 Hey there, and welcome to a long overdue polyphonic Q&A. In case you missed it, my channel hit a million subscribers a few weeks ago, so this is a little video to celebrate. Before we get into things, I just really wanted to thank you all for your support. A Million Subs is genuinely one of the coolest things that's ever happened to me in my life, and I am eternally grateful for all of your support. I want to give an especially big shout out to those of you who are supporting me on Nebula, and if you've been considering checking out Nebula, I really can't stress enough how much it helps creators like me. And also, it's great for you. You'll be able to watch my videos early and ad-free, you'll be able to watch an extended cut of this very Q&A, and you'll be able to watch all sorts of exclusive content like my video on Rage Against the Machine's self-titled album artwork, or my original series, Polyphonic Magazine. Okay, that's enough with the plugging. Let's get on to the questions. One question that I got a lot is, am I going to do a face reveal? And you know, I've thought this over a little bit, and I wonder if doing a face reveal might not just kill the mystique of polyphonic, and maybe I'm just better as a disembodied voice. So I don't think I'm gonna, oh wait, wait, what's that? What's that? We're rolling? And I spent hours last night setting up lighting and setting camera and stuff like that? Well, then I guess we might as well do the face reveal. Hi, my name's Noah. You probably know me better as Polyphonic. All right, let's get into some questions. Just so you know, and you know this already, but I don't really do a lot of stuff on camera. I don't really do a lot of stuff unscripted at all. So this is either going to be endearingly awkward or cringe as hell. Either way, you're the ones that asked for the face reveal. Ari or something asked what video I'm most proud of and what episode of Ghost Notes was the most fun to do. We'll start with Ghost Notes. By the way, Ghost Notes is my podcast with 12-tone. If you don't listen, you should check it out. You can listen to it on Nebula and on all other podcasting things. I really, really like our episode on children's music. If you want a place to start, I just think that that's a topic that isn't really discussed much and we got to talk about it in a really interesting way. As for videos, you know, there's a lot of them over the years. Most recently, I think the one I'm super proud of is My Queer History of Disco. I think that video is some of the best journalistic work I've done. I think that it is telling an important story that's really relevant right now. One of the first videos that I was ever really, really proud of was my Scott Joplin video because I just, I think that that's a really cool story that nobody's really told. So, you know, like it felt really important to tell that story. And I think it's one that not a lot of people knew about. And I know I didn't know about it before I really started to look into it. I also love my Run the Jewels video. The visuals on that are some of the best work that I've ever done. I went really, really hard on that video and it pushed me to a new level. And then one more, that's actually like six more. I love my audio visual companions. I'm super proud of them. I think it's a really cool medium. I think that they look fantastic. And especially my Wish You Were Here project, which you can watch in full on Nebula. Honestly, I really recommend you do that. If you've got Nebula, it's it's a pretty cool experience. Sarah Mercedes and a couple other people always ask me what musicians right now do I think are going to have sort of a huge impact on the music world in the future? To be honest, I'm not that tapped into what's going on right now. In case you haven't noticed, most of my channel is kind of about older music. But there's a few modern artists that I think are really phenomenal. I think Hozier is amazing. His album coming out this year. I think that's going to be absolute fire. I've been banging the Hozier drum for a while. Everyone should get on him. He's he's got a sort of poeticism that is just very rare. He's an incredible singer. He's just got a ton of vision. Little Sims. I don't think this is very much a controversial take, but Little Sims is doing some really incredible work. Yeah, I think she's kind of hip hop's next great auteur, if you will. Yeah, to be honest, I don't really tend to keep up with what's going on right now. The way that I listen to music, I like to frame and contextualize music within history. And so I find listening to what's happening right now is a little sort of close up for me. It's hard to tell a cultural impact from this close. I often pick up on stuff kind of five years after it's been big. So ask me in five years, I guess. Oh, this is a fun one. Semtex asked if there's a story behind me choosing four band by Prax as my theme song. In case you don't know what that is, it's this thing. So, yeah, there is actually a story behind that. And that is that Prax is one of my best