Episode 5 — Nordic creativity, grand pianos and AI emo
This episode turns into an unplanned Norwegian special. Fresh from workshops in Northern Norway, Steve unpacks how a high-spec studio, trust, and a refusal to hide behind notation can flip young brass and wind players from cautious sight-readers into confident composers. It’s a practical guide to creative ownership: no sheet music safety net, no waiting to be “good enough”, just structured play, collective writing and performances where teenagers end up confidently conducting bands that include visiting pros.
Back in the studio, Entertaining Noises zooms in on a beautiful Fazioli grand piano with young pianist Birk: dynamic range, overtones, pedals, resonance tricks and why good instruments change how you play. Then Genre Tombola lands on emo pop, so Steve calls in long-time friend Lawrence Francis (LK Francis) to map the journey from Weezer and Saves The Day to My Chemical Romance, power chords, eyeliner, and why AI-assisted lyrics over chunky guitars somehow still feel extremely 2000s-human.
What we cover
Nordic creativity labs: Workshops in Northern Norway with the North Norway Jazz Centre; turning a retro BBC-style studio into a playground for young musicians; writing by ear; composing in groups; directing ensembles as teenagers; and murdering the myth that creativity “belongs” to virtuosos.
Beating blank-page syndrome: Style-first prompts, mood-based writing, lights-off sessions, winter-and-darkness sound worlds and other concrete tricks for starting new pieces.
Entertaining Noises — Fazioli grand: With Birk — touch, responsiveness, extreme soft playing, three-string unisons, sustain and sostenuto pedals, overtones, resonance and why stage placement and lid position matter.
Harmonics & overtones in action: Simple, audible demonstrations that quietly smuggle physics into piano geekery.
Genre Tombola — emo pop: With Lawrence Francis — from emotional hardcore roots to MTV-era hooks; power chords, palm-muted chugs, loud/quiet dynamics, melodic choruses, whiny (in a good way) vocals and big, cathartic singalongs.
AI + emo: Lawrence’s Christmas emo track built from Steve’s drums and ChatGPT lyrics — as a case study in collaboration, pastiche and why constraints help, not hurt.
Further listening & links
Full Transcript
Verbatim transcript, reflowed into paragraphs for readability only. No wording changes.
Hello, my name is Steve Pretty. I am a musician, composer, and performer from London, and welcome to my podcast, Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces. This is the show that sets out to help you to hear and understand music in new ways. Now, last episode, I used my slightly flawed performance at a Remembrance Day service to talk about musical harmonics. And then I talked to the brilliant singer Nicole Cassandra-Smith about singing from the head, singing from the chest, singing from the heart, of course, singing from the nose, and even singing from the bum. And then, of course, I moved on to discuss the niche genre of death grind with my guest, the comedian and musician Andrew O'Neill. Really interesting deep dive into that niche genre crossover between death metal and hardcore punk. So really, really enjoyed that. And we made a track together, a very, very, very heavy track full of blast beats and growled vocals and all sorts of things. So it's a really mixed episode, all sorts of stuff going on. And this episode is no different. Coming up in today's show, we have a kind of impromptu Norwegian special in a way. I've been working in Norway since the last episode was recorded, as I'll talk about a bit more in the show. And so I'm gonna have some Norwegian guests introducing you to some new concepts, some new instruments, all sorts of stuff. And then towards the end of the episode, I'm gonna be diving into the randomly selected genre of emo pop with an old friend of mine and emo pop fan, Lawrence Francis, who's also very kindly made me an incredible emo pop track with the help of Chat GPT. It's a lot of fun. Stick around. Here we go. But first, as I mentioned earlier, I am working in Norway at the moment. In fact, I'm recording this right now in Oslo, on my way back from the project I'm gonna talk about shortly. And just quick shout out to absolutely amazing new library in Oslo, right next to the opera house. I just popped in because the friend I'm staying with in Oslo mentioned if I needed to do some work, I should come here, and he's not wrong. It's incredible. It's got views over the fjord. There's four or five floors, and the floor I'm on at the moment has got music books, sheet music, CDs. It's got a turntable if you want to practise your DJing. It's got CDJs. The little place next to where I'm recording this is a little mini music studio so that you can go and practise your music production techniques. And this is, I'm in a podcast studio. I'm in a dedicated podcast studio, which I didn't know existed until I turned up here. I turned up here. I realised it was going to be free about 10 minutes after I discovered it. Booked online and sure enough, here I am 15 minutes later, recording in an incredibly high specced podcast studio, completely for free, overlooking the fjord. Oh my Lord, I love Norway. I've worked here a lot. I've been very lucky over the years to work here a lot. And it is honestly one of my favourite places. So yeah, I'm just delighted to be working here more over the next year or so. So apologies in advance if you hear quite a lot of Norway content over the next year or so, but man, what a place. So yeah, thank you to the Norwegians for having me and to this
