Rearranged

The man behind Meridian Brothers on the highly organized method he uses to produce his scrambled takes on Latin American musical traditions. Eblis Álvarez's music under the Meridian Brothers banner mines cumbia, salsa, and other traditions, but his outlandishly creative imagination and skill with electronics produces music that exists beyond any particular genre.  Álvarez discussed "Mi Pregunto" f...

We visit the composer's Peabody class on "Listening to Baltimore" and discuss his "intimate and epic" music. Baltimore-based Judah Adashi brings the community into his compositions and into his classroom at the Peabody institute. We talk about his music, his city, and why marimbas sound like rain. In this episode, we discussed Judah's compositions "my heart comes undone," "Art and the Rain," and a...

Clare and Olivier Manchon on their dedication to craft and never ever cutting corners in songwriting, arranging, and film scoring. Clare and Olivier Manchon met in a world of sound as students at the Berklee College of Music. Over the last couple decades they've brought the world many rich arrangements, both in their band Clare and the Reasons, and on arrangements and film scores. In this episode,...

How the prolific songwriter and composer draws on intuition and orchestration to create his musically and emotionally compelling songs and concert music. Gabriel Kahane discusses his arranging approach for his own vast and varied catalog as well as for other artists, writing orchestrally for piano accompaniment, and what it's like to hear a jazz musician interpret one of his songs. Gabriel Kahane'...

Georgia Anne Muldrow and Brandon Ross talk about their collaboration on the new Harriet Tubman album Electrical Field of Love and how their bandmates create in the moment by supporting each other through their musical "it's alright, go ahead" moments. Thanks to Susan Valot for recording Georgia Anne Muldrow in L.A. and Good Studio for recording Brandon Ross in Brooklyn. Thanks to Osiris Media for...

How the High Llamas founder and in-demand arranger gets his sound. Rearranged host Lawrence Lanahan inteviews O'Hagan about the evolution of the High Llamas' sound, arranging for other artists, and learning from the younger version of himself while arranging old tunes with Cathal Coughlan for a Microdisney reunion. SHOW NOTES Thanks to Talia Augustidis [link: https://allhear.substack.com/] for rec...

The music arranger’s power to put a listener inside a song. Songwriters write the songs—duh—but arrangers determine how we hear them. To arrange a song is to make a series of musical decisions. What do those decisions add up to? Sometimes it’s really just a sound, and we like that sound or we don’t. But musical decisions can also determine or even change the meaning of a song. Today, we’ll discove...

Don’t mess with my melody! What happens when arrangers end up in court. Copyright law is supposed to incentivize creative expression, but court rulings on arrangements have had the opposite effect. In Episode 4, we learn why the courts have called arrangers "mere mechanics," stifling creativity from the 19th century right up through songwriter Ed Sheeran's recent trial. Guests: Kembrew McLeod is a...

How revolutions in recording technology remade the sound of the popular song. Studio technology has evolved from Edison's massive and unwieldy acoustic horn to an infinite array of possibilities that fit on the smartphone in your hand. In Episode 3 of Rearranged, we explore the revolutions in the sound of the popular song that accompanied revolutions in how we record sound. Guests: Brandon Shaw Mc...

Arrangements are often belittled as second-hand, second-class music. We’ll discover their potential for stunning originality.   A pianist and a scholar of Franz Liszt show us the profound originality possible in derivative music like Liszt’s piano renditions of Beethoven’s symphonies.   In Episode 2 of Rearranged, a classical music scholar and a pianist will look under the hood of Franz Liszt’s so...

In this pilot episode of Rearranged, Lawrence Lanahan explores the life and music of someone who helped Miles Davis create some of his most unforgettable music: arranger Gil Evans. Lanahan uses "Moon Dreams," the Johnny Mercer tune that Evans rearranged into a work of art on Davis's "Birth of the Cool" album, to consider the underappreciated art of arranging…and to investigate the deepest meanings...

A preview of the podcast REARRANGED, wich considers the meaning we take from songs by examining an under appreciated aspect of their creation: the arrangement. Premieres February 25.