and oldest friends. He grew up literally next door to me. We spent all sorts of time playing together as kids. He was getting into making music as I was getting into making YouTube videos. And so it seemed natural to me. It was a great fit. You know, I could just ask him and wouldn't need to worry about licensing and stuff like that. And so I liked four band and I ended up editing the first video I ever edited to it, which is the Bowie Cohen one. Originally, it was not really going to be a theme song. But then as I kind of edited and got to the the drop, I was like, OK, this is really great. And I made a little intro for it. And then, yeah, the rest is sort of history. So yeah, Prax and I go way back. You should check out his SoundCloud, by the way. He he doesn't really stuff super often. But every time he drops something, it's an absolute banger. Jon Jon asks if we want to support you. Is it better to watch content on YouTube or Nebula? Nebula, Nebula pays out better per watch rate. So yeah, watch my stuff on Nebula. It's also better for you to watch my stuff on Nebula. If you're watching my stuff on Nebula, you're not getting ads. You're getting a better compression quality. It's it's a better experience for you too. So yeah, watch on Nebula. And also a lot of my stuff on YouTube has dealt with various various amounts of copyright bullshit and some of it has songs removed and stuff like that. Nebula doesn't have any of those issues. So it's better for everyone if you watch on Nebula, if you've got it. And if you've got it, thank you. Thanks for supporting me. I appreciate it. Swarolis asks, do I think the complexity of pop music is decaying over the years? And what about the freedom of composition of the pop artist? No, absolutely not. Not no on either fronts. So first of all, I want to talk about this for a second, because there seems to be this idea of complexity as this thing to be held up in music. And there is a lot of music that is very complex and is very good. But there's also a lot of music that's not complex and is very good. And also, even when people talk about complexity, complexity can mean a number of things. For example, timbral complexity. There are more different sounds in pop music than there ever have been because of the advances of technology, because of sampling, because of how far synthesizers have come. There's so many sounds in pop music that you never would have had 30, 40, 50 years ago that alone adds these levels of complexity. Never mind the fact that most pop music now is kind of genre bending. We've reached this point where all of these genres are kind of colliding and collapsing in on each other, and it's creating a really cool moment where these scenes that have been sort of divided based on pretty arbitrary guidelines are now working with each other. And you've got, you know, you've got Lil Yachty doing psychedelic rock albums, and you've got all of this this sort of amalgamation coming together and freedom of composition. No, it's never been easier for pop artists to experiment and do weird stuff. The the barrier to entry for music has never been lower. Pop artists don't even really need labels as much anymore because of the spread of digital media. Pop artists are able to be way, way more inventive than they were in the past. So, yeah, in short, no pop music is no less complex than it's ever been. And pop musicians have as much freedom as they've ever had. The Purple Bear asks, do I have any desire to go revisit a story? Absolutely. I mean, the theme of musicians and mortality, which was my very first video is something that's really, really interesting to me. And I would really love to revisit again. Recently, I actually kind of did revisit an old video. That was part of the idea with my Wish You Were Here project where I made the audio visual companion because very early in polyphonic I did a Wish You Were Here video that it's honestly, it's it's not very good. I don't like it. I don't feel that I did the album justice. So I revisited it and this new one is one of the best things that I've ever made. What's a trend in modern music that I'm excited to see continue? And what's a trend modern musicians should revive in some way? So I'm excited to see this continuing collapse of genre in modern music. I love stuff that crosses genre bounds and is sort of genre lists or is sort of omni genre, I guess you could say. Really, really big fan of that stuff. And a trend musicians should revive is standards. I miss standards. They're so it's so cool to have, you know, the Great American Songbook and hear a dozen different artists take on these songs that just exist in the zeitgeist and really in general, like a lot of folk practices I'd like to see brought back that rely less on, you know, this this idea that musicians need to be auteurs who write everything and do everything themselves, like work with material that's been there for hundreds of years. You know, work with material written by people whose job it is to write songs. The Great American Songbook is incredible. And