amazing library and podcast studio so that I could get some podcast recording done while I was away. Now, the main purpose of being away was to work with some young musicians up in Northern Norway. So up near the Arctic, place called Berda, really beautiful place. Not that we saw much of it because it was only light about two or three hours a day. And all of those hours we were working in the studio. We had an amazing studio to work in. I think the BBC apparently set it up back in the 60s. And so it's got this cool kind of retro feel, but of course, kitted out with loads of modern things. And just the thought of working in this studio, which reminded me a bit of BBC Maid of Veil, very cool, large studio that you could maybe even record a small orchestra in. And the North Norway Jazz Centre who we were working with on this project had hired it for us to run essentially an education project, kind of education workshops and master classes with these young people. And I just, the thought of that happening in the UK, someone hiring a top spec recording studio to run an education project is, let's say, it's a distant dream. So yeah, it was a really fantastic few days. We were working with young people between the age of, I suppose, about 14, 15 and mid 20s, something like that. A variety of experience ranging from the less experienced, people who played in their school band maybe, or a local marching band, that kind of thing, right through to young professionals who are just starting their careers. The thing that we set out to do is myself and my two Hackney Colliery Band colleagues, Ollie and Ed, what we set out to do was to give these musicians some sort of creative ownership over what they were doing. I think often as instrumental musicians, as all these people were, I think particularly as brass players, saxophone players, people who play, who've grown up playing classical music, jazz, that kind of thing. It can be quite hard to think in a kind of creative way to take ownership over the projects that you're doing because so much of the music education is focused understandably on technique, on getting your technique on the instrument up to a really high level. And that's fantastic. I've talked about that in other contexts on this show. Of course, I support that fully. That's absolutely brilliant. But what's often left behind in that is what I realized when I started playing with rock bands growing up at school and then especially at university. It's the ability to separate out the kind of creative process from your ability on your instrument. The ability on your instrument is to do with technique and practice. Your creative ability is also something that needs practice, but that is not necessarily about how great you are on your instrument. It can come from that, but it doesn't need to. And so playing in those rock bands where sometimes people will be the first to say they're not the greatest guitar player ever, they're not the greatest drummer ever, they're not the greatest bass player ever, but it doesn't matter because what they're doing is creating music that they want to create that comes from them, that comes from their influences, and they're not waiting to be the world's greatest guitar player in order to be able to create that music, they're doing it anyway.
And I think that's what I always try and bring to these sorts of workshops and master classes when I've done them over the years, and especially with this project, we really wanted to give these musicians some ownership over what they were creating. And I think that's what we did, it was a really intense few days, the very first thing we did was talk to everyone, let's remember as well, in a second language for these guys, mind-blowing they're able to do this in a second language, will never cease to amaze me. But we talked to them and said, look, we're not really going to use sheet music here. And I knew that this would be controversial because we'd already got quite a few requests from the North Norway Jazz Center to send through some sheet music of the bands ahead of time so that they could work on it. I sort of said, well, we can do that, but I think really what we want to do is, you know, is get them to write their own music basically and to try and do things by ear. And so there were a lot of raised eyebrows and slightly nervous looking faces when I announced this at the beginning. And then two days later, after a very intense but brilliant couple of days working on new music, on creating a whole set of music that they had written, those same nervous faces, those same teenagers who had never tried making music without sheet music before, they had not only composed the pieces that we were playing, they were standing in front of an ensemble of people, including three professional musicians from London and people who might have been older, much more experienced than them, and they were directing that music. They were conducting it, they had strong opinions about where it should go, and it was really, really inspiring to see that change. It can be a bit of a cliché sometimes to talk about working with young people being inspiring, but this truly was one of those times. I'm just going to throw over to a couple of the participants now who I had a chance to grab a quick chat with at the end of the project to give a bit of an insight into what we did and some of the different methods of composition. This might sound a bit niche if you're listening to this and you're thinking, I'm never going to write any music, but do stick with it if you can, because I think there's a bit of an insight here into ways of tapping into creativity, into avoiding that blank page syndrome where you're staring at a sheet of paper or you're sitting at an instrument and thinking, what do I do now? So here we go, I'm going to hand over to those guys. My name is Edward, I play bass. My name is Leonard and I play trumpet. It's been a lot of improvising, making new stuff, new songs. Yeah, we've been talking about improvisation and how to create music without a plan or sheet music, just going for, for example, feeling or a style, and then just jamming and just... Yeah, at least for me, and for bass guitarists and stuff like that, we don't start with learning notations. It's just a part of the playing in the beginning. You just learn how to improvise and you just have to do it in a way. As opposed to on trumpet, have you improvised very much before? A little bit. All my training has been classical. Okay, interesting. And so we've split off into small groups.
