Get to Know your Fellow D.B.Oer | Music (DBO)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Monday, April 09, 2018, 06:46 (2448 days ago) @ INSANEdrive

I love music. My parents had music playing in the house constantly while I was growing up, and I’m the same way now. I’m an 80s kid, so there was a lot of Peter Gabriel, Don Henley, the Police, Dire Straits, and Roxy Music in the house when I was a kid, all of which I have a soft spot for. But my parents were 60s kids themselves, so there was a lot of CSNY, Hendrix, Emmy Lou Harris, etc. The first concert I ever saw was Dwight Yoakam (he was awesome, lol).

Growing up in Toronto in the 80s, you pretty much had to love either Bryan Adams or Celine Dion, so I chose Adams. I still sing along like an idiot any time I hear Run to You.

I got into U2 in my early teens, right when I started learning how to play guitar. They were, and still are, a huge influence on me musically speaking. I went through a brief love afare with Radiohead, but I only like bits and pieces from them anymore. I love The Clash, Joy Division and New Order, Depeche Mode, The Cure, David Bowie, Coldplay, IAMX, Tears for Fears, Faunts, the 1975, Tycho. Anything with a synth-pop new-wave 80s vibe is a safe bet.

I can enjoy listening to most genres in small doses. I also played the flute for 8 years, so I’m fond of classical music (tchaikovsky FTW).

I started playing in a band and writing music in high school, and that had a big impact on how I listen to music. Learning to write music went hand-in-hand with learning how to record music (I’d always be recording demos to show the rest of the band what I’d come up with). This opened up a whole new dimension of appreciation for me. Now, any time I listen to music, I’ll enjoy the music itself while also studying how it has been mixed and arranged. There’s a real art & science to recording music... it’s a kind of sonic architecture (<-possibly the most pretentious sounding thing I’ve ever said, lol). That’s a big part of why Achtung Baby (by U2) is my favourite album of all time. Not only are the songs amazing, but from a production point of view it’s a masterpiece. Every single time I listen to it, I hear things I hadn’t heard before. There are songs where I can’t tell if I’m hearing 2 guitars or 12. The boundaries between all the instruments are blurred and swirled around until you can’t even picture something as real as a “band” playing them. It’s just sound. And yet it never sounds sloppy, or muddy, or complicated. It sounds simple and pure. It’s the Mona Lisa of music, as far as I’m concerned.

Side note: I never really got all the hype about the Mona Lisa until I saw it in person. I spent about half an hour in the same room as her... that thing is ALIVE. Every time I glanced back at it over my shoulder, it had changed. She’d moved a little, or her expression had shifted. The more time went by, the more every other painting in the room felt like pieces of wallpaper, while she felt more and more like a person standing in the room.

Anyway, I played in bands for years, but stopped doing that about 6 years ago. I do a lot of writing and recording music at home though. I’ll go weeks at a time without listening to anything other than what I’m working on, then I’ll come up for air and listen to a bunch of stuff; half for enjoyment, and half to try and figure out how they achieved certain sounds or solved a specific problem. What still surprises me to this day is that the side of my brain that is obsessing over the technical aspects of how music is recorded hasn’t interferes with my pure emotional enjoyment of listening to music. It just got bolted on as an additive.

As far as the bonus question goes, I already mentioned guitar and flute. I play a tiny bit of piano, which I’m finally able to dedicate some time to now that I actually own a piano for the first time. I can bang out a few chords on a mandolin, and if you put an upright Bass in my hands I can play “Love Cats” :)