I really, really wish I it was incorporated more into contemporary music. C asks, I've talked a lot about copyright claims and musicians stealing from other artists. What's my opinion on sampling? Sampling is amazing. Sampling is a brilliant form of art. It is a absolute gift to the world that has been neutered by bullshit copyright laws. Frankly, I don't believe in intellectual property, especially when it comes to music. Music belongs to the commons. Bonsai Dalek asks a couple. They ask a favorite album, not what I think is the best album ever made, but what holds the most personal importance to me. Some some albums that hold personal importance to me five days in July by Blue Rodeo, Crisis by Alexis on Fire, a lot of Canadian stuff because I'm Canadian. But outside of that, Blonde On Blonde by Bob Dylan. That's probably my favorite album. That's probably also the album that I think is the greatest. I have been known to call it the pinnacle of human artistic achievement from time to time. So I got a shout out Blonde On Blonde. RTJ4, I really love that album a lot. Oh, and Worry by Jeff Rosenstock. That's an absolute favorite of mine. I feel like that album, I don't know, it feels like it kind of perfectly captures a certain kind of millennial angst that I have. And so many of my friends have really, really great album. And they also ask what's an artist that I'm a huge fan of but hasn't made their magnum opus yet. I'll go with Hozier again. I think I think it's I think he's got potential to do some really, really cool stuff. Bernie Williams has a whole host of questions. So we're just going to rapid fire this. What musical genre took me the longest to like? Probably country, maybe EDM. I still haven't quite figured out EDM. What musical genre ranks lowest on my list? Yeah, probably EDM, but it's not because I have any problem with EDM. I just haven't really thrown myself into it yet. Was there ever an artist that didn't make a positive first impression and you didn't like, but you listened to them later and fell in love with them? Oh, yeah, that happens all the time. I think the most clear example was Alt J. I really didn't. I didn't know what to do with Alt J when I first listened to them, but they pretty quickly became one of my favorite artists. Also, just a lot of hip hop. I it took me time to get into hip hop, but I love it now. What was the hardest video to make physically or emotionally? Definitely my 27 Club video. That video was very personal, obviously. And that was a difficult one to make, but I'm really glad that I made it and we can put that onto the list of videos that I'm most proud of, too. And is there any artist I'd like to travel backward in time to meet? I mean, I'd like to meet Bob Dylan. So I don't think I need to travel backward in time for that. But if there's someone who's dead that I would like to meet, I would love to chat with Duke Ellington. Everything I've heard about him sounds like that would be a marvelous experience for the Q&A. What's something that I would like my viewers to know? I would like my viewers to know that Curtis Mayfield's Move On Up is the greatest song ever recorded by humankind. 12 Tone asks, who's my favorite ghost notes co-host? That's really tough, but I got to say Polyphonic. I don't I'm not a big 12 tone fan. You know, I think that they're a little too right about most of what they say, whereas Polyphonic is just spitting hot takes and I kind of like that energy. So we're going to go Polyphonic. TSS3393 asks, can I pinpoint an artist or album that caused my taste in music to expand the most? I think to Pimpa Butterfly was really big for me. That really got me into hip hop and kind of in getting into hip hop. It sort of just cascaded into all sorts of music's appealing to me and me discovering the joy of various things. And I would also say Beyonce's self titled because that kind of got me into pop music. So, yeah, those two are pretty seminal for me. Pinocchio asks, what are the best three albums that would be great if they got turned into a movie or TV show or musical play? The first one obviously has to be Good Kid Mad City. You know, that's often called the most cinematic album made. It's got an incredible narrative. It's got these really, really intricately drawn out character arcs. Yeah, Good Kid Mad City would absolutely rule as a movie. I've always really liked Fucked Ups, David Comes to Life. That's a post-hardcore rock opera that I think could be a sort of spectacular piece that's got a lot of really cool meta narrative in it. And let's say, I mean, I know that it already exists as a musical, but I'd go for a Hades Town movie. I think you could do some really, really cool stuff with that. Amanda Caster asks, do people recognize my voice in day to day life? I've never been recognized in day to day life. Maybe that'll change now that I've got a face reveal. If you see me, you can say, hi, just don't be weird about it. But yeah, no, I've never had anyone recognize me from my voice. I mean, as you've probably noticed, even just from this