Excellent music blog

I stumbled upon a new music blog the other day. The 'about' page gives a little bit of background, but no name and no dates. Maybe that's just as well. So far I've only read a few pieces and have enjoyed them: the no-name author seems to like much of the same music that I do.

A recent post was about master arranger Paul Buckminster, who is well known as having been the arranger for David Bowie's "Space Oddity". Without going into details about this article, there is a very important quote from Buckminster (who died a few years ago), when talking about arranging the early Elton John songs:

The delayed entry of the rhythm section makes it more dramatic, and serves to lift the piece into a more propulsive mood. One general rule is to hold back as much as possible, to give the listener the chance to let the song grow and unfold, introducing new sonic elements, such as new instruments or sectional groupings. If you use everything from the beginning, you have nowhere to go.

This principle was called 'the staggered entry' by Ian MacDonald when writing about The Beatles: a good example would be 'Day Tripper'. But The Beatles generally only used this approach for their intros: the instrumentation during songs would be fairly constant.

I have been working during the past week on a song that was written 42 years ago and first arranged 22 years ago, bearing a very strong and mature lyric. In updating the arrangement for Reason, my main goal was thinning out the notes. There are very few notes that I have added, but quite a lot has been subtracted. Parts have been moved around, assigned to different instruments and even split into two, further deepening the sound. The solo section is played by three instruments which make their initial appearance at this stage, one of which then disappears.

I used a little trick, which is also my form of musical joke, or tribute: the intro also appears as the coda, and these few bars form the introduction to King Crimson's 'Starless' (just the mellotron chords). I only needed to sing the song once, but at the moment I'm too close to the song  to decide whether the current mix is the final one (and that's after about six previous mixes, each slightly changing the equalisation settings on the vocal).