Paul Simon – om at skrive sange for nogen og om musikkens subtilitet
18. marts 2011“That’s what I think about when I write. I think: Who’s going to understand this, what I’m talking about here? I think that plenty of people will, if it’s out there to hear. It may not be millions of people. It may not be what it was when I wrote songs that were Top 10 hits. But then again, I don’t think the same way that I thought when I was age 25 to 35.”
“I felt really terrible that all the record stores closed. For a lot of people, they liked wandering into a record store and seeing what was new. They’d come in to buy one record and then they’d see some other album that would be interesting. I would go into record stores and wander through African records or something. I guess you can do the same thing today. You just have to do it online.
The record business has sort of imploded, really. It’s just a fragment of what it was. That’s too bad. It makes it harder for musicians to record. The budgets of albums go down. They have to do them faster. Really, really good musicians, who used to get paid a premium to record, are unaffordable now.
If you’re not listening with really great earphones or really great speakers, then you can’t hear if a record is made with subtleties of sound in the studio, which means that people are less inclined toward making art that has that degree of subtlety. Or at least attempting that degree of subtlety that might approach art. That means that everything gets reduced to a simpler formula, and whenever that happens, it’s not the most interesting music. When there’s too much prepackaging, it’s not interesting. That’s why, to me, the most interesting stuff of popular music is indie.”
Mere i Vanity Fair.
18. marts 2011 kl. 14:22
@capac: FÃ¥r mig til at tænke pÃ¥ et Simon-citat: “You’re supposed to be pretentious at 22. It’s better than being pretentious at 42. That’s unforgiveable.”
18. marts 2011 kl. 14:34
@Torben: Ja, det er en klassiker. Men derfor kan der jo godt være noget om snakken… ;)