Having grown up late 90s into the 2000s I went from buying cds to lime wire to spotify.
In the last 6 months I have found such a greater appreciation for just putting on a whole album and listening to it front to back.
I feel there is a huge loss when going from one artist to another to another all random.
Today I am listening to Refused, The Shape Of Punk To Come
A non-sequitur reply that says a completely different thing than what was discussed in the thread.
I thought it made sense in context, but maybe not since so many people seem to not understand what I’m trying to say.
Plenty of very talented people write individual songs instead of conceptual albums, and songs on a record often sound cohesively only because they were written in approximately the same period. I don’t know where you got the notion that it’s either whole albums or songs written by others, nothing in between.
For example, Velvet Underground operated pretty much in pop industry’s recording mode despite their experimental approach to the sound and themes. ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico’ straight up opens with one of the poppiest songs they have, and the tracks aren’t thematically linked aside from being generally about people at The Factory. Songs about drugs and BDSM are interspersed with heartfelt songs about Edie Sedgwick, Warhol, and a poor girl who wants to party. They also recorded a bunch of great songs that went unreleased for fifteen years, until the compilation ‘VU’.
I don’t know where anyone got that notion, because that’s definitely not what I was trying to say.
I mean, that’s how your comments read.
🤷🏻♂️ makes perfect sense to me.
Write your own album > play a series of songs that you paid other people to write for you.
You can disagree with that, or maybe you’re offended because you’re in a band that can’t write songs. That’s fine, but it doesn’t change my opinion on the matter.
You seem to hold two ideas in your head that are fighting for the share of the brain time: that conceptual albums are better than semi-random collections of tracks, and that artists writing their own songs are better than those getting songs written for them. Somehow you can’t distinguish the two, or at least write as if you do.
Meanwhile, e.g. Nico’s ‘Chelsea Girl’ has only one song co-written by Nico, but is a great album with two songs that are regularly featured in media decades later: ‘These Days’ and ‘The Fairest of the Seasons’, and also the splendid ‘Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams’.
Also btw, you might be surprised at how many popular songs are covers. This was particularly widespread in the sixties, when the same song could’ve been sold to several different performers in a few weeks.
After all, songwriting and singing or playing music are skills that aren’t inherently related. Have you heard many poets sing their poems in a town square while playing a guitar or some shit like that? Many popular bands have someone like the drummer be the primary songwriter. Even the lyrics and the music are often written by two different people. Plenty of great labels have producers, songwriters, and house bands that are separate from singing artists that they publish — this was prevalent in the seventies with labels such as Stax (with Booker T. and the M.G.'s as the house producer and the band). It’s changed somewhat in the recent times, with labels playing a smaller role both with the ascent of streaming and the preference for singer-songwriters.
Lastly, recall that e.g. Mozart was a great composer, but could perform perhaps just a few of his own pieces, as he was neither an orchestra, nor a conductor or an operatic singer, for whom he wrote.