From our friend Sarah Zimmerman comes a link to an article by Steven Van Zandt about just what it is that ails the music business.
Readers will know Steve as Bruce Springsteen’s long-time associate in the E Street Band, and as consigliere Silvio Dante from The Sopranos. I got to know Steven myself during the making of the Springsteen album The River at Power Station Studios, where I was a member of the engineering staff, and I later worked on some of his solo projects. He is an enormously thoughtful, passionate and articulate man, and in this essay he examines the etiolating effect on the music of the way records are, by and large, made these days: by solitary individuals working in little private rooms, without any of the social interaction and specialization of responibilities that were, he argues, essential to the process during the golden age of record-making. As much as appreciate the value of the tools that the digital revolution has given us, I think he’s right on target.
Read the article here.
6 Comments
Some rules for pop song writing:
1. Unless you’ve got a good reason, keep it under 3:00. (look at the typical Beatle song).
2. If you’ve got a good musical idea, don’t wear it out. Find a few more.
3. Let your song (and singer) breathe. The singer doesn’t need to sing all the time. Let the other musicians or instruments express their own musical ideas. And silence and pauses in a song can be the your best tool.
4. Use the dynamic qualities of sound.
5. Establish patterns so that you can break them later.
6. Get honest opinions, and don’t hate them when they give them.
7. Ignore 1-6, when it makes the song better.
BTW, when you click ‘new image’ for the CAPTCHA it reloads the whole page (and for me at least, loses all of the text of my message.
Very sorry, Jack. I’ve lost so many comments at various websites that I always copy to the clipboard before pushing any buttons.
If you register as a user here you won’t see the Captcha thingy at all.
I must chime in here since there is another side to what SVZ has observed. I agree overall that the craft of music has suffered greatly, particularly in popular music, with improved technology. SVZ’s example of the introduction of MTV is the clearest example I have ever seen (which is why I am a jazz fan since that is, more times than not, music for music’s sake).
But, not all of what he talks about is true. There is one positive aspect that is indeed a byproduct of technology which was not mentioned by SVZ. That is the handful of recent bands/artists that have done truly amazing music because of new technology. There are plenty of deserving bands/artists today that may never have gotten a record deal under the old framework of the major labels. These people would most likely never have the chance to have their music heard otherwise if it wasn’t for their ability to DIY thanks to recent music technology. That technology includes both the production side and the playback side (distribution more specifically).
Innovative musicians like Greg Kurstin from The Bird and The Bee, Shana Halligan and Kiran Shahani from Bitter:Sweet, and singer/song writer Jonatha Brooke all have done amazing music without the aid the major labels and in some cases, recorded and mixed all their own material themselves. Add your favorite post digital technology band (mostly after 1971 according to SVZ) to this list and I am sure you will agree that great music can and does exist today. Many music fans have benefited from all kinds of new technology with inventive, innovative, un-formulated music. The only catch that I have seen is that we, as listeners, need to seek it out rather than wait for it to come to us.
Ron D
Good points, Ron. This always happens in a transition to mass production: quality suffers, but in return there is availability to all.
Funny to see my blog name here on an article that’s similar to what I write about (and I know I’m commenting SERIOUSLY late), but I had to throw something in here that “Little” steven (does he still use that appellation?) missed.
He talks about bands missing the “dance band” covers-playing part of their careers, but this isn’t a matter of taste on the parts of the bands. Clubs don’t PAY for bands to come and play covers anymore, they pay DJ’s to play “the real thing”. If you want to play anywhere, you have to find the kind of old-school artsy hold out clubowner who wants to showcase bands and support music. And that guy doesn’t want covers played by these bands, he wants capitol-A Art.
In other words, live bands are used more like the paintings on the wall in coffeehouses, used to show off the clubs “commitment to the community” than to provide entertainment that anyone would actually pay for. That’s why bands have no “bar band” phase anymore: no-one wants it.
Welcome, Rich, and thanks for stopping by to make that relevant point.
Back when I was playing in bands (that would be back in the ’70s before I made my transiton to the other side of the glass), you could still get by doing just what you describe here: playing well-known music for revelers in bars. Everybody had fun, and the musicians got paid.
More than that, there was a social interaction – a dynamic musical loop between the players and the listeners/dancers/drinkers — that is lost when the musicians are replaced by recordings of musicians.
I think the scene is still more like it was in the old days once you get away from the big cities. I hope so, anyway.
I like your blog! Onto the sidebar it goes.