In the 60s and 70s, rock and folk bands intro­duced ear­ly Euro­pean music to the mass­es, with Medieval, Renais­sance, and Baroque strains run­ning through the songs of Simon and Gar­funkel, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Fair­port Con­ven­tion, and even Led Zep­pelin. For the most part, how­ev­er, arrange­ments stayed mod­ern, save the appear­ance of a few, still-rel­e­vant folk instru­ments like man­dolins, dul­cimers, and nylon-string gui­tars.

One can draw many lines in pop­u­lar cul­ture from this development—to prog-rock bal­ladry, goth rock’s dirges, metal’s medieval obses­sions, and what­ev­er that tech­no Gre­go­ri­an chant thing was in the 90s. In so many of these evo­lu­tion­ary moves, the trend has been toward more tech­nol­o­gy and away from acoustic music. So, how can play­ers of old Euro­pean instru­ments inter­est con­tem­po­rary audi­ences in their sound?

One pop­u­lar way they’ve done so is by play­ing hits from bands who drew from the tra­di­tion (and from a few who very much didn’t)—hits like Procul Harum’s Chaucer-ref­er­enc­ing “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

At the top, Baroque lute play­er Daniel Estrem gives a solo instru­men­tal per­for­mance of the soul­ful tune, throw­ing in a sec­tion of Bach’s “Air on the G String,” to which “A Whiter Shade of Pale” alludes. (I wasn’t con­scious­ly com­bin­ing rock with clas­si­cal,” com­pos­er Gary Brook­er lat­er said. “It’s just that Bach’s music was in me.”) The song’s con­tra­pun­tal struc­ture trans­lates beau­ti­ful­ly to the lute, as does the sin­is­ter musi­cal­i­ty of Cream’s “White Room,” above, a song with a vague­ly Medieval-sound­ing descend­ing melody in its clas­sic psych-rock vers­es.

Of course, Euro­pean folk and clas­si­cal informed the increas­ing­ly com­plex com­po­si­tions of the Bea­t­les, includ­ing George Harrison’s “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps” (or at least its first fin­ger­picked acoustic gui­tar demo ver­sion). In his take on the clas­sic, above, Estrem recov­ers the song’s folk influ­ence and retains its shifts in mood, from mourn­ful lament to hope­ful melody. Of course, Estrem not only has to trans­late these songs to a dif­fer­ent musi­cal idiom but to a very dif­fer­ent instrument—one with a tun­ing unlike the gui­tar on which so many pop songs are writ­ten.

Com­mon lutes at the end of the Renais­sance had 10 cours­es (a “course” is a set of two strings tuned to the same pitch). These instru­ments used “a more har­mon­i­cal­ly based ‘D minor tun­ing,’ instead of the more ‘gui­tar-like’ tun­ing that con­tin­ued to be used for the viol in the baroque era,” notes Case West­ern Reserve’s Ear­ly Music Instru­ment Data­base. They were suit­ed to a very dif­fer­ent kind of music than, say, the blues. But whether or not we ful­ly under­stand the chal­lenge of arrang­ing “House of the Ris­ing Sun” (called “the first folk rock song” when the Ani­mals record­ed it) for the Baroque lute, we can cer­tain­ly appre­ci­ate the results. Estrem makes a gen­tly plucked, elo­quent­ly word­less argu­ment for giv­ing the instru­ment a star­ring role in pop­u­lar music again.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

With Medieval Instru­ments, Band Per­forms Clas­sic Songs by The Bea­t­les, Red Hot Chili Pep­pers, Metal­li­ca & Deep Pur­ple

Finnish Musi­cians Play Blue­grass Ver­sions of AC/DC, Iron Maid­en & Ron­nie James Dio

Pak­istani Musi­cians Play Amaz­ing Ver­sion of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Clas­sic, “Take Five”

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

Last week, Nick Cave announced “It’s 10.30 Wednes­day evening, and if the world wasn’t in lock­down, I’d be onstage in Toulouse, France singing my heart out with The Bad Seeds. But I’m not. I’m doing the next best thing—sitting at home watch­ing Bad Seed TeeVee. Pure non-stop joy!” And you can too. Above, watch a new 24/7 YouTube livestream that will fea­ture, writes NME, “rare and unseen footage from the band’s archives,” includ­ing “pro­mo videos, inter­views, live footage, out­takes and oth­er exclu­sive unseen footage from the band’s archives.” Enjoy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nick Cave Cre­ates a List of His Top 10 Love Songs