video, my talking voice is a little different than my polyphonic voice. So that might be part of it. But yeah, nobody's ever, nobody's ever recognized me. Sheila asked, what songs get me into a summertime groove? I love this because I love making summer playlists. A big one for me is Dindive by Derondo. That's that's my ultimate, you know, lazy hot day patio song. I listen to a lot of Motown music in the summers. I want you back by the Jackson 5 is especially one of my favorite summer songs and then sort of laid back country, acoustic stuff. You know, a lot of Neil Young, Blue Rodeo is always the soundtrack of summers to me, the tragically hip cottage music, you know, if you're from Ontario, you know, Victor Royo asks, how has my relationship with some artists or albums that meant a lot in a precise moment of my life evolved over time? Yeah, I mean, I think it's always evolving. I think there's a lot of artists that really, really were seminal to me that I barely listen to now. The Red Hot Chili Peppers come to mind. They were my favorite band in high school. They were one of the first bands that I like really, really obsessed over. I almost never listened to the Chili Peppers now. Another one that really comes to mind is Led Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin was my favorite band for a long time. And I still really love Led Zeppelin. But, you know, in recent years, my relationship to Zeppelin has changed a lot as I have kind of tried to confront the realities of who they were as people, which is not very nice. You know, I did a couple of years back, I did Zeppelin Month, which sort of tackled the darker sides of Zeppelin's legacy. And since that, I feel like I've had a hard time listening to them a lot of the time. I still love their music, but it's definitely changed. And then on the other side, there's artists who I have just my love for them has deepened. Dylan, I've come to appreciate everything he's doing on so much deeper of a level. Blue Rodeo is a band that has just grown and grown on me as I've gone into adulthood. That most of the music that I love, I feel like I've just I've come to appreciate on deeper levels and appreciate on new levels, which is part of the fun of getting old. Mav asks what albums or artists shaped my current music taste the most? Bob Dylan is one of them. He really got me into the whole Greenwich folk scene, which sort of also kind of cascades into country and blues and all of that sort of early Americana stuff. Dylan really, really was my my gate into. Miles Davis was my entrance into jazz, both Miles Davis and Charles Mingus really were my entrance into jazz. And I love love a lot of jazz. You know, I love Ornette Coleman now, which I never would have listened to without Davis Coltrane, obviously. But even going back like Swing Music, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis really opened the door for all of my jazz appreciation. And Kendrick, like I said earlier, to Pimba Butterfly opened the door to hip hop for me and changed my relationship with hip hop. What was a moment in a song that was so good you physically stopped and had to listen to it again? That happens to me all of the time. Most recently, I've been fixating on the song Oklahoma from the musical Oklahoma. I think when the chorus hits, it's just this sweeping, enormous moment like Richard Rogers is an incredible, incredible composer. One that comes to mind, one of the songs that I fixated hard on for a long time was Coltrane's My Favorite Things. I listened to that song on repeat for days. I just I couldn't get enough of it. And what else am I really into right now? Oh, I'm really into Led Belly's Midnight Special, too. That's one where I just keep going back and listening because the chorus of that is just it just rips. I don't know how to pronounce your name. Tis de Liger. I'm sorry for butchering that. What am I listening to to expand my musical horizon? Do I listen to new music comparing it to classics? When I try to expand my musical taste, the way that I tend to do it is through diving into history. I tend to try to find artists who maybe were a little under appreciated in history, but had huge influences on artists that a lot of people loved. You know, lately, I've been really diving into the Greenwich Village scene and listening to people like like Karen Dalton, who is just incredible and, you know, nobody really talks about. Even Dave Van Ronk is criminally underrated. And the other way that I really try to expand my music listening is by watching music documentaries. It's a great way to enrich in your experience, whether that is for, you know, getting a deeper love for an artist you already love or finding new artists. I mean, even if it is an artist you already love, watching documentaries on them will often show you their influences and stuff like that. The honestly, the probably the two biggest things that always expand my musical tastes every time I rewatch them is Ken Burns, country music and Ken Burns Jazz. I'm a huge Ken Burns fan. And if you want to if you want