The Making of an Album...

If you read enough trade magazines and online articles concerning how albums come together, two basic patterns emerge: either the songs are fleshed out and ready, or there are a lot of ideas, or riffs, or hooks, but no complete songs so the band gets together and sees what come of it.
Then there’s the process. Is the album a creation made over time, or cobbled together over a short period, say a few days or weeks?

I bring this up because every week; I read that the album is dead or hold on a minute; the album is not dead.

No, the album isn’t dead, because artists continue to release them. There is the “Pop” culture trend that stresses that artists drib-drab of series of singles or EP’s-an ironic term since it is tied to records, which just about no one other than vinyl affectionados listens to-in order to maintain the attention of a generally inattentive public.

The rest of us marshal on.

Albums, or LP’s (long playing), have generally fallen into 2 categories, themed or concept-think Pink Floyd’s The Wall, or a collection of songs like Taylor Swift’s Reputation. 

What interests me is how albums come into being. For the most part, the artists and bands I like have put a premium of song creation. Artists like Steely Dan and Peter Gabriel tended to work on songs until they were finished and enough were done to construct an album. This only really works if the songwriter is running the show and isn’t under any kind of time restraints, and generally few people write the songs versus a committee.
Band albums, where the members of the band bring in ideas, riffs, tend to be hit or miss, meaning some albums are great and others are maybe one standout song and what was euphemistically called “filler”. Prime examples are Bad Company’s first album, Bad Company, where everything worked, and their album, Burning Sky... not so much. Some of this is a product of expectations, a lack of time to really work out ideas, and that most infamous of band distractions, burnout. Believe it or not, not all bands love each other. And sometimes that shows in the rancor that follows the album. Take the Police’s last album, Synchronicity, which was a struggle to finish and yet was their best seller!

Fortunately, as I am not particularly famous, I can work on songs at my own pace and construct the album over that time. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. I’ve had songs fall like rain and then go through long dry periods where nothing gets finished, but then I wasn’t on any timetable, so....

On the plus side, the albums I started I finished.