Episode 18 : My Three Songs with Larry Dolton

Jake: 0:09

Coming to you almost live from Berkeley, California, it's Aaron's Radio Show, with your host, Aaron Gobler.

Aaron Gobler: 0:19

Thanks, Jake. And welcome, everybody to Episode 18. Welcome to My Three Songs where I play three special songs chosen by my guest, and we talk about why they chose each song. Today, my guest is my brother in law, Larry Dolton. How are you today, Larry?

Larry Dolton: 1:07

Hello, Aaron, I'm doing quite well. Thank you.

Aaron Gobler: 1:10

That's good to hear. I want to thank you for being on the show. And, you know, I know you're a guitarist, a sound engineer, and an avid music collector. And I'm really psyched to have you on today. And I'm sure we're going to have a really interesting discussion.

Larry Dolton: 1:24

Yes, I'm looking forward to it.

Aaron Gobler: 1:26

And before I forget, I do want to acknowledge your ongoing help with the sound production on the radio show. So tell me what prompted you to be on the show?

Larry Dolton: 1:35

I like your idea of three songs. You know, it's actually a great exercise in reflection. It's been a you know, I kind of wanted to do that to figure out three songs and and then talk about it because I like talking to other people about music. So that's a great thing. Also, I wanted to support your show.

Aaron Gobler: 1:55

Well, thank you. Thanks. I appreciate that. Yeah, I've had several guests tell me that this was kind of daunting or frightening prospect at the beginning, like how do I you know, how do I find these three songs. And then as they started thinking about it, they got more into the groove of like putting their list together. And I do remind people, it doesn't have to be your favorite three songs, it could just be three that are important to you right now or throughout your life. Or you can come on the show again and give me another three songs. So before we get started, Larry, tell me, how does music fit into your life? Like you listen to it on a whim? Or is it like a key part of your normal day? Or do you just find that it's mostly in the background,

Larry Dolton: 2:32

I listen to music and think about music every day. Music basically, it's it's kind of a lifelong adventure for me, you know, because I'm always exploring music, finding new and old music, really across many different genres and making new discoveries and connections. I'm like a sponge and very open minded about music. And I learned about music from many different sources, college, radio, online, radio, books, magazines, and people I know always have good ideas. My wife, Ellen introduced me to some great artists such as the Jayhawks and Neil Finn, among many others. She's your sister, Aaron. So I'm sure I know that you guys grew up sharing a lot of good music.

Aaron Gobler: 3:16

Yeah, so she was definitely an influence for me. You know, to like listen to the Eagles. And the two of us really enjoyed going to concerts, certain concerts together, especially Crowded House. And to, to our listeners, if you want to hear Ellen's interview, I'll put a plug in here, she's on episode 14.

Larry Dolton: 3:36

You know, another thing too, is that I, as you pointed out, I am a sound engineer. And one of the things is kind of in a more general sense, I'm kind of always listening to the larger world of sound around me. And really, any interesting sound is fun to listen to. And if I hear something, I'll listen to it. And along those lines, I don't really even draw a distinct boundary between music, and sounds. There's a lot of artists that I listen to kind of work in the gray area between music and just sound. And it's all interesting and very accessible. So it's, you know, throughout my day, I'm listening to music, I'm kind of thinking about sounds. And the other thing is, as you pointed out, I have... I do collect music. I've been collecting music since I was, you know, a teenager, have this large collection of music in various formats. You know, as I went along, I never really duplicated anything. In terms of technology. I still have all my vinyl records. Most of those I never went out and duplicated in CD form or whatever. And so I have I have lots of vinyl, I have some cassette tapes and CDs and then of course lots of digital stuff.

Aaron Gobler: 4:49

Do you have... you don't have any like other cylinders? You play on an Edison, do you?

Larry Dolton: 4:54

Well, funny you mentioned that. I do actually.

Aaron Gobler: 4:58

Oh, okay.(Laughter)

Larry Dolton: 4:59

My grandfather had a cylinder player in pristine condition in his attic. So we got it and I have, oh about 25 cylinder records. And it works.

