutes while Gaucho is on. And that's the kind of music I'm trying to write. As soon as someone will get me a brass band, damn it, and a brass band grant.

Chad (52:44.756)
Hahaha

Chad (52:52.576)
We'll take you to the custard dome. So do we miss anything? Is there anything else you wanted to cover? Because I think we're getting close to our time together. But yeah.

Cal Meadows (52:54.76)
Finally. You scared drop me off. Do a number there.

Cal Meadows (53:05.765)
Yeah, I think this is great. I'm sure I'll be on again sometime and I'll have plenty more zeppelin stuff.

Chad (53:11.422)
You absolutely will and we will definitely have to dig deeper into Zeppelin. But Cal, thank you so much for being here. You didn't really have a choice, but... But I'm glad you're a willing participant, so I appreciate it, yes. But absolutely. And lovely as always talking music with you. And yeah, definitely have to have you back soon.

Cal Meadows (53:17.988)
Thank you for having me. I know, I kind of did. I kind of did. What was I gonna do, say no? Like... Oh, always, of course. My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Cal Meadows (53:37.938)
Yes, likewise. Would love to. Thank you so much. Auf Wiedersehen.

Chad (53:39.954)
Alright, I'll talk to you later. Bye.

Cal Meadows (53:44.334)
Bye.