So we've all heard about the child prodigy, and the crazy scheme where the parent has the kid smear some finger paint around then sells it as modern art- this is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how awesome my daughter Amelia is going to grow up to be, living in Portland with its diversely wonderful music scene and growing up with our weird family.
Amelia's mom, my lovely wife Kayla, is a tattooed slinkster cool chick, and she's been encouraging baby to listen to everything from Modest Mouse to Mates of State to Lil' John. Sure, why not. I've been all over the map, dancing around with baby in my arms to Justice and Barry Adamson and M83. She gets a healthy dose of Neil Young and Leonard Cohen at grandma's house. I'm pretty sure her babysitter plays a bunch of weird slack-key guitar polynesian stuff and potentially some contemporary classical. There's your musical foundation, which anyone can tell you is very important to having a healthy and eclectic musical life.
This is the age of teh Intarweb, and you could get all that in the comfort of your own headphones, but I feel very happy that we are in such a wonderful town as PDX. Our blog is a great example of how we're interweaving our liking of music so that others can find it too. I'm glad to be a part of it. As Amelia grows up she will be exposed not just to the truly terrible but very earnest riot grrl band in the house next door, but the Cuban music concerts in the park, and PDXPop, and more shows that I play with my band, and shows at the zoo, and maybe things that I can't even anticipate. Will she want to go see some horrid teeniebopper it-girl-of-the-week? Maybe. She'd better have a damn good reason. Daddy is a critical philosophy douchebag, remember.
One last thing, and this ties in with what I was talking about at the very beginning. Since she was born, Amelia has been my constant companion as I have been teaching myself the basics of keyboard and electronic composition, and reinventing myself as a songwriter. Now that she is an 8-month-old wiggle worm, for a month or so she's enjoyed the privilege of sitting on my lap and banging on the MIDI controller like a big girl. She seems to really enjoy the fact that she's producing crazy prog rock noodling, and I had the great idea of recording her stuff and looping it. So, this music is all her playing, I just set up the virtual instruments and looped them together. Then I set it to some videos for awesomeness. Enjoy!
3 comments:
This is awesome! How lucky she is to grow up in such a musically nurturing family. Sort of reminds me of the Booya Reggae kids on youtube.
I enjoy precision and mastery of craft as well as anyone. But I think the true power of music lies within the playful childlike wonder and joy of pure creation that so many of us lose with age.
kids rule. My little brother used to sing the best songs about things like pumpkins and thomas the train but now he just likes pokemon and thinks that stuff is dorky :(. he wants to play the drums though, so there's still hope.
Heh, my little little bro(14 now) had aspirations to be a metal singer at one point (we jammed on some White Zombie- he's normally a marimba player). He at least listens to MGMT and Ratatat and such nowadays instead of Hannah Montana or whatever. My other little bro(21 now) is pretty eclectic, and seems to be running some sort of record label that has signed the Old Believers and Double Dutch. Or something. We haven't really talked much about it. Ya gotta love family.
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