Q&A: Life After Capitalism, Loudness, More Thoughts on Lyrics
Also: what I think of X, the band
Hi. The good news is: one album is finished as of this week, and it sounds great. The bad news: the other, longer, probably better one is still hanging over my head. I’m hoping that I can get to the end of it this month.
And what have you been up to? Is life throwing you curveballs? Are you basking in the March sunshine and feeling strangely fatigued?
I solicited more questions this week because I didn’t think I would have time this weekend to do a longer post. But it may end up getting long anyway because lots of you submitted excellent questions. Thanks, everybody. Now I will pretend like I know the answers:
James asks: “What will happen to pop music in a post-capitalist society?”
Garry Rafferty’s manager once said on a phone call to Capitol Records: “‘If you give him [Rafferty] 5 million, you’ll never get another album.’ It’s the worst thing you can do. Artists write the best songs when they’re hungry.” I do think there’s some truth to this—not that artists necessarily need to suffer of course, but that some of the best albums are made because an album needed to be made. The decision-making process that results in an album is a lot clearer and more streamlined when time is limited. I would argue one of the greatest privileges an artist with a big recording contract has is the limited time to deliver their art—in my experience, spending infinite amounts of time on a project usually results in nothing ever being released, and certainly nothing good. So I think a post-capitalist society would be a disaster for pop music, or at least the pop music we know and love.
But I think that’s okay—like many impossible things in this world, pop music is something that we fall in love with unconditionally in spite of the machinery, and in most cases, exploitation that keeps churning it out. So as much as I love pop, I would be interested in what happens when it dies—when the incentives for making it finally crumble. It wouldn’t be the end of music, but it could be the end of what we think of as music, which is right on time as we are currently trapped in a cycle of endlessly repeating nostalgia.
Here’s one more idea: If I were going to predict the future, I suspect that there will be a sort of battle between the tiny-local and the massive-global in terms of music consumption. For a while now the small and medium-size music venues have been shutting down, which leaves, well, you know it already: the houses and the arenas. The backyards and the stadiums. On one end we have late capitalism working as intended: you can spend a lot of money to see Taylor Swift, or a hologram of Roy Orbison, and surely lots of people will continue to do that. On the other end, local scenes may have taken a hit during the pandemic, but I think they will never truly go away, simply because it’s hard to stop people from playing music together, and it’s too much fun, even if all the money dries up. The major players of the music industry are, like all of the world’s major players right now, steering us towards consolidation. I think what they don’t know is that something can and will grow from underneath. Maybe something big and scary!
Case asks: “Do you feel we, as music fans, have moved past the loudness wars?”
I want to say yes, but I actually think we’re still living with the fallout in many ways. For one: a lot of people still like to mix into a limiter. And there’s nothing wrong with that, to be clear! I love mixes that sound loud. But we’ll never get the towering peaks (as in literal peaks, ha ha) of older recordings from the 70s and 80s while that remains the dominant style, which I think it still is. And it seems like these days even if the mixing engineer has a pretty soft touch with their buss processing, it’s pretty rare that a master gets delivered without a fair bit of gain reduction.
But anyway, those are the concerns of the engineers; as fans, I think we could be on the way to being past it. I’d like to see the stats on how many people turn normalization off on their streaming apps. Here I go predicting the future again, but I think we’ve been stuck with a mandated “have your cake and eat it too” quasi-hi-fi sound for the last several years, where everything is supposed to sound good AND loud, which has resulted in some records that I find sound both really good and quite bad depending on the playback context. I feel like I’m starting to see the reemergence of a more lo-fi approach, largely just out of necessity since almost no one has the money to make a really good sounding record now. But it’ll be a different lo-fi than it was in the 90s or early 2010s, because no one actually wants to be lo-fi; the Phil Elverum of today is using shitty gear and trying to make things sound good, whereas the actual Phil Elverum had access to some pretty kickass gear and was interested in making things sound bad.
Dean asks: “What do you think of X (the band)?”
Good rhythm section!
Lani asks: “Equally inane question this time around: lyrics or melody?”
I don’t think that’s inane, I think that’s the big question!