Well, we started with finding a style. We wanted to do some funk stuff and so we just ended up making a really funky thing. Yeah, it's not too much to it. That's kind of it. And finding the chords was like, okay, play whatever note you want and then we are just going to move it up half steps, a whole step, so stuff like that, until we find like, oh yeah, that chord, that was great. You know, we'll move one voice up and the other's down or whatever, until we find a good voice. What's the deal? Interesting. How did that compare with how we worked? I think we also started with finding some styles and just mentioning what sort of influences we wanted to have. And then we closed the blinds, we shut off all the lights, and everyone played some notes until we found something we liked. We said, OK, we like it, that's a quark. That's a quark. But why did we close the... I mean, this was me doing this, but why do you think I turned the lights off and closed the curtains? We did find a theme about winter and darkness, and that kind of set us in the right headspace to find that. Because we were talking about writing a tune about... that was sort of, if not about this area, but it gave a feeling of being here, so a kind of musical representation of being in Buddha in the end of November. And the words that you guys came out with, if I remember, were cold, dark, wet, and they were kind of negative words, but it's a very beautiful place. But yeah, we've had an amazing time here. We wanted to try and represent those things musically, and of course without lyrics, just in an abstract way. So I wanted to sort of get insight. Sometimes it's quite helpful when you're creating music to try and really put yourself into, you know, to get into the zone of it. And because you guys didn't know each other, most of you, and obviously you didn't know me on that first day, and so sometimes it's quite good to just try and imagine yourself out in the dark and the cold and the snow, and I was going to take us all outside and do that. That would be too extreme. But yeah, just to try and create that kind of mood, because that's what we're trying to go for with those chords, isn't it? So I guess the point is that there's lots of different routes. That's what's been so interesting to me, all the different routes that we've all taken to getting to these three pieces, which are really, they're really amazing, these pieces. We've got some really incredible moments. And they've all come from completely different, through completely different methods, some of which were a bit more, you know, a bit more theatrical, turning all the lights out, and some of which were just, okay, great, what do we like, funk, what key do we like? There we go. But it's still, the tune that, even though it was very, very funky, it was also, it's a big epic sweep with all sorts of different stuff going on. So, you know, it goes in lots of different directions. And again, having, composing as a group is, I think it's quite challenging to get it all locked in. But I think you guys worked amazingly well together, with everyone suggesting things. And yeah, but thanks very much. It's been such a
pleasure being here. And you guys are all such brilliant creative musicians, which has been very interesting and very gratifying to work with. So, yeah, thanks a lot. Thanks for coming. So thank you very much once again to these brilliant musicians and to the North Norway Jazz Centre. What a time it has been. And again, I will continue to occasionally update on this project as we go through the next year or so, because there's a lot more interesting, fun, exciting music to come, some of which you'll have heard while I was talking there. So just to finish this section, I'm just going to let some music that we made this weekend, entirely composed by the young people that we worked with and sort of shaped and sculpted by myself and Ollie and Ed from the band. I'm just going to let that play out before we move on because I think it's really special. So we come to entertaining noises. Now, reminder that this is the section where it's good to have headphones on if you can, because I'm using binaural microphones to record from the musician's perspective. So if you've got headphones, do chuck them on now. If not, don't worry, it works fine on speakers or in a car or on your smart speaker or wherever you're listening to it. That's fine. While we were in this amazing studio in Burda, I had the chance to ask the pianist we were working with, a really incredible musician, to talk about the piano. There was this beautiful grand piano we were working with in the studio. So headphones on, and here we go, deep dive into this beautiful fazioli grand piano in Burda, Norway. Would you mind just telling us who you are and introducing yourself a little bit? Yeah, my name is Birk. And I've played piano since I was six. Wow. Yeah, and I mostly play like jazz, improvising stuff. I also like classical a lot. I'm studying jazz and having classical lessons on the side in high school. And last year now. Nice. Well, we've been working together this weekend on this project, and you've brought some amazing, amazing things to this. And there's this incredible piano here. Yeah. This is a Fassi Orli. And it's definitely one of the better pianos you can get. What makes it better? It's mostly for me as the player, it's the feel of like actually playing and the feedback I get. The acoustic feedback. Yeah. And especially like a test everyone can do who has an acoustic piano is just to see how low you can play. How quietly? Only Fassi Orlis and Steinway, you can go really, really low on the best ones and still have the clarity in the sound. So what we as musicians call dynamic range, so where you can play very, very quietly to very, very loud and you're saying that on these pianos and Steinway's and some other really great pianos, you have an amazing ability to play really quietly and really loud. Yeah, definitely. Can we just demonstrate that now? Can you just play whatever you
