Harry DeWalt

Harry DeWalt

HNR 2509: AI Country Music

Dr. Turner

Final Reflection: Turning Point 2

               The second half of this semester as a class, we were tasked with creating and producing a country music EP album. The idea behind the assignment was to apply the knowledge gained in the first half of the semester about the construction of a country song and the industry’s history. The collaborative effort was also meant to allow us all to use our strengths, since we hail from varying majors. We were split into 4 different teams; an executive team, a creative team, a marketing/legal team, and the event planning team. I was a member of the event planning team, and our primary task was setting up the release party to showcase our album.

               I thought it was very cool to have the project set up to try and let students work within their own specialty when we aren’t necessarily the most musically talented. This is also one thing I have noticed in large projects within my honors classes, that we are given quite a bit more freedom to be creative with the projects than I usually expect at the beginning. Usually I feel like I see a project, get an idea, and then have to scale it into the walls provided. However in projects such as this one, I get an idea, and am immediately able to note it, and even build on that idea. For my specific major, finance, I didn’t think there was really anything that was a reflection of that, but that isn’t negative because I don’t really see a spot for a good reflection of finance courses in this project so it was a good opportunity to branch out into something I do not look at everyday with planning the event. I was just glad to be able to take a role that wasn’t making the music, which I originally thought was going to be the case. Myself and a couple other people thought we were going to each be singing and creating our own albums to share with the class at the end of the semester which I can confidently say scared me.

               In terms of turning points, I think the biggest thing for me came from watching the creative team from afar and observing the process of making their songs. As I only heard so much of their conversations, and any of the music ever so often, it was pretty amazing how much change the songs went through, and just how much better the songs became as they added the live music in, and spent time in the recording studio. Even though I played no part in the actual creation of the songs, I felt a sense of pride knowing I had any part of that at all just being in the class, because my expectations for us as college students and myself as a born country music fan was not high, but wow they executed well.

               Working in these teams allowed this giant class project to feel like a few group projects, which I believe took some stress away from it that could have been there if it wasn’t split up. I enjoyed working with my group and I think we all got along well and everyone was very agreeable on the topics we discussed which allowed for us to be extremely efficient and complete each task in no time. I think this had both a positive and negative influence on the final event. Positively, we were very quick to outline how we wanted the event to be structured, which gave us a lot of classes to repeatedly go over that and change little things so we were very proud of it by the end. However, on the negative side, since we knocked out the tasks very early on in the process, we seemed to lose our motor later in the semester and there could have been some things we just never looked at as much as we should have since we just assumed we had already done what we needed to.

               More than anything this semester, I now realize how much work behind the scenes must go into the albums that artists make and the tours they go on nearly every year non-stop.  As fans, we tend to never be satisfied with the amount of product produced by our favorite artists, and wonder when the next album will come out, when the artists are doing stadium concerts every other night for their most recent album which usually has only been out for around a year. This isn’t fair to the artists, as I can now only speculate that they and their teams must be busting it to get through these tours and release new quality music.

               We have discussed in this class before how mainstream everything that the famous artists do becomes, with many thanks to social media. Most recently, Morgan Wallen went viral after he was arrested for throwing a chair off of the top floor of Eric Church’s bar in Nashville. There have been a wildly large number of posts and videos mocking Wallen posted across all platforms, shining a negative light on him. Unluckily for him, his ancestors in country music never had to worry about this sort of thing blowing up and affecting their image. The “Outlaw Era” of country music may never have been able to take place under such watchful eyes and scrutiny, with the first name coming to mind that would have never been able to see the spotlight being David Allen Coe. His songs would have caused the public to want him canceled by today’s standards. I think reading about the history of the genre allows me to take a different outlook on and even question the validity of some artists' persona. Have any artists had to change from their original self in order to meet the standards set for them with fame? My guess is more than I could imagine and probably some of the biggest names in the genre were different people before they caught the public eye.

               As previously mentioned, I enjoyed being able to work with a team that was not directly involved with making the music, and there was not a job with this project which I would consider one for a finance major. I do not think we really needed someone to do the types of things I learn about in my courses, but that also could just be me being closed minded and unable to think past the roles we had this semester. I think it would be beneficial before assigning the groups, to open the floor up and ask each student what types of roles they think would be helpful with the project that relate to the major and come up with a few reasons why this role would benefit the project. This could be a homework assignment to give a little bit of time to think, and would also allow for every student to know they are getting at least a little experience in their future field. However I still believe it was valuable for me to gain practical experience in a field outside of my major.

               Other than that I think this was actually a very good and fun project to work on as a class, especially for it still being an “experiment.” As the class mentioned, I agree that the amount of work the creative team did was far more than the other 3 groups, and that is something that can be fixed pretty easily by having the other groups act as help for the creative team as mentioned before. I also would just like to add that I thoroughly enjoyed this class and being able to learn about country music from the beginning of the genre to the present, both about the artists, how the music is made, and the history surrounding it.

