Iteration 94: Finding Dots to Connect

04/10/23 • 5 min

Last month, we lost Ryuichi Sakamoto, who was an absolute monster of an artist and since hearing the news I’ve been going back and listening to a bunch of his catalog, which is not only massive, but it’s also incredibly diverse.

There are certain artists whose work allows you to see the world differently. If they’re really good, they might even allow you to feel it differently. Ryuichi Sakamoto was one of those artists. He worked across multiple musical genres and he was able to tap into and even affect different aspects of the human experience. I think the first piece of Ryuichi’s music I heard was Forbidden Colors, which is a vocal version of the theme to a film he scored and acted in alongside David Bowie called Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. It was also the first of what would be decades of brilliant collaborations with former Japan frontman David Sylvian. A friend in college had reintroduced me to David, who I was familiar with from Japan, but it was his solo record Secrets of the Beehive, which featured Forbidden Colors as a bonus track, that introduced me to Ryuichi and I’ve been a fan ever since.
LINKS
Yellow Magic Orchestra
Brandon Stosuy
Documentary about the piano that was damaged by the 2011 tsunami
asyncAsia
Roger Dean
Tales From Topographic OceansHugh Syme
Storm Thorgerson
Mick Rock
Eric Meola
Hipgnosis
Reid Miles
CONNECT WITH ME
Website: https://jefferysaddoris.com
Twitter: @jefferysaddoris
Instagram: @jefferysaddoris
SUBSCRIBE
Subscribe to Jeffery Saddoris: Almost Everything in your favorite podcast app to get more conversations like this. You can also find a written version of Iterations on Substack.
MUSIC
Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Previous Episode

Iteration 93: Joyspotting

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I’m a big fan of trains and have been since I was a kid. My dad was a railroad man for the Southern Pacific, as were his two brothers, my grandfather, and his father before him. So you might say that trains are in my blood. I remember my dad sometimes taking me to work with him and I would get to ride on the caboose while he did his shift. Of course this was back when trains still had cabooses, which they phased out in the early 80s. My dad really wanted me to go into the family business and he even set up an interview where basically all I had to do was sign some papers and I would have been in. But when I got to the interview, I couldn’t get out of my car. I could see the trajectory of the life that would mean and it just wasn’t the life I wanted. When I told my dad about it, he was furious with me. And understandably so. He took my response to mean that I thought I was too good for the life that was good enough for three generations of the men in our family. But it wasn’t that at all. It wasn’t that the life wasn’t good enough for me, it was that the life just wasn’t right for me. I wanted something different, not better, and he just couldn’t understand that at the time. All this to say, I still love trains and will occasionally even go out of my way to see one, but my love absolutely pales in comparison to someone I’ve been following on Instagram for the last couple of months.
LINKS
Francis Bourgeois
Joe Jonas
Louis Theroux
Elizabeth Gilbert
CONNECT WITH ME
Website: https://jefferysaddoris.com
Twitter: @jefferysaddoris
Instagram: @jefferysaddoris
SUBSCRIBE
Subscribe to Jeffery Saddoris: Almost Everything in your favorite podcast app to get more conversations like this. You can also find a written version of Iterations on Substack.
MUSIC
Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris

Next Episode

Iteration 95: Creaking Back to Life

For years I’ve wanted to do some sort of legacy project that would allow me to explore and somehow acknowledge and maybe even come to terms with my family history. As many of you know, I come from a family of railroad workers. In fact, I’m the first and to my knowledge the only male in three generations of my family not to work for the railroad. At the beginning of 2019, I started laying the groundwork for a project that would not only allow me to lean into my family history but that I could also use as a starting point for something much bigger that could end up being the legacy project that I had been looking for. Unfortunately, COVID shut the world down and because the project really had to be done in person, most of the connections I made up to that point and permissions I had secured became moot. I got really upset about it because I loved the idea and it had taken me a long time to get there. But how I wanted to do it was completely disrupted and since at the time nobody had any idea how long the lockdown would last, I put the whole thing on hold, and it’s been there ever since.
CONNECT WITH ME
Website: https://jefferysaddoris.com
Twitter: @jefferysaddoris
Instagram: @jefferysaddoris
SUBSCRIBE
Subscribe to Jeffery Saddoris: Almost Everything in your favorite podcast app to get more conversations like this. You can also find a written version of Iterations on Substack.
MUSIC
Music For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris