As my faithful readers are aware, I’ve got an album I’m currently wrapping up (that’s the verb that’s used for all stages of production, by the way). My engineer and producer is the estimable Doug Kwartler, omniinstrumentalist and gracious man about town. I’m very happy with how things are sounding: they sound like me, and I was reminded recently that this is not, by any stretch, a foregone conclusion.
On the one hand, there’s the possibility that you might not sound like you on an album because, to be blunt, the album wouldn’t be very good if you did. I think I’ve previously related a story my brother tells, about a producer he knows who was in the process of painfully reconstructing a drum part whose original version, in my brother’s account, “sounded like a drum set falling down the stairs”. My brother asked the producer what would happen when the band in question went on tour, to which the producer replied, “Not my department”. And, indeed, it wasn’t, and one imagines that there were some unpleasant surprises in store for the band’s fans.
Nowadays, with autotune and Harmonica-In-A-Box and Uber-Me-A-Lead-Singer, this sort of thing is extremely seductive, and I’d be lying if I told you that every single one of the notes I sang on my last album was a note I actually hit. I mean, most of them were – I can hit almost anything with enough attempts – but I’m ashamed to admit that I occasionally succumbed to the siren song of, well, a song I didn’t quite sing. But that’s not the particular concern I bring to you today.
My particular concern is on the other hand – yes, two hands, always two hands – where you might not sound like you because someone made you sound like someone else. This may have happened because you don’t know what you sound like and someone else told you what you sound like and they were wrong; but most likely, it was because your producer had more juice, or more skin in the game, or something, or maybe just steamrolled right over you because they were louder than you were. One of my very favorite local musicians – I will not name them – had this happen with their most recent album, and whoever their producer was can rot in hell as far as I’m concerned.
And a couple weeks ago, the person who did not sound like himself was a man named Dana Cooper. My pal Mark Stepakoff shared a stage with him at David Thorne Scott’s songwriter series at the Armory, and raved to me in advance about him and insisted that I come, and, given Mark’s encyclopedic knowledge of popular music, if he says go, you go. So I went. And Dana Cooper, a touring musician of exceptional talent, played a song, “No Second Coming”, that just killed me. Here’s a live performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=TXTCzEqbJYg. He’s got those fantastic lyrics and the Travis picking and the harmonica and, well, the whole deal, and he was even better at the Armory.
And here’s the album cut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFDuNoTE0Cs. I’m just a humble amateur (well, not so humble, but still), but to my ear it sounds like it’s been fed into the Nashville sausage machine, and what’s come out the other end is but a shadow of Dana Cooper’s energy and style. I don’t know what happened here, but if I were Dana Cooper, I’d want my money back. Did the Nashville suits get to him? Was he kidnapped by Big Country? I’m sure I’ll never know, but one way or another, I’m glad I have the live Dana Cooper to compare to the recorded Dana Cooper, so I can recognize the problem.
The punch line is, the only person who will make sure that you sound like you is, well, you. And you may have to swim upstream to make it happen, but c’mon: if you don’t want to sound like you, why are you bothering?