Aaron Gobler: 5:13

Wow. Nice, nice.

Larry Dolton: 5:14

Yeah, it's from it's a Thomas Edison thing from 1904, I think.

Aaron Gobler: 5:20

Wow.

Larry Dolton: 5:21

Yeah. I don't listen to that too much.

Aaron Gobler: 5:24

But you, you really do have multiple formats. Do you have any reel-to-reel tapes?

Larry Dolton: 5:29

No. One, one thing that one thing I do, I don't know if you do it. But I mean, I have been converting some of those things to digital. Because these days, I buy a lot of digital music, a lot of stuff from Bandcamp. Artists and labels on Bandcamp. I have a server in the basement, so I can access the digital music, you know, from anywhere in the house? Are you are you converting things to digital, or?

Aaron Gobler: 5:57

Well, there was a period of time where I was just really converting so many of my CDs to things I could put on my iTunes so I could listen to, to music, and I would mark each CD with little sticky that said, like, you know, iTunes or something. And so I knew which ones were you know... I had and which ones I hadn't converted, but we're talking like 10 plus years ago that I started doing that. So I just buy new songs or songs that I want to get digitally. I just bought... get them from on Apple Music right now, which used to be called iTunes. But I do have I did have a lot of a lot of vinyl that I gave away. And I still have some really classic albums, and ones that I haven't replaced with, with CDs. So like a lot of my Billy Joel stuff, I just have it on CDs now. And I gave away the albums. But I do have I do have a lot of 12 inch dance remixes that I bought when I was going to college on Long Island. The proximity to New York City meant that the record stores on Long Island often would have some some of these dance remixes and stuff that I don't know if you could get them too many other places. So I really need to like digitize them, or maybe make an episode of the radio show with these with these dance remixes or some really kind of classic, maybe a little bit obscure songs that people of our generation would would recognize from the Studio 54 era, per se.

Larry Dolton: 7:21

Well, I just want to one other thing about that just in thinking about these three songs and putting them together. You know, I kind of went back to my beginnings and kind of thought about, you know how I ended up on this path that I kind of realized there were some kind of key turning points back when I was a teenager. You know, growing up around the house, my mom had some records like Simon and Garfunkel and Frank Sinatra, big Sinatra fan. My dad played accordion and they both played piano. It was in fifth or sixth grade. This is around 1970. I started listening to AM radio.

Aaron Gobler: 7:55

Okay.

Larry Dolton: 7:56

I don't know if you listened to AM radio but man I just loved it. It was all those artists, all those songs. I just

Aaron Gobler: 8:00

Oh yeah. couldn't get enough. But then, when I was in seventh grade, I was on the bus going to school. And there was a guy that lived in the neighborhood. He's an eighth grader. And he's a tall guy, long black hair, you know, really cool. And he shuffled by me and my friend on the bus me and my friend were talking about AM radio. And he said something kind of smirk like "Ah those teenyboppers. They're missing out on the wonders of FM radio." And I said, FM man, I gotta check that out. And I did and you know, this was the early 70s. and FM radio was just it was pretty cool. They had all those mellow DJs that could select a lot of the songs they wanted to play as long as you know, along with playing all the current hits and things like that, that that really sent me off into a new direction. A lot of people don't even think about AM radio anymore, except for maybe talk radio or sports or just strictly news. I can recall when I first started listening to FM, but yeah, in 1970 I was already listening to WFIL 560 AM in Philadelphia.

Larry Dolton: 9:11

Yeah, I'm sure Philadelphia had some good stations.

Aaron Gobler: 9:14

Yeah. I could probably rattle off some of the call letters of the other stations.

Larry Dolton: 9:18

Then when I was in high school, I joined the journalism staff and the teacher there, Nick Ferrantinos, he was he's fairly young, and he had his record collection in the room and a turntable. He had this stuff in New York, like in the mid 70s, the Television's Marquee Moon album first came out. And that was just just amazing. I just couldn't believe it because it didn't sound like anything on kind of the other music on FM radio. It wasn't really punk like the Sex Pistols that had just come out. There's a little bit more jagged guitar and I was just... sort of the beginning of that whole new wave indie stuff that happened through the 80s.

