Last night I saw Saul Williams (http://www.saulwilliams.com/) perform for a small gathering of folks at Cornerstone Promotions' offices in NYC to celebrate the release of his new album The Inevitable Rise and and Liberation of Niggy Tardust! He performed three spoken word pieces and debuted a music video. It had been a while since I have watched a spoken word performance, and I was blown away by the passion of his delivery and his remarkable grasp of word play. I almost felt like he was a Shakespearean actor in the way that he molded and delivered the consonants and vowels from his mouth. And sure enough, I checked his website and he is also an actor. It all comes full circle. Full circle.
More importantly, John and I had a chance to chat it up with Williams post-performance and find out more about his writing process, which I personally found very provocative as a lyricist and songwriter so I thought I'd share it with all y'all. He described how it starts with the music, and then listens to that and does his first pass just trying to find how he wants the lyrics to be delivered, so he will literally record a track of just sounds of consonants and vowels and how they will pop in the relation to the music with an occasional word here and there. Then he listens through that and starts doing a pass at writing actual lyrics that will create that auditory effect in those particular places in the song. It's always nice to see intelligent, creative people get the attention they deserve and I hope Williams continues to get cred for his art. I, for one, and going to take a crack at writing some songs the way he does and see what I come up with. Who knows, maybe next show I'll be getting all up in some spoken word...
John, I elect you to bang on the steel stool for the beat. It's either that, or we duke it out in a battle of words on stage, and you better hope they don't ask you to spell out your verses. Just saying... HA! :)
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5 comments:
Yo - my spelling is perfectly fine. Surizly. Fo Reelz.
Check out theze Vidz of some awzzum Saul songs:
Saul Williams - List of Demands
Saul Williams - Black Stacey
Knock knock.
I just added a "Recent Comments" widget to the blog. let's see how she works!
ok ok. I am posting a comment app again. the first one was sucking. I hope this one doesn't suck.
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great job, johno. only thing is that now when you comment you come up as "Syvia," which is awkward cause i never said that stuff, nor would i ever refer to a widget as a 'she.' that's such a guy thing to say.
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