Hello to my dear and dedicated Breaker’s Point Readers. As the year wraps up, I want to tell you how much I appreciate you. I am not being modest in saying I never expected this many people to embrace this project, and follow it so consistently. I wish it were my music instead. Kidding. In all seriousness, thank you. I cannot stress enough how important your engagement has been to me as I really have written from the heart in both my periodic life updates and my earnest, lengthy, and potentially self-indulgent Bruce Springsteen album reviews.
That leads me to introduce the newest Breaker’s Point series, Love and Theft (gold star if you know where this brilliant title comes from). The concept of this series is to shed light on extraordinary musicians and artists who I have stolen from in my writing, my recording, and my performance. It can be a guitar lick, lyric, move on stage, vocal inflection, recording technique, arrangement, or someone’s musical instinct that has parasitized itself into my subconscious via obsessive listening and my brain’s natural tendency of analysis.
The word “stolen” has a negative connotation, but maybe we are not being open-minded—or maybe what I will describe in this series is not stealing at all. The amazing thing about music (and all art in general) is that deep within its foundation is the ideology of paying it forward.
I scoff at the idea of any sort of “ownership” in music. From a legal standpoint, sure. I am on board with the fact that music is a commodity and each song is a distinct entity that should be owned only by whoever the music industry has assigned the definitive ownership. We can get into the ethics of the music industry later (or never). However, my school of thought lies within the idea that what is mine is yours, and that music is a community around soundwaves that are universally shared and collectively interpreted over time. To me, music is not a finite product delivered by an artist to an audience. The truth is that everyone has access to the language that music is made from. Just as I do not own the words that I say to you in conversation, I do not own the words that I sing to you or the chords I play on the guitar. The only thing that is mine is my voice. Everyone has a distinct voice and expresses themselves uniquely. That is all that music is. Expression. The only caveat for me is whether or not a person is authentic in their process and their purpose for making music. I do not like imposters or copycats, but if enough people are fine with someone egregiously ripping off someone else, then by all accounts, c’est la vie. I truly do not believe the creation of music can ever be unethical; it only becomes unethical when the business and money come into play. I hate copyright infringement cases when artists whine that another artist copied them. Fuck you if you are like that. That is the whole point. Tom Petty was one of the coolest people to ever live, but I cowered in disgust when he sued Sam Smith for “Stay With Me” sounding too much like “I Won’t Back Down.” It could be the dumbest, most out-of-touch thing I have ever witnessed. My opinion.
Let’s circle back to this pay-it-forward idea. By sharing music, you are inviting musicians to actively and subconsciously take elements of it that they like to create something new and original with it. Here is an example and opportunity for me to plug a song of mine that I really like, “White Lying.”
I listen to this song and I hear The Strokes. Then, I listen to The Strokes’ biggest song “Last Nite.” The beginning of that song sounds a lot like Tom Petty’s “American Girl.” Then, I listen to “American Girl” and I hear the signature upbeat pop-rock of The Easybeats. I listen to “Friday on My Mind” by The Easybeats and I hear the early British Invasion. Almost all of the British Invasion was built on early rock n’ roll. And every fucking Chuck Berry song sounds the same (great, but the same). All of those Chuck Berry songs follow this thing called the 12 Bar Blues, a chord progression that came from none other than Blues music which came from gospel music which came from slave rituals…you get the point. Stealing is good!
There are some people I steal from more than others, and those are the people that I will be writing about in this new series. Don’t worry, it is not going to be so technical. It will focus on specific musical moments within my music, draw it back to who I “stole” it from, and write about that musician or artist or songwriter and what they mean not only to me but in the grand scope of music and culture.