FRESH WIND SESSION No. 9
Scott Randolph
Recording Dates: 5 September 2022
KNCE 93.5 FM Premiere: 16 October 2022
Substack Premiere: 29 August 2024
There’s something bittersweet about sharing this Fresh Wind session from September 2022 with Scott Randolph. It was this session that led to the formation of the group Big Numbers, which disbanded earlier this month. And, though none of the songs from this session made it onto the album we completed, three out of the five songs that Scott played on that day (“Surrender”, “Rearranged”, and “A Different Dream“) made it into the group’s repertoire at various points in our 18-month journey as a band. Listening back to this session almost two years after recording it, I was struck by the songs’ sweet simplicity. Without the harmonies, counter-melodies, driving bass lines, and exuberant drums that me and Peter Halter brought to them in the Big Numbers format, the songs sound naked, innocent, and also a bit more melancholic than I had come to think of them.
There’s something both topical and prophetic about Scott’s songwriting style, with a dash of humor bringing all the pieces together. In that sense, his songwriting voice is not so different from that of his sculpture and visual art work. In the artist statement on his website, he writes:
“My art seeks to build a path to the most important place in the world – the heart. I am always looking to create something that bypasses the busy monkey mind with its endless concerns of the material world, to impulse that pure place where we just smile. I used to think that this was a silly and inferior use of art –perhaps not even art at all – but of course I was wrong. This is serious stuff. When that smile occurs and the heart swells with happiness, the rest of the world falls back into its rightful place. I find the root of this path most often in imperfection. I come from a background of cartooning, where the smallest line or gesture unlocks emotion in the most magical way. I’m never really sure why something works and makes me happy, but I know for sure when it does. Each piece has a special flaw at the center of its creation. Like a good friend, we end up falling in love not despite these imperfections, but often because of them.”
I had not yet developed the three-part interview format when I recorded this session with Scott, so the session begins with two songs: “Surrender” and “Rearranged”. In the interview, he tells of his time playing in the group The Whitefronts (sometimes called the Fronts) in Santa Barbara and then San Francisco in the 1980s. It was with two other members of that group, David Costanza (Fresh Wind Session No. 8) and Anne Speroni, that Scott originally moved out to Taos - now over 35 years ago. In the time since moving here, Randolph has been a part of the groups Slaves to the Magnetic Field, My Country of Illusion, and Big Numbers. He also released a “solo” record under the name Freight Brain in the early 90s.
For a long time, Scott taught classes in media studies as part of the now defunct Taos Talking Pictures Festival. Speaking of that time, he said:
“I majored in media studies in college a long time ago, before people even knew what that was. It was thought of as a joke major, and in some ways I guess that it was. Except that I fully believe that we’ve been involved in a sociological experiment throughout all of our lives with media, and the stories that are being told to us. Traditionally, for hundreds of thousands of years, people in tribes have defined themselves by telling their own stories. And, we’ve lived and grown up in a society where stories are told to us. We’ve abdicated that process of telling. I’m a big fan of participating in creating your media, in creating your life, rather than just being just a passive consumer about it.”
The session concludes with three songs: one from the Freightbrain album (“Our Dream”) and two more recent compositions (“A Different Dream” and “From The Noise”). I hope they find you well as the end of summer comes upon us now.
16: Fresh Wind Session No. 9: Scott Randolph