Nina Nastasia & Jim White - Odd Said the Doe: youtube.com/watch?v=1oj_TmfHBYQ
It was a little over a year ago. I remember Eli was there that night, it was the first time he'd met Duffield and they got along pretty well. We were, the three of us, sitting on the patio at Nirvana. And Duffield got to talking about Nina Nastasia.
The work that Nina Nastasia has done with Jim White, he said, was more like a duet between songwriter and drummer than it was a song with instrumentation. Most pop songs are based around the words, follow the chord patterns of the guitar and the rest follows. It can be a very easy pattern to comprehend and mimic if you really wish. But these songs are quite different in that the drums don't necessarily follow the guitar nor the voice; both instruments work independently of each other along a common ground. Neither player is more important than the other. It is a duet.
I've never, as far as I can tell, come across anything else quite like this. No, wait, that's a bit of a lie. On Joni Mitchell's Hejira there is a similar technique applied but with Jaco Pastorius on bass. Regardless, it is a form of playing I've not completely overlooked before but have never quite put into the proper words.
I used to play in a band where the lead singer wrote all the music and taught us our parts. This wasn't unfulfilling; we had a lot of fun together and the songs were good. But I doubt this is the way.
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