From what I’ve been able to dig up, the quote “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” likely originated with either Martin Mull or Frank Zappa. It’s a cheeky phrase that has been quoted often by musicians ever since, especially if they’ve recently gotten a negative review in a high-visibility publication. “How can a written description of a purely aural artform be taken seriously?” they ask, suggesting that music writing and, especially criticism, is a far less valid occupation than their own.
I gave that idea a fair amount of thought before I started these ramblings. Overall, I don’t intend to criticize the music I write about here, just the opposite, in fact. My goal has always been to evangelize about it, to praise the new and old music that makes up such an important part of my life, and to suggest that somebody who gives it a chance just might find it brings a dash of joy, or at least entertainment, to their life, too.
But the larger theme of these posts has always been to utilize whatever knowledge and experience I might have gained from obsessively listening to popular music for the last five decades to provide some sort of connection between folks of roughly the same age as me to music that was made near the end of last century and the opening decades of this one. No matter when you grow up, music listening falls off as you grow older for a significant percentage of the population. Most folks who are fortunate enough to reach my age still enjoy listening to music, but demographics show that the vast majority prefer to hear the music that shaped their formative years – the soundtrack of their youth. It’s what makes them happy, for nostalgic and emotional reasons, and I have no beef with that. Carry on, my wayward sons.
I realized that if I’m going to have any success with the folks who want to explore a bit, who either want to shake up their routine with new music that bears a satisfying resemblance to the older music they love, or even want to strike out in entirely new listening directions (you go!), I would have to find ways to use words as a guide to music. I’d have to dance about architecture. Thankfully, I’ve read countless millions of words in music essays and criticism in my life and have a basic grip on the tools really great music writers have used to instill me with excitement about some new listening possibility. My ongoing challenge is to use those tools in my own way, to get what I want to communicate about some current music that’s making my arm hairs stand on end, and still have it sound like me. And the only way to improve at anything is to do it – a lot.
But before I get back to the usual reviews and random thoughts, I want to take a second and go over what the tools are, common approaches to making words about music make some kind of sense, to conjure up images in the reader’s mind that relate somehow to what I’m hearing. Some of these tools are closely related to each other, so I’ll do my best to explain why I listed them separately.
• Genre – Sometimes, this is an easy one, sometimes not so much, but it’s a great place to start. If a record I want to write about is solidly in the camp of, say, jazz, classical, rock, country, or rap, I can use those terms and have a great head start on describing what I’m listening to. The problems arise when the music I’m listening to mash a couple (or more) genres together. The term country-rock, for example, can mean anything from a softer, country-ish sounding record like the Flying Burrito Brothers’ Gilded Palace of Sin to the nearly hard rock bombast of Steve Earle’s Copperhead Road. Genre only takes me so far in those cases, and I have to come up with other descriptions to get closer to what I’m hearing. The genre of pop can be too expansive to be useful on its own. I use the term basically to describe anything that doesn’t fit neatly into other genres, with or without an eye on commercial success. Adele’s 30, to my ears, is a pop record. It’s not rock or jazz, and it’s designed for mass consumption, but April March’s In Cinerama is also a pop record to my ears, although it uses the recognizable sound and framework of an older 1960s type of radio-friendly music to create something far more adventurous.
And then, there’s the whole branching out into sub- and micro-genres to contend with. I do still dabble in some metal albums, as long as they’re creative and have good tunes underneath the heavy sound, but to try and describe an album in that genre means deciding between heavy metal, hair metal, doom metal, goth metal, prog metal, thrash metal, death metal, and still-likely-forgetting-a-couple-metal. Most casual listeners don’t know or care about the differences between those species, and truth be told, I really don’t either. Most of them sound like unlistenable sludge to me. So, if a heavy album, like PUP’s amazing new The Unraveling of PUPTHEBAND grabs me and won’t let go, I need to find ways to communicate what they sound like to the non-headbangers among us. (Now that I think about it, PUP might be more punk than metal, or maybe not, but you get the idea.) Genre’s a useful place to start, but more often than not, there’s more ‘splaining to do.