Harry DeWalt

Country Music

February 23, 2024

Turning Point Essay

         As I have written about and mentioned in class on multiple occasions, I have grown up listening to country music. For the most part, the country I listened to was more of the modern wave with artists like Blake Shelton, Darius Rucker, and Miranda Lambert. As I have become more of a true fan of the genre in the last 5 years or so, I have grown to think that each subgenre of country was different and came from different chains of influence. I have said on a few occasions in my field notes that I could have seen certain songs (“Busted” -Johnny Cash) being released today. Even then, I still considered these eras to be uniquely different. I could listen to old country like Hank Williams Sr. and hear the simplicity of it due to the time he produced his songs, and then to Coleman Jennings today and hear similar levels of simplicity but say it is different since I hear the increased production level of today’s music.

         The assignment that really changed the way I think about country music was actually the map assignment, despite having done a large amount of work analyzing music beforehand. I completed the map assignment before beginning to write this paper, and once I researched the influences that the country artists today have I noticed how similar the music was that they all took inspiration from. I expected some overlap from artists who are similar ages, but not to the extent that it all overlapped. I ended up having to change how I formatted the map itself, since there were too many overlapping connection lines between our generation of country (both pop country and folky country) and the generation before them (neo-traditional and outlaw eras).

         I still would argue that the music made by the likes of Cody Johnson or Colter Wall are on a completely opposite side of the country spectrum from artists such as Sam Hunt, Thomas Rhett, and even Morgan Wallen. The reason being the latter 3 all took influence from southern hip-hop and rap. Morgan Wallen cites rapper Lil Wayne as one of his greatest musical influences. Now, I am not expert on the topic, but as great of an artist as Wayne is in his own field, he is in no way a country artist other than the fact that he was born in Louisiana. I don’t even hear the similarities between the two artists (Johnson and Wallen) in the sound of their songs instrumentally or lyrically. However they both take heavy influence from the outlaw era of country with the likes of Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard.

         Why I think the map specifically sparked this change rather than actually analyzing the music, is because I wasn’t listening to how the music was the same when I was doing my field notes. I was instead trying to find the differences and noting if I thought the song sounded like any modern sounds. To my surprise after reading my field notes back, there were quite a lot of songs with mentions of how similar they felt to me compared to today’s country.

         Even when I was having to change my artistic philosophy for the design of the map, I didn’t truly process that my struggles were from me being unable to comprehend that I could not represent the influences of each artist since they all were influenced by some of the same groups. One of the artists that influenced both sides of today’s country was Townes Van Zandt. Van Zandt comes from an influence line that I would have never known existed, being influenced heavily by Bob Dylan’s time as a country artists, who took much inspiration from Woody Guthrie. Woody even ties into the country we started listening to at the beginning of this year, being influenced heavily by the sounds of The Carter Family.

         Through this, I can see how interconnected country music is throughout it’s history. Every artist has ways in which they can be compared to another seemingly very different style of country which I think makes the genre vastly more interesting than I already found it.

         Now, as I have been listening to my normal country playlists, I hear old artists who I didn’t before now that I learned about their impact. I think I mentioned in my reflection that I do not have a very trained ear for music. I played some bass for 2 years in middle school as a requirement, so I can hear it when I try hard to listen down, but even then my knowledge is very limited of what I remember about it. Because of my limited knowledge I have a hard time noticing little things that I have been trying to listen for in songs such as different instruments and rhythms.

               Listening for instruments is a way that I will use my new knowledge of how interconnected the genre is and listen for things like how Colter Wall uses a steel guitar in his music which was brought into use nearly 100 years ago. On a more intricate note though, listening for the ways the instruments are used as we demonstrated without beat project is something I can use my knowledge with. Trying to hear the construction of the song is something I struggle with even in the songs we talked about in class. I think by trying to listen to the similarities in the chords and drum loops are evidence of the influences of older country on newer country. I can try and think again about the things we said in class to listen for, such as the way a chord change makes your body feel different, or the choo choo sound to the high hats of the train beat. Since I do struggle to hear these things to a high level on their own, it could help to use songs I am familiar with in contrast to those we used as examples in class as an assisting tool for my ear.

               I do not think that I am struggling to learn these things, though, because from the zero knowledge I had going into this year about the technical side of country music to the simple foundation of how the songs are formed that I have now, I would say I am learning this information at a very solid rate. I have come a long way in my knowledge which I think having my turning point now shows. I went from a stubborn country music fanatic who struggled to learn simple musical concepts to someone who was able to change their view on a genre and learn from that the ways that each artist was connected. After finishing writing this I am actually excited to use this knowledge and these ideas of new ways to listen to my music and be able to hear how Sturgill Simpson takes inspiration from Eric Church, and then how his music is similar to the outlaws. I am constantly becoming more interested in music, broadening my horizons to different genres, which even then I will be able to look at them and compare them to my country music. After learning how wildly different the influences are across the different subgenres of country music, I am sure that genres such as some of the modern rock and folk take inspiration from some of the same older artists.

