Dear Mom,
Hey. So I was driving around the other day listening to Glen Campbell. I know, there's nothing cooler than a Subaru blasting songs from a 60's Pop/Country star. I assure you I do actually have friends. It was making me think about something that Dad showed me a lot about, though.
A lot of my musical heroes exhibit the ability to pick good material. While there are many songwriters I really love, a lot of my favorites don't write and instead are great pickers and arrangers. While Glen was a great songwriter, a lot of his biggest hits were written by other people, namely Jimmy Webb. Webb's version of Wichita Lineman and Galveston are very different from Campbell's versions and reveal a lot about Glen's talent for arranging songs. Other artists like Tony Rice showed this kind of musical talent. Tony played stuff written by everyone from Gordon Lightfoot to Bob Franke. He was a master of not only picking songs that fit his style but also turning them into his own music. There are a ton of other bands that I love (like the New Grass Revival, J.D. Crowe and the New South, Alison Krauss and Union Station, etc) that do this same thing. Picking amazing obscure material that will suite their style and arranging it to fit beautifully.
Dad taught me a lot about this when we'd listen to music together and it's a musical skill I really value. No one in our band writes very much so we try to practice this as much as we can. We put some weird stuff on our new album and I'm really proud of what we did. We took stuff from people like Jimmy Webb, Gordon Lightfoot, and Willie Nelson and broke them down and rearranged them to fit our style. it's really one of my favorite things to do as it presents a really satisfying music challenge.
I tried to do the same thing with these Zelda songs. I mean, part of the whole reason I picked Zelda was that it was still recognizable but not the obvious choice. If you mention video games around someone with an instrument they'll almost immediately play the super Mario theme. Which is a great tune but it's so over done. There are so many other interesting songs in the video game world! Even in the Mario world! If I was going to cover a Mario song it'd probably be the Character Select Screen from Super Mario Brothers 2. The songs I picked for this were a mix of classics and some pretty obscure ones (I even got a song from a game about Tingle, Link's mid-30's fairy hunting cartographer friend). I went back and forth with different lists for months and I cut a lot of really popular and maybe obvious songs for different reasons. While the strummy happy feel of the Dragon Roost Island theme might seem like a good choice, I really couldn't find a way to recreate it without just doing a straight cover. In other words, I couldn't think of a way to arrange it that would make it sound any different than the original recording. And that's really boring to my musical tastes. While there are some songs I picked and intend to arrange really close to their original versions, songs like Dragon Roost Island or Geurdo Valley just seemed too obvious. Songs that I think don't need to change much (because they're classics) like Zelda's Lullaby or the Title Screen from Link to the Past (but maybe the Link Between Worlds revamp because it's amazing) will still hold their undeniable music valley and have an obvious twist in that they're on acoustic instruments. But I'm really excited about adding subtle twists like turning Laruto's Lament into a progressive bluegrass instrumental or using twin fiddles to bluegrass-ify song like the Shooting Gallery or Horse Race.
What I'm really trying to do with this project, is show the value of two things I love. I want to show that video games and the music created for them is a valid art form worthy of respect and I want to show that it's possible to cover something so far removed from bluegrass in a style that completely honors the traditions of the music and style makes an enjoyable product both for people who already like bluegrass, and people who have never heard it. I really spent a lot of time going through the entire series picking songs and trying to strike a balance between songs that I know fans of the series would want to hear, songs that would translate well, songs that were good anyway, and songs that I could really do something special with. I know you won't know any of the songs but that's ok because I really want to make a stand alone product that isn't just a gimmick. I'm trying to make an album that is so good musically that it is simply enjoyable musically. But I also want fans of the series to hear these songs that they know and love in a new way that might make them see bluegrass music in a new light.
Love, Tristan
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