Aaron Gobler: 10:01

Mm hmm.

Larry Dolton: 10:02

So when I heard that it was like, wow, there's, again another world kind of opened.

Aaron Gobler: 10:07

Were you like these new worlds were already being established or you were hearing them like when they were in their infancy?

Larry Dolton: 10:14

Yeah, in their infancy.

Aaron Gobler: 10:15

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that is kind of exciting hearing a new a new style, a new genre kind of breaking through. Yeah.

Larry Dolton: 10:22

I guess what happened was, you know, I just I didn't really get stuck in anything. I just kept sort of veering on to new avenues. And after that, I went to College up in Portland, Oregon. And, you know, it's a city, smaller than San Francisco or Seattle, that's still a city. And that's kind of where I discovered going to live music and smaller, you know, venues clubs, which was a kind of an eye opening experience. And I've kind of been doing that ever since. To be up close to a band and just kind of fairly small room of people is fantastic. Yeah. The other interesting thing that I discovered in Portland was the and this probably happened in Philly too, is just these local bands, bands that were really good. But mostly just popular in the in the area.

Aaron Gobler: 11:08

Larry, you selected three great songs. Each one is I find was really kind of different from the rest, and they're each from a different era. So the first song you chose was "Rumble" by Link Wray from 1958. The second song"Sugarcube" by Yo La Tengo from 1997. And the third is "I Can't Give Everything Away" by David Bowie. And that was from 2016. Now I know you're a huge fan of guitars and surf music. So I'm eager to hear your thoughts about "Rumble". And I'm interested to know to know why all of these songs are meaningful to you. So first, let's take a listen to "Rumble" by Link Wray.

Aaron Gobler.: 12:01

Larry, before we heard the song, I noted that you're a big surf music fan. Would you consider this song as part of that genre?

Larry Dolton: 12:08

No, no, it's kind of pre ... it definitely predated surf. Surf kinda showed up more in that early 60s. You know, Link Wray was this kind of... he came out of the kind of blues and rock scene, we really kind of focused on instrumentals. But back in that 40s and 50s and, and even on into the 60s, there was quite a bit of guitar instrumental music going around.

Aaron Gobler: 12:35

Would you say that surf musicians were inspired by his guitar playing or that in some kind of a seed? Or kernel for the certain music sound?

Larry Dolton: 12:47

Well, yes, definitely, that there's kind of a trajectory of Instrumental Guitar Music. And one of the things that I really like to do is to look back and discover music from the past because I always find things that, you know, just amazed that I didn't know existed, and there they are, and, and a lot of them kind of relate somehow, up through the years to today. So one of the things that I discovered is quite a while ago, now 20 years ago, was there was a lot of Guitar Instrumental Music starting kind of in the late 40s and early 50s. Primarily in the country side of things. There were guys like Herbie Remington and Speedy West and Chet Atkins, were doing these country instrumentals featuring the guitar and they're just super cool. I mean, you listen to him now and they sound exciting. And then there was kind of the rock stuff, which is kind of Link Wray and then kind of in early 60s, the surf music kind of took off on the West Coast, California, primarily, but even then in through the 60s, as rock guitar kind of got bigger, you know, the Stones and the Beatles and, and all of that. There were these other guys who were a little bit older, working musicians kind of in the entertainment industry and, and they started doing guitar instrumentals. So I have these albums from the late 50s early 60s from guys like Billy Mure and Buddy Merrill and Al Caiola, where they[re experimenting with guitar sounds, but a little bit more in the easy listening kind of feel.

Aaron Gobler: 14:19

Okay. Okay.

Larry Dolton: 14:21

But it's cool. And there's this whole variety of Instrumental Guitar Music that kind of started there in the 50s and 60s that is interesting. You know, you're not gonna hear it on the radio. But so and I think a lot of the earlier stuff definitely influenced the 60s. I mean, the surfers they knew about these, even the country stuff that I'm sure they heard.

