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A very enjoyable interview with Brian Eno, mostly about his new album The Ship. Also about his process and some memories of working with David Bowie and Robert Fripp.
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A very enjoyable interview with Brian Eno, mostly about his new album The Ship. Also about his process and some memories of working with David Bowie and Robert Fripp. -
the song from his new album
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It is pretty amazing how much influence VU has had on music, and people's perceptions of it, across so many genres and generations. A great cover and perfectly fitting way to close the album I think.
Eno explains, “The first time I ever heard [The Velvet Underground] was on a John Peel radio show… it was when their first album came out and I thought “This I like! This I want to know about!”. I was having a huge crisis at the time. Am I going to be a painter or am I somehow going to get into music. And I couldn’t play anything so music was the less obvious choice. Then, when I heard The Velvet Underground I thought, “you can do both actually”. It was a big moment for me.
Why did you decide to cover I'm Set Free?
I recorded it twelve or thirteen years ago, but I changed it a little bit for this final version. I've always loved the song. It has so many elements of songwriting I like, not many chords! Nearly all the songs I really, really like, when I look at them closely, they're three or four chords. There's usually a very interesting distribution of the chords. One of the chords on I'm Set Free, if it's a thirty-two-bar sequence, occurs for one bar. It's the real oddity in the thing.
The third VU album is one of your favourites, isn't it?
It's one of my big albums, I guess. It made a huge impact on me and it has done ever since. They broke so many rules. Look what it did with drumming! Instead of having a hairy guy hitting a big drum kit, there's a girl with one drum and she plays the simplest things. You have Lou, who was an enthusiastic but not great guitar player. I thought, 'Wow, I can probably play like that.' Sterling [Morrison] was fantastic; a very lyrical player. Early on, you had John [Cale] playing viola. John had worked with La Monte Young, so had Lou. That band represented a convergence of a lot of thoughts. At that time, I was playing with the Scratch Orchestra and the whole subtext of that is that art students were the best musicians because they didn't know how to play things, they were more likely to make original choices. Nearly all of the Scratch Orchestra were art students and nearly all of the Portsmouth Sinfonia was art students as well. So these foundational institutions from that time were people who'd come through an education that said, in a way, craft is not the issue. Ideas are the issue. approaches, processes.
Much more on the album at the last linkLast edited by Ambire Seiche; 05-31-2016, 12:47 AM.Comment
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