A Favor
by Dan Trueman, track 2 from the album The Seventeenth Hotel, with
- Molly Trueman (voice)
- Jason Treuting (drums)
- Florent Ghys (bass)
- Dan Trueman (bitKlavier and Hardanger d’Amore)
- Recorded by Molly Trueman, Dan Trueman, and Matt Poirier
- Mixed by Matt Poirier and Dan Trueman, Mastered by Matt Poirier.
- Artwork by Judy Trueman
As described in the first post about this record, all of the songs on The Seventeenth Hotel began with a Machine for Listening. “A Favor” emerged from machine #9, which itself generates a kind of “rhythm melody,” 43 beats long, and super fun to internalize and improvise with (inside the orange box below, where it says “this pattern emerges…”):
Turn the virtual “knobs” on the machine at the heart of Machines for Listening (the so-called "blendrónic” preparation in bitKlavier) to 11, 7, 5, 3, 2, 3, 5, 7, play some notes, and out comes this 43-beat rhythm-melody, in various colors and energies; so fun. Machine for Listening #9 has some other suggested riffs to play with (see below), some of which became part of “A Favor” as well:
The lyrics are based on an experience I had some years ago which led me to, well, empathize with notions of “radical empathy,” as developed by Terri Givens and others. I’m not so naive as to think that empathy itself is enough, or that the imagination itself is immersive enough to really put yourself in someone else’s shoes, but it’s a start (as is listening, in all its forms). As Givens herself said, “having empathy is different than practicing empathy.”
And that’s all I have to say about this one!