• Comparisons – This one, like genre, can be useful if it’s obvious enough. Taking a couple of familiar artists and saying that the music I’m listening to sounds like a cross between them works as long as the artists being compared are unique (and consistent) enough in their sound and casual music fans know who they are. I find it useful to think about Jenny Hval’s new Classic Objects album as sounding like early, folky Joni Mitchell if she had found herself in the studio with DSOTM-era Pink Floyd. That’s not an exact comparison, of course, but if it gives you the idea that the album sounds like a dreamy, introspective female folksinger exploring some non-traditional, experimental, but still easily accessible production, then that comparison got you (and me) into the right ballpark. On the other hand, if I described Hurray for the Riff Raff’s excellent Life on Earth as a cross between Patti Smith and Wilco, I better be ready to expand on that.
It can also be useful to compare an artist’s sound on a particular album to him- or herself at a different stage of their career, especially if other records have been more popular. If a lover of Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall, let’s say, became curious about the earliest Pink Floyd albums, I could suggest they be prepared for shorter and poppier songs with a sense of whimsy they would later outgrow, and a more dated British 1960s psychedelic sound. They didn’t become the band we know and love from multi-platinum selling albums until their original leader, Syd Barrett, lost his grip on reality and left the band after the second record.
• Sound – An overall impression kind of tool. I use it to try to describe generally what an unfamiliar album would sound like to somebody listening for the first time. Is it loud and assaultive? Gentle and soothing? Artsy and complex? Catchy and hummable? That kind of thing. The details can be fleshed out from a basic aural impression, sometimes a very helpful place to start. If I want to describe a jazz album from the Duke Ellington catalog, a handy place to start is whether it’s one of his blaring, big-band sophisticated swing albums like Ellington at Newport, or smaller in scale and intimate like Duke Ellington & John Coltrane. If I’m describing a Talking Heads LP, is it more like the sparse and jittery acoustic propulsion of Talking Heads ’77 or the lush and complex, multi-track Afrobeat explorations of Remain in Light?
Overall sound can provide a useful, quick shorthand for discussing an album, I just try to avoid getting too esoteric with it. As much as I love me a Brian Eno soundscape, I doubt that descriptor by itself can conjure up what I’m getting at for a lot of folks.
• Instrumentation – Similar to overall sound, but more specific. Whether a record features primarily acoustic instruments or electric ones is a good place to start, but not necessarily an indicator of how rocking or mellow the songs are. The Cowboy Junkies’ Trinity Session is played almost exclusively with electric instruments but is as calm and lulling an album as you’re likely to hear. On the other side, Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York doesn’t sacrifice much of the band’s punky intensity. Jazz records, especially classic LPs from the 50s and 60s, tend to be all-acoustic affairs, with a horn or two or a piano as the lead instrument. When jazz musicians plugged in and went electric, it didn’t necessarily make their music louder, just different. Albums like Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew traded the open-room spaciousness of earlier jazz albums for something more in-your-face, closer to the sound and approach of rock music. Miles’ complex arrangements on the record filled in an overall flatter and drier sound than his earlier classics on Blue Note.
The use of unexpected or nontraditional instruments on an album is something I notice and enjoy when I’m listening to music, and that’s where an artist’s palette opens up, so to speak. The Band, the brilliant second album by, well, the Band, would be a fairly traditional sounding rock record if not for the multi-instrumental prowess of the musicians. Bassist Rick Danko was also adept at rural sounding fiddle playing, drummer Levon Helm was a world-class mandolin player, and the ever-enigmatic keyboardist Garth Hudson added the sound of the accordion and three different types of saxophones to the final mix. The album’s producer, John Simon, even threw in a little tuba. It’s impossible to write about the timeless beauty of The Band without describing the way the different instruments float in and out of the arrangements.
Some excellent modern albums don’t rely much on traditional instruments at all, the sound is shaped by electronics and rhythm machines, manipulated in the studio. More often than not the basic electronic tracks are colored with a few traditional instruments to warm up the sound a bit. Ibibio Sound Machine’s masterful new album Electricity uses a combination of drum synthesizers, hand drums, a full drum kit, and a real, hands-on electric bass to concoct their completely absorbing Afrobeat electronic dance music. The classic Random Access Memories by Daft Punk stays entirely in the “two guys turning knobs” electronics camp, just bringing in a few guest singers to make it all sound a bit more human.
An album’s instrumentation works pretty well as a starting framework to put the way the music sounds into words, both to plant a picture in the reader’s mind of a familiar lineup, like a rock band’s guitar/bass/drums, and to describe the particular idiosyncrasies of more experimental, or at least non-traditional, artists. Most people don’t need to be active music fans to imagine the sound of a wide range of instruments, which makes for a very helpful starting language.
