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Sumptuous Production

by 52 Comments

Three for a kick-off:

The Nightfly – Donald Fagen
Famous Blue Raincoat – Jennifer Warnes
Steve McQueen – Prefab Sprout

Any more for any more?

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Comments

    • Know it’s tragic to respond to one’s own post but these lyrics never fail to speak to me, particularly ‘all my insights from retrospect’. Fucking brilliant.

      I spend the days of my vanity

      I’m lost in heaven and I’m lost to earth
      Didn’t give you minutes, not even moments
      All my life in a tower of foil
      Shaded feelings, I don’t believe you

      When you were there before my eyes
      No one planned it, took it for granted

      I count the hours since you slipped away
      I count the hours that I lie awake
      I count the minutes and the seconds too
      All I stole and I took from you

      But Bonny, don’t live at home
      Bonny, don’t live at home

      Words don’t hold you, broken soldiers

      All my silence and my strained respect
      Missed chances and the same regrets
      Kiss the thief and you save the rest
      All my insights from retrospect

      But Bonny, don’t live at home
      Bonny, don’t live at home

      I count the hours since you slipped away
      I count the hours that I lie awake
      I count the minutes and the seconds too
      All I stole and I took from you

      But Bonny, don’t live at home
      Bonny, don’t live at home

      But Bonny, don’t live at home
      Bonny, don’t live at home

      But Bonny, don’t live at home
      Bonny, don’t live at…

    • As part of my year of daily music blogging, I spent the first days of May taking each song from Steve McQueen in turn. I’d always found the album beautiful to listen to, but had never connected with the individual songs on their own, without being part of the ‘run through’ of the album before.
      Here’s the Bonny entry, for what it’s worth.

      • Excellent stuff. Bonny is undoubtedly one of my (well not mine but you know what I mean) all time greatest songs. It’s, for me, even more poignant when you learn that it’s not about a woman as one might presume but about a male – brother? father? as in ‘bonny lad’.

          • One of my Desert Island Discs, and probably my favourite track of all time. I read somewhere it was about a male friend who died of a drugs overdose* but I may well be misremembering; some have also suggested it’s about his father.

            Great album but (whispers) it tails off a bit.

            Agree below with Scritti and also ‘Streets of Your Town’: all gorgeous.

            *’Tower of foil’ may have misdirected me….?

            • Just seen this reply Ruby. Yes, absolutely, Steve McQueen does indeed tail off a bit. But it wouldn’t be alone in that.

              Interesting about ‘tower of foil’. Never thought of that before. Anyway, glad you and others share my love for this song.

  7. A couple of examples from me. If sumptuous means polished, I think peak shine was achieved by Scritti Politti. The Word Girl is just perfect. Or, a little later, Brushed With Oil, Dusted With Powder is equally sumptuous.

    When I think of it in terms of a mix that is sumptuous, I think of Edith and The Kingpin, from Joni’s Hissing of Summer Lawns album. Considering this was done in real time, the way the voice and instrumentation is weaved together is phenomenal. The perfect pre-digital production in my view.

    • Fair points. I suppose from my 3 opening choices it can be inferred I was thinking of production you can luxuriate in rather than simply ‘appropriate to the material’. Not really sure where I’m going with this – feel free to post whatever the feck youse want. Yes I may have had a beverage…

    • Was going to post Scritti you beat me to it. Immaculate stuff and my go-to choice for anyone who dismisses 80s production techniques. In the right hands, and with a good song they’re just fine – see also the aformentioned Thomas Dobly and Prefab.

  10. Any number of those old Blue Note jazz albums produced by Alfred Lion and engineered by Rudy Van Gelder at his Hackensack and Englewood Cliffs studios.
    Perfectly recorded and perfectly reproduced.

    (Kenny Burrell – Midnight Blue)

    And now for some controversy.

    From 1999, Van Gelder remastered the analogue Blue Note recordings he made several decades earlier into 24-bit digital recordings in Blue Note’s RVG Edition series and also a similar series of remasters of some of the Prestige albums he recorded for its current owners, Concord Records.
    He was positive about the switch from analogue to digital technology. He told Audio magazine in 1995:
    “The biggest distorter is the LP itself. I’ve made thousands of LP masters. I used to make 17 a day, with two lathes going simultaneously, and I’m glad to see the LP go. As far as I’m concerned, good riddance. It was a constant battle to try to make that music sound the way it should. It was never any good. And if people don’t like what they hear in digital, they should blame the engineer who did it. Blame the mastering house. Blame the mixing engineer. That’s why some digital recordings sound terrible, and I’m not denying that they do, but don’t blame the medium.”

    If OTOH by “Sumptuous” you mean “Lush” then this takes some beating.

    (Etta James – At Last)

    • That Shelby Lynne track is staggeringly good in production terms, lots of space between sounds, a beautiful expansive song, incredible drums and vocals.
      I’d suggest Badman’s Song by Tears For Fears, lots going on but sounds magnificent.

  14. The Stone Roses – John Leckie

    Arguably gave them a career, a legacy and a lucrative run at the global mega stadia nostalgia circuit. Listening to the difference between the same songs on Garage Flower to the reworked numbers on the debut is astounding. Key track is the work on Made of Stone where the lead and bass lines are sucked in through a vortex and pushed out the other side to a crystal clear note whilst the rhythm chords crash continuously through that middle eight.

    Another game changer that propelled a band into the monster stratosphere was Eno and Lanois production on The Joshua Tree. Not just the sound engineering aspect but how they pushed the band into different areas.

  15. Bryter Layter,
    Kind Of Blue,
    Solid Air,
    Sea Change or Morning Phase…both beautiful
    Sail On-Muddy Waters
    The Band-The Band(not sumptious but they sound like they’re playing in your living room)
    Call Me-Al Green

  17. Chicken Skin Music is my favourite Ry Cooder album and have always thought it has a really crisp production. Here is a great version of a great song:-

  18. Japan – Gentlemen Take Polaroids
    The Blue Nile – (All of them)
    Bowie – Young Americans
    Fleetwood Mac – Rumours
    Joni – Hejira
    Talk Talk – The Colour of Spring

  19. Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever is a fantastic read on the history of production techniques. Not really to the Afterword’s taste, but he has a lot to say about Def Leppard’s Hysteria, arguing that the band were almost superfluous in its making.

  26. Wot, no Quincy?

    We don’t know exactly what Quincy Jones’ input was on the Michael Jackson triptych Off The Wall/Thriller/Bad, and sure there were some mawkish tracks we wanna forget, but the balls and drive and sheer architecture of the music making would suggest it was quite a lot. Here.

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