like, a chord or tune or whatever, just maybe going from really something really, really quiet to something really, really loud. You just, I don't know if it is going to pick you up. Let me just turn this up so you can hear that. Yeah. Yeah, it keeps that, it's really rich down there. Every key has three strings, and a lot of pianos don't, I don't know why, but they don't get the full sound of all the strings when playing quietly. But these are the... Maybe we just go back to basics and explain how the piano works, like what the mechanism of the piano is. Yeah, it's just strings on the inside, here is a hammer. So the key is connected to a kind of lever, right? Which moves a hammer, which then strikes the strings. And then the strings, they're like, they're free almost all the way, and down here, it's just one, I think. At the bass end. Yeah, because they're so thick, the bass strings. Yeah, so it's just, because obviously people can't see. So up the top, they're really thin. They're as thin as maybe, thinner than a paper clip. Like, yeah. So you can hear them up here. And as you go down, and down here, this is as thick as like a big screw that you might screw something into the wall with. So really, really thick down there and really thin up here. We were talking about the three strings. And so when the hammer hits the strings, what happens then? Sorry, I know you're doing this in English. Yeah, it's kind of hard with the words. The dampers, these. Yeah, so these are little bits of wood. Yeah, with felt on them. With bits of felt underneath, yeah. And these, and they move up so the strings can resonate. So yeah, when I press it, it moves up right before I hit it. When I press the right pedal, all of them goes up so I can play a lot of notes. And they're all sustained. Yeah, so that, and that's called, in fact, the sustained pedal, right? So the very right-hand pedal on a piano, a lot of upright pianos only have two pedals, but there's a lot of more serious pianos and all grands have three, right? Or pretty much all grands have three. And so that one's called the sustained pedal. So yeah, that lifts all of the felts up. Could you give us a real, something really lush and sustained with the sustained pedal on? That's beautiful. And so that, if you took the pedal up, which is why the note stopped, but if you carried on pressing that down, that would have sustained for... Yeah, for quite a long. On these pianos, the pedals are also really precise, because if I play, another, it stops. But to get it to like fade out, just without having to wait for a real long, you have to really slowly take it off. I see, I see, I see. This pedal is really good, because a lot of pianos you have to really like, yeah, fight against it.
So it's like on the car, like finding the kind of biting point of the clutch or the accelerator or whatever. Would you just be able to hold the sustain pedal down, and just so we can see, because all these strings at the moment, with the sustain pedal not pressed, they're all dampened by this felt that we talked about. But without that, so if you lift it up, I'm gonna clap and then sing or shout into it, and you'll hear the whole piano coming along, so. So. Hello? So that's just the sound of the piano doing that, sort of reverb from all the strings being free to resonate. A way to hear the overtones in the piano itself and in the strings is to not just to pedal, but just hold them down the keys without the plucking of the string. So the felt of these keys goes up. So when I play other notes, you will hear the overtones of those strings. Just sorry to stop you, but just to explain a couple of things. Firstly, what you're doing is holding down your hand across loads of keys in your left hand. And just to explain what overtones are, on every note, we haven't got time to go into this in this particular segment now, but I will do it in the podcast in future. On every note, the moving air is made up of not just one wave, but lots and lots of waves laid over the top of one another that are kind of in mathematical relationships to one another. So one might be twice, one might be three times, four times, five times, et cetera. And so when we say overtones, it means that whenever you're hearing a single note, so if you could just play a single note, so that note has got loads of, it's not just one set of waves, it's loads of waves on top of one another, and you can't necessarily hear so much until you do something like you're about to do now. And the same note, without any sustain or anything, it's just, and you can, quite a good tool if you wanna make some like, yeah, some textures and stuff. And you can use it to make chords and do, you know, yeah. Yeah, it's beautiful, yeah. So that's, just to reiterate again, you're not holding the pedal down there. You're just holding down those keys with your left hand, but they're not sounding. They're just letting the felts come off the strings, and then playing with your right hand, and letting that natural, the overtones of that note really ring out. Whereas you normally couldn't hear them so much. That's amazing. And the other pedals, so we've got three pedals. So... The left pedal is to make, it shifts all the keys to the right a little bit, so they don't hit all the strings, the hammers. And that's to make the sound a little bit quieter or softer. Yeah, all the keys move to the right. Let's have a look at that, so we... You can see the whole keyboard moves slightly to the right. It's quite mad to watch if you don't realize that that's what happens, because all of the black and white notes, they all shift slightly. Yeah. So the sounds get a little bit softer, and yeah. It doesn't only get less dynamically, but it also gets softer in texture. And then we have the middle pedal.