Harry DeWalt

HNR 2509: AI Country Music

Dr. Turner

Final Reflection: Turning Point 2

The second half of this semester as a class, we were tasked with creating and producing a country music EP album. The idea behind the assignment was to apply the knowledge gained in the first half of the semester about the construction of a country song and the industry’s history. The collaborative effort was also meant to allow us all to use our strengths, since we hail from varying majors. We were split into 4 different teams; an executive team, a creative team, a marketing/legal team, and the event planning team. I was a member of the event planning team, and our primary task was setting up the release party to showcase our album.

I thought it was very cool to have the project set up to try and let students work within their own specialty when we aren’t necessarily the most musically talented. This is also one thing I have noticed in large projects within my honors classes, that we are given quite a bit more freedom to be creative with the projects than I usually expect at the beginning. Usually I feel like I see a project, get an idea, and then have to scale it into the walls provided. However in projects such as this one, I get an idea, and am immediately able to note it, and even build on that idea. For my specific major, finance, I didn’t think there was really anything that was a reflection of that, but that isn’t negative because I don’t really see a spot for a good reflection of finance courses in this project so it was a good opportunity to branch out into something I do not look at everyday with planning the event. I was just glad to be able to take a role that wasn’t making the music, which I originally thought was going to be the case. Myself and a couple other people thought we were going to each be singing and creating our own albums to share with the class at the end of the semester which I can confidently say scared me.

In terms of turning points, I think the biggest thing for me came from watching the creative team from afar and observing the process of making their songs. As I only heard so much of their conversations, and any of the music ever so often, it was pretty amazing how much change the songs went through, and just how much better the songs became as they added the live music in, and spent time in the recording studio. Even though I played no part in the actual creation of the songs, I felt a sense of pride knowing I had any part of that at all just being in the class, because my expectations for us as college students and myself as a born country music fan was not high, but wow they executed well.

Working in these teams allowed this giant class project to feel like a few group projects, which I believe took some stress away from it that could have been there if it wasn’t split up. I enjoyed working with my group and I think we all got along well and everyone was very agreeable on the topics we discussed which allowed for us to be extremely efficient and complete each task in no time. I think this had both a positive and negative influence on the final event. Positively, we were very quick to outline how we wanted the event to be structured, which gave us a lot of classes to repeatedly go over that and change little things so we were very proud of it by the end. However, on the negative side, since we knocked out the tasks very early on in the process, we seemed to lose our motor later in the semester and there could have been some things we just never looked at as much as we should have since we just assumed we had already done what we needed to.

More than anything this semester, I now realize how much work behind the scenes must go into the albums that artists make and the tours they go on nearly every year non-stop.  As fans, we tend to never be satisfied with the amount of product produced by our favorite artists, and wonder when the next album will come out, when the artists are doing stadium concerts every other night for their most recent album which usually has only been out for around a year. This isn’t fair to the artists, as I can now only speculate that they and their teams must be busting it to get through these tours and release new quality music.

We have discussed in this class before how mainstream everything that the famous artists do becomes, with many thanks to social media. Most recently, Morgan Wallen went viral after he was arrested for throwing a chair off of the top floor of Eric Church’s bar in Nashville. There have been a wildly large number of posts and videos mocking Wallen posted across all platforms, shining a negative light on him. Unluckily for him, his ancestors in country music never had to worry about this sort of thing blowing up and affecting their image. The “Outlaw Era” of country music may never have been able to take place under such watchful eyes and scrutiny, with the first name coming to mind that would have never been able to see the spotlight being David Allen Coe. His songs would have caused the public to want him canceled by today’s standards. I think reading about the history of the genre allows me to take a different outlook on and even question the validity of some artists' persona. Have any artists had to change from their original self in order to meet the standards set for them with fame? My guess is more than I could imagine and probably some of the biggest names in the genre were different people before they caught the public eye.

As previously mentioned, I enjoyed being able to work with a team that was not directly involved with making the music, and there was not a job with this project which I would consider one for a finance major. I do not think we really needed someone to do the types of things I learn about in my courses, but that also could just be me being closed minded and unable to think past the roles we had this semester. I think it would be beneficial before assigning the groups, to open the floor up and ask each student what types of roles they think would be helpful with the project that relate to the major and come up with a few reasons why this role would benefit the project. This could be a homework assignment to give a little bit of time to think, and would also allow for every student to know they are getting at least a little experience in their future field. However I still believe it was valuable for me to gain practical experience in a field outside of my major.

Other than that I think this was actually a very good and fun project to work on as a class, especially for it still being an “experiment.” As the class mentioned, I agree that the amount of work the creative team did was far more than the other 3 groups, and that is something that can be fixed pretty easily by having the other groups act as help for the creative team as mentioned before. I also would just like to add that I thoroughly enjoyed this class and being able to learn about country music from the beginning of the genre to the present, both about the artists, how the music is made, and the history surrounding it