Aaron Gobler: 14:44

Sounds like you have a kind of encyclopedic mind of the different types of sounds a different guitar sounds so I'm guessing as you listen to musicians, you can kind of pick apart their inspirations or you know who they're trying to simulate.

Larry Dolton: 14:57

Yeah, definitely Link Wray in this 1958 song, he influenced a lot of people after that, and one of the reasons is because he's distorting the guitar, there's a little bit of distortion, it's coming. You know, back in those days, the distortion could only come from the amp, they didn't have pedals and all those kinds of things. But the guitar amp, you could easily distort it because there are beautiful two bands, and they did have some onboard effects, primarily reverb and tremolo, which Link Wray really uses the tremolo on this song. It also should be pointed out that Link Wray he didn't invent distortion in the 40s and 50s. It was the Black blues artists that were really they knew how to crank up their amps. And you had guys like Hound Dog Taylor, Otis Rush and Cubert someone who played with Howlin Wolf. They really cranked up their amps. And those were the guys that influenced, you know, the rock that came in the 60s... Clapton, Hendrix. They listened to all that blues stuff. And they heard the sounds and they just kind of, you know, as technology changed, they were able to make it even louder, right?

Aaron Gobler: 16:01

Yeah. So they would have to, like move their guitar closer away from the amp to get like, extra, you know, distortion or something or they you're saying they didn't have pedals to introduce these sounds. So they were leaving it up to knobs on their amps to or their proximity with their guitar to the amp.

Larry Dolton: 16:20

Yeah, a little both there, they're really just turning the amp up, and then turning the volume on your guitar up. And then having a guitar that might have one or two pickups, you start to get all that going together.

Aaron Gobler: 16:31

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Really kind of an experimentation.

Larry Dolton: 16:37

So I get the whole idea that Link Wray song, if you listen to a right now, you know, it sounds it's kind of simple. And you can hear the guitar, which is really cool. But he really had a big influence on musicians going forward.

Aaron Gobler: 16:52

And why is the]is song meaningful to you?

Larry Dolton: 16:54

First of all, I just love the simplicity of it. And the fact that you can hear the guitar. I mean, it's kind of cool to have a musician put together a song that lets you just hear that sort of one instrument. So I like that. That means a lot to me because of that focus. But then these other things, too, it kind of represents this whole instrumental area that that I think is fascinating and ongoing. And also, it's an older song. Like I said, I like listening to older music and finding things. And so it's definitely, it's in that category.

Aaron Gobler: 17:29

The next song you chose is "Sugarcube" by Yo La Tengo. So let's give that a listen. And we'll talk about it on the other side.

Aaron Gobler.: 17:50

I've heard of Yo La Tengo, but I don't think I ever knew any of their songs. So this is new to me. And as I listen to the song, I was trying to figure out what genre it in. And I'm figuring you'll let me know what inspired you to add this particular song to your list?

Larry Dolton: 18:07

Well, I've always loved this song. Yo La Tengo is one of those bands that I've been following for a long time. Yo La Tengo is made up of three people, Ira Kaplan who plays guitar and Georgia Hubley, who plays drums and James McNew plays bass.They also play other instruments, and they all play keyboards, and they all sing. So they have a nice variety of sound. This particular song was more on the noisy end of things, but they can they do quite a variety of sounds. And they've been playing for about 30 years now releasing records with new stuff. And they're really an amazing set of musicians. And this song itself is just a good representation of one style of music they do, but I guess I really like it just because it just kicks off with Georgia's drumming, and then just keeps rolling. He's just got this big giant ball of fuzz. But it's got a nice melodic line. But the other thing that's interesting to me also is just the way there is a guitar solo, but it just kind of emerges out of the fuzz and and it's not a normal guitar solo. It's kind of a noise guitar solo.

Aaron Gobler: 19:17

Right, right.

Larry Dolton: 19:18

And so that to me, I think it's just fantastic because it makes you feel something and it kind of pulls you around a little bit. And then you kind of go back into the song.