It's like the sustain pedal, but more advanced. If you hold down a note, and then press the middle one, that one holds, but the rest of the keys do not. I've never played a piece where it's required to use that. It's really, really rare. But, yeah. You can play the same notes again without... Because they're the only felt that's held up. I see, I see, I see. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, really, really, really interesting. Obviously here we've got a grand piano. Can you describe what's happening with the body of the piano? Because obviously we've got this big body of the piano stretching out in front of you, and there's different ways of using the lid, right? You can either have it all the way up, like we do now, or you can have it like this half position, or you can have it all the way down. And it's just like when you want a lot of sound, or if you're playing solo, we always have it all the way up. But if I'm accompanying someone, then hopefully I can have it like halfway, because that's the best sound with less volume, or sometimes I need to have it all the way down. Yeah, I see, I see. Because the other thing about the lid, this big heavy wooden lid, is that it reflects the sound out, right? So it obviously lets the sound out in general, but it also just reflects the sound out into the room. So it's not the same as taking the lid off, where the strings vibrate and the vibrations go up from here and hit the lid here and bounce off into the audience. So it's a kind of acoustic shield reflector. I don't hear so much difference as long as it is open, but there is definitely a difference when they're closing. When it's closed. But I think there would be a big difference if you're in a concert room. And that's why pianos are always set across the stage, so that the sound reflects out. Amazing. Well, I wonder if, just to finish, if I put the lid back up, and if you just want to play whatever you like, just to, because I've really enjoyed your playing this weekend. It's been amazing. That's beautiful. What was that? Was that something? Yeah, something I've written. That's incredible. Keep up the good work, man. Blown away. Absolutely amazing. And thank you so much to Birk for demonstrating that magnificent instrument. Right. So we come to the genre tombola. And you may remember that the genre chosen for me by the random list picker of the 1300 genres on Wikipedia was emo pop. Now, I'm going to hand over to my good friend, Lawrence Francis, very old friend of mine from university, to explain why it was that I asked him to get involved when talking about emo pop. So here's Lawrence. My name is Lawrence Francis. I guess I'm a musician. I play music as a hobbyist in, I've been in various bands over the years, some of which have performed with Steve, some of which haven't for many, many years, play the guitar and a bit of singing. I think, you know, you're very modest about, I'm not sure if I'm a
musician and blah, blah. But I would say you're definitely a musician. You write songs, you play guitar really well, and you sing. The reason I got you on today is that you know way more about a lot of the styles and you understand them in a different way. Yeah, I mean, I think that's actually really interesting. Yeah, I say I'm not a musician. I've never had any formal music training at all. I have learned by listening to an awful lot of pop, indie, rock genre music over the years, being a bit of a music nerd. I mean, as you know, one of the other things that I do, I run a sort of online music listening discovery group full of music nerds, which means that we throughout all of lockdown, we forced ourselves to listen to a new album by a new band every single day for three years, which was quite intense. But I love listening to new music, learning about new music, but it's really, really non-technical. It's about what I like playing. And I think the talking about kind of emo pop and the genre we're going to talk about is a really good route in of how I got into music, how I started playing music and starting from a really simple place, but it's what I like hearing and like listening to. And then what spins out from that rather than the theoretical, which obviously having listened to your previous podcasts, there's some quite deep dives into the world of jazz. And yeah, come from a very different perspective on that. So there's this kind of huge WhatsApp group of, as you say, of music fans. And when I got allocated by the gods of the internet, I got allocated Emo Pop this week. I said, I know a group where I can ask who's into Emo Pop and who can talk to about Emo Pop. Yeah. And we, Steve dropped into the group with, well, does anyone know anything about Emo Pop? And then five minutes later, there's 40 messages of people discussing which band counts, which doesn't, which album is good. What's the key track from the early 2000s peak period? How does that reflect on the 90s emergence of Emo Pop? I mean, Emo is one of those terms that is very broad. It means lots of different things to lots of different people. The, I mean, the origin, the meaning of the word, I believe, is emotional hardcore is where the term Emo comes from. But Emo Pop, as one of the sub genres, is very much taking away the hardcore elements. So, taking away that kind of screamy, shouty thing. I think you could very easily argue that it comes from classic rock music. Punk, definitely punk elements. And some people would use the term Pop Punk, I think interchangeably with Emo and Emo Pop. But I'd say there are differences. And definitely a big inspiration is kind of grunge movement and music from the early 90s, from Nirvana and that kind of thing, which has a very simple kind of structures and the loud, quiet dynamics that you get in that kind of music. The best way to think of it is it's kind of a coming together that happened. I'd say in the mid 90s, it sort of had its birth as a distinct genre. But taking the kind of punk music mentality and things that was sort of the original punk from the 70s and then through the sort of 80s and early 90s, kind of punk stuff, the sort of American punk scene.
