Over the past year or two, we’ve managed to come up with over thirty new songs. This feels nice since whenever I’ve read about the album-recording process of big important bands, they always say something to the effect that “We had about twenty or thirty songs recorded, then we ended up picking the best ones.” That is we may be a big, important band now. Or at least we share one thing in common with them.
Having said this, I am reminded of an experience I had in seventh grade, shortly after I bought Oasis’ “What’s the Story Morning Glory?” The world-wide-web was a relatively new feature of our lives, and I was in the basement, playing video games and browsing the pages Yahoo! brought up. I liked Oasis and their swaggering, bad-boy image, and noticed that I could find more information about them “online.”
So I did. I stumbled upon a lengthy, text-only interview with them, though I can’t recall the interviewer. What I do recall, and will always recall is my reaction to their, er, colorful language. It was sprinkled with more expletives than I’ve ever seen since, save for in HBO’s “Entourage” and in my former work at a drug and alcohol treatment center for adolescents. Being 12 or 13 and having very little exposure to the common speech of people in bands, I assumed that this was simply “par for course,” and that all real rock ‘n’ roll stars must have equally filthy tongues. It was much later, after I’d read many more reviews and interviews in music publications, and after I’d slowly realized the strange uniqueness of Oasis and the brash brothers, that I discovered they were on the heavier side of the f-bomb dropping continuum. For a time I really thought the world was a dark place; as it turns out, it’s just the Gallagher’s vocabularies that are dark places.
Of course I’ll drop an F-bomb from time to time… watch out.
To return to the topic at hand, however, I was mentioning that we’ve got lots of songs written, but have to whittle the list down into some sort of cohesive album. Which brings us to blog-audience participation (I mean, isn’t that what this whole “online community” thing is all about?). What role do you think song order or track-selection plays in making a “good album”? Should an album follow an emotional line that could be graphically represented? On the other hand, is the album dead, like Brett Vail says of the analog film? Has the “digital revolution” guillotined the full-length, sequential musical work?
A friend of mine said recently, “Who the heck wants a stupid album now?” or something to that effect. In other words, who wants packaging and compact discs and art-booklets when they could just store it all in iTunes and look up the lyrics somewhere on the internet? I don’t know. Is this debate already over while I’m just walking into the exhibition hall? Does anybody care? I suppose history will march on regardless of my vague, passive feelings.