Hi! Please tune in tomorrow (Tuesday) for an all new
Show 147!
Thanks for your patience last month btw, I think I'm finding a good balance now between my newest "project" and this one. 😄
I'm really excited about this episode and it epitomizes my "70s" theory (my quote, lol):
The 70s - particularly the late-70s and even early-80s - were a magical era where music production and engineering, arranging, performance, genre, talent, and industry aligned perfectly and yielded amazing recordings - many of which have now been neglected as leftover "commercial product".
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Arrangers, union musicians, labels flush with money looking for the next hit, multitrack studio recording that allowed the perfect mix of live recording and overdubs, a melting pot from different genres, the old craft and the new technology....it's all there.
Go twenty-five years earlier and you lose some of the recording fidelity and flexibility. For a more extreme example - compare Sinatra's Columbia era (Axel Stordahl) to his Capitol era (Nelson Riddle & Billy May)...and the Capitol era was still just the 60s! The arranging was always there, but you could hear so much more detail as the technology improved.
Go twenty-five years past the 70s though and you have incredible technology, but the industry and tastes changed and it became harder to find "traditional" arrangements of brass, strings, woodwinds, etc. Don't get me wrong, lots of amazing music came out of this era too.
But the late-70s/early-80s...where else can you hear majestic strings sections and g-funk synths, over a solid groove, with vocalists singing over backup sections of themselves overdubbed? And, labels were spending money to make this happen, and the customers were buying it.
I must add: I feel like Anglophone mainstream rock (FM rock, etc) of this era deemed itself too cool for this musical party. It was either "strings sections are yucky", or "wow, this psych/prog band used a string section...no one's ever done that before!". Sure dude, as if. That's why ABBA blows most of those now-hyped "psych" bands out of the water.
[Obviously these gripes don't include punk, post-punk, indie, new wave, etc.]
Ok, sorry for turning this blog into a blog, hahaha.
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Anyway, a lot of that 70s "anything goes" spirit shines in this episode. But honestly I've been on this kick for a while now so none of this should be a surprise. I hope I haven't talked it up too much now!
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Show 147
Tuesday October 1, 2024
7:00 pm (19:00) CDT