Lis­ten to Nick Cave’s Lec­ture on the Art of Writ­ing Sub­lime Love Songs (1999)

Nick Cave Answers the Hot­ly Debat­ed Ques­tion: Will Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

If there were ever a time to rush a pan­dem­ic-themed project to mar­ket, this is it. The move can seem well-inten­tioned, gen­er­ous, or cyn­i­cal, depend­ing on the artist and the audi­ence. The Rolling Stones proofed them­selves against the lat­ter crit­i­cism ages ago by build­ing cyn­i­cism into their brand. They know what their audi­ence wants, and they con­sis­tent­ly deliv­er, decade after decade, play­ing the hits. When vague social com­men­tary slips into a Stones tune, it vibrates at the same fre­quen­cy as their trade­mark sleaze.

But why would we expect rel­e­vance from a band that hasn’t released any new music in eight years? “On their most recent tour,” writes Alex­is Petri­dies at The Guardian, “which began in 2017 and would still be on course were it not for the coro­n­avirus pandemic—the most up-the-minute addi­tion to their setlist was 25 years old.” Who indeed “would have thought that the Rolling Stones would be ear­ly to mar­ket with a Covid-19-themed song?” They cer­tain­ly don’t need the mon­ey.

In fact, the band wrote and began record­ing the song in Feb­ru­ary 2019. “It wasn’t writ­ten for now,” Mick Jag­ger told Zane Lowe in an Apple Music inter­view. “But it was writ­ten about being in a place which was full of life, and then now (is) all bereft of life, so to speak. And when I went back to what I’d writ­ten orig­i­nal­ly lyri­cal­ly, it was all full of… well, I didn’t use them in the lyrics, it was all full of plague terms and things like that.” Jag­ger and Richards decid­ed they had to release the song, part of a col­lec­tion of new mate­r­i­al the band was work­ing on. Or as Richards put it in a state­ment:

So, let’s cut a long sto­ry short. We cut this track well over a year ago in L.A. for part of a new album, an ongo­ing thing, and then s— hit the fan. Mick and I decid­ed this one real­ly need­ed to go to work right now and so here you have it.

Richards sounds almost apolo­getic about the rushed ver­sion you hear above, which they fin­ished remote­ly after the lock­downs began, but in his inter­view with Lowe, he says he’s pleased. “We sort of did it from out­er space. But I actu­al­ly liked the way it turned out.” The track has a tight, bluesy, stripped-down dub groove. Shots of Sir Mick read­ing lyrics from his iPad, in what is pre­sum­ably his home stu­dio, add a Zoom meet­ing-like vibe to the video. “We’ve worked on it in iso­la­tion,” Jag­ger says.

He also admits he rewrote the lyrics, “but didn’t have to rewrite very much, to be hon­est. It’s very much how I orig­i­nal­ly did it. I was just jam­ming. I was just play­ing a gui­tar and just wrote it like that. I don’t know what frame of mind I must’ve been in. I mean, it was semi-humor­ous, then it got less humor­ous….” I think we’ve all said some­thing like that, many times, over the last few years. The Stones were in the right place and right time to play out the end of the 1960s, when things got decid­ed­ly less humor­ous. But who would have guessed they’d show up over fifty years lat­er to sound­track our cur­rent 21st cen­tu­ry tragedy?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Rolling Stones Play “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” While Social Dis­tanc­ing in Quar­an­tine

Revis­it the Infa­mous Rolling Stones Free Fes­ti­val at Alta­mont: The Ill-Fat­ed Con­cert Took Place 50 Years Ago

A Big 44-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Rolling Stones Albums: Stream 613 Tracks

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

World War I sym­bol­ism gets lost on Amer­i­cans. Our his­tor­i­cal mem­o­ries are short and selec­tive, and the War has “large­ly van­ished from view,” as his­to­ri­an Geof­frey Wawro writes at Time mag­a­zine. But in Europe, of course, where some armies suf­fered ten times the casu­al­ties as U.S. troops, and where mil­lions of civil­ian died and towns were bombed into obliv­ion, the mem­o­ry of the Great War is very much alive.

