So you want to make… something that’s “dead”
KeithHandy posted in Featured Posts, Producing, So You Want..., Songwriting on January 23rd, 2008
The good news is, not everybody takes glee in the album being “dead”.
John Lennon was only ever interested in singles. Paul McCartney was the one pushing to segue tracks together to build longer suites. But neither was right or wrong; it’s a floor wax and a dessert topping. What’s “dead”, if anything, is the need to bend your ideas in an inauthentic way to conform to a physical format. But even physical media itself isn’t “dead”.
We call something “dead” when a bubble bursts. (It’s our spiteful way of celebrating the decline of something that has been popular and ubiquitous, but maybe not a good fit for us individually.) A bubble is something that is bigger than it should be, or bigger than it normally would be, and as a result, can’t be sustained as it is. However, when a bubble pops, the material that made it up still exists; it only ceases to be artificially inflated, reverting to its real and natural size.
There may no longer be a trend of people making albums who weren’t interested in albums in the first place. If you are interested in albums, though, that’s good news for you; when the people who came to the party for the wrong reasons finally leave, that’s when the party becomes fun again.
Oh, and don’t forget all the other things that “died”: acoustic pianos, real drums, the orchestra, radio, live performance… seems to me like most things do quite well after they “die”.