But which had a very political kind of slant to it originally, in terms of lyrical and that sort of thing, and very sort of angsty and lots of different subjects there, which I'm sure you'll explore. But then took out the politics completely and replaced that with very broad teenage emotional subject matter, which by definition opened it up to a whole new audience, a much younger audience, this kind of indie rock kind of sound, this distorted guitar driven sound, and capitalized on the sort of angst that you had from Brunge. But again, almost softened it by making it more accessible and less kind of screaming and howling to, I'm really sad because I'm a teenager and I maybe read a bit of Nietzsche on the side. I'm quite intelligent, but I don't really understand it, but I know I'm feeling angsty and sad about something. I would say one of the sort of first bands that really captured this sound was the American band Weezer. Everyone remembers Weezer of our generation because they had the song Bloody Holly, which came free on Windows 95. Everyone was exposed to this video that mocked Happy Days, the song Bloody Holly and preppy look and this band of clever school kids singing songs that sounded uplifting and positive, but lyrically were about sad things, about the world has turned and left me here or only in dreams, do I get to see the people I love and all that sort of thing. So I had this sort of dichotomy in the lyrics and the sound between the uplifting poppy sound and- That's something we talked about before, not in terms of pop, but in the episode when I was talking to Claude Deper about MvConga, where he was talking about it being a music of oppression in lots of ways, but you would never know that by listening to the jaunty riffs and happy melodies. And I find that really interesting with Emo Pop and a lot of indie genres have that quite jangly, uplifting sound, but then also lyrically pretty dark or pretty... Yeah. And I think one of the other things is that teenage angst feeling, but it being not so extreme. It's not becoming a goth or getting into death metal or something like you've talked about in previous episodes. It's not being that alienated, being that the audience for this are pretty high functioning people who are probably getting decent enough grades at school, but still feeling a little bit outcast or a little bit sad. There's a music for them which captures this without them without having to go too far off the rails. But I mean, I'd say that I think that that sort of era was the start, but it's not really Emo Pop at that point. It's still rock, it's still indie. And where the genre, as I would place it, really boomed would be early 2000s with, there was a sort of emergence of bands, very American driven, bands like Jimmy World, Bleed America, who had Bleed America in a big album in 2001, All American Rejects, Saves the Day, and then Weezer who came back with their fourth album then, which was their self-titled green album, which was very much fitted within this genre, really polished kind of sound. And that's when this sort of music suddenly went mainstream, I would say, MTV2 mainstream. There's a song that I'd recommend anyone listen to, which I think encapsulates perfectly this genre by a band called Saves the Day, a song called At Your Funeral. And if you watched MTV2, circa 2001, 2002, that song was on pretty much every hour. And it's got all the
ingredients of the genre. I always think of it as like appealing to a 15 year old in some Midwest high school who's feeling a bit outcast, but is also getting decent grades and wants to rebel a little bit and go into a room and listen to some heavy music, but it's not that heavy and can really engage with it. Going through the history, my timeline anyway, I think then it really, this genre reaches its zenith and its peak in that sort of second half, mid to second half of the 2000s. And really my, I would say most people would say the lead act in Emo Pop is probably My Chemical Romance, where they took this format, this style, this fashion, that's the whole look and feel, pushed it to another level in terms of theatricality and production standards. And the music videos were big and everything was slightly taken to another level and became really mainstream. That teenagers, every teenage, every school in America at that time would have had a sort of tribe of people wearing My Chemical Romance t-shirts with their nails planted black, but they're not the Goths. They're not that they're very, it's a very sort of distinct sort of PG version of being into extreme music. And I think that's, I think that's probably more of a unifying thing about this genre than the sound in a lot of ways, which I think it really, that period in that 2000s period, it was suddenly, you know, I go, I went to gigs by these bands in the 2000s and everyone, all of the fans that were there look the same. There is a very much a uniform, the girls wearing fingerless gloves and torn fishnets and about a black band t-shirt with colourful, I like thick eyeliner and eyeshadow, dark colours, but it's sort of like, again, like I say, it's a bit edgy, but it's not bad. They're not getting tattoos all over their faces. It's an edginess that by the time they're 18 or 19, they definitely, the majority have grown out of it. And it's a phase. It's again, reflected so much in the lyrics of these songs, subject answer, which is all very angsty drama. I don't know if you'd fall into the category to a lot of people, but I'd say a poster girl would be early era Avril Lavigne. If you can imagine that, what she looks like, it's that kind of look. But it's like the people that would go, I don't like Avril Lavigne, or might have liked Avril Lavigne when they were 13, and then they'd mature to get start liking My Chemical