LAZY MUSICIANS
You know how it usually goes with rock bands: in their formative years, lean and hungry, they release an album a year, but then it starts to tail off. Ten years later and they’ve committed the cardinal sin of introducing a horn section and new releases are down to about one every four years. When middle age kicks in, if they haven’t already sunk from view entirely, you’re lucky to get an album a decade.
Why? Songwriting is something that is an integral part of you: once it’s there, it doesn’t go away. The urge to express yourself musically is a lifelong and quintessential component. I’m reminded of Robyn Hitchcock who once stopped making music for a year or so, but remarked that suddenly when he was bending down to pick something up, a song just started to bubble up. There was no stopping it. Few musicians just stop creating, with perhaps the exception of the Finnish composer Sibelius, who didn’t write anything in the last thirty years of his life.
Let’s take a look at a band like New Order. They emerged from the ashes of Joy Division in 1980 and are still regularly performing, still very much a going concern. Let’s take a look at their album discography:
Movement (1981)
Power, Corruption & Lies (1983)
Low-Life (1985)
Brotherhood (1986)
Technique (1989)
Republic (1993)
Get Ready (2001)
Waiting for the Siren’s Call (2005)
Lost Sirens (2013)
Music Complete (2015)
Ten albums in forty-three years. Not very impressive. It’s even less impressive when we understand that Lost Sirens was just a bunch of offcuts from the preceding album, so it’s nine, really. OK, so in some of these long gaps between releases members were doing side projects such as Bernard Sumner’s Electronic and Peter Hook’s Revenge and Monaco. It’s still a piss-poor work rate.
But I ask you this: since their last album in 2015, what they hell have they been doing? Touring sometimes, yes - but why no new songs in nine years? These are people who have their own recording studios and don’t have any other job - how are they NOT writing any new songs? Are they writing but not releasing? Why? Afraid of ruining their legacy? Just lazy perfectionists like Kraftwerk?
I, on the other hand, work full time, but in the last few years I’ve managed to release TWO full albums each year. Now, I know what you’re thinking :he’s a bloke who makes music on his computer in his bedroom, so his songs must be sonically substandard compared to “real” releases. Well, these days, such is the power of technology, people can and do make top quality music in just this way. Huge fancy studios are no longer needed. OK, if you’re paying famous producers and engineers to polish up your tunes at Abbey Road, then yes, they will sound better than what I come up with on my MacMini. But not much better. You’d be surprised. The average punter wouldn’t be able to tell the difference these days.
And in terms of compositional quality, my stuff is far more complex than most of the efforts that Spotify is full of. I’m constantly amazed how simplistic and underdeveloped other people’s music is, and I’m not just talking about amateurs. OK, enough of the bragging, and while we can’t solve the mystery of the lazy musicians, let’s finish on a positive note.
Some ageing rockers totally go against this trend. The best example is Robert Pollard, the insanely prolific songwriter behind Guided by Voices. Now this guy regularly puts out three albums a year, as well as other side-project material. And people often say that he puts out too much and doesn’t edit enough, but I have to disagree. His signal to noise ratio is just as good as those bands who only release one album every seven years.