Aaron Gobler: 19:29

I often pay attention when I'm listening to music as to like where the vocals fit in or how front or back they are. It sounds in this song, it sounds like the vocals were like they're in the back of the room doing the vocals and the guitars are all up front or something. It sounds like it's almost like a second thought the vocal part. I guess the music is so prominent.

Larry Dolton: 19:50

Yeah, it's true. Music sits up front. Yeah, and the lyrics are kind of interesting. They are kind of indirect. I mean, you kind of hear them. If you hear them one way you might think one thing and if you hear it the next day, you might think something else. I mean, it kind of sounds like he's maybe, you know, talking to a relationship partner and talking about how he's going to try and be better try and improve things. But then it also kind of sounds like, well, maybe he's just kind of being a little sarcastic.

Aaron Gobler: 20:19

Yeah.

Larry Dolton: 20:19

Because this other person just keeps telling him to be better. He says, "Sure, yeah, anything. Yeah, I'll do it. I'll do it. I'll even squeeze blood from a sugar cube. You got it."

Aaron Gobler: 20:28

Yeah.

Larry Dolton: 20:30

Oh, in terms of genre, you know, I, I don't get too worked up about genre. I certainly, you know, have names that I throw around sometimes and things but to me, there's so much cross pollination that hard to throw things into a single bucket. However, you know, one of the reasons that I chose this song is because it represents or it's from now whole 80s 90s band thing that was going on, often called indie music.

Aaron Gobler: 21:00

Ah, yeah.

Larry Dolton: 21:01

You know, there's bands like Sonic Youth, which is my all time favorite band who were part of this. There's the Replacements. Dinosaur Jr., Hüsker Dü, The Minutemen, REM, Mudhoney, you know, it's just, they all had not this sound in particular, but they are all kind of guitar oriented, and not quite regular music and they tried a lot of different things. And so that's kind of the genre I see it hitting.

Aaron Gobler: 21:31

Uh huh. So like an indie alternative kind of sound.

Larry Dolton: 21:36

Yeah, exactly.

Aaron Gobler: 21:36

Yeah, yeah.

Larry Dolton: 21:37

Alternative is another good term that gets passed around. Since then, in more in more recent times, you know, as technology changes, some of these kinds of musicians change a little bit. So hearing since about 2010, or even since 2000, there's been kind of more solo kind of projects. So there's, there's still bands, but there isn't the sort of fertile band activity of 80s and 90s, or the fertile band activity of the 60s right after the British invasion. Everybody was in a band. So nowadays, with recording, musicians can record themselves, you know, with all the available technology that right in your home studio, it's easy to do more recording. And even beyond that, recording and promoting and distributing your music. And I think with that there's been, I mean, there's always been solo artists, but there's more of these little solo projects, where somebody will, it won't be their name, it'll be the name of their project, but it's really just them. Like, there's this band called Caribou. And it's this one guy, he's gotten quite popular, and he'll play live shows, but he has his, you know, he has musicians playing with him. But he goes by Caribou. And he does a lot of the recordings stuff himself. And I kind of I kind of noticed this trend when there's this festival in San Francisco called Noise Pop. It's been happening every February for 30 years, started in the early 90s. And in the last 10 years, there's been less bands and more of these more solo artists and more solo projects. So you can kind of see that I could kind of see the band thing, not falling off again, but just going down.

Aaron Gobler: 23:22

Is part of that due to like, say, tools like GarageBand, or other software or just looping devices and other kinds of things people can use to do the instrument instrumentation themselves?

Larry Dolton: 23:34

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. It's not like these people are saying, you know, I don't want to play with anybody. It's just they're... that's that's kind of how they're working. Because that's sort of what a lot of people are doing these days. It's not bad, in fact that Caribou album is fantastic.

Aaron Gobler: 23:48

It's just, you're just seeing a more of a trend over the last couple of decades just toward individuals creating whole sounds on their own, and not really needing a whole band to build their projects or their sound.

Larry Dolton: 24:04

Yeah, exactly.

Aaron Gobler: 24:05

Yeah. Yeah.

