Choice Notes

I am on a personal mission to make Jeff Bezos a pauper by withholding my patronage from his businesses.  It won't happen overnight but I'm in it for the long haul.  My wife shares my opinion of the man who may be not be the only asshole billionaire but is certainly at the extremities-- but she can compartmentalize her feelings about him from the act of ordering batteries for a car fob from Amazon when you can't find them anywhere nearby or going to say Whole Foods when the usual place doesn't have currants.  It's a mixed marriage but love knows no bounds.  

For her, I was at the local WF on the currant mission recently.  We had split up.  I was hunting for the currants while she was going to grab another item she couldn't get at the usual store.  Suddenly, I became aware of something heavenly happening on the sound system.  It was a chorus of voices-- I couldn't tell if they were women or children -- singing a refrain of "Oh"'s that soared up the scale only to be followed by a line coming back down in an immediately captivating melody.  After hearing the refrain a few more times, it dawned on me that my need to know the name of the song was urgent.  This being Whole Foods, and the unfamiliar music having a confidence and a vaguely (to my ears) classical vibe about it, I assumed it was an entertainment for wealthy folks that I was surreptitiously overhearing by being in the store.  I retrieved my iPhone* and set my SoundHound app on the job, and after a momentary grinding it came back with Choice Notes by Alex Winston.  Nothing about this new information dissuaded me from my initial impression that this was rich people's music.  Alex Winston?  Never heard of him.  I had visions of some continental European guy in a studio in Paris directing a chorus of French school children in a musical confection for the aristocracy.  My glee at having the information felt a little bit dirty.  When I got home, I snuck an opportunity to look into the matter and was relieved to be somewhat disabused about my prejudices right off the bat, first of all about Alex Winston himself.  She's American:

The setting of the video is Detroit (Winston is from the suburbs) and specifically an area reclaimed by The Heidelberg Project of Detroit artist and activist Tyree Guyton and his band of young artists from the city. I've lived in those environs of Detroit, and I know what a Michigan autumn does to you.

Aside from its great charm, two things struck me about the video.  First, its age.  How did such a thing exist for so long without once entering my consciousness?  Second, and even more striking is the high volume of comments posted by fans whose experience echoed mine: they heard the song in one or another national chain store-- many of them as employees-- went through a period of urgent wonder about it only to either, like me, eventually pull out their music identifying app to track it down or to rediscover it by accident online-- one of my favorite rare pleasures in the world. Another contingent of commenters were Europeans who heard the song on advertisements.  Did it exist only for corporate commercial contexts?   

It's no mystery how once aware of it, corporate musicologists would be all over it.  There's no denying the strong hooks it gets into you by virtue of its alluring sound and structure.  Also, as an independently produced piece of music it's competitively priced. But where were the rest of us?

I don't have an answer for this.  I also don't really have a point in writing about it other than to take an opportunity to ponder why some music grabs us, how it affects us, and whether there is more to that interaction than delivery of pleasure.  In the case of this particular song and me, I detect traces of deep seated nostalgia that the song evokes in me.  Musically, I respond to the harmonies and pleasant dissonances, the easy way it straddles moods and modes between minor melancholy and major exuberance,  the wall of voices,  the texture created by the interplay of the timbres of each instrument.  Lyrics are not usually the first thing I notice about a song, and there was no exception here, but on multiple listenings, the matching of phrases to music strikes me as above average. There might be something to my initial impression of the song as a kind of delicacy that was slumming a bit by availing itself to my ears.  I stand at the threshold of a song I'm learning to hear, and from this vantage, I somehow see other roads I might have gone down.  If the song itself is old when I first hear it, something about the lost time gives the acquaintance an extra poignance.  After ten years as a stranger, this song finally grabbed me by the shoulder and made me pay attention.

Plus it's got a good beat.
~~~~~~
* Once Bezos is destroyed, Apple is next.