Stevie on the Madonna/Britney MTV Kiss

[face of glass]

Originally posted by Oooh Missionary
I didn't say that the stuff wasn't enjoyable, but surely you can see the difference between a piece like Beautiful Child versus one like Sister Honey. Oi. She even resorted to ghost writers/co-writers (the two are normally interchangable) from 85-up. I think she gets/takes too much credit and normally when her body of work is reviewed and she is referred to as a "legendary songwriter", you don't hear anything about songs from a post-81 release (save for the occasional nod given to Gyspy.)

I’m with you on this one. My personal opinion is that a lot of those ‘70s demos are great and very moving. So are the studio versions of them. But I think she lost some of her inspiration after The Wild Heart. What caused it is a mystery to me, but I’m just a monkey anyway.
The only demos of the later period that I like are the ones that are more arranged anyway.

Originally posted by Oooh Missionary
In the 80's she leaped from the Lindsey sound to a pop/dance sound and adapted a phony, higher register, all for the sake of remaining a commercially viable sex symbol playing the pop/rock game, and in the process made her initial songs seem like svengali steered flukes...something she still, 3 decades later, has yet to disprove.

Again, I agree. When she’s not working with Lindsey she tends to go very, very mainstream. It’s not that Lindsey doesn’t sometimes get mainstreamish himself, but he at least knows how to straddle the fence between the mainstream and the experimental. There’s similarity in his work, but when I first heard SYW I was very surprised by the way he had treated Stevie’s tunes. I do like RAL, OSOTM and TISL (haven’t yet found Street Angel) but the sound on those is very middle of the road. And the studio musicians add to this certain sterility. A lot of TISL sounds neutral to me because of those goddamn ProTools.

Originally posted by Oooh Missionary
She hasn't written a decent song since 1981's Bella Donna album... and actually I believe half of those were from the 70's too, so...

That’s right. Maybe “decent” is too harsh, I would use the word “good” myself, but the point is the same. I do realize that a lot of the fans are willing to lynch the one who has the guts to analyse her talent, but I feel like I have to speak up anyway.
What she writes these days and has written since the early ‘80s can be described as “the Nicksian drone”. And no, this doesn’t mean songs about men. That’s what her current demos sound like to me, unless they’re more arranged by other people. This means that she’s still milking those same old three chords to what it’s worth, just like she did during the ‘70s. However, this time there just isn’t that freshness anymore. If you write in a certain mode for a long time, you’re bound to run out of certain ideas, or at least your new efforts won’t be as memorable as the earlier ones. That’s what I think has happened to Stevie. Her way of writing hasn’t changed. She’s stated something like the following: all of her songs are extensions of previous ones and seem to capture only certain moods. I agree with that 100%.
So, why do I think that a lot of her songs on SYW are nearly as great as her best work? Simply because of Lindsey. If you look at what makes a song successful, it’s not the notes. The thing that matters the most is what chords are those notes against. Take something like the Beatles’ “Across The Universe”. The whole thing has a two or three note melody. If it didn’t have those rich chords and that tone colour backing it up, then no one would speak of it as a classic. Stevie writes usually with very basic chords. What a producer/arranger can do here is to make those chords richer. Lindsey’s the best for that job, but I do like the work that Jimmy Iovine, Rupert Hine and John Shanks did. They were trying to do the same thing that Lindsey did and while they didn’t succeed, they did come close, especially Iovine.

Originally posted by trackaghost
I've also heard many demos that I feel are better than the finished product and I've always thought Stevie was short-changed in that respect. I don't believe her producers deserve all the credit at all.

I do like some of her recent demos too, such as “Space Needle”. A lot of them just bore me though, with that drone going on. However, I don’t think an album of Stevie’s demos with no additional production work would do well at all. She needs help in certain things and I’m sure the fans accept that. Of course, if someone is actually willing to release an album like that, then it would be an interesting experiment.
I wouldn’t put most of the credit on the producers’ shoulders either. I think fifty-fifty would be just right in this case. They can always hear in Stevie’s songs what someone untrained can not. A certain lyrical imagery can create a great arrangement in a producer’s head. I don’t think she’s untalented these days in songwriting, but I do think that certain people love those current demos because it’s Stevie singing them and she hasn’t changed her style. But I don’t think any of us can be truly objective in this matter.