Interview Excerpt -- Daniel Smith

For this interview, I spoke with a former colleague of mine about his musical preferences, regarding both taste in music and use of technologies. Smith went into great detail through the interview, and the responses I have selected for summary below only glimpse some of the broader issues addressed. Unfortunately, the audio recording I made--speaker phone to digital recording--peaked throughout the interview and unfortunately is very distorted. However, if anyone would like to read the full transcript, it is posted here.


Q: With the mood-related music, is there one aspect of it you tend to relate to—tempo, beat, lyrics, aesthetics, etc?

It’s a balance often. I’m absolutely interested in lyrical content and there are artists such as, oh well, without getting too specific, someone like Bob Dylan, who fascinates me as well as others because the lyrical content is so important. However there are other realms too, rhythm particularly—I grew up in a household with an older brother and sister and my musical tastes were very much influenced by theirs. And oddly enough, about the time that I would’ve been a young teenager, it was the punk incursion in America, as well as shortly thereafter sort of the start of rap and hip-hop music, but more significantly I think for me was that my sister had just traveled to Jamaica. She had brought back records from that country that were absolutely riveting to my brother and me. So there has always been that attention to heavily rhythmic music like rap and reggae, both of which remain very important to me.

Q: From what you’ve said about your history with vinyl records and other formats, I have to ask what new technologies you use in discovering/listening to music—iPod, iTunes, MySpace, Pandora?

Primarily iTunes. I find it absolutely fascinating and I got into it in this way. There was a part of my collection that was simply not appearing on vinyl for a long period of time so I would continue to look for traces of it out there and now of course as more time has passed more and more of what in the marketplace would be obscure recordings or not previously commercially a viable recording, in other words 10, 20, 30 years old, are appearing now, and it’s so much easier to look back through iTunes and pick out several of the songs that I liked or remembered. Also within that realm, there was always a tension in years past, you never got to preview a vinyl album unless they had one on in the store and of course I’m talking about ancient history here. Now however if there’s an album, for example, if I’m thinking about the new Lil’ Wayne album… heard the big hit, perhaps in the club perhaps on the radio and I want to know what the rest is like, well, I can actually sample it online, and I think it’s absolutely wonderful. Oddly enough it hasn’t led to greater increased purchases for me, in terms of purchasing entire albums based on this or along the lines of purchasing specific songs. That tends to be a mean too now in my listening which is, I tend not to be as much out of focus as perhaps I once was. I’m much more into preparing mixes or different compilations and that tends to be very rewarding for me and they even have a new feature on iTunes, it’s a button where if you selected a specific song in your library it will arrange a mix for you based on its interpretation of the qualities of that song and I find that delightful.


Q: Touching on what you’ve said earlier, what is your relationship with live music and what do you get out of it as opposed to recorded music?

I started going to live performances when I was a teenager, and I’m racking my brain now to try to remember a touchstone live performance and it probably wont come right to the surface. However, I did start going when I was a teenager. The interesting part of it was I think I initially went probably out of that teenage desire to just get out of your house and do something fun with your friends and all the rest. But you’re also very much too a part, not just of experiencing the music, but many of the initial concerts that I went to were a part of that whole fandom that many of us lived in to in that age. It was not just that you needed to see a live recreation of your favorite song or album, but you really wanted to see that performer and you wanted to have that physical experience of being in the same room with them. I still remain a fan of certain performers, but it doesn’t have that same emotional resonance that it might have at say the age of 15 or 16, being in the same room with someone you considered the greatest artist that year. It’s interesting, because I’ve had this conversation with friends, I’m obviously, as any concertgoer, I’ve been to some pretty bad ones where nothing lived up to what you thought it would be, but I think I tend to go to concerts now with a different perception and that is the performance aspect of it. An art form, which is the presentation of music in concert. Certainly I’m still going to them, in fact, as I’ve gotten older, one of the things that has happened is that I’ve become a more frequent traveler to shows. I just came back from Montreal, and the reason I had gone there was to see Nick Cave perform, and that was fascinating for me because I’d first seen him in ’83. And I’d seen a lot of him in the 80’s when he toured more frequently. The first time I saw Nick Cave was the birthday party show. But it was very interesting because Nick has just turned 50 I believe, and nothing could have stopped me from going to that show. I had to see where he was you know I’ve followed his released work and recorded for him, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen him physically, publicly, you know, not since the 90s.
Although if you had asked me though at the age of 15 or 16 if I would ever go see Bob Dylan, I would have dismissed that as not really a probable concert that I would see, possibly because I associated him with the 1960s and having much less to do with my time. Now however? I will travel to go see him, in fact just last year I traveled to go see him. Often the people I will travel to go see are people with whom I’ve had a long history with, I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing but I’ve actually now seen Bob Dylan in a hockey rink in Rochester, MN. I drove to Missouri, maybe 7 or 8 hours, to see the Fall perform in a strip mall, simply because they weren’t going to be performing where I was. Maybe part of it too Steve, is that some of these artists will not be performing in the future, that some of them are getting up there. But part of it is still that excitement of the concert experience that each one is going to be totally different and some of them have just been epic.