Larry Dolton: 24:06

Definitely kind of a different feel. When there was an 80s 90s and in the 60s, when, you know, everybody was forming a band. One more thing. You know, the name Yo La Tengo?

Aaron Gobler: 24:18

I remember looking it up once, but I haven't... I forget what it means.

Larry Dolton: 24:23

Right, well, it's Spanish for the outfielders cry of "I got it".

Aaron Gobler: 24:28

Oh, okay. Okay.

Larry Dolton: 24:29

They're from New York. And I know Ira is a big Mets fan, so that must be where it...

Aaron Gobler: 24:33

I had not heard this particular song. I just thought that for some reason they were more like a Latin music or Santana-type music band. I had no idea that was it was just the name they had kind of chosen for their, for their band. That was kind of kind of like a funny choice of name.

Larry Dolton: 24:51

Right?

Aaron Gobler: 24:51

Yeah, yeah. The last song in your list is "I Can't Give Everything Away" by David Bowie. I'm a huge David Bowie fan, and I'm always glad to include his songs in the show. Let's give it a listen.

Aaron Gobler.: 25:06

Larry, I love Bowie's music and I have a lot of his albums, but nothing really recent. This this particular song, I feel it's kind of heartfelt. I understand it's one of his final songs. I have been meaning to explore his last album, why is this song meaningful to you?

Larry Dolton: 25:33

Yeah, I'm a big Bowie fan, too. This is from the album Blackstar that happened to come out just a week after he... no, a week before he died.

Aaron Gobler: 25:42

Okay.

Larry Dolton: 25:43

And they started working on it about two years prior to that. But after he knew that he was sick, it's just a beautiful, kind of touching, send off that he put together himself. It's kind of interesting how the lyrics are very minimal. And again, there's just a few phrases that kind of come out. And mostly it's the song and instrumentation is just kind of sending him away. The very last word that he that he uses, and because it's the last song on the album, the last song that he gave us. So very moving. I guess the other thing in a different sense that fascinates me about this album is that well, first of all, Bowie, you know, throughout his career, he would have a vision, right? When he was working on a project or an album. And some of it would include even a slightly different persona for him. But what he could really do was put together music that really fit that particular vision. And he would get, you know, musicians that would work. So on this particular one, I read about right after the album came out that he had, he was living in New York, and he'd seen these, this quartet of, kind of modern style jazz musicians. He asked them to work with him on this last album.

Aaron Gobler: 27:04

Uh huh. Okay.

Larry Dolton: 27:05

Anyway, when I explored some of their music it is just vibrant and interesting. Jason Lindner, the keyboard guy, he has another side group called Now Vs. Now. It is just really electronic, but kind of jazzy. So I was fascinated. I was like, wow, Bowie, you know, made the right choice. He could really see that these guys would fit his current vision. And so from what I understand, they kind of worked together. I mean, Bowie, he had wrote the songs, but they kind of all worked together to make the recording. So it must have been a fascinating process, working with Bowie at that stage in his life. So what's interesting is the song, I think they really bring something out in the song. And there's other parts of the album that are very similar, have a similar feel. But you know how the keyboards if you listen to that whole kind of synthesized keyboard sound, it's kind of the whole thing in the background, this kind of wash of sound, it's kind of rising up, so I thought that was fantastic. And then that McCaslin sax kind of comes out and he has a nice solo that kind of swings or sways along and then it ends with this other guy that was brought in Ben Monder playing guitar.

Aaron Gobler: 28:20

I do really do see the song is kind of like a showcase like you said for these for the other musicians in that there's not a whole lot of lyrical difference in the song. There's one break where we get the the jazz musicians and then another break, where we have that guitarist and then through the whole song is kind of like a dance rhythm with this keyboard synthesizer sound and then how it just kind of ends how it just kind of peters out at the end there almost like a light flickering and then going off. I don't know if I'm just applying the fact that we know that Bowie passed away. We knew he was ill and going to pass on soon. Or if that actually is what he he wanted the album to kind of like whisper away and just kind of peter out like that.

