The best part about watch­ing videos of my favorite musi­cians talk­ing about their play­ing is the moment they reveal that cer­tain styl­is­tic quirks–the ones that made them who they are–came about more-or-less by acci­dent. Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mas­cis, for exam­ple, well-known for his huge, open chords as well as his long, expres­sive solos, recent­ly told Matt Sweeney that he only learned to palm-mute (damp­en the strings to muf­fle exces­sive ring­ing) a cou­ple years ago. Maybe he was jok­ing, but the idea that an essen­tial ele­ment of his mas­sive sound emerged because he didn’t know anoth­er way to play fills me with joy.

Anoth­er of my favorite play­ers is also a self-con­fessed “com­plete auto­di­dact,” Tina Wey­mouth of Talk­ing Heads and Tom Tom Club. As dis­tinc­tive a play­er as Mas­cis, it’s impos­si­ble to mis­take her style for any­one else’s. “I was only play­ing bass for five months when the band first played [live],” she told an audi­ence in 2014 at the Red Bull Music Acad­e­my in Tokyo. “I did not take a les­son. Nobody taught me.” But unlike many of her self-taught male coun­ter­parts with roots in punk and a decades-long asso­ci­a­tion with a band that defined an era, Wey­mouth, argues Car­rie Couro­gen at PAPER, has been trag­i­cal­ly under-rec­og­nized.

Yet “with­out her there would be no ‘Psy­cho Killer,’ no ‘Burn­ing Down the House,’ no ‘Once in a Lifetime,’—grooves which are imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able.” It takes noth­ing away from the smarts of David Byrne’s song­writ­ing to point out that Talk­ing Heads was just as much a prod­uct of its top-notch rhythm sec­tion. Weymouth’s “basslines became the pulse of the band,” writes Couro­gen, “infus­ing down­town punk with a new sound: a dance­able com­bi­na­tion of the soul­ful, funky jams of Par­lia­ment and James Brown with the rock steadi­ness of Car­ol Kaye.” In the video above from Reverb.com, our host Jere­my walks us through the ele­ments of Wey­mouth’s play­ing

As Jere­my points out, unlike many play­ers, Weymouth’s sound was not defined by one par­tic­u­lar instru­ment: through­out her long career, she played Fend­er Mus­tang and Jazz bass­es, a Hofn­er Club, and sev­er­al cus­tom bass­es. “She real­ly used what she need­ed,” he says, “to fit the sound to the tune.” Jere­my him­self demon­strates her basslines on a Fend­er Mus­tang. He gives her high praise indeed by com­par­ing her sim­ple yet melod­ic lines to those of greats Don­ald “Duck” Dunn and James Jamerson—long con­sid­ered two of the best play­ers in funk and soul. It’s a well-deserved com­par­i­son, and Wey­mouth has men­tioned both as influ­ences.

That she took their Motown and Mem­phis sounds and turned them into angu­lar art-rock makes her all the more inter­est­ing a play­er to study, and a rea­son for her major influ­ence on gen­er­a­tions of bassists who draw as much from clas­sic funk as from 80s New Wave. There may be no more per­fect fusion of the two than in Weymouth’s playing—and in her song­writ­ing too, as Tom Tom Club’s 1981 “Genius of Love” made abun­dant­ly clear. Jere­my cov­ers this one as well, and if you’re a bass play­er, you should too.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

7 Female Bass Play­ers Who Helped Shape Mod­ern Music: Kim Gor­don, Tina Wey­mouth, Kim Deal & More

What Makes Flea Such an Amaz­ing Bass Play­er? A Video Essay Breaks Down His Style

What Made John Entwistle One of the Great Rock Bassists? Hear Iso­lat­ed Tracks from “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Baba O’Riley” & “Pin­ball Wiz­ard”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

As we get old­er, fam­i­ly and friends may pass away or leave us some­how, but for many of us cre­ativ­i­ty can be our solace. (Yes, it could also make us immor­tal, like Bach or Shake­speare, but we won’t be around to find out.) In the case of nona­ge­nar­i­an Inge Gins­berg that has been the case in the unlike­li­est of out­lets: death met­al.

This charm­ing New York Times doc­u­men­tary by Leah Galant details the unlike­ly team-up between Ginsberg–who spends her time between Switzer­land and New York City–and the young musi­cians who became her friends and got her into per­form­ing her poems live with full death met­al accom­pa­ni­ment.

Half earnest and half good-natured stunt, the cen­ter of it all is Ginsberg’s poems, which she has been writ­ing for years, and only a tiny glimpse of which we get to hear. The poems take on heavy sub­jects of mor­tal­i­ty, our destruc­tion of the earth, lone­li­ness. At one point Gins­berg was writ­ing these with no audi­ence, and, as she says in the doc, soci­ety is not inter­est­ed in hear­ing from the elder­ly (espe­cial­ly when it’s this dark.) It took her younger friends to make the con­nec­tion between her poems and the usu­al pre­oc­cu­pa­tions of death met­al and insist Gins­berg per­form them in that hec­tor­ing, doom laden-style of the genre. She was game.

Galant’s mini doc rewinds his­to­ry halfway through to explain Ginsberg’s upbring­ing: a “Jew­ish princess” who sur­vived the Holo­caust, fled to Amer­i­ca, and wound up writ­ing songs with her hus­band (Dean Martin’s “Try Me” was one of their hits). Tired of the war, they moved back to Zurich, and, well, fast for­ward three hus­bands and sev­er­al decades lat­er, Gins­berg was back in the spot­light, per­form­ing on the Swiss ver­sion of America’s Got Tal­ent.

We won’t spoil the end­ing of the doc, as the band try to get Gins­berg to try out for the actu­al America’s Got Tal­ent, because we’ve already said enough. But we’ll leave you with this quote from the singer her­self: “My con­cept of heav­en and hell is that in the moment of death you real­ize your life was full and good–that is heav­en. And if you think, ‘Oh, I should have done this or that,’ I think that’s hell.”

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Bat­tle-Scarred Heavy Met­al Musi­cians Play Rock ‘n’ Roll Clas­sics on Hel­lo Kit­ty Instru­ments

John Cage’s Silent, Avant-Garde Piece 4’33” Gets Cov­ered by a Death Met­al Band

The Physics of Play­ing a Gui­tar Visu­al­ized: Metallica’s “Noth­ing Else Mat­ters” Viewed from Inside the Gui­tar

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.