Juvenile birds babble in screechy random bursts before they eventually develop a tonally and rhythmically precise song.
ABOUT midway through three decades of turning his tumultuous love life, troubled relationships with parents and children and slow physical decline into wry, precise songs, like a particularly gifted comic recording a 30-year nervous breakdown, Loudon Wainwright III wrote an ode to the county where he grew up.
He's known for hazy but precise songs and soundscapes; his new album is "Andorra" (Merge).
His new identity made him feel slightly removed from the world around him: he was an avid soccer player, but he learned to keep quiet when the other boys sang anatomically precise songs on the team bus.
'NED IS NINETY' A month before Britten's centennial is a notable not-quite-centennial: the 90th birthday of the composer Ned Rorem, whose elegant, emotionally precise songs are at the heart of his output.
(Sinagra) PLASTIC PEOPLE OF THE UNIVERSE (Sunday) In Prague in the 1960's, the Plastic People of the Universe transmuted the lessons of Frank Zappa and the Velvet Underground into dank, dissonant, precise songs that drew the wrath of Czechoslovakia's Communist government.
Jamie Parker's Sky Masterson sings "I've Never Been in Love Before" so that you believe it, he acts the song with a precise hold on every word.
TV on the Radio, the Sunday night headliner, has inadvertently become the most exciting funk band of our time, and its show was searing, a precise collection of art-soul songs by a band that's happy to appear sloppy from a distance but knows exactly how all its parts are moving.
Do you go on stage with a precise set list, or just choose the order of songs on the night?
The songs, re-ochestrated for a four-piece orchestra, also never seem to stem from a precise social context, but become a series of discrete numbers.
