a difficult bugger?

[bombaysaffires]

Originally Posted by SteveMacD

The thing I found curious was that Stevie came to the sessions with fully flushed out demos and was upset by the way Lindsey deviated from them. Stevie, Christine, and Lindsey have all consistently stated over the decades that one of Lindsey’s biggest strengths was taking something completely rudimentary from Stevie (I believe Christine called it “rubbish”) and turning it into something spectacular. That’s always been the way he’s looked at his role in the band. It seems a little bizarre that she went into the sessions that way, especially knowing the core of Lindsey’s material was culled from songs he/they had been working on for at least six years. All three guys, not just Lindsey, seemed a little put off by it.

Stevie began working out her songs with other people right after she and Lindsey broke up. She realized that relying on him for that created a real power imbalance, and made her dependent on someone who for quite a while didn't always have the best intentions towards her music. Once she went solo, she did this even more. People often confuse *songwriting* demos which are just her recording herself during the raw writing process, and then getting a complete start-to-finish performance of what she's written with a demo of how you want the finished song to sound. She used to just do her songwriting demo and hand it off to Lindsey for the most part. For many years now, since going solo, she will work with other musicians to record a more arranged version of the song. She did this because she felt frustrated that often the way her songs came out working with Lindsey wasn't what she wanted. As you could see in her film with Dave Stewart, Stevie evolved into wanting and getting more control over the arrangement of her songs over time and that's been the case even when working on solo albums with Jimmy. That's why they would argue in the studio.

So I wasn't at all surprised that she brought fleshed out demos to the band. She had clear ideas about how she wanted those songs to go. She's not obligated to give him a raw songwriting demo. They're her songs. As a producer he should respect how the writer wants a song to go-- in fact that's exactly the job of a producer, to help an artist get their vision out to the world. Just because in the early days she was lazier, or less inclined to fight with him while they were a couple or didn't have the years and years of experience in the studio that she has now doesn't mean she has to still work that way. Let's not forget how many albums she's done, she's not totally clueless about how different recording techniques work and how to get some of the sound she wants.