Langley Schools Music Project

Always can bring my daughter along to deceive those pesky record clerks and pretend it's for her. ;)

The accompanying photos are more moving than the music. When you look at the photographs of the kids, you can't help but wonder what kind of futures lay ahead for them all.

It should be said that it really isn't different from hearing any old choir of 10th graders doing some pop hits. It's pulling the music out of the context of a recital and hearing it in your living room, or over headphones, that makes it so powerful. The arrangements are nice, but aside from "Space Oddity" (which really is weird and scary), they're not the real appeal of this thing.

I haven't been emotionally affected by music like this in ages.

And I mean proper puppies, not the kind of puppies you smut-dogs are are thinking of.

As for many of the rest, and "Know Him" too, somehow the Langley performances make me hear power and beauty that I hadn't previously noticed.

I don't know. Maybe in a few cases this has to do with the kids' youthful energy: kid energy is a good thing, and can be great when it comes across on record ("Double Dutch Bus," Lil' Romeo's "My Baby"), but there has to be artistry involved, something that organizes the energy for effect.

For instance, I'll say flatly that when a friend of mine's daughter Lia (age seven or eight, at the time) got her neighborhood friends to dance and sing along to Britney's "Lucky," acting it out and somewhat drowning it out, this was better than the original. When Lucky is sad, the kids are making sad faces, and so on. It was a real kick, and I'd say the kids organized their own energy on that afternoon (the artistic organization of an afternoon). But a tape of that out-of-tune version wouldn't be worth hearing; nor a videotape worth seeing - or if the latter were worth seeing, this would only be if the video maker himself were an artist and knew how to manipulate sound and images for effect. The greatness of Lia's performance was in its moment (though the fact that "Lucky" could be used for such a performance makes the song better than I'd realized, better than it had been).

So what about the artistry in the Langley's versions, artistry that works in my moments not just in its own? Energy is only a small part of it, since the energy songs here are nice but don't predominate and are usually not the best. The better songs are slow and mournful, and their renditions matter-of-fact. What I like in "Desperado" is that the nine-year-old singing it (accompanied only by piano, which is less in tune than she is) lets the song hold the stage - this is not my general aesthetic, by the way (nor my general anaesthetic), that bare beauty is the best beauty. I often like performers who mess with the material and who throw as much stuff as they can into their sound. But it was bare beauty that worked at Langley. In the liner notes the guy says that he kept the accompaniment spare, since he had all those kids voices and he needed to give them space. And I'd say the spareness helped him avoid the worst problem of '70s soft rock, which was that the soft-rock arrangements balanced things out too much, filled in too many of the spaces, cushioned and muffled everything in harmonies and strings and guitar - not that there were too many harmonies, strings, etc. but that they were used in a way that knocked them all into neutral. So it isn't so much that '70s soft rock was too slick, or that slick is worse than rough, and professional worse than amateur (thousands of hardcore punk bands prove otherwise), but that the willy nilly application of any professional technique, whether slick or rough, spare or full - "it worked on the last record, so this is how we must do things, forever and ever" - simply smothers the ability to make good music.

On the Langley record the singing is remarkably in tune, given that it's a bunch of children, nontrained voices, everybody gets to play. Still, since the voices are untrained, the sound has a fuzz of nonmusicality at the edges, the sort of nonmusicality that you get when a lot of untrained singers sing at once. What's impressive, though, is that the musical director got the kids to sing softly - beautifully softly - when necessary. This isn't impressive just because he got them to do it, though getting kids to sing softly must be difficult, but that they do it well. It's harder to be soft than loud, and my guess is that the kids must have felt and trusted the music enough to let themselves be soft, to let their voices sit back in the melody. The crucial accompanying instrument was the xylophone (supposed to be Tibetan bells, I think, but it sounds like a xylophone to me), which plays single notes or two- or three-note riffs, not a lot of them but very effective. To compensate for all this soft perfection, whenever there's percussion it comes crashing in too loud. Fortunately there's not a lot of it, since it's played for punctuation, not rhythm.

Best tracks on here: "Sweet Caroline," original by Neil Diamond (why don't I own any Neil Diamond albums?). "Wildfire," original by I don't remember who. "Venus and Mars," also can't remember who'd hit with it. "Rhiannon," indestructible, as I said. A good version of "Mandy." ("Frank, there's this record you're really going to like; it's got a bunch of ten-year-olds singing stuff like 'Mandy' and 'Wildfire'"????) "The Long and Winding Road," a girl singing solo, totally gripping version of a song that I'd hated up till now, considered it the worst Beatles song ever. Maybe I'd been so angry at late-Beatles McCartney for retreating into sap that I wasn't willing to like anything like this. I'd heard nothing good in it. When the girl sings "will never disappear," and later when the tune comes 'round again, "Will always lead me here," I say to myself "That's gorgeous." I just had no idea this song had so much beauty. Was my problem that originally McCartney had made it sound too easy? Normally I'd say that if someone makes the difficult sound easy - which was one of the glories of the early Beach Boys, that they weren't sounding glorious but just fun - then he's doing a good job. But that's another rule that doesn't always apply. Maybe I'm paying more attention to the beauties here, the song intricacies, because I'm caught up in the process, the struggle for the beauty. Sometimes the girl's breath goes short, but she never loses the rhythm and never gets too loud or too soft; stays right where she needs to be.

Well, I'm not totally helpless: "Wildfire" is by the immortal Michael Murphey, and "Venus and Mars" is by the hated McCartney (a fact I'd repressed), but I had to go to Allmusic.com to find this out.

Maybe the post-Beatles McCartney was a better songwriter than I'd realized, but lost the ability to sing for effect. Or maybe I need to go back and re-evaluate him. Maybe the Langley versions of his music are better than his own. Or maybe they're not better, but they're simply different enough to make me pay attention to what's there in the music.

And no, I won't say that the versions on here of "Good Vibrations" and "In My Room" are better than the Beach Boys' (or nearly as good) but I will say that maybe these performance show why (and how) the Beach Boys' versions could be bettered.

'Venus & Mars' is good, but Wings' versions (2) are still a lot better.

I heard 'God Only Knows' because it was played by Jason Schwartzman (yes, that actor) when he was doing Steve Jones' 'Jonesy's Jukebox' on California's 103.1, and I had to just go and immediately buy the album on eBay. Hopefully the whole album is awesome. Some samples are here:
http://www.keyofz.com/keyofz/langley/

I like these kids:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq-z_aYreTs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKPC-T3jjRg

https://charityvillage.com/jobs/search-results/job-detail.aspx?id=366588&l=2

found this CD in an old box recently. It's recorded where I used to live (in Langley)

i drove by a sign for langley yesterday on the 1 back from harrison hot springs. that's my only langley story

i haven't heard this album in ten years, i really enjoyed it and found it moving. not one to be played on a comedown tho ...

depends on a comedown from what :P

yeah I could see that lol, the cover of desperado guts me