A thought on bands and good songs

I tend to listen to albums while I write, and today I was listening to the Bookends album by
Simon and Garfunkel (kids: check it out if you haven't heard it; has a "Sgt. Pepper's" quality to it that I hadn't noticed when I was younger).

There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in the margins of the songs -- sound effects and whatnot. Which made me think about the role of bands, versus songwriters, versus producers.

Very briefly (because I'm actually writing a Dissertation, offline...), most hit songs you hear are catchy because of the songwriter, and the producer: the band or performer doesn't have much to do with it.

To illustrate, think of just about any favorite song. If you heard a (good) cover band play it, would it still be good? Most likely. So, the band itself -- the performers -- can be subbed out by any of a thousand (no -- ten thousand) bands or singers. Whereas only one person, ever, could have written that specific song.

As far as the nifty "twists" that "make" a song ear-catching -- like that weird vocodor sound (technically, I think it's Auto-Tune) in Cher's "Believe" song? That's probably the producer doing that. When a band goes in to record an album, it's often the producer that suggests making the song longer, making it shorter, maybe repeating the chorus an extra time at the end, hey, let's start the song with a ticking clock... etc.

As another example, for those of you who heard Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out", I saw them perform it live on t.v. (was it on Letterman?), and they totally robbed it of what made it catchy. On the album, it has a jerky, robotic pulse to it -- which is what makes it unique. Played live, they just cranked through it -- I suppose in a (misguided) effort to give it more energy -- but instead, it just generi-cized it (i.e. made it generic). Which made me think that **they** weren't the ones that had the idea to play it Devo-like: it was the producer.

Sometimes it's the songwriter that suggests that (that's how I work, at least...) -- but then, that starts to blur the lines between "songwriter" and "producer".


Anybow...


--GG