Romance and Panic! At The Disco and that sort of thing. But there is that emphasis on it being accessible and poppy. I think emo and that sort of scene there in the late 90s diverged in lots of different ways, as is always the way this sort of thing. So there's a totally different end of emo that is probably quite a lot more niche, but people refer to it as Midwest emo. Total opposite at the same time with stuff that was going on in the UK, like the Arctic Monkeys and things, who were singing about, I went to the chip shop, I got in a fight with a man at the chip shop and it's really prosaic and beautiful in its own way. This is one day we will all die, one day it'll all be over, but we can swing back and as long as you're by my side, but you're not because my diary is not saying the thing, you know, it's all like, oh, drama, it's got an intangible drama, but I love it, I love it. If you've got time, you're going to try and put some guitar and
maybe some vocals down, is that right? 100 percent, 100 percent. That would be great. So I just sent you some drums and again, we don't, I mean, it's not a particularly unusual sound for the drums. It's kind of fairly standard rock drumming, right? So like quite heavy, but not super heavy. Not like, you know, the blast beats on the last episode where it's like... The drums are very standard, I would say. We're talking pop and these are songs. Generally, the melodies and structures of the songs and the thing you could, if you take, took out, changed the instrumentation completely, this could be a pop song, you know? Going back to what I said about sort of learning to play guitar to this sort of music, one of my, one of the ways that I learned to play guitar properly was I got the first Weezer album in 1995, so I would have been 14, 15. Until then, I didn't realize there was such a thing, what I call a power chord or like it's a sort of bar chord, but it doesn't have all the notes. So essentially, you're just playing the three notes on the guitar, moving that shape up and down the neck of the guitar, meaning you can play every sort of basic chord. And it's really easy, which means it's really accessible when you're young or when you're in a band or you're not sort of that proficient or no training. And that is really at the basis of all of the songs in this genre that are the big songs. It's like those power chords being played either with distortion on them, a bit of overdrive distortion, which just means it's a fuzzy sort of heavy sound, but it's a bit chugging, which is my call, which is palm muting, where you rest your hand on the string. So it's like you probably have then a lot of in the chorus that gives you that kind of wall of distortion noise. Then the other thing is this sort of a jerkiness to it, so you'll sort of get the guitars of playing simple chord structures just going round and round in the same pattern over and over again. But sort of like on staccato kind of blasts of the of the guitar, but when you put it all together with the drums, it just sort of sounds quite melodic, really. Yeah, but so just to briefly explain the power chords, as you say, one of the things about them, we haven't really covered in the show yet. We will do soon. But the difference between major and minor chords, right, people will have will be aware of major and minor and the different sounds. But basically power chords, I'm writing saying there's no third note, right? And it's the third note in the chord that makes it major or minor. So that's exactly or a major third. And there's no third note in those. So they're quite open. The melody can kind of be fairly free with where it goes over the top. And I'd say as well, because generally the line up of the bands of this genre would be, probably, normally it'd be two guitars, bass and drums. Yeah. And the bass will essentially be playing the same root note. So actually, if you mostly, I mean, they'll do a bit of walking around around it, in between them, but it is so, so basic. And then it means that there's really, it's really just just a few notes being
repeated. Like, again, there's no, no difficult harmonies in the music. Then sometimes a lead guitar will put in different bits, and obviously they build it up and it gets complicated. But the other thing that's a real genre defining element is, is the vocals. And I think generally it's an American accent. You can hear the American accent just because of the bands that do it. And it's got a bit of a whiny quality to it. It's got a bit of a broken, they'll be like, sometimes they'll strain a little bit and they'll go a bit broken. And then there'll be lots of oohs and aahs and harmonies. That's another thing. When the chorus comes in, often it'll be like someone saying something like dramatic, singing about themselves dying. But there'll be someone else in the background going, so it's got that kind of poppy beach boys influence there somewhere. Yeah, I see, I see, I see. It lifts it a little bit. You've got something to promote before we finish. I have. I've got something to plug. Yeah, you've got an amazing thing to plug. Yeah. As a bit of a project, this last Christmas I had this realization that there, I didn't really think there'd been any decent Christmas songs for years. So I set myself a little mission to try and unpick what goes into a classic Christmas song in terms of the ingredients, probably inspired by knowing you, Steve, and wanting to dissect music. So I set about trying to write some Christmas songs through the year and that have all the ingredients. I've got a Christmas EP out that I'm trying to write and trying to get people to listen to. So you can find, This Is Our Christmas is the name of the EP and it's got three songs. It features a little bit of trumpet by someone you might