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Post by beachboystalkmatt on Jan 17, 2022 16:05:06 GMT
Please join us tomorrow evening at 8 EST as we conduct a deep dive of the 1968 Album Friends! We will go track by track with Greg playing the songs. We will also give away a Friends poster! Hope to see you there!
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Post by Kapitan on Jan 17, 2022 17:51:27 GMT
Cool show. It's a great album. One of my favorites that always gets lost in the shuffle of my favorites, since there are so many (after Pet Sounds) that really seem to rise and fall in that second-tier range for me. Great albums like Friends, but also Surf's Up, Love You, All Summer Long, Today, Summer Days (And Summer Nights)...quite a few right in that "second-best" ballpark depending on my mood.
Like a few of their albums, my biggest complaint is it's too short. One or two more tunes would have really made it hard to beat. (Except by Pet Sounds. Few albums on earth can compete with that one.)
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Post by beachboystalkmatt on Jan 17, 2022 18:39:20 GMT
Great observations! It is a short album, and I wish it was longer. But it is one my favorites.
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Post by joshilynhoisington on Jan 17, 2022 20:22:51 GMT
I think the album's brevity is part of its essence -- if it were any longer it would no longer be what it is. And I think it needed to be short because it's what Brian could handle taking on.
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Post by Kapitan on Jan 17, 2022 20:57:19 GMT
I think the album's brevity is part of its essence -- if it were any longer it would no longer be what it is. And I think it needed to be short because it's what Brian could handle taking on. The latter is quite possibly true.
The former ... I don't know. I mean, yes, in some sense, by definition! Change a thing, and it's a different thing. But I think the addition of, say, any two of "Time to Get Alone," "We're Together Again," and a completed "Been Too Long" or "Ol Man River" wouldn't have dramatically changed the character of the album and made it a wholly different thing. (As opposed to, just for argument's sake to demonstrate the opposite, adding "Cabinessence," "Fire," and "All Dressed Up For School" would have indeed made it a very different thing.)