• Lyrics and Vocals – Unless I’m discussing jazz or classical records, this is a huge one. Two huge ones, actually, but they’re too intertwined to talk about separately. The words and the singing are often the first things that catch the ear when you’re listening to an unfamiliar song.
Bob Dylan is given credit for changing the pop music lyrical game, an idea that’s hard to argue with. Before his astounding mid- to late-60s run of albums, most songwriters were still struggling with ways to phrase songs about romantic love and loss in ways that hadn’t been done a million times before. Once Bob invented his unique brand of metaphorical poetry, probably in its first flower on “Mr. Tambourine Man,” all bets were off. A light bulb went off in the heads of Lennon & McCartney, Jagger & Richards, Brian Wilson, and countless others, and an age of wildly inventive lyrical language began. It continues to this day.
When describing lyrics, my first approach is simply to determine if the words are saying something readily understandable or not. It’s the creative choice between songs like the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” from Pet Sounds, whose instantly relatable words about yearning and romance make it one of the truly great love songs in popular music, and Brian Eno’s wonderful “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More,” which seems to have been written by grabbing random phrases from a hat and pasting them together (which isn’t far from the truth). Two amazing songs that illustrate the difference between literal and non-literal communication. A lot of, if not most, popular song lyrics fall somewhere between the two, and my job is to let the reader know if an album’s words are trying to communicate something specific, if they’re to be enjoyed simply as fanciful wordplay, or if there are elements of both.
An artist’s approach to singing can be a make-or-break moment for a lot of casual music fans. I usually start discussing an album with a general description of who’s doing the singing – a man, a woman, a solo vocalist, or a combination of two or more singers. To my ears, how voices are arranged and recorded in the studio as background and/or harmony vocals is often as significant as what the lead singer is doing, so I make an attempt to describe those, as well. Crosby Stills & Nash, to use an obvious example, can’t be discussed in any useful way by only talking about the particular character of each member’s lead vocals. If you’re not focusing on the backing and harmony vocals, you’re talking about a different record altogether. I also pay close attention when an artist brings somebody equally famous into the studio to serve as a duet partner on a song or album. Linda Ronstadt often called on her pal Emmylou Harris and listeners were treated to a spectacular pairing of singular voices.
Something I need to keep in mind when describing albums I love is my own tolerance for, and enjoyment of, non-traditional singers. To this day, a large number of music fans will say they’re turned off by Dylan’s albums because, to their ears, “he can’t sing.” To my ears, Bob’s sly, often humorous, sense of timing and phrasing are the perfect vehicle for his fascinating words. Even though he’s had his songs covered by countless other “good” singers, very rarely do the cover versions even get in the ballpark of capturing the spirit and depth of his lyrics. It takes Bob’s voice to make his words come alive for me. Another favorite album that springs to mind is Television’s 1977 classic Marquee Moon. I can’t imagine what this much-beloved record would sound like without Tom Verlaine’s jittery, sneering vocals. A downtown NYC band who perfectly captured the lightning-in-a-bottle feel at the beginning of the punk movement, Verlaine’s singing is cryptic, celebratory, nervy, and perfect for making his edgy, allusive poetry stick in my head like glue. And yet, for every ten people I’ve played the album for, at least eight of them never wanted to hear it again because they found the vocals unpleasant. So my own appreciation for the unorthodox when it comes to vocalizing needs to be put in some kind of perspective when I’m writing about singers I enjoy. Everybody has their own idea about what “good” singing is, a factor I sometimes struggle to remember.
• Production – An album’s production is one of the things I listen to closely and deeply. But I realize that’s not true for every music fan, so I have to be careful about leaning too heavily on what the producer brought to the table on an album. To my ears, an outside producer, if there is one, is a vital part of getting the artist’s vision down on tape. Like instrumentation, production is simply a deeper dive into the record’s overall sound.
