[face of glass]

Originally posted by Johnny Stew
I was just trying to keep the playing field level... you know my thing about double-standards.

Oh, alright. That’s often very necessary in these boards, for sure.

And thanks for the compliments, Dissention and Johnny.

Originally posted by CarneVaca
-- Lindsey still comes out ahead. It is the dynamic interplay between melody, chord structure and rhythm that makes a song good or bad musically.

If it’s pure songwriting, stuff you put down on paper as notation, then I do agree. But then again, no one is capable of conveying that interplay through notation alone. It is only through performance when it is conveyed.

Originally posted by CarneVaca
As an example of something that sounds simple, but is very dynamic and irrepressibly evocative, take a listen to Save Me a Place.

I’m sorry Carne, I know that “Save Me A Place” is one of your very favourites, but I’ve never found it an attractive piece of songwriting. It sounds to me about as simplistic as any Stevie demo. Such as piece can only be salvaged by a performer who can express also the untrivial emotions (think of Stevie, think of the late Johnny Cash, etc). I don’t think Lindsey is always up to that challenge. Instead he made this piece work by paying attention to the production details: the way those guitars (and his cardboard box drumming) were recorded and the warm harmonies. It wouldn’t work as a simplistic demo with just strumming and a basic vocal performance, at least for me.

Or better yet, take Go Insane acoustic, in which you have the man and his guitar, and put it up against one of Stevie's vocals-and-piano demos.

No contest there. But then again we all know that Lindsey easily beats Stevie in arranging. And I do believe that with most of her demos Stevie was just drawing rough sketches; she wasn’t trying to do a finished work of any kind. The acoustic “Go Insane”, on the other hand, is a very thoroughly arranged and calculated (by this I do not mean that it’s “emotionally devoid” or anything like that) piece. Lindsey prepared that arrangement especially for the OOTC tour and I do believe that he never wanted to approach it as a simple “strum-and-sing” piece. It is based on pre-arranged riffage; there was a slight, notable change in the opening phrase between the OOTC tour and the Dance versions but that was about it. There’s never been a rough demo version of “Go Insane” in circulation (which is too bad, since we LB fans could use any alternate version of any song!), so I do think it can’t be used as a proper example here.
There’s been one rough version (or maybe more, I don’t know how many) of “Down On Rodeo” available, though. I have to say that even though I love the song, I still find that the demo is miles away from what we all assume is the final version. There’s still a lot to of work to be done. A similar case could be made for “Soul Drifter”. At MadnessFades.net there’s this video clip of Lindsey playing the song alone in the studio, accompanying himself with a few strums, so it’s not like the version he played as an encore during the OOTC tour. That, too, is still a long way from the final take (even though, I guess, it was filmed in 1993). This is why I’m not capable of following your example and calling Lindsey one of the greatest songwriters. Ok, those two performances of “Down On Rodeo” and “Soul Drifter” are more appealing to me than Stevie’s recent demos, but a lot of the impact that the final takes had is not there.

My point with the two-note comment about Stevie's songs was that she will strike the same note repeatedly before making a change to the second note, whereas Lindsey's melodies are more dynamic.

Ok, so Stevie does that. So does Lennon in “I Am The Walrus”, which is still considered by many to be his finest piece of writing. But then again, I guess that’s once again beside the point.

He may or may not, but that's not the point. The point is when the writer sits down at the keyboard or with a guitar, does the writer take up the challenge presented by the interplay mentioned earlier or does the writer simply put new words to the same chords he/she has used before? So it comes down, not to a matter of skill, but artistic complacency.

Basically I think that there won’t be great songwriters in the classic sense anymore. That’s simply because there’s only a limited amount of purely musical things that will sound appealing to the ear. Most of those things have been used and reused for a long time. So what matters these days is not what you do in the compositional stage (because you’re most likely bound to repeat yourself or break some ear-pleasing rules), but how the overall track sounds and what tone colours you choose to complement your writing. So, purely as a songwriter, Lindsey isn’t in a much better situation than Stevie.

And I'm not so sure that comparing Stevie's tired chord structures to the blues is appropriate. Pop music, though in some ways derivative of the blues, is a whole different animal. Anyone can write a melody using the same 12-bar blues in E without being accused of copyright infringement or artistic laziness (necessarily), but if you keep using the same G-Em-C-D chord structure (as an example) in multiple songs, it will most likely become tiresome.

I admit my comparison may seem far-fetched. However, it felt natural to me because that’s the only way I can find some value in those current demos. Blues hasn’t been about composition for decades, neither have Stevie’s demos been about composition for a long time. It may seem that Stevie is still writing “pop music” (although I’ve never cared that much for genre boundaries). In the end, though, her songwriting rules are similar to those of the blues. Stevie’s demos, like most blues, can superficially sound the same. So it should be assumed that they will always sound the same at first; the impact of the track is due to whether the performer is capable of showing a new side of the same old emotion or not. It’s clear that both Stevie and the blues artists are putting the emphasis on their performances, not on what they write musically. Stevie refers to her recent works as “poems”, so it’s obvious she hasn’t been concentrating on the traditional songwriting for a long time. She’s still searching for new ways of expressing the same “two or three things”, she’s trying to find the nuances, just like a blues performer. It’s evident in her voice, there’s a richness there that LB isn’t capable of capturing vocally (but in some other terms he is). Johnny Stew said it best:

They both convey things now lyrically that they never could have 30 years ago, and they're both more sophisticated in the ways in which they get that across, performance-wise.

I understand Carne, that you prefer Stevie’s older performances and past writings. It’s easy to look at the surface and say that Stevie’s voice is now a lot weaker and that her scribbles are derivative. When you speak of Stevie striking “the same note repeatedly before making a change to the second note”, it reminds me of something that Branford Marsalis said of Billie Holiday’s “April In Paris”. Billie’s voice had lost most of the surprisingly small range it used to have before the recording of that song. Yet Mr. Marsalis praised the performance even though Billie was using about one or two notes throughout. It was obvious to him that she was expressing a lot with so little. That’s what I believe can be said of Stevie’s singing these days. If she had sung with that voice in the golden days of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Edith Piaf, etc., she would be considered a legend alongside those other ladies. For me the best female vocalists of the 20th century weren’t always the most attractive in the traditional sense of singing, and they certainly were limited from an academic standpoint. Yet they made most of what they had with emotionally devastating results, especially those ladies I just mentioned. For me Stevie is in that league too and we shouldn’t be afraid of admitting that.
So I think comparing Lindsey’s and Stevie’s writing styles is not entirely appropriate; after all they both put the emphasis on different things; Stevie on her performance and LB on the way the track will sound.
I wish we all could learn to appreciate their differences. I don’t think Stevie should be criticized for not writing/arranging like Lindsey. And Lindsey shouldn’t be criticized for not singing like Stevie. But I’m being very utopian here.

Originally posted by CarneVaca
So you do consider him to be among the greatest when it comes to producing, but not the other roles unless you combine them?

Well yes, one of the greatest in producing/arranging (since they can be essentially the same); that’s what I was trying to say. One of the curses of a long post at work there.
I do find him a great guitar player and a vocalist as well but there are many others I’d place on the same level. I think LB has been putting the emphasis on his production work for a long time; the guitar showcases in the sense of playing long solos in the studio have never been that constant throughout his career. The overall arranging is still what he does best. Even when he engages in a long solo in the studio it seems like it serves to the outcome of the track itself. The male aggression mocking of “Come” needs that hair-metal solo as its “extension”.
Happy Christmas to everyone. May it be full of every excess you can think of.