Quote:
Originally Posted by elle
in my ignorant world, songwriters and performers get a credit for songs, good or bad, not producers. people usually don't even know who is the producer.
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But in Buckingham's case, it's always been sort of a special case. He isn't just producing--making administrative decisions, mixing decisions, & logistical decisions about cuts & length. He's also heavily invested in the shape a track takes on tape. In fact, he's been largely responsible for that since 1976 because he is generating the sound ideas himself.
He isn't just the novelist who wrote the book. He's the one recording the books-on-tape, too, deciding things like intonation, tempo, where to breathe, if & when to cut, whether & what to add for music or FX backdrop for his reading, etc.
But even still--on
Say You Will, he was working very closely with other people (like Mark Needham) whose sound ideas I wasn't so crazy about. The Caillat+Dashut team in the past were super-talented, & made sonic & artistic decisions about frequencies, for example, that won awards & pleased millions of listeners (without their even thinking about such things). But the
Say You Will team, probably by design, shook all that up, following more contemporary practices in the studio world (for example, emphasizing mids to control the sonic landscape). I'm sure they set great store by their artistic decisions. I just happen not to like those decisions. Maybe the album was engineered to be most effective on today's reproduction equipment. I don't know. But I do know it doesn't sound like a vibrantly healthy album. Remember how one of the critics of
Tusk--Stephen Holden or Noel Coppage or somebody--said that the digital recording created a glassy, unreal ambiance? Whatever slight sonic problems
Tusk has,
Say You Will has them in abundance.