Welcome back to Parsons Playlists! Today’s playlist is curated by Music Library student assistant Luis (class of 2025) and features songs to help you decompress after a busy day.
Letting Go Of My Thoughts
This a playlist of mostly indie and indie pop artists with a few classic older songs from bands like the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Jim Croce. I find that listening to these songs helps me decompress when I’ve had a long day and allows me to ease all the thoughts in my head.
The Music Library has more resources available than physical items. We’re highlighting some of our digital resources, and including information about them as told by our student employees.
Here is what student manager Cole (class of 2021) had to say about this resource:
“Music Online’s Popular Music Library is exactly what it sounds like: an online repository of popular music from around the world, all tagged with the appropriate metadata to make the site an effective research tool. Something I appreciate about Music Online’s collection is the emphasis placed on international works. The site is filled with recordings of songs I have never been exposed to, across all genres and in various languages. Many of the works archived are not available for sale online, so the site can be a valuable resource if one is looking for an obscure, elusive track.
When I first opened Popular Music Library, I was immediately greeted by the album Babies Go Pink Floyd, one of the works featured on the rotating carousel of new arrivals.
I immediately clicked on it to find out what exactly I was seeing. Each album is displayed as a waveform, with vertical lines separating individual tracks. The music player is accompanied by a sidebar of details and the track listing, with each track accompanied by the appropriate metadata. After some listening and further digging on the site, I learned that Babies Go … is a series of albums, originally sold in the UK, that rework popular music acts into soothing lullabies. Some of my favorite editions include: Babies Go The Cure, Babies Go Led Zeppelin, Babies Go Shakira, and, of course, Babies Go Radiohead, the music player for which, in an apparent (and humorous) technical oversight, presents a flat line and reads, “Waveform temporarily unavailable.”
Though Babies Go … probably won’t be often used as research material, I like to imagine it as a testament to the diversity of material collected for your listening in the Popular Music Library.”
Editor’s note:Arachnophonia is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.
What happens when three of the most influential guitarists alive, each from different eras of popular music, sit down for a day to swap stories and riffs? That’s the question at the heart of Davis Guggenheim’s 2008 documentary It Might Get Loud, starring Jimmy Page (of Led Zeppelin), The Edge (of U2), and Jack White (of The White Stripes). Although the three musicians come from differing backgrounds and generations, the film explores the three men’s lives as they’ve revolved around their shared fixation: the electric guitar.
In proportion to the total runtime, footage of the three’s meeting, dubbed “The Summit,” is relatively sparse. Instead, the film documents each of the musicians in and around their respective homes, piecing together their personal narratives, playing and recording styles, and musical philosophies. The film crew follows Jimmy Page to Headley Grange, a former workhouse-turned-recording studio whose interior acoustics can be heard on Led Zeppelin IV. The Edge visits the secondary school in Dublin where he co-founded U2 with his childhood friends. The film opens on Jack White assembling a rudimentary one-string guitar from plywood and a glass bottle on the porch of his Tennessee farmhouse. Guggenheim constantly moves between these three strands, allowing the guitarists to tell their own very different stories while revealing the subtle similarities in their lives that drove them all to the electric guitar.
My favorite moment in the film comes when The Edge delves into his playing philosophy. Known for his extensive use of reverb and delay, The Edge is sometimes criticized for playing his pedal board more than his guitar. Hearing him explain his methodology reveals the sheer creativity at work in creating his sounds, despite not “shredding” in the same vein as White and Page. At one point, The Edge plays the riff to “Elevation,” in which his guitar undulates between an indefinite number of notes. He then strips the effects and reveals the riff to be simply two notes, the space between filled with reverb, delay, and distortion. While this style of play rubs some the wrong way — such as those who consider effect pedals “cheating” to hide technical deficiencies — the great strength of It Might Get Loud is in capturing the dialogue between three pillars of guitar styles. In the film’s introductory sequence, Page admires The Edge as a “sonic architect,” a powerful compliment coming from the man most often placed beside Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton in conversations of electric guitar greatness.