know. There's Lathered With, Soppy Christmas Lyrics, Sleigh Bells, My Kid's Toys, that I've nicked from the house, Playing Little Islands and things. You can find them. It's This Is Our Christmas and my name on Spotify and Amazon Apple is LK Francis. So absolutely love people to give it a listen, stick it on your playlist and let me know if you think I've nailed the brief that I set myself. It's great. I think you definitely have. As well as writing the songs and trying to do this Christmas thing, I also wanted to experiment on how do you release a Christmas song? I don't know anything about it. And I spoke to a few people I know in that world and they were like, oh, you've got to release it in early November. So I've been like Christmas up to the max. I've become that awful thing of an early Christmas advocate. Thanks a lot, man. That was really brilliant. It's really helpful. Thank you. And I look forward to listening to more episodes of the podcast. There we go. Thanks very much. And here's the song that Lawrence put together. I mean, it blows my mind. When we talked about it, I sent him some drums and I thought, if you've got time, it would be great if you're
able to do some basic vocals or guitar or whatever you can do. And sure enough, two days later, he came back with a full emo pop track with the lyrics written by Chat GPT. So I think it's very entertaining lyrics by Chat GPT here. Yeah. So enjoy the lyrics, enjoy the song. This is by Lawrence K Francis. Do check out his Christmas EP. It's really great. I know I'm biased, but it really is. So here we go. Thanks. Once again to Lawrence. I mean, honestly, above and beyond that guy, making that whole track just for this podcast. Thank you, thank you. Right, the time has come to choose the genre for next episode. So I'm putting the list of 1300 genres, musical genres from Wikipedia into the list picker, pressing go, and what have we got? It's Solaire, so S-O-L-E-A accent. No idea about that one. So it's gonna be a lot of fun discovering what that is. So I think it's time to wrap up the episode and say thank you to all my brilliant guests, the incredible young people from Norway, who you heard from, from up in Burda, and of course the North Norway Jazz Center for having me and Ed and Ollie up there towards the Arctic, working with these brilliant people. And who else is there to thank? Lawrence Francis, of course, L K Francis on all the streaming platforms. Do go and check out his fantastic Christmas EP, get you in the festive spirit. It's already doing really well. Anjali Kidjo and the Hackney Colliery Band for the theme song. Right, I think that's about it. But before I go, I have one last thing to ask of you in this episode, and that is that I have just started a Patreon, and for those of you who don't know, Patreon is a way that you can help support the show by giving me a little bit of money. So it's five US dollars per month. It's an American service, so it's in dollars. And that allows me to help make the show as good as it can be, but also allows you access to a whole bunch of extra stuff. I'm gonna put up the unedited interviews with a lot of my guests. I've had some absolutely incredible, inspiring chats, really fascinating chats with people like Andrew O'Neill last episode, Claude Dapper, Valeria Clark, The Harpist, Tamar Osborne, all sorts of fantastic people. And we have a lot of very exciting guests coming up, some quite big names coming up. So those interviews will be going out unedited. Believe it or not, I do edit the interviews down a lot for this show. Often some of the chats last an hour, two hours sometimes. So I edit them down to 10 or 15 minutes for this show. But I really, it's a shame to miss out on a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about because my guests have been fascinating. So I would like to share that with you in exchange for a little bit of money. I will also be putting up all of the music that I make for the show, or that my guests make for the show, in full, so that you can download that music if you like it and listen at your leisure. And all sorts of other things. Other benefits like ticket discounts, I'll be announcing gigs for things like Hackney Colliery Band here before anywhere else. Yeah, and all manner of things that I haven't even dreamed of yet. It's
going to be a real hub for people who like this show, like what it's doing, and maybe want to dig a bit deeper and explore a bit more. So please go to www.originofthepieces.com, originofthepieces.com, or you can go to my website stevepretty.com, or just Patreon, you can find it's Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces. And you can sign up there, $5 a month, and it will really help me to make this show as good as it can be. A reminder that I am appearing at Wilton's Music Hall in a special live podcast recording slash gig. We've got a very exciting announcement to make about that. I will save that for next time. But that is the 20th of January 2024. So if you're able to make that, please do. There's already some brilliant guests. We have Valeria on Harp. We have my friend Chris Lindtott, who presents The Sky At Night on BBC. We're going to be talking about astronomy and music. And we have some of the guys from Hackney Colliery Band. We're going to be premiering some new work and reworking some old classics. Plus this very special guest. Or should I say guests? Little tease there. I will announce more next time. Meanwhile, thank you so much once again for listening. We are back in two weeks' time. So that is going to be the 14th of December. I imagine there's going to be some Christmas stuff going on in that episode. Kind of has to be, doesn't there? So there'll be a few little Christmas bits and bobs there. Meanwhile, thanks again and catch you next time.