What Is It About Pumped Up Kicks?

I can always tell when a song has caught the imagination of a lot of people because I start to hear about it from my guitar students.  It doesn't even have to be a guitar song per se, but as soon as my students begin referring to it, especially if the students are of different ages, it piques my interest.

Such was the case with Pumped Up Kicks by Foster The People.  It's a very simple song, musically, with a little bass/guitar riff repeating through most of the song and the same four-chord progression.  

For simplicity's sake, I have the guitar capo-ed on the 1st fret so my beginner students can play it using Em, D, G and A, one measure per chord.  The bass riff extends over that four-chord progression as well, but you can also play it on guitar, as some of my more advanced students like to do.

Diary of a Music Producer

Okay, that sounds somewhat pretentious.  I am not a big time music producer by any means.  But the last few months I have been deeply entrenched in my studio for hours at a time working on a new theme for a local television news show.  It is not the first time I have done this;  my music ran on that show for three years in the early 2000's and was then replaced by a corporate decision to brand a number of television stations across the country with the same music, produced somewhere back east.

This time, I was given a musical piece to emulate...not "copy", but essentially create a similar feel and tension to.  At first what I came up with was too much the same and I knew that, but it eventually morphed into something much more original.  The most difficult part was creating the drum track.

Amy Joins The 27 Club

Although a lot of people could see it coming, the death of Amy Winehouse was still a heck of a shock to many not wanting to believe that her addictions were so bad that they would ultimately kill her.  She was another one of those bright stars who burned herself out at a shocking rate, adding herself to the infamous 27 Club along with the likes of Kurt Cobain, Jim Hendrix and Janis Joplin, among others.

These were obviously talented people, musical trend-setters who's influence in the musical world was undeniable.  Some might argue that they had yet to even show us their best work, and maybe that's true.  Having experienced relationships with musicians all my life, I can certainly attest to one thing:  a lot of the really talented ones have a side to their personality that has a desire to go right to the edge.  You might consider them "musical thrill seekers".  And thrill seekers tend to be that way in more than one area of their lives.  Their boundaries are almost non-existent, and that's what makes them susceptible to addictions to hard drugs and other extreme behaviour.