Music that inspired the All of Our Cornbread album

Oliver Norred, 3 November 2023

I posted this on the album page, and I’m copying it here because I think it deserves a blog post. Look out for another post about how I made the custom audio players you see here!

Good artists borrow, great artists steal, and we write a big blog post about where every song on our album steals from, mostly as an excuse to share some great music.

Computer Time! was probably an attempt to do a Louis Cole thing. There’s a video I love (below ↓) of Louis Cole, Sam Wilkes, and Jacob Mann with some other guests in France playing “BUTTS TITS MONEY” at a jam/show thing. Sam Wilkes is really good at bass.

And I took the horns melody straight from this Jacob Mann Big Band tune:

The Creature Makes But One Demand is not really a Pharoah Sanders–inspired song, but we quote the bass line from “The Creator Has A Master Plan” in the middle of it, and the lyrics are of course a parody of that tune.

For Who Took This Picture, the chord progression from black midi’s “Welcome To Hell” was just silly and just scary enough to make it in! I think it really fits this song.

I can’t think of any direct inspirations for Helping, but the chorus chord progression maybe sort of came from “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” by Roberta Flack, right before she goes back into the verse. Sort of. You gotta stand on the shoulders of giants, I dunno. This is a great chance to share a great song, anyway.

I think the melody for Markgrafenstrasse comes from Ginger Root’s “Loneliness.” We thought of it during a rehearsal, which is pretty rare. This whole song was thought up collaboratively over the course of a few weeks, and it turned out really nice. Also, not sure how I got such a clean drum sound. Something special in the mic that evening.

I can’t think of a direct inspiration for Too Much Time either, but maybe the I chord to the flat-II7 comes from that one song “Dream (When You’re Feeling Blue)” by the Pied Pipers. I’m not even sure if that’s the chord, but it evokes the same sort of feeling. The celesta accompaniment is really cool.

We Like It When We Play Our Tunes is a direct tribute to Sun Ra’s “Springtime Again.” This song is so beautifully sloppy! It has this sort of “bad mix” sound that I love from the 70s that probably comes from being super rushed in the studio. No such thing as mixing at home back then. Ironically, I spent more time on the track trying to make it sound rushed.