Writing this blog has made me realize I care way more about lyrics than I thought I did. But man, lyrics are misunderstood. I think most people who write good melodies have a pretty good grasp of melody. Whereas, people who write good lyrics may be doing it completely by accident! A great example of this is that line in Hey Jude: “the movement you need is on your shoulder”. Which was just something Paul sang to fill in the scansion. But it’s also, as writers better than me have pointed out, a perfect expression of the coming-of-age-ness of the song, and relates it to—thank you, Scott Miller—physicality, and masculinity, which is all pretty unusual to find in one of the best pop songs ever. And I think most crucially, this is all done elegantly and subtly, nothing is too on the nose, nothing is hitting you over the head. Which is not to say good lyrics are only written by accident, just that music is a space where a few words can hold a lot of meaning—often multiple meanings—and the writer that knows this and turns it to their advantage can get a lot of emotion across without having to try so hard.
I think melody has usually been my primary concern because for some reason, it’s almost no one else’s concern at all. Here’s a place to look for good melodies to rip off: doo-wop—the original collision of Celtic hooks, classical harmony, African polyrhythms… this is where it all started. Try to rip off a Beatles song and you’ll wind up sounding like a third-rate Beatles. Rip off a doo wop song and you will sound like the Beatles, because that’s what they were doing.
Bry asks: “How does one live without music?”
If I didn’t write music, I would probably just write (as my non-capitalistic, non-lucrative artistic practice, not as my job), and I think I would be a little bit better at it. But with writing, I feel like I know how to do it too well, whereas music still holds a lot of mystery and will always be above me. As frustrating as that may be.
To answer a different way, if I lost my hearing or something, I think I might still be okay—I can hear music pretty well in my head. And that’s not to tout myself as some kind of musical genius; I just think if you’ve been recording or arranging music long enough to train your ears to hear the different parts in a song, your brain can do a decent job of reconstructing it, hence a song getting “stuck in your head.” I would probably have to stop the “new music roundups” though.
Luka asks, “Are people who can drive manual vehicles justified in believing in their superiority?”
Yes! Until they get stuck 7 miles off-road up a mountain in a blizzard.
Luke asks, “Imposter syndrome: maybe actually a good thing?”
Imposter syndrome sure gets thrown around a lot, to the extent that I’m not sure what it means anymore. Surely we all know by now that adults don’t really know what they’re doing, they’re just making it up? I think it’s good to believe in yourself a little. At the same time, you have to find some balance of knowing your limits, and maybe bringing in other people to help out in areas where they know a little more. My early 20s were a reckoning of facing my weaknesses as a musician and working to become more rhythmically competent. My late 20s so far are feeling like a reckoning of figuring out how to collaborate more effectively and not being so precious about everything. I don’t think that’s everyone’s journey, it’s just what I’ve been up to.
On a related note, I’m interested in recording an album really quickly this summer and specifically writing songs that I know are well within my capabilities as a performer, instead of what I usually do which is to write songs that are well beyond my capabilities and then trying to stretch towards being able to play them. So trading interesting-ness for comfortable-ness. We’ll see how that goes, I think it might just end up sounding kind of boring and safe, but I know I’ve never tried boring and safe!1
Luke also asks, “How to win friends and influence people while recording your next album alone in your bedroom?”
This might be the big question of our time. Right now we’re all isolated individuals. It’s not really a recipe for good art. I think the difficult part about collaborating with your peers is that, it might not be good at first—it takes time, which equals money, to get better together at the thing you’re trying to do. You could also spend that money on a fancy, older producer. But I suspect that the albums made that way are a little bit less vital, because they’re not being worked on in community. The albums that come out of nowhere and turn the music world on its head, even the ones by the bedroom-recording individuals, tend to actually originate from scenes, not people. Elliott Smith’s quiet solo recordings would not have existed if he wasn’t sick of playing in loud rock bands. Everything is a reaction to something, and there has to be something to produce that reaction—and the something needs to be other people, I think, because for better or worse other people create the drama and the high-stakes emotions that drive us to write songs.
Duncan asks, “Foster, is it better to wonder or to know?”
A younger me wanted to know at all costs. The slightly older me thinks the costs are sometimes too high.
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That’s all I have for you this week. Next week we’re about due for another roundup; I think I have some good things to share. I ran out of time writing this earlier today so I’m tidying it up before bed and mostly I think I should just go to bed.
Only Success Can Fail Me Now