music moots with PHONE TIME's Kristin Merrilees ("Keep Your Head" by David O'Dowda)
We are extremely back with Music Moots™, the blogseries where I ask someone to recommend me a song they like, and then I listen to the song and then write a little about it.
Today we have Kristin Merrilees, who writes an amazing publication called PHONE TIME "about internet culture, technology, media, and everything in between." (She's also very good at making memes.) I learned about PHONE TIME in an Embedded piece called "Is the ‘internet culture reporter’ job dead?"; internet culture reporting is one of my favorite things and Kristin's commitment to it—covering the Clippy profile picture movement, profiling an artist who made a "poetic website" about grief, tracking the edits to the Wikipedia article for the My Weekend as a 28-Year-Old-In-Chicago video—is admirable, dare I say essential.
Also I pitched her an interview about I Enjoy Music and she graciously accepted. It was frankly wild to do a Zoom interview and read my own words back when that's what I've been doing with other people for so long.
Kristin Merrilees
Kristin recommended the 2016 song "Keep Your Head" by David O'Dowda. "I think I had first heard it as this Netflix series’ intro theme years ago, but it somehow popped into my mind around two months ago and I’ve been listening to it again recently. Very grounding to me!"
FIRST IMPRESSION: love this. Chill beep boops a la The Postal Service, soft vocals, a verrrry gentle build that gradually pours more and more calm vibrations into the ear canal...am imagining an old painting of a lady with a pitcher, Vermeer maybe...can definitely see this as a cellular reset song.
SECOND IMPRESSION: I didn't know who David O'Dowda was, so I looked him up and a good portion of his public output seems to be music specifically made for placement in film and television. He's an associate of the label Velvet Ears, subsidiary of Extreme Music, a production music arm of Sony. I'm not sure if "Keep Your Head" was created custom for the Netflix series Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On, or if it was just in the library and fit the title sequence well, but either way the song is music created to be licensed by secondary media, which makes it all the more interesting to me.
Now the bleep bloops come into focus as a signature part of contemporary streaming television: ARPEGGIATION. That's when a chord is played as individual, successive, sometimes 'broken'-sounding notes. "Arpeggio" comes from the Italian "arpeggiare," "to play like a harp." Such fracturing of chords creates tension...perfect for introducing a television program.
[BONUS IMPRESSION: When I first moved to New York after college, I had an internship at a tech startup, but it paid $50 a day plus I wasn't sure if it'd turn into a full-time thing, so I spent a lot of my first summer in the city running around interviewing at jobs. There was one application process for an entry-level marketing job at a production music library that went so well. I did a couple rounds of interviewing and was convinced I had it. I didn't get it, obviously, but I still think about it sometimes...what a special job for a baby music writer!! Sliding Doors vibes...what could have been?]
THIRD IMPRESSION: I could probably write a whole thing on television intro music, how it has changed over time, what is a "good" intro vs. a "bad" one, etc. Maybe someday, but in the meantime I leave you with two short TV music anecdotes. One is that, when I was fairly pregnant and everything was making me emotional, I was watching television and Family Matters came on and the theme song hit me so hard in the feelios that I burst into tears. Two is that the baby is now here, which means a lot of couch time, so husband Chris has been playing the new Peacemaker season and their new song is...a downgrade, sorry. Season one superior. In the right mood I can sing THROW THAT DOG AN INVISIBLE BONE all day.
Thank you Kristin! PLEASE subscribe to PHONE TIME, it rips.
And thanks for reading I Enjoy Music! If you like it, tell a friend.
