Happy Monday –
Let’s talk about production and making records, working with artists, all that art stuff, for the next few weeks.
The problem with talking about art is the language around it tends to be vague: “…I feel this. The bass needs to be more round. It doesn’t pop. This speaks to me…”
I don’t understand how any of that is useful as a way of figuring out the big questions, things like: What to do next? What is it missing? How do we fix this? Is it done? What does it need?
I was teaching multidisciplinary arts, and we all needed a way of talking about work in different genres and mediums that didn’t require everyone to learn jargon. We needed a way for dancers to talk to painters to talk to writers to talk to musicians. The Five Things is what I came up with.
The Five Things
1) Mood
2) Metaphor
3) Narrative/Thrust
4) Individuation/Character
5) Technique
The Five Things appear to be universal—I can find them in any creative project regardless of the medium or the intentions. Any work will have them, in varying amounts.
The Five Things are more for critical reflection and discussion of a piece, and less for use as starting points in making a work. Starting is more about inspiration. The Five don’t inspire. Don’t use these at the beginning. Use them when you’re stuck somewhere in the middle. Of course, break this rule if it helps you to get work accomplished.
They are connected to language, and they tend to make themselves known by the words used when discussing a piece.
MOOD
Mood is the easiest to discuss. Is it bright and cheery? Is it dark and mournful? Is it a comedy? Is it a tragedy? Is it slow and thoughtful, or fast and frenetic? Is it energy up or energy down? Is it a period piece, or is it modern? Does it harken back or hint forward? Alive? Dead?
Most EDM: mood. Heavy metal and punk: mood. Most music used in cinema is mood and tells the audience what to feel.
Tapping your foot or not? That’s mood. Most music production is about manipulating mood. And finding a stupid, too-loud snare that has been on everyone else’s record.
Many artists don’t get much beyond mood. For many people, mood is the whole point.
Mood is easy to discuss because it is very easy for someone to say, “I feel…” Feelings don’t require facts to back them up. Feelings are hard to argue. Feelings are perhaps the ultimate opinion.
If you’re discussing or pondering a piece of work, and the thoughts run towards, “I’m not feeling this… this is dull… the energy feels off… I hate this… This isn’t grooving (groove is a mood thing),” you’re dealing with mood issues in the production.
METAPHOR
Metaphor is one idea standing in for something else, describing a thing by describing something else. Metaphor is a means of communicating an idea for which there are not words, an experience that cannot be described. Myth is metaphor. Clichés are often metaphors beaten to death—she broke my heart, etc. Metaphor results in a poetic sense to a song.
“Paradise by the Dashboard Light” is a metaphor for sex in a car. Metaphors for sex abound in music, to the point that it gets boring… cliché.
Modern country music has no metaphor to it, unless you consider that the entire genre is a metaphor.
Mood in music is REALLY tied up with metaphor. We even describe “scenes” in a song using metaphoric language: He’s in his own head at this point. It should sound like a war. It’s festive. It smells like the sweat at a punk show.
Metaphor that’s used a lot becomes cliché—the proverbial she broke my heart and almost all the lyrics on Foreigner or Journey records.
Quick aside: a good writer flips metaphors inside out. Elvis Costello is a master of this, and this wonderful line from “Being Simple” by The Judybats is a wonderful example: “Hearts cannot be broken. They’re small squishy things. They don’t break like glass, but they bruise easily. This one you bruised.” Really, that has everything. Shifting mood, as it goes from humor to something bleak, a sense of narrative as the moods shift and then we find out what happened: this one you bruised. And the metaphors are all over the line.
Perhaps the strongest appeal of metaphor is the safety it affords an artist. It provides plausible deniability. We can talk about a thorny inner mess without revealing that it’s our thorny inner mess. The metaphor can be expressed through role play; the best-known proponent of this is David Bowie, but Cindy Sherman is constantly playing roles in her own photographs, and every novelist is a part of all the characters in the book.
NARRATIVE/THRUST
Narrative, in its simplest form, is: what’s the story, and more importantly, what happens next? Narrative is often in lyrics, and good lyrics make you wonder what happens next. Back to The Judybats and their song “Being Simple,” which I quoted, we can hear from that line that we’re in the middle of a dialog between people, and we sort of wonder what is next. A sense of narrative pulls us along.
Narrative can also be a sense of change across time, of things going somewhere, and I call it Thrust, and this is what music typically has. Shifts of mood are narrative, are thrust. A lot of arranging and production is creating and stringing together shifts of mood, like the way a film is a collection of scenes. See the metaphor there?
If you’re listening to a song, and it is going nowhere, or it seems stuck… if it drones on and on… if you find yourself drifting off during it, and you don’t get pulled in and pulled along by it, that is a narrative issue.
INDIVIDUATION/CHARACTER
Individuation is what makes something recognizable as its own thing. There can be characters in the song, and the people making the song can be characters. Great artists and singers are deeply individuated and you recognize them in a moment. The way a person plays, the sound of an entire album, these are all individuation/character.
Individuation is also called style. It can be in a singer’s voice, the characteristics of the way a person plays or writes. Jeff Beck sounds like Jeff Beck. Bob Dylan is all character. Love him or hate him, he’s an individual. Madonna took character out of the music and put it into the marketing and performance. Jeff Lynne’s production has character (and almost none of it I like, but that is just me). This is also Kate Bush and Prince, and of course Bowie. Even when Bowie isn’t being Bowie, and he’s performing as a character, he manages to be Bowie.
These days, much pop music is written and produced by a committee, and then checked against an algorithm, the ultimate committee. It all sounds the same because the same people make it. It’s just stamped with someone else’s name. People are fearful, therefore they copy. The first time someone dropped a rap in a song, that was individuation. Now that’s expected. People copy.
If it sounds or looks like something else or somebody else, if it’s easy to label, if it doesn’t rouse any sort of emotions from you, if it is familiar and comfortable, if it is boring, if you really don’t care about it, if it doesn’t kind of bother you and make you a bit uncomfortable, it’s an individuation issue.
TECHNIQUE
Technique is a catch-all for how well something is constructed. Think fit and finish. It can be from the precision of the playing to the recording. Technique is everywhere.
Great works of creativity often make us think “WOW.” How did someone pull this off? What sort of effort did this take? How did they ever think of this? This is technique.
For some music, great technique is the driver and the point. Van Halen without technique is a lame version of Aerosmith. Aerosmith without Steven Tyler is a bar band.
But a lack of technique is also a thing. Simplicity can speak loudly. And then there is transcending a lack of technique until it turns into individuation. The Edge from U2 is not burdened by excessive amounts of chops. But in overcoming that limitation, he developed a very recognizable style.
Technique without individuation is a huge problem in music these days. Things sound great, everyone’s in tune, and you can’t tell one song from another and you don’t give a shit in any direction anyway.
In production, technique is everywhere—mic technique, mixing technique, how one gets the most out of an artist, the caliber of the performances.
So, these are Five Things we use to talk about art, scoped to music and production. Here’s an example.
Listen to this:
Here Comes My Girl
https://youtu.be/GOOiZAHFvfc?si=7JHL7U9-vMgxsD5A
At the top, there’s mood: immediately there’s a mood of expectancy and waiting. And of course, with a title like “Here Comes My Girl,” what else could the mood be? She’s not there, she’s on her way, and the guy is waiting for her.
Sounds to me like a guy on a street under a streetlight. It’s definitely nighttime, right? Before there was a single lyric, it somehow sounds like night. That’s metaphor. The soundstage is wide and the instrumentation sparse. He’s in a big space, not some small room. It’s intimate. It’s quiet and low-key and hushed. He’s talking to himself. There’s a ticking watch sense to the guitar parts (technique).
The mood shifts. First he’s talking about how hard life is—talk singing. Individuation and character, right? And also Tom Petty’s distinctive voice. The mood shifts again. He sings, desperately, about how great she is, and it sounds like he’s bursting, yelling, exploding with emotion. Then the chorus kicks in, damn if it doesn’t sound just like a Byrds tune. It’s SO gentle and melodic and sweet. It’s also the first time we hear the I chord, the tonic. The song has been hanging on the V chord, which is why it had a sense of expectation, the whole thing is waiting to resolve. Technique.
Do you see the narrative and thrust of it there? It’s tied into the lyrics and reflected by the music. There’s something about that chorus that has such a release of tension. It’s wonderful, but the song doesn’t stay there, because it’s HERE COMES MY GIRL, not my girl has arrived.
We go through the same rise and fall of action again. The lyrics are cliché and not poetic, but I get the sense this isn’t a poetic character in the song. It’s a guy that works all day. He’s not going to express himself with poetry; he expresses himself simply and lowbrow—cliché. Another example of individuation/character is the way the lyrics are used. It’s also narrative—part of the story of the guy in the song.
Note the little additions and changes during the second verse and chorus. It’s not a lot of stuff, but it is pushing the song along (thrust).
And then that bridge, which has one lyric: Watch her walk. And that’s what we get to do through the bridge: sit in that musical metaphor of this girl approaching. There’s this great little syncopated guitar part in there (technique)—the movement of her hips? The “watch her walk” is quiet and reverbed (technique) and the organ build… and it modulates back to the last verse (all technique) and we’re back to that mood, but there’s something triumphant about it. It’s the little piano touches that are in the highs and in the holes of the vocal, kind of like quiet horn stabs, and then the piano fits itself in as a part, adding to the energy and the density in the third verse (thrust yet again).
Finally, there’s a lovely vamp out. The guy says, “That’s right.” It’s quiet, and piano and organ fill the space. They might be walking away together, or he might be still waiting. If we turn the piano and organ into a call and response (technique), we hint at the two of them talking (narrative). We add a single solo guitar, and now it hints at the guy still waiting. It might even hint at that she doesn’t really exist. And that plays into the next song on the album, “Even the Losers,” which is sort of “there went my girl.” It opens with a machine-like sound. Is that the factory where the guy works?
This is me applying the Five Things in hindsight, which is a bit easier than applying them in the moment. Well, we learn from the past and apply it in the present and hope for a future.
Here’s a song to hear. Pull it apart using the Five Things. Listen for what’s going on with the drums—tons of narrative there.
https://youtu.be/59Cw1IrmFig?si=w5e9H3z4plveP8cU
After you listen to it, does the video fit it?
https://youtu.be/Cdu1ea4j7-A?si=e5fgRjaiOVjz1QNb
Different mix… Better mix?
Feel free to ask questions.
Have a great week in the studio!
Warm regards,
Luke