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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=bOELnR2vb-8

15 seconds in

haha, love it

Nice find, kurt.

http://www.vulture.com/2018/10/st-vincent-on-masseducation.html

One of the great things about being such good friends with somebody is we didn’t talk about what we were gonna do. Thomas is a genius, so it’s not like he had to sit and practice the songs. He would listen to it one time and then go, “Okay, I got it.” He was at the grand piano in a big room, and I was on a couch, kind of sitting and kind of in a fetal position, in front of a mic. No headphones, just two people in a room discovering the songs. None of my attention was bifurcated on a guitar part. I got to live in the moment. Everything that I’d written and all the stories were right there in my chest.

very nice

i wonder if, after the singularity, various AI bots will eventually come around to a "back to the basics" approach as well.

Just four bots in a chatroom, jamming.

"We tried to take it back to when music was real: when the robots were imitating humans, not just other robots."

that's more or less the concept of the latest 0PN record

after the singularity robot musicians will be cycling from three-chord basics to sprawling prog epics hundreds of thousands of times a second, it's gonna be lit

Categorizing that St. Vincent quote as merely a “back to basics” thing seems to diminish what she’s actually talking about.

Rob Halford:
https://www.bandwagon.asia/articles/judas-priest-s-rob-halford-on-the-band-s-legacy-babymetal-returning-to-singapore-and-more

Over the course of the past five decades, has the band changed the way it works in the studio?

The one really unusual, well, not really unusual... but it's definitely something we had not done in a long time was actually being in the studio together, playing as a band. As time went on, technology has made it such that you can build a record piece by piece and layer one thing over another so you don't need the entire band there for a session. But we decided to go back to our roots and earlier style of recording and did it as one unit.

haha now that one's otm!

xp I think it's all just good fun?

morrisp yeah it’s not a pure example of this phenomenon I just giggled at the appearance of “x people in a room”

I really want to go back to the sound this thread had when it first started, the roots of the idea, just strip away all the extra stuff, I don't want to say raw, but there was an immediacy in those first couple months and we've gotten away from that, I think it'd be cool to see what could happen if we

Just 4 Ilxors in a room jamming

lol

Yeah sorry if I sounded bitchy

No worries! I'm listening to MassEducation right now tbh

Just a hint of back to basics and being a real band from both John and Ringo at the very start of this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG85fF-CZBI

haha, indeed! although Let it Be is their real back to basics album...

yup. "no overdubs, maaan".

was Let it Be the first "back to basics" rock album?

maybe Dylan got there first

There had been 'back-to-basics' albums before that but maybe not with the 'four guys in a room' narrative - except The Band s/t was kind of 'four guys in a room'.

I always think of the Beach Boys' "Wild Honey" as being an early back-to-basics album ... but it's the Beach Boys so it's debatable how much conceptualizing was actually involved.

The Band was more a back-to-basics group from the get-go. It's not like they had much to come back from after the first album

Yes, but the 2nd album was, you know what, why don't us four five guys just get together and play and record in Sammy Davis Jr's poolhouse a room?

sure. I think this is a philosophical difference though. Like, to me, for a band to have one of these moments they have to have slipped away from their original sound into big production/artiness or whatever and then make the "back to basics" move.

Oh yes, I agree, but it could be deciding not to record in expensive studios and instead to woodshed in Sammy Davis Jr's woodshed, er, poolhouse, for instance - and I think that definitely influenced other musicians and bands at the time.

John Wesley Hardin, Let it Be, Beggars Banquet

wrt John Wesley Harding, there was no overdubbing on any Dylan record until 1969 (or so he claims) because, by his own admission, he didn't know what it was or that it was possible. He'd listen to something like Sgt. Pepper and assume it was all cut live, because that's just how records are made.

I'm wondering if there's an overlap with the old Getting It Together In The Country thing.

or if there are any instances of the Getting It Together In The Country Thing also being the Big Production/Artiness thing at the same time

Maybe the first Traffic album or two? And Genesis' Tresspass (though the production isn't exactly big on that).

I always think of the Beach Boys' "Wild Honey" as being an early back-to-basics album

yeah, this is the archetype/template. They did it first and exemplify the arc of kids w raw talent going overboard w expensive studio musicians + arrangements and then reverting to a "stripped down" sound

Morrison Hotel

It was definitely in the air, '68/'69.

i kind of figured the start of this sort of thing was dylan's basement tapes - nobody wanted to make records that sounded like "wild honey"!

yeah there's a wider post-psychedelic impulse that comes up in a lot of late 60s rock records, even if they're not explicitly back to four guys in a room, and even when the albums feature tons of overdubs and production tricks. the white album is a case in point, since while it was after that that the "back to four guys" model seemed momentarily like a good idea, it's still considerably more austere and scratchy than the previous couple of albums. cover art may be shading my perceptions here.

I never really bought JWH/basement tapes as "back to basics", I don't think that thing applies in Dylan's case, they are really no more or less ornate than the stuff that came before

i feel like dylan was never part of the "60s" in the same way the beatles were, i don't think he saw himself as part of that

Wanting to play the *blues instead of that psychedelic shit was an regrettable attitude prevalent among musicians who'd been capering about in kaftans and beads months earlier.

(*or country rock)

JWH was after blonde though right? And blonde was pretty ornate in a electric keyboard fill kind of way

(xp) Zappa (but of course) poked fun at it in "200 Motels". Well, poked fun at Jeff Simmons anyway.

is there a hip-hop equivalent to this particular narrative?

maybe the run-up to Jay-Z's 4:44?

hip hop equivalent is rappers making albums/tapes with a single produce--like they did back the day

Diddy: "This goes out to all the mother fuckers that like 15-20 minute versions of a mother fucking record.“

https://partysan.net/global-music/dj-hell-the-dj-feat-p-diddy/

Speaking to Resident Advisor Matt Edwards aka Radio Slave said „I’m down with the 20 minute versions! I’m also into DJs playing the whole record! Most producers still make records with a start and an end… I actually wanted to do a 60-minute version and my friend Tom Gandey (Cagedbaby) recorded a lot of piano parts in Bordeaux, which I used in the last 10 minutes… So I guess I just let the track do its thing. I played about 25 minutes at Fabric and it definitely wasn’t boring!“

I never really bought JWH/basement tapes as "back to basics", I don't think that thing applies in Dylan's case, they are really no more or less ornate than the stuff that came before

i feel like dylan was never part of the "60s" in the same way the beatles were, i don't think he saw himself as part of that

― Greta Van Fleek (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

it's not about what the basement tapes _were_, it's about how they were _perceived_. dylan has always, always, been about the myth, which in this case is encoded right into the name of the recordings - what's more "back to basics" than jamming in a basement? i don't know if it happened or not, but the genesis of the "let it be" sessions sounds to me a lot like one or more of the beatles (probably not george) heard one of the "basement tapes" acetates and said 'that sounds amazing, we should do that'. (probably by this time they'd already _done_ it with the esher demos!)

Dylan does not fit here, at all