In Ypres, Bel­gium, the War has been memo­ri­al­ized every day since 1928 (with the excep­tion of four years of Ger­man occu­pa­tion dur­ing WWII) by the Last Post Asso­ci­a­tion, a devot­ed com­pa­ny of buglers who play the mil­i­tary song at the Menin Gate memo­r­i­al every evening to com­mem­o­rate the British dead at the Bat­tle of Ypres. As of this writ­ing, they’ve held their 31,748th cer­e­mo­ny.

In Britain itself, and around the world, the tune has a long his­to­ry as a sym­bol, like the pop­py, of Remem­brance Day. Just like Taps in the U.S., the Last Post is “a bugle call,” writes the Last Post Asso­ci­a­tion, “played in the British Army (and in the armies of many oth­er lands) to mark the end of the day’s labours and the onset of the night’s rest…. It has come to rep­re­sent a final farewell to the fall­en at the end of their earth­ly labours and at the onset of their eter­nal rest.”

Robert Graves summed up the song’s asso­ci­a­tion with death in his 1918 poem, “The Last Post”:

The bugler sent a call of high romance—
“Lights out! Lights out!” to the desert­ed square.
On the thin brazen notes he threw a prayer,
“God, if it’s this for me next time in France…
O spare the phan­tom bugle as I lie
Dead in the gas and smoke and roar of guns,
Dead in a row with the oth­er bro­ken ones
Lying so stiff and still under the sky,
Jol­ly young Fusiliers too good to die.”

I imag­ine Mark Knopfler, a lover of poet­ry, might be famil­iar with Graves’ verse. In his own ren­di­tion of the Last Post, above, Knopfler com­mem­o­rates 17,000 Northum­ber­land Fusiliers killed in the War, who came from his home region and suf­fered more casu­al­ties than any oth­er reg­i­ment. Record­ed on Remem­brance Day, Novem­ber 8, 2018, the 100th anniver­sary of the War’s end, Knopfler’s ver­sion is both restrained and fierce­ly over­driv­en, recall­ing Hendrix’s “Star-Span­gled Ban­ner” in some of its flashier moments of vibra­to. Rather than one of his usu­al icon­ic gui­tars, he plays a cus­tom instru­ment that howls like a keen­ing bugle.

The record­ing was part of a project in which musi­cians around the world played the cer­e­mo­ni­al call on a vari­ety of instru­ments. For com­par­i­son with Knopfler’s cre­ative inter­pre­ta­tion, see a straight­for­ward ren­di­tion played above by a mem­ber of the Aus­tralian Roy­al Mil­i­tary Col­lege Band. The bugle call reminds us of the war dead we may have for­got­ten, and the mil­lions killed by star­va­tion and influen­za after the armistice. And per­haps it also reminds us of the impor­tance of col­lec­tive mourn­ing for the dead in our own extra­or­di­nary his­tor­i­cal moment.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gui­tar Sto­ries: Mark Knopfler on the Six Gui­tars That Shaped His Career

Mark Knopfler Gives a Short Mas­ter­class on His Favorite Gui­tars & Gui­tar Sounds

The Great War: Video Series Will Doc­u­ment How WWI Unfold­ed, Week-by-Week, for the Next 4 Years

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

If you’re feel­ing a lit­tle stressed today—maybe a lot stressed today, maybe severe­ly-rationing-your-social-media stressed—it might do you some good to get com­fort­ably numb. And unless the laws of your local­i­ty pre­vent it, you can reach a safe state of bliss at home with his­toric live con­cert films from Pink Floyd. “Fol­low­ing the lead of Radio­head and Metal­li­ca and launch­ing a YouTube con­cert series,” notes Con­se­quence of Sound, “the band will release unseen, rare, or archived mate­r­i­al from their vault and stream it for free” over the next few weeks.

It may or may not be nec­es­sary to qual­i­fy that Pink Floyd these days con­sists of only two peo­ple, David Gilmour and drum­mer Nick Mason, key­boardist Richard Wright hav­ing passed away in 2008 and bassist/rock opera impre­sario Roger Waters hav­ing stormed off to make his own records in 1985, nev­er to return. Per­haps only coin­ci­den­tal­ly, the first film the band has released is 1994’s Pulse, a 22-song set from the Divi­sion Bell tour, the sec­ond stu­dio album made with­out Waters. But it’s got quite a lot to rec­om­mend it despite his absence.

