Tal Wilkenfeld: preference

Transcript context

…So the song goes before the genre in a sense. Each song is like its own thing. They’re both things that are held in my mind. It’s like, okay, genre and then song, which is comprised of those basic elements. And I tend to kind of prioritize lyric because somebody is trying to express something over music. And so the lyric is very, very important. And so then the choices come from there. It’s like, okay, within the genre of X this is the typical language. And then how do I best serve this lyric? And then where else can I pull from that might not be in these two bags that would put a little twist on it. So those are all the kinds of things I might be thinking about. But I don’t like twists for the sake of twists either. I like twists because I want to hear something that might be fresh. But when someone does something just to be hip, it’s annoying to me. I think you can hear the difference. It’s like when people, they write in odd time signatures or they write all these riffs just because they can, just because they have the chops to do it or they know how to play in 11/16 and whatever. But if it’s not actually creating a piece of music that’s going to move somebody, then why are you doing it? And so I think a lot of the questions I’m asking myself when I’m approaching a song or mainly philosophical and aesthetic. So you like to stand on the edge of the cliff, not for the thrill of it, but because where you find something new potentially.…

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