Single minded
Marcus Berkmann
Agreat surge of lipsmacking new releases is on its way, tragically preceded in my household by a couple of whopping bills, so I am having to restrain myself. The need for new music: is it a physical addiction or a psychological one? Cold turkey would be listening to one of those oldies stations that only play Phil Collins’s greatest hits. But the album I currently want/need the most, the one I keep eyeing on Amazon, is the latest and last from California beardie slackers Grandaddy.
Writer, producer and lead beard Jason Lytle announced in January that he was splitting up the band, although it has to be said that even fervent fans like me would struggle to name any of his former bandmates, and I would bet my dog that a Jason Lytle solo album would sound pretty much like a Grandaddy band album. Never mind. Just Like The Fambly Cat (V2) remains a mere click away from next-day delivery, with its very loud and its very quiet bits, its astoundingly morose lyrics and Lytle’s unquenchable (if skewed) pop sensibility. There I am, reviewing an album I haven’t heard yet, but I can say three things with confidence: that I won’t like it much on first hearing, that I will love it on tenth hearing, and that nothing on it will even faintly resemble a hit single.
Maybe that’s why Lytle is giving up. After all, his band look like a cross between John Prescott and ZZ Top: they are more likely to spontaneously combust than be invited on to CD:UK. Lytle’s albums become ever more carefully and fascinatingly constructed, and yet we can all picture the faces of record company executives as they hear them for the first time. Where are the singles? It is their mantra. I don’t hear any singles. Where are the singles? Rock ’n’ roll is 50 years old; no one buys actual singles any more; and, although a few people over 30 do download individual songs from the internet, it’s at considerable risk to their dignity and self-respect. CDs are where the real money lies: more were sold in the UK last year than ever before. And yet we remain in thrall to the notion of singles. Why?
It strikes me now that many of my favourite albums are marred, if not ruined, by failed attempts to write singles. Older, established acts don’t need to worry about this: you won’t find Neil Young gearing his tunes towards the Radio One playlist, and David Gilmour’s recent album was wholly directed at the many thousands of people who would have bought it if it had contained 45 minutes of him blowing his nose. The sneering record company term for this is ‘fanbase’. Their fans will buy it, but they will make no serious attempt to engage a wider audience. They won’t write a single.
But everyone else has to try, and we listeners must suffer for it. You can always spot the failed single on an album: the obvious, rather schematic songwriting, the simple melody, the bright mix, the dull lyrics. Often you can hear the money that has been spent on A&R advice to bolster a thin tune. There’s the single, right there. Now take it away and bury it in peat for a thousand years.
A caveat. I am not of course referring to the self-evidently great singles that do emerge from time to time. Such rare and beautiful creations make you feel happy to be alive. Even when they later turn up three times an hour on those oldie stations that play Phil Collins’s greatest hits.
I wonder, though, whether the grand mass of mediocre singles might not put some people off pop music altogether. After all, not everyone is like me, or like you if you have read this far, who listens to and absorbs vast quantities of music in order to ferret out the stuff that makes us glow. How often is it the single that has this effect? How often is it the strange and unregarded album track?
I suppose there has to be some way of filtering the good from the bad: there’s simply so much music made these days that the sheer profusion can weigh on you, if you let it. But the single, in all that it has become, is too reductive. Now I’ve written that, Grandaddy will have a huge worldwide hit, reform for a stadium tour and make more money than is entirely decent. Here’s hoping.
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