There’s no better, or more familiar, example of the producer’s role than the work Sir George Martin did with The Beatles. It was Sir George who, in the early stages, figured out how to mic and record the band’s simple guitar/bass/drum sound and exceptional talent for vocal harmonizing to maximize the impact of their records on the radio and 45rpm singles, played over decidedly non-audiophile equipment. Those earliest of Beatles records, “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” jumped out of those small speakers in a way that hadn’t been heard before. Later on, when the Fab Four became increasingly experimental with the sounds they heard in their head, it was their producer who figured out how to mic up and record instruments in new ways, and which instruments could be used to get the particular sounds they were hearing in their heads. If there were orchestrated parts to the songs, Sir George hired the musicians and wrote the arrangements himself. If, after the group started to dabble a bit with drugs, they wanted something really out-there, Martin worked with the sound engineers at Abbey Road to figure out how to manipulate the recording equipment itself. If anybody could rightfully be called “the fifth Beatle,” it was their long-time producer and most valuable creative partner.
With the Rolling Stones, their early career was pushed forward largely due to the bluesy, bombastic sound their young manager, Andrew Oldham, coaxed out the studio mixing board. It sounded exciting on the radio, too, but in an entirely different way than the Beatles did. Later on, it was Jimmy Miller who figured out how to take the Stones’ ramshackle studio jam approach to songwriting and craft it into their seminal albums of the late 60s and early 70s. The Who had Kit Lambert, Miles Davis had Teo Macero and Rudy Van Gelder, the list goes on and on.
Many of the greatest producers in modern popular music have developed a true signature sound, like a resume, which draws artists to them in search of a change or fresh approach to recording. Daniel Lanois’ swampy, reverb-heavy sound has elevated records by U2 (The Joshua Tree), Bob Dylan (Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind), Emmylou Harris (Wrecking Ball), and the Neville Brothers (Yellow Moon). Dan Auerbach, the Black Keys’ guitarist and singer, has built an impressive side hustle as a producer-for-hire based on his bluesy feel for Americana authenticity. Taylor Swift changed horses in 2020 by making two albums, folklore and evermore, with Aaron Dessner, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist for the somber-rock band, the National. I haven’t always liked everything Taylor put out before them, but the two Dessner-produced records have totally changed my opinion of her as a maturing artist. The more intimate sound, to me, highlights her impressive songcraft and singing better than any of her previous albums.
I won’t be throwing out too many names of producers when I’m describing a particular song or album, I know that’s venturing into esoterica a bit for a lot of music fans. But an album’s production, for me, is an extremely important part of why a listener hears and feels the music in a certain way, good or bad, and I’ll continue to do my best to put words to this most subjective tool of artistic expression when it seems helpful.
• Environment - Sometimes, but certainly not always, the conditions under which an album is recorded is important to the final sound and/or the emotional impact of the music. An obvious example is the live album, of course. They give the illusion, at least, of being captured on tape in a very different way than studio recordings - set the equipment up in the venue and hope some magic gets captured. Less well known is that it’s not at all uncommon for a live concert recording to be “touched up” in the studio, fixing some off-key vocals or re-recording and dubbing in a guitar solo that was less than brilliant during the show is a pretty common practice, going back, at least, to the 60s Rolling Stones. It’s an open secret that the multi-platinum selling Alive! by Kiss, the record that made them superstars, has almost no music played in front of fans on it. They weren’t great musicians yet, and the concert tapes proved to be mostly unusable. Peter Criss’ drum sound was left the way it was, but almost everything else the albums’ millions of fans heard on Alive! was recreated in the studio, including the fans themselves. Even the cheers and screams from the crowd were reconstructed from tape splices to fit the music better. “Fixing” live recordings before they’re released is an interesting facet of the music industry, but ultimately of little or no importance to the fans, so I won’t go there unless something really weird happened.
There are more intriguing environmental factors that play a direct role in the final sound of an album, however. The Beatles’ White Album, for example, sounds as disjointed as it does because the four guys weren’t getting along very well, and the conditions under which it was recorded inform the way it sounds – like brilliant solo work mashed together. It’s impossible to separate the feel and sound of the Cowboy Junkies’ Trinity Session from the spacious church it was recorded in. The music ricochets all over the place, you can almost hear it bounce off the vaulted ceiling, and all that physical space gives the simply recorded tracks a forlorn, lonesome kind of sound that fully enhances the lonesome sounding music.
I’m hoping these descriptions accomplish a couple of things. A measure of transparency about how I try to communicate what I find exciting and satisfying about a record I love, and possibly some tools for the reader to use to bridge that tricky gap between words for the eyes and music for the ears. Some steps to learn if you want to dance about architecture, so to speak.
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