The Art of Albums…

Recording an album is a tricky business.  As I was telling one of my good friends the other day, your average person doesn’t understand the amount of work that goes into the making of an album. It is a completely different beast than performing live.  When you perform live, what’s most important are the broad strokes–the chord changes, the melody–as performed with some energy and, one hopes, a modicum of charisma. But when you’re committing that same song to “tape,” what’s going to give it legs are all the little sonic details you incorporate into the song. Many of these would be lost in a live setting, where you hear it once and move on. But these are *exactly* the sort of things that keep you listening to an album over the years.

Pat Garland was recording in the studio with me last night, and he said, “Wow, you’ve got a lot of cool stuff going on in there. You don’t usually hear that level of depth in a pop song.” I took that as a great compliment, though I would say I do hear that level of depth in a lot of the artists that inspire me, from The Beatles to XTC to Gomez to Beck, etc.

Another useful way of thinking about it, using the medium of photography for comparison, would be “audio bokeh.”  Bokeh is the “aesthetic quality of the blur” in a photo, often seen in the background of the object being photographed. These blurry elements, some combination of light and color, add to the depth of the photo. And that is what I’m trying to achieve in the new album. Not only good songs, but well-recorded songs that will add depth and thus reward multiple listenings. I want to make an album that yes, you can listen to it blaring in your car on your way somewhere, and sing along to the melody and lyrics, but you can *also* listen with headphones late at night and enjoy the way those sonic details wash over you and change the song, the atmosphere, the space, vibrating and bouncing off each other, and hopefully firing some synapses and lighting up your brain in interesting ways…

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