Music
Sobule uses both satire and personal experience to sing about a range of issues, including sexuality, depression, war, abandonment, and greed. According to her website bio, a central preoccupation of her work is the classic one: "Love found, love lost, love wished for and love taken away." Many of her songs incorporate humor into their narrative. She often creates detailed character sketches, especially of women.
Generally, her songs are unconventionally folk-like, using lounge music percussion flourishes and retro horn charts not usually found in tracks recorded by mainstream artists. Occasionally her arrangements intentionally mimic works by other performers, most noticeably on "Rainy Day Parade" from 2000's Pink Pearl, which quotes TV's The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme to lend ironic triumphalism to a song about a woman going back on anti-depressant medication, and "Cinnamon Park" from the 2004 album Underdog Victorious, which paraphrases portions of the 1972 single "Saturday in the Park" by the band Chicago. Her rhythmic sensibility at times recalls cocktail music producer and recording artist Esquivel, and her harmony parts can resemble the Beatles on some of her more elaborate album tracks – possibly an influence from her early recording efforts with Nazz founder and avowed Beatlemaniac Todd Rundgren.
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Famous quotes containing the word music:
“While the music is performed, the cameras linger savagely over the faces of the audience. What a bottomless chasm of vacuity they reveal! Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, whose vacant faces flicker over the TV screen, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures . . .”
—Paul Johnson (b. 1928)
“As polishing expresses the vein in marble, and grain in wood, so music brings out what of heroic lurks anywhere. The hero is the sole patron of music.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For do but note a wild and wanton herd
Or race of youthful and unhandled colts
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood;
If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,
Or any air of music touch their ears,
You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,
Their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze
By the sweet power of music.”
—William Shake{peare (1564–1616)