I'm gonna try something a little different here.I often find myself second-guessing even my favorite artists. Frustrated by songs that shouldn't have made the cut (or B-sides that should have), collaborations that (while well-intentioned) never should have seen the light of day (e.g. the Tom Waits/Bette Middler duet on "I Never Talk To Strangers"), horrendous album art (the original cover of You Forgot It In People, anyone?), even simple sequencing problems. The number of records that I listen to without skipping any songs can be counted on my left hand. And nowhere is this more true than with double albums.
Rare is the book longer than 500 pages that wouldn't have benefitted from being edited down, and doubly rare is the double album that shouldn't have been a single, stream-lined, 12-track massacre. The classic thought experiment in this vein (which we can get to eventually, if there's any interest) is to try to whittle the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs down to 23 Love Songs (the length of each of the original 3 volumes), or else however many you can fit onto a single 80-minute CD. No more "Punk Rock Love" throwaways, no more "Wi' Nae Wee Bairn Ye'll Me Beget" nonsense, just your absolute favorite cuts lined up end to end. While it may be impossible to find any song that an absolute consensus could agree to ditch, I think a strong two-thirds majority wouldn't be that hard to reach.
Enter Okkervil River.
Mr. Sheff mostly brings this on himself, as he was fond of regaling interviewers with his distaste for double albums when discussing OR's Stage Names/Stand Ins project, basically a double album with the first disc concerning the pitfalls of fame, the second, in negative, looking at the liminal space that surrounds fame, the groupies, ex-boyfriends, has-beens, etc. First, there's no small amount of hubris to posturing in opposition to the form you've chosen to work within. It's almost as if he's saying "double albums have never worked before because I've never made one" (the flip side of this notion is that he took his own distaste as a challenge, a nicer way to phrase things and a notion that I'm not entirely unsympathetic to, but ultimately just the other side of the same coin). Second, academically speaking, the line drawn between these two groups of muses seems artificial to me, specifically the idea that there would be anything so fundamentally different between them that they couldn't cohabitate on a single disc just seems wrong to me. Third, and perhaps most apropos, the bulk of the Stand Ins feels like filler, and even it's best moments seem to reflect even better ones on the Stage Names (cf. "Pop Lie" vs. "Unless It's Kicks," "Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979" vs. "John Allyn Smith Sails"). While this may underscore his conceit nicely, it doesn't make the slow moments on the Stand Ins any easier to swallow.
Therefore, in service of a more personal hubris, I have merged the two albums, cut the filler, resequenced and compiled the album that Okkervil River should have put out. I give you:
1. Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe
2. Pop Lie
3. Unless It's Kicks
4. A Hand to Take Hold of the Scene
5. You Can't Hold the Hand of a Rock and Roll Man
6. Lost Coastlines
7. Calling and Not Calling My Ex
8. Love to a Monster
9. Plus Ones
10. John Allyn Smith Sails
11. Title Track
12. Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979
8 comments:
I've never understood everybody's problem with the original YFIIP cover, and I thought it was pretty lame that they changed it after Pitchfork specifically made fun of it. I suspect no one would have said anything if Ryan Schreiber hadn't (though, to be fair, BSS probably owes its career to him also saying "9.2"). In fact, no one on that cover has a "feeling the music" facial expression.
"Wi' Nae Wee Bairn Ye'll Me Beget" is on my current 23 Love Songs.
I don't necessarily disagree with your comment about 500+ page novels, but I think almost every (non-academic) essay I've read needed to be about twice as long as it was (including those by DFW).
The original YFIIP cover looks like it was thrown together with Photoshop in a basement by one of the band member's cousins. All it's missing is Comic Sans font.
I would be interested in seeing what made your 23 Love Songs cut...a twinkle little ee.
Have you tried out the OR list, and if so, what are your thoughts?
See, I would leave off "Love to a Monster," "Title Track," and "Bruce Wayne Campbell" in favor of "A Girl in Port," "Singer Songwriter," and "Starry Stairs."
So even here where we're in 75% agreement, it seems to be better that we just have both albums. We have more similar musical taste than the vast majority of people, and you've left off two of my favorite tracks ("Girl" and "Stairs"). Since one can, and you admit that you almost without exception do, skip tracks, why not just conclude that the album isn't the most important hermeneutic unit? Or if you want to maintain that it is, just embrace the fact that each of us can make a flawless version for ourselves, but there's no real hope of bands putting out one version that will be flawless for all of even the sorts of listeners similar enough to be their fans in particular?
Better for who?
I'd say it's worth down-sizing and tightening up if you can reach above a 50% consensus. Let's say the actual released album was halfway between your's and mine. We're both only missing at most 2 songs that we liked (which will most likely be available as b-sides for the more active listener, another pleasure that is lost when everything gets lumped together) and "losing" nearly an album's worth of material that did nothing for us. I have no problem cherry picking my favorite songs and constructing my own playlists, but I don't think it specious to critique the deliberate choices that a band makes with regards to their material. To an extent, the importance of "the album" as a unified parcel, more than the sum of it parts, directly correlates to way that it's constructed by the artist. If Okkervil River was just releasing singles, there would be no conversation about what should have made the cut and what shouldn't--you'd either like it or you wouldn't, end of story.
More importantly, the concentrated single album is more likely to appeal to listeners on the fringe, who would have been luke-warm with either of the expanded releases. I may have a passing interest in the Fall, but the likelihood that I'm going to invest time into listening to any one of their albums when they have over 40 is greatly reduced.
More than anything, I find it strange that you of all people seem to be arguing for less editing.
I'm pro editing in the sense of "This, like most writing, is terrible, and you need to completely rewrite it," not "This is too long, you need to cut it down."
More later.
Also, ftr, I like Girl in Port, and if I was going to add another track to my list, that would be it. I have no idea what you hear in Starry Stairs.
I don't see how you overcome the fact of the range of taste. 50%, 2/3, 75%: whatever threshold you stipulate, you're leaving off songs some significant minority like for, what seems to me, negligible benefit. I'd rather have one really good album (SN) and one okay one (SI) than have one marginally better album and have to track down b-sides. We could play this same game with Kid A and Amnesiac, but I'd rather just have both albums as they are.
The bigger the set of songs, the more impossible consensus becomes. So almost everyone might agree that that a band made a mistake when their album includes one terrible song and they had one single with one good b-side, but we can't even agree here in double-disc territory, and if you post your 23 Love Songs, I suspect we'll only agree on about 10/69 songs.
The notion that OR would have written and recorded all of these songs if they had only one album in mind is probably just false, too. So I doubt we actually would have everything as b-sides. Probably a half-dozen of these songs just wouldn't exist at all. It's too strong (in my case at least) to say that the remaining songs do nothing for me. I don't think there's a single bad song on either the SN or SI, and I'm pretty sure I like both albums less than you do.
I don't think you do, as I would say the Stage Names is a good record and Stand Ins a mediocre one (my greatest love when it comes to Okkervil River is and most likely will always be Black Sheep Boy). There also seems to be a latent assumption in your position that increased output has no effect on quality of output, which I would disagree with (i.e. if they had written and recorded fewer songs in the sessions that produced the records, the average quality of each cut would have been higher).
Perhaps where we're just not going to agree is that weak points on an album can seriously affect my enjoyment of it, whereas it seems you're content to just skip over the part you don't like and not think any more about it. I would actually prefer to be more like that, but the closest I can muster is what I'm doing here, in re-cutting things.
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