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| From | Gregory Sager <hochsalzburg@yahoo.com> |
| Subject | Re: The Shazam "Meteor" |
| Date | Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:02:23 -0700 (PDT) |
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> Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 18:19:02 -0000
> From: "largro13" <largro13@yahoo.com>
> To: audities@smoe.org
> Subject: Re: The Shazam "Meteor"
> Message-ID: <h6ulim+j66i@eGroups.com>
>
> I'm judging the music on its own merits. But doesn't
> it seem to you that a longer period of time to work on a
> project would lead to greater quality? Like an album
> that took two years to make would be twice as good as one
> that took one year to make. Or and album that took
> four years to make would be twice as good as one that too
> two years to make.
>
> Of course I guess thinking like this also presumes that the
> band writes songs at a constant rate, and a constant level
> of quality, like maybe 18 songs a year. And that out
> of the 18 songs, four are really great, seven are usable,
> and seven are below par. So thinking like this, you'd
> figure that everytime a year passes the band has four more
> truly excellent songs.
>
> To my way of thinking, at six years, or whatever it's been,
> "Meteor" should have been a tour de force, double album,
> without a weak link on it.
>
> "Meteor" also seems quite a bit different, and also more
> ambitious than the Shazam's earlier work. I know this
> comes at things from a totally different way of thinking
> than my "greater time spent on the project/greater quality"
> idea. But in a way, I also feel a 'missed presence' of
> maybe songs they wrote but didn't release that might have
> been the in-between albums. I'll use the Beatles as an
> example because I think most of us are familiar with their
> group of albums. But another thing that I think
> bothers me slightly about "Meteor" is you get the feeling
> that you're skipping from "A Hard Day's Night" to something
> like "Revolver" or "Sgt. Pepper" without knowing the work
> that came between, to maybe gradually adjust your
> expectations of the band.
>
> I mean I know bands aren't of earth shattering importance
> or anything, and these things shouldn't disturb me, and
> really don't to the extent that a post like this probably
> makes it sound like. But still you get both the
> feeling that maybe it could have been better with the
> (perceive on my part) time that went into it, and then you
> also feel like maybe you missed 20 or 30 songs where the
> band gradually changed their style, that they just didn't
> release.
>
> No big deal though. Different strokes for different
> folks.
I don't think that there's enough of a correlation between album-release intervals and album quality to make any sort of hard-and-fast rules about it. There are too many variables at work in the process for it to fit neatly into the more-time-equals-better-music pattern you assert.
The biggest and most important variable has to do with the abilities of the songwriters and musicians involved. How much talent does the band or artist have in terms of either songwriting or song procurement? (The latter could simply be a matter of finding a producer who has good ears, or access to a strong demo/publishing pipeline.) If you don't have the resources or capability to record good songs, it won't make any difference whether you release your next album eight months from now or eight years from now.
Then there's the matter of artistic inspiration. If you're writing your own songs, you may not be the Bob Pollard type who rolls out of bed and writes three songs every day. You might go weeks, months, even longer, without writing at all -- and then the divining rod finds the underground aquifer, and all of a sudden three dozen songs pour out of you in a fortnight. Inspiration doesn't tend to adapt itself to a recording schedule for most songwriters.
Then there's the selection and redaction processes. Just because you write (to use your example) four great songs, seven usable songs, and seven below-par songs in the space of a year, doesn't mean that you're going to select those eleven great or usable songs to record, much less release as a part of your next album. You (or your bandmates) might prefer some of the songs that are actually below par. And the cumulative effect if you wait longer than a year to release the album might not be beneficial, either. You might scrap the four good songs that you recorded last year, because the eighteen tracks you've just recorded *this* year (including seven below-par numbers) are "fresher" and sound better to your ears. And the redactive process? You might change those four good songs in the can in such a way that they're no longer good anymore. The longer they sit around, the more tempting the impulse to tinker with them becomes. Sure, you might improve upon
them, but, then again, you might not.
Finally, there's the well-established paradigm of the inspired bash-it-out album. Lots and lots of bands and artists over the years have gone into the studio and knocked something out in a hurry that ended up sounding fresh and vital -- and lots and lots of bands and artists have spent years slaving over albums that sound overly mannered, stale, and/or quickly dated. Wanna catch lightning in a bottle? You might not get it by flying a kite with a key on it every Monday night for three years -- but you might get it if you show up with your kite instead on a single random Tuesday night when there happens to be a thunderstorm overhead.
I also don't follow your reasoning regarding the Shazam's progression, i.e., the movement from *A Hard Day's Night* to *Revolver* or *Sgt. Pepper* without an intervening *Help!* and *Rubber Soul*. I mean, this is power pop we're talking about. By definition, the Shazam is not reinventing the wheel here; they're walking well-trodden ground. With so many prior examples already released of each and every stylistic variation in the Beatles catalog (and in the Kinks catalog, the Who catalog, the Byrds catalog, et. al.), the Shazam's change from one style to another isn't necessarily a leap forward that skips intervening periods; it's not even a progression per se. It's simply a stylistic choice from among a series of well-established stylistic choices. A band in the studio can say, "Let's do a *Help!*-type song today," and then say, "Let's do a *Sgt. Pepper*-type song today," the next day ... and then they can turn around and record a *Live At The Star
Club*-type song and an *Abbey Road*-type song the next week.
In other words, your sense of a "missed presence" in Shazam songs is relevant by the original 1960s context of their musical genre, but it's not relevant by the standards of two generations later, in which the templates for that genre are so set in stone that power pop is among the most notoriously classicist flavors of rock music.
Gregory Sager
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