“Filmed at London’s now-defunct Earls Court dur­ing the band’s record-break­ing 14-night res­i­den­cy,” this show is notable par­tic­u­lar­ly for “the inclu­sion of the first-ever film record­ing of Pink Floyd play­ing The Dark Side of the Moon in full.” The 1972 album’s sar­don­ic rumi­na­tions on the banal­i­ty of mod­ern life in an econ­o­my that can­not stop its con­stant grind might strike us as par­tic­u­lar­ly grim while we’re fac­ing such huge col­lec­tive loss­es of life and liveli­hood. But as always, the band knows how to make its med­i­cine go down with some sweet eye and ear can­dy.

Mixed in 5.1 sur­round sound and dig­i­tal­ly re-mas­tered by James Guthrie, Pulse also includes some of orig­i­nal screen films used for the 1970s con­cert per­for­mances of The Dark Side of the Moon (which were nev­er filmed) as well as the visu­al com­po­nents for the piece which were remade for the 1994 tour.

On their Face­book page, the band promis­es more “inter­est­ing and divert­ing images, music and video to help us all get through this”—as best as we can, in any case. And if you run out of Pink Floyd to help you get through a tough time of day, head over to see anoth­er band bring­ing blues-based psych-rock, Amer­i­can style, to the shut-in mass­es this spring. The Grate­ful Dead have their own week­ly stream­ing series of full con­cert films. Of the first con­cert post­ed, they write, “Its excel­lence is indis­putable and is some­thing that we think pret­ty much every­one will enjoy in the absence of actu­al­ly being able to see live con­certs.”

Take an hour or two to relax with some clas­sic live shows from clas­sic bands of yore, and maybe make a list of all the cur­rent bands you want to go out and sup­port as soon as you get out of quar­an­tine. Some­thing tells me after all this livestream­ing, there’ll be waves of renewed appre­ci­a­tion for live music. Good­ness knows, musi­cians every­where will need it.

Vis­it the Pink Floyd Youtube chan­nel for more lives streams in the future.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pink Floyd Films a Con­cert in an Emp­ty Audi­to­ri­um, Still Try­ing to Break Into the U.S. Charts (1970)

The Dark Side of the Moon Project: Watch the First of an 8‑Part Video Essay on Pink Floyd’s Clas­sic Album

An Hour-Long Col­lec­tion of Live Footage Doc­u­ments the Ear­ly Days of Pink Floyd (1967–1972)

Dead & Com­pa­ny Announces Couch Tour, Let­ting You Stream Free Con­certs at Home

Radio­head Will Stream Con­certs Free Online Until the Pan­dem­ic Comes to an End

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

Ladies and gen­tle­man, the great­est rock n roll band in the world, the Rolling Stones. Live, in quar­an­tine, at home, per­form­ing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Any the­o­ries on what’s the sto­ry with Char­lie’s drum kit? And why they have red in their homes? Enjoy.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Rolling Stones Write “Sym­pa­thy for the Dev­il”: From Jean-Luc Godard’s ’68 Film One Plus One

Mick Jag­ger Tells the Sto­ry Behind ‘Gimme Shel­ter’ and Mer­ry Clayton’s Haunt­ing Back­ground Vocals

Jef­fer­son Air­plane Wakes Up New York; Jean-Luc Godard Cap­tures It (1968)

I need­ed a lift today. This did the trick. Neil Finn–you know him from Crowd­ed House and Split Enz–plays a beau­ti­ful acoustic ver­sion of David Bowie’s “Heroes.” Enjoy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch David Byrne Lead a Mas­sive Choir in Singing David Bowie’s “Heroes”

David Bowie’s “Heroes” Delight­ful­ly Per­formed by the Ukulele Orches­tra of Great Britain

Pro­duc­er Tony Vis­con­ti Breaks Down the Mak­ing of David Bowie’s Clas­sic “Heroes,” Track by Track

David Bowie Per­forms a Live Acoustic Ver­sion of “Heroes,” with a Bot­tle Cap Strapped to His Shoe, Keep­ing the Beat