Larry Dolton: 29:07

Yeah, yeah, no, you're you're spot on it. There's definitely that whisper ending which, yeah, that's fascinating. I would say that he did. He planned that very precisely, which is, you know, it's kind of that's the way Bowie works.

Aaron Gobler: 29:21

Yeah. Like we were talking about that there's very little in terms of lyrics. But the title of the song is "I Can't Give Everything Away". So there's probably some deeper meaning in that too, because he doesn't really explain that title in the song. It's just the lyrics. I feel like maybe I'd have to look at their written lyrics, but just listening to it, I can't make heads or tails of, of how the rest of the lyrics in the song connect to this idea of not of not giving everything away. I'm curious now to read what might be some background on that.

Larry Dolton: 29:54

Yeah, I know. It's a little ambiguous, you know, just getting a few thoughts really. That's the line "I can't give everything away". It's I can imagine throughout Bowie's life people wanting to know more and more, you know, always want to know more about him. Him personally, or why he wrote that song that way, or you know, all those kinds of things. So it's probably part of it is kind of saying, you know, I can't give everything away. I've done the best I can.

Aaron Gobler: 30:24

Yeah, yeah. It's, it's really a loss. He he still had a lot of art left in him, I think. So is there anything else you want to share about your selections that I haven't asked you about or that you've thought about since we've been playing them?

Larry Dolton: 30:39

Yeah, well, I chose these three songs, because they, you know, they're wonderful songs within themselves. And they also kind of represent different aspects of music that I like. And one of the things is that there's still so much ongoing, interesting music being being made in some of the different genres that I that I listen to, like jazz. There's some young musicians in New York, or there's these guys that Bowie worked with. But there's also some other people. Mary Halvorson that plays just amazing electric guitar, and she kind of uses some effects. It's still jazzy, but it's kind of very modern sounding. Over in the electronic world, listen to a lot of electronic music, but there's this one guy named Eli Kessler. He's a drummer. And so he's, he's kind of a jazz drummer, but he's done this thing where he is tied his drumming into electronic sounds.

Aaron Gobler: 31:37

Okay.

Larry Dolton: 31:38

So I know it sounds really silly, right? When you listen to the album, it's just amazing, because the drumming is real, gentle little patters, and electronic sounds and more washes of sound and just a beautiful sound. So when I listen to things like that, I go, wow, it's like, I guess I have a lot of hope for music going forward. That's, that's, that's the, what I'm getting at. There's so many interesting musicians, still, that are kind of expanding the boundaries of these different genres, without just like being weird. They're just expanding using technology and their own imagination.

Aaron Gobler: 32:17

I'm big on creating analogies in my mind. And I as you're saying this, I'm thinking of visual artists who might use acrylics in a way that no one's used acrylics, or watercolors in a different way, or mixing them together and, you know, mixed medium or something. And so there's a certain creativity or curiosity, and to try even somebody who's say, making some kind of food, right. Let me throw this in. Let me try that. Let me see if I do this a different, different way. And then coming up with something that's really really delicious that no one else had really thought about.

Larry Dolton: 32:52

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And they're not they're not turning their back on anything. You know, coming up with some interesting...

Aaron Gobler: 33:01

Yeah. And then when you hear it for the first time, your brain hasn't heard something like that before, and it like, set off little sparks in your head like, wow, I don't know. That's really intense or that this really, you know, pushes buttons a certain way that that I hadn't experienced before.

Larry Dolton: 33:20

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you know, some some things like that don't really work, right?

Aaron Gobler: 33:26

Right.

Larry Dolton: 33:28

But that's, that's what each individual gets to choose what works for them.

Aaron Gobler: 33:32

Yeah. Thank you again, Larry, for taking some time today to be on the show. I had a lot of fun.

Larry Dolton: 33:39

Yes, so did I, this is great, Aaron. I'm glad I could talk with you.

Aaron Gobler: 33:44

And to my listeners, if you want to be part of this show, start by going to our website, Aaron's Radio dot show, and clicking on the My Three Songs button, which is on the homepage.

Aaron Gobler.: 33:57

Until next time, keep your ears and mind open and let more music into your world.

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