Paul Simon: The ear goes to the irritant

From the notebook: Notes on a lowkey gem from France, the art of record-making and the (unfortunately related) art of gaming the streaming algorithms

“The ear goes to the irritant.”

That’s Paul Simon, in the control room of a recording studio, discoursing on how barely audible flaws can become colossal mind games in the process of mixing a record. It’s a quintessential Simon cadence – “Make a new plan, Stan” – that’s backed by experience: The singer and songwriter has had his share of tussles with uncooperative technology, seemingly insurmountable logistical hurdles and marathon searches for the elusive muse.

The singer and songwriter allows that he’s used the line before. But it appears as part of director Alex Gibney’s masterful documentary In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, and lands with a heavy resonance. The camera follows Simon’s face at close range. The eyes dart. He looks vaguely troubled, then hunted. He’s at work on his most recent album, the interwoven song cycle 7 Psalms, and while he’s sweating the usual details of the music, he’s also contending with the sudden onset of hearing loss in one ear.

Which, needless to say, changes the nature of the irritants. Possibly distorts them. Adds at least a mind game level or two. The film goes right at this, following the 82- year-old Simon – who might not be a perfectionist but at the very least we know is surgical about word choice, chord choice and melodic shape – as he contends with the new challenges.

This is already more than I intended to say about In Restless Dreams, which toggles between Simon at work and tremendous archival footage of the making of his solo records and the meteoric run of Simon and Garfunkel. Because if you care about the art and craft of the pop song, you will want to experience it.

That quote though. It speaks to the struggles that take place daily in the soundproof, intentionally dimly lit rooms where random noise bursts and audio inspirations are corralled into transfixing recordings. It’s weird work. Sometimes agonizing, sometimes joyful, usually beset with unforeseen problems. The producers and recording engineers who do this work pursue it with an odd (yet necessary) split-screen intensity, handling the technical snafus with manic precision while projecting an unflappable zen serenity when the artists are nearby.

Before I heard Paul Simon talking about the ear being drawn to the irritant,  my favorite quote about record-making was from the producer Jim Dickinson, whose discography includes landmarks by Aretha Franklin, the Replacements and Alex Chilton. We were at a press dinner in Memphis, talking about a long list of records that, in his estimation, didn’t work.

His theory about why: “Misery sticks to the tape.”

We are lucky that people who do what Simon and Dickinson do are also so reflective, and often poetic, about what is a partly mystical process. Because their words help shed light onto those slivers of time when, out of nowhere, magic happens. The other day I started out looking for instances where Dickinson might have repeated that quote, and wound up in a thick forest of wisdom from the pages of audio-pro magazines like Tape Op, from interviews with producers and engineers. Below are a few highlights.

Quincy Jones (recording artist, producer of Michael Jackson’s Thriller and many others): “For every hour of recording, have two hours of laughter in the studio.”

Eddie Kramer (Jimi Hendrix, Kiss): “Mixing is way more art and soul than science. We don’t really know what we’re doing. We’ve all been faking it for 40 years. We do it because we love music. It’s what gets me going every day. It’s the love of music first.”

Elliott Smith (singer/songwriter): "[The recording] was really noisy. I kind of liked it. That was the way it had to be. Then you stop worrying whether you should have made this decision or that about how things sounded, and just get down to the business of making songs."

Joe Boyd (Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, R.E.M.): "That is one of the problems I have with a lot of contemporary recording. You don't feel like it is taking place in a room. It's taking place in cyberspace, or in an electronic environment — close mic'ing in a dead space. If you want atmosphere, you dial it up (via software). I keep quoting these two examples, but I think they're good examples: Buena Vista Social Club and Norah Jones. They really sound as though they've been made in a space. I don’t personally think they would’ve been that successful if they hadn't sounded like that."

Steve Albini (Nirvana, the Breeders, many others): "Everybody is faking it. Pretty much everybody is not as good as you think they are at it. Everyone is constantly afraid that they're going to be found out as a fraud. Now I've been making records long enough that nothing really surprises me. I don't feel like I'm going to be baffled. I might not necessarily get it right the first time, but I'll have an approach. I'll have a way of getting through the problem. It wasn't that way when I first started, but I was lucky enough to work with peers who would deal with just about anything."

Jim Dickinson: "The engineer's job is to record every note as well as they can possibly do it. The producer's job is to finish [the project] and basically steal it from the artist, because there's no artist on earth who wants to give it up. Because once they give it up, it's not theirs anymore. You can't even blame them. I myself, as an artist — I stand at the microphone and I don't want to give it up. Paul Westerberg looked me in the face and said, 'I'm not going to give you 100% because you don't deserve it.' So I had to steal everything I got from him. That's the producer's job. It is a nefarious craft, and when it's happening to you, you don't know it."

***

This is what I was listening to while reading these (and many more — used curatorial discretion!) quotes:

It’s the 1975 debut by the French fusion group Cortex, issued originally by Paris-based Disques Espérance label. Recorded in two days (!), it combines poised, disarmingly inventive improvisation (particularly from keyboardist and leader Alain Mion) with enchanting melodies (some of them sung by the wondrous Mireille Dalbray, whose voice evokes ethereal mountaintop realms) and spry, deftly chopped post-electric-Miles grooves. You’ve probably heard snippets of this album before: It’s been sampled by Madlib on the classic MF Doom track “One Beer,” and figures prominently on Lupe Fiasco’s “Mural.”

Cortex recorded several other smart records (seek out Vol. 2, from 1977). Its sounds jolted me back to my most recent French obsession, Laurence Vanay (see Echo Locator here and here), who was active and making dazzlingly creative music at the same time. Couldn’t find anything that suggested any connection between the two, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some overlap.

Last thought from the notebook this week comes courtesy of the New York Times Magazine’s Brett Martin, whose wry, delightfully written story about an enterprising songwriter named Matt Farley has not left my brain since I read it. (Gift link available here.) Farley is one of those creative souls who understands the care and feeding of streaming algorithms; he knows what the machine wants, and is a happy and impressively prolific supplier of music for every occasion, every need, every bodily function.

Martin breaks down Farley’s full time (and lucrative) operation this way: “As the Hungry Food Band, he sings songs about foods. As the Guy Who Sings Songs About Cities & Towns, he sings the atlas. He has 600 songs inviting different-named girls to the prom and 500 that are marriage proposals. He has an album of very specific apologies; albums devoted to sports teams in every city that has a sports team; hundreds of songs about animals, and jobs, and weather, and furniture, and one band that is simply called the Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over.”

There’s been much discussion about the opportunistic cluttering of streaming databases, lots of it in the key of “The Sky is Falling.” Martin seems to have intuited that the sky already fell and we’re wise to examine — and, yes, laugh — at the results. More bemused than horrified, his story speaks to the existential threat of this late-stage-capitalism type of creativity. It’s a kind of death struggle, an irreconcilable pull of opposing forces: Deeply gifted artists struggle to be heard while the Farleys of the world get paid for poop songs. We zoomed past the inflection point where all kinds of algorithm exploiters — AI bots, volume dealers like Farley or the virtuosos offering “Relaxing Piano Music” — flooded the music ecosystem. It happened really fast. Many didn’t even notice. What now?