to find some artists to dive into and expand yourself, those series are the as good as it gets. Also, No Direction Home, another really great music doc that will show you a lot of really cool artists. Craig asks, how has my music taste and understanding and music changed over time? What about since I first started my channel? Yeah, my relationship to music has changed drastically since I started this channel. I feel like I have a richer experience of music, but I also feel like I sometimes experience music on a bit less of a visceral level because I'm always kind of trying to place it within a context. And my mind's always doing that thing where it's like, this could be a video, that could be a video, this could be a video. And that's sort of impossible to turn off. But on the plus side, I feel like I have a very good understanding of where music fits in history now. And that's where I'm most interested in music these days, especially these days, I'm really interested in music as a cultural document, something that orients you into a certain time or a certain place and teaches you what the values of that moment were. I think that that's sort of the biggest change it's had is it's made me so much more of a historian about music. And I really love that I consider it my job to like music. So I try to make sure that I like all music. So I try to educate myself and dive into stuff. And, you know, that's something that's always really rewarding. On that note, Luke Perser asks, did I always have such variety in the music I like, or at some point was my music taste limited? My taste used to be incredibly limited. Yeah, I mean, up until I was like 20 or 21, I listened to almost exclusively rock music with a smattering of jazz songs here and there. I was your kind of typical rock elitist in high school, where I was like, oh, hip hop sucks, oh, top 40 pop sucks. You know, that's the that's the world that I grew up in. And I was completely wrong about that shocker. Turns out most music is pretty cool. So yeah, I my tastes used to be pretty narrow. Yagoshi asks, who is my favorite guitarist and who is the best guitarist of all time? My favorite guitarist right now is probably Curtis Mayfield, the best guitarist of all time. It's it's probably Hendrix. It's an uninspired take, but it's the right take. Jill Silver asks, what's the very first band? I remember shaping my love of music or peaking my interest in seeking out other kinds of music. So there's a couple early bands that really influenced me. Billy Talent was the first band that I ever listened to outside of my parents. So that was a big one. Some 41 were the first band that I ever really fell in love with in like the eighth grade. It was the era of pop punk. What can I say? Yeah, so some 41 were a big one. And then the first band that I really obsessed over that really, really got me into music was the Chili Peppers. I loved the Chili Peppers. They were the first band wherever downloaded their whole discography and learned all their biographical information and stuff like that. And then after them, Nirvana was another really big one for me. Sarah Jones asks, do I find myself falling back into certain artists or genres in different seasons or weathers? Absolutely. To do a quick sort of cycle through. I mentioned summer before. Summer, I tend to listen to a lot of funk and soul and also folk. In autumn, I listen to a lot of folk music. In autumn, for some reason, I also listen to a lot of sort of like new wave, like 80s synth poppy stuff. For some reason, every time autumn, late autumn comes around, I want to listen to Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tiers for Fears. I don't know why. In winter, I tend to listen to a lot of traditional pop. I think of the Christmas spirit kind of gets you into it. But also the shorter days, you know, it's it's cozy music, like Sinatra and Edda James and stuff like that. And then in spring, what am I listening to right now? Soul again, I guess. Folk again, I guess those are the music I listen to most. Jazz a lot right now. I don't know if that's a seasonal thing or I'm just in a jazz phase right now. But yeah, yeah, absolutely. Music change. My music changes with the weather. My music changes with how I'm feeling physically, emotionally. Absolutely. Darth Raiden asks, do I have plans to do any more Pink Floyd album accompaniments? Yeah, I really want to do one to animals. That's that's sort of my last one. I want to do something on the wall, but it wouldn't be an album companion. And I don't know if I'll ever end up doing that, because it's sort of a big project. But I'd really like to do something on animals, because then I've kind of got that whole trilogy of Dark Side of the Moon, which you are here, animals done. So that's a that's a big one for me. Seward Ostenberg asks, I need to know the fonts this guy uses. My most common fonts are Mort Modern, which is real, real versatile, Sarah font. Lately, I've been really into a lot of stuff by Oh, no typeco. This this this is stuff that I get on Adobe fonts. Oh, no, do really funky stuff. Oh, no, Blazeface is one of my favorites. The sort of more elaborate sort of 60s vibes. And then what's it called? I forget what this one's called, but I use this one a lot. It's on the screen. The name will be on the screen here. Generally, I use a lot of stuff from Adobe fonts. Here's a couple more of my favorite fonts with the names on screen. Wow, Welp asked, why did I choose Polyphonic to be my name? Because it means having many sounds. And I always I never wanted Polyphonic to feel narrow and locked in on one thing. And I always wanted to cover many sounds. Originally, I was actually planning on covering more stuff than just music. I wanted to do stuff on films and literature and stuff like that. But it didn't really pan out that way. It the channel took off so fast and there was such a hunger for music content that I feel like I kind of got locked into that. And now I've got a couple, a couple of Twitter questions to end this off. The Math Hatter asked, do I think there's a sweet spot for length of music? Not really. I think the sweet spot for a song is how long that song needs to be. I love a lot of short music. I love a lot of long music. It really depends. Gustavo Achevito, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, asks, what's my view in the way we listen to and understand music today in comparison to previous generations from just listening to songs and records and radio to the empty Viera and the internet and so forth. I mean, this is an enormous topic. But one of the things that I think, you know, I think there's a lot of panic about the death of the album today. But I actually think people are more obsessed with albums than ever. If you look maybe not more than the peak of the album era and the 70s, but if you look at most of music before that albums didn't exist. People conceptualized artists in terms of songs. And the song was the base unit of music these days. I think most people, especially in music circles, tend to think of albums as the base unit. I think that's a big change. I also think that there's a lot of obsession with authorship today, which I I don't like. Like, I think there's a lot of people today. There's so much cultural weight on people singing their own songs, even though singing and songwriting are two completely unrelated skills. And it's really cool when people can do both. But a lot of the greatest music ever made was made by, you know, often it was somebody composed the music, somebody else composed the lyrics and somebody else performed it. And, you know, that practice still kind of exists in pop music. But we're we're very obsessed with the singer songwriter thing, which is good. But I mean, also the Great American Songbook is amazing. And these are just really brilliant songs written by people whose job it was to write really brilliant songs. And in general, I think the biggest thing is that folk music doesn't really exist anymore, at least in sort of the West, quote unquote. You know, I think in a lot of more rural cultures, there there is still some folk practice. But, you know, in America and Canada, there's there's not folk practice because, you know, I mean, recording did a big hit on that. But also just the concepts of intellectual property, the reality of folk music as it, you know, existed for most of human history is folk music has existed devoid of real authorship, devoid of intellectual property. It was, you know, music where someone would just sing a song that had been in the zeitgeist and, you know, someone would adapt that song with their own little flourish and bring it to the next town over. And then someone in that town would rewrite new lyrics to that song about something that happened in their town. And there was this very sort of organic building of ideas. And you look at a great example for this is any classic blues looks like this. That doesn't happen anymore. People are so obsessed with authorship. People are obsessed with, you know, I wrote this song about this thing. And people are, you know, less interested in this idea that songs can kind of just emerge slowly over time and mold and shift. And I think there's something really, really big that's been lost because of that. And I think it's kind of tragic. There's a lot that's been gained to. I don't think the two need to be mutually exclusive, though. But but right now they often are. Also, I really like Pink Floyd. All right, I think that that's enough questions for today. I hope my on camera persona didn't scare you too much. I hope you thought I was hot. Is that going to make the cut? Let's see. I think I'm going to do more on camera stuff in the future. So keep an eye out for me. And hey, thanks for getting me to a million. That's really fucking cool. I got a million subscribers. I have a I got a frigging plaque. Look at it. It's it's big. It doesn't even match my silver one, because it's been so long. But that's OK. It's it's beautiful. All right. I don't I never know how to end things. Bye, guys. Bye. This is me. This is my face. Look at it.