Aging rock act on new album: This time we wanted to go back to the basics

Geoff Downes of Yes on the new Yes album:

There’s a lot of acoustic piano on the album, there’s a lot of acoustic guitar. This makes it almost a sort of urbane feeling that Yes has gone back to its roots in some ways.

Yes, that piano and acoustic guitar band from way back when.

can't wait for the return of the Jerry Lee Lewis era of Yes

lol

Now there's a prog rocker in Vladivostok
Got every side by Jerry Lee
But for Tales from Topographic Oceans
That guy could well be me

Many of the big prog groups had a 50s pastiche (16th note piano pounding) song/segment: "I've Seen All Good People" or "Going For the One" by Yes, "Are You Ready Eddy?" by ELP, the climaxes of "Too Old to Rock and Roll" and "The Spirit of Radio"...

i don't think there's any (or very few) musicians of that generation that weren't seriously influenced or inspired to start music by early rock n' roll

Sure, Steve Howe's guitar style has at least as much rockabilly as jazz and classical in it.

Yeah, that generation can often be relatable on that level, it's true.

I saw "Yes" (the Steve Howe version) a few years ago and the highlight for me of the dya was a solo acoustic piece Howe played that wasn't even technically a Yes song, it was him solo.

definitely felt like a gumbo of styles including rock 'n roll which is why I enjoyed it so much. the rest was great too but that piece stuck out more to me

i don't know his solo career but i always thought a solo instrumental fingerstyle acoustic album from howe would have been great (which may exist i don't know)

So you're saying you wanted Steve Howe... to go back to the basics?

One guy in a room

definitely felt like a gumbo of styles including rock 'n roll which is why I enjoyed it so much. the rest was great too but that piece stuck out more to me

One guy in a room

Why did he think he had to travel to Italy, if he thought it would just be a digital collab thing?

underrated question

See paragraph three (though it isn’t a quote from a band)

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-beatles-let-it-be-super-deluxe/

Duran Duran have a new album out.

Roger says: “Erol came in and said, ‘I want you to go back in a live room and play the way you used to play together’.

“He wanted the feel of our early 12in records, which he’d been playing in the clubs for years. So he’s kind of responsible for that beginning.

“He told us to forget technology for a little while and get in a room and play together. And that’s how we wrote this.”

Forget technology for a little while

*Chucks synthesizers out window, lands on an elderly lady walking the dog*

Excuse me, that elderly lady is one of Banarama.

and on and on and on it goes -

"The band’s two most recent albums, 2014’s They Want My Soul and 2017’s Hot Thoughts, were made with producer Dave Fridmann (Tame Impala, Lord Huron) in his Fredonia, New York, studio. During the Hot Thoughts tour, which wrapped up at the end of 2019, Daniel and his bandmates had a strong idea of what they wanted their next album to sound like. Daniel liked the electronic experimentations and rhythmic left turns of Hot Thoughts, “but it was a conscious decision after playing those songs live that we wanted the next one to be . . . I don’t know. I think every time you do an album, you’re reacting against the last one. We wanted to go back as much as we could to a record where it’s about a band playing in a room, playing rock and roll music, and playing off of each other. Just kind of more old school, where you figure out what the songs are going to be, hash them out over months, and then you hit ‘record.’”"

https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/keep-austin-spoon/

feel like spoon would be more self aware than to phrase it like that

lol I mean their whole aesthetic presents as “basic”

When I read this I thought “Britt was 100% aware of this thread when giving this interview”

It is hard to believe that bands can continue to be this clueless but this and the Oozing Sobriety thread (and others) suggest otherwise

Why is it clueless, though? I get it’s a cliché, but if it rings true to all these musicians, what is the criticism?

They could maybe try talking about in less clichéd terms? Any mention of rooms right out for a start.

Is there a thread on I Love Sports for athletes saying, “I’m just gonna give it 100% and leave it all on the field”?

They could maybe try talking about in less clichéd terms? Any mention of rooms right out for a start.

I think athletes talk that way so much, week to week, every game, that that’s transcended cliche.

The quotes in this thread are almost as tedious as interviews with athletes!

― Halfway there but for you, Sunday, 21 March 2021 00:08 (seven months ago) link

...but then again, this is one important way that records are made. And it's more pleasing to most rock listeners to heat a band talk about going back to a live sound than saying, "we decided on this record we would Pro Tools every individual sonic element until it sounded like digital static".

If so many professional musicians say the same thing on so many separate occasions, it must surely be true?

I'm sure for some bands like perhaps Duran Duran above, someone is the 'music' guy who puts together the tracks, sends to the vocalist who sends back the vocals and everything is just overdubbed and looped together - really no different technique wise than any hip hop or electronic music. They might have records that have never been played live together until they start rehearsing to tour. I'd say for some it is probably novel for them to get all back together and try to get that garage/basement vibe back.

Lots of Metal is made the same way that's why there are so many bands out there that get slagged for not being able to pull of their own records. They often literally cannot play what they have edited/sequenced together.

Is there a thread on I Love Sports for athletes saying, “I’m just gonna give it 100% and leave it all on the field”?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5uQBQzr8T0

:33

i feel like musicians probably don't read enough interviews with other aging rock musicians to realise how cliched the phrasing is

"We just want to go back to the sound of 5 players on a court"

xp OTM - or equally likely, they’re not pressed about trying to impress nerds like us who read lots of rock interviews.

I think there's a synth pop reversal of this thread premise - ie synth bands of the early eighties, as they push on into the nineties they go a bit rock and get out the guitars etc... and then at some point they decide to 'go back to basics', throw out their guitars and plug in the synthesisers again. I distinctly recall reading something along those lines in an interview with Phil Oakey in the 90s or 2000s.

I'm sure for some bands like perhaps Duran Duran above, someone is the 'music' guy who puts together the tracks, sends to the vocalist who sends back the vocals and everything is just overdubbed and looped together - really no different technique wise than any hip hop or electronic music. They might have records that have never been played live together until they start rehearsing to tour. I'd say for some it is probably novel for them to get all back together and try to get that garage/basement vibe back.

Lots of Metal is made the same way that's why there are so many bands out there that get slagged for not being able to pull of their own records. They often literally cannot play what they have edited/sequenced together.

Yes, this sounds about right. Nonetheless I'm suspicious about how back to basics a lot of these back to basics albums actually are if, for instance, back to basics means sounding like a Duran Duran 12" - granted that that might seem like a garage/basement vibe to Duran Duran.

I suspect a lot of these bands jam out the vibes in a live-ish fashion during the tracking phase, whereupon the producer gets to work editing it to fuck / comping the vocal takes together etc cause the band don't quite get that they're not exactly Led Zep when it comes to the musicianship.

Also they probably hardly ever see each other anymore and can't stand to be in the same room if they can possibly avoid it.

Yeah these proud statements of "just five guys in a room" aren't so much about the music, but about the marvel that these people can stay in one room for the duration of one song.

Just five guys in a zoom

I feel like a bunch of synthy and New Wavey early 80s bands started as four-piece rock bands with traditional rock instrumentation, so it IS more going back than "going a bit rock."

That feels reasonably close to true in the cases I'm thinking of - Duran, JD / New Order, Devo, T. Heads, Cure, Costello, Flock of Seagulls, etc. Pretty much have always had guitar / bass / drums along with keys. Am I missing something?

Just five guys in a zoom

_Just five guys in a zoom_

Lol

five guys in a room, one went out for a pee during the solo

... and never came back.

That gets to the point, though—as some of us have been experiencing in our non-musician lives since last year, there’s a big diff btw collaborating “in a room” and doing it remotely or in a mediated fashion.