At 04:00 PM 2/23/99 -0500, Terry wonders:
>I guess I'd just like to know whether you defenders of 60s
>pop-country, the Nashville Sound, or whatever it was called, have ever
>heard a song from that era -- or any era -- that was too heavily arranged
>with background singers, strings, etc?
TOO heavily arranged? It's not about passing beyond some arbitary amount;
it's about what works. I think plenty of songs from that era--hell, from
any era--are badly arranged (Bobby Bare's Miller's Cave, to return to our
earlier ex's). And I think many others are well arranged (Hank Snow's
Miller's Cave), though I'd also add that I know there's more than one way
to skin a cat. That is, a recording could have everything on it but the
kitchen sink, and another version of the same song could be stripped down
to nothing but voice and one instrument, and they could both be
artistically successful. Like I said earlier, art is about choices.
Consequently, it's also not always all about what makes intellectual sense
with the lyrics, as you've been asking about elsewhere. That's one way to
figure an arrangement, I'd imagine, but I'd bet there are other factors
that could contribute to those decisions too. Off the top of my head, they
might include but would not be limited to questions such as: simply, what
feels right musically? what will the songs around it on the radio sound
like? what do the songs around it on the album sound like? do we want the
music to reinforce the lyric or create a tension with it? will such a
contrasting arrangement make the listener hear the lyrics differently? will
it make the singer sing differently? does it just sound fuckin' cool? and
so on and so on with the questions changing with the artists and the song
and the musicians and the project...and so on and so on again.
You know, I think that a lot of what we think of as "making sense," in
terms of matching up sound to words, is a sort of game we play with
ourselves anyway--the meaning, or the connections, aren't always there
inherently; often we supply them ourselves after the fact. I mean, for
example, we might hear a particular steel fill as happy because the song is
a lyrically happy song, or because all of the other parts leading up to
that fill have sounded happy. But if we took the same fill and stuck it in
a sad song, surrounded by sad lyrics and other sad sounds, we might very
well hear it--the very same fill, now--as the saddest, bluest, lonesomest
sound we ever heard. Context isn't just huge; it's everything.
Sad and happy are inadequate words, I know, but hopefully you follow my
point: it's about learning how to hear, how to open up your heart to the
music and letting it take you where it wants to take you, not where we've
already decided we want to be taken. That's what I think anyway, for me...
>I still don't understand why debating decisions on arrangements is such a
>bad thing.
It's not bad at all. It's why I'M here. --david cantwell
