bjork and i have this in common
and it's not that we're both geniuses. about finishing an album.
In the Sonic Symbolism podcast where Bjork talks about my favorite record of hers—Vespertine—she said this re: the writing/recording process:
“…in the beginning, I try to just trust that my subconscious is documenting who I am…So I just try not to police or control anything the first two or three years. And then usually there is a moment where I sit down and listen through. First time, I try to save it till as late as possible…I try to rather surprise myself, and after two years of writing, listen to what I have and go, ‘Oh, wow, there's a theme there.’ And try to find a theme that I wasn't aware of. And then I tried to pretend that I'm somewhere else, someone else. Then, I finish the album in that theme. And then sometimes the best song on the album…is sometimes the last song I write. Not always, but sometimes when I see the big picture, and I have assembled the album and the album order, and I know like, ‘Okay, we have this, this, this, this, this, this, but this is missing for this to be whole.’ And then I'll just go, ‘Okay, now I'm gonna write this kinda song.’…’Okay, I've done a whole album here about quiet, whispering music, and insect sounds, and micro beats, but there's no whisper song.’ So I have to do one and the lyric has to be, whisper…you know very like a secret, something you're whispering in someone's ear and nobody else can hear it.”
I’ve touched on this before about my ‘process’ making “Lessons For A Son”. This was a song I had serious doubts about ever finishing, but working in the context of an album brought much needed clarity. Themes and particular sounds revealed themselves to me only when seen as a whole, like a roadmap toward town rather than a Webb telescope image of the entire fuckin’ galaxy, which made it obvious what that song had to be. Practical decisions like: piano instead of guitar; real instruments instead of electronics/samples; orchestral instead of rock; closer adherence to a conventional verse/chorus structure.
In this overlong process, I’ve whittled it down to ten songs that together sound cinematic by happenstance, downtempo by habit, vaguely spooky and old-fashioned, about cars spontaneously exploding, surveillance, the end of the world, wounded spies, houses on fire (and a city doused in red), being followed in the supermarket, floating above the roof of the Getty Villa, comparing our lives to movies, getting addicted to your phone, poison, parked in the parking lot doing nothing, videos in place of memories, sex, and heartbreak.
Sure, the album may be dead and the single is king, but using the album concept as a rulebook is a technique that alters the way you think and write, even if in the end you don’t release anything as an actual album. You’ll end up with a cohesive sound that, hopefully, makes you easily recognizable as yourself.
All right, get outta here.