61. Song Constructor
October 24th, 2025
Listen: strongsongspodcast.com
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Kirk Hamilton belongs to that specific group of musicians for whom the highest compliment you can pay to another musician is to say they're cooking. If they're not cooking they might be burning, or wailing, or (most inscrutably) really pouring on the gumbo. A regular sax solo is good, but a truly brilliant one is disgusting—delivered with the grimace of someone who just swallowed a whole lemon.
Lately I've been taking an immersion course in this jazzy lingua franca by listening to Kirk's podcast Strong Songs, a neat counterpoint to Hrishikesh Hirway's Song Exploder, which trades top-down demolitions for forensic reconstructions. It's the reason friends of mine have received excitable texts asking, "When was the last time you really listened to 'Walking on Broken Glass' by Annie Lennox?" or "Remind me the next time I see you that we need to have an eight-hour conversation about Billy Joel's 'Scenes From An Italian Restaurant'."
Starting with the base elements (often just a note, a key, a mode, or a melody) each episode builds a song from the ground up, delighting in the details but never getting too stuck in the weeds of musical theory. One episode about The Mars Volta's spectral gallop '(Roulette Dares) The Haunt Of' begins by noting that the opening three-note melody in A minor is also found in the Carpenters' 'Close to You', but is quick to add: "...saying this is a song in A minor with a 3 time feel is a little like saying the Grand Canyon is a hole in the ground—technically accurate, but somewhat incomplete." Kirk's a great writer, too.
I recently watched Frederick Wiseman's National Gallery, a three-hour documentary that—despite the museum having neither a church nor a steeple—opens the doors and shows you all the people. Specifically all the people being literal or figurative stewards of art: restoring paintings, carving wooden frames, teaching classes, leading tours—balancing budgets, even. I was unexpectedly moved by the sum total of this stewardship, but especially the tour guides, who are shown making august but often abstruse artworks sing to rapt tourists. It's a skill and a kindness to help others understand art, whether it's a 14th century altarpiece or the third-best Billy Joel song.
Listening to Strong Songs feels like riding sidesaddle on the piano bench of a particularly genial and enthusiastic music teacher: Kirk asks questions, points out nuances, and (in a way I find extremely endearing) chuckles quietly at particularly audacious musical flourishes. In the way a sommelier is able to identify flavour notes in wine, Kirk can find qualities of sound you never knew were present - direction, weight, or colour. But his interests aren't purely theoretical—some of my favourite moments of the show are his more autobiographical asides, or the moments where the sheer force of the music stuns him into silence. The episode on The Police's 'Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic' ends in a near-reverie, while 'A Song for my Father' is a beautiful and vulnerable remembrance of his father and his relationship to music—though perhaps don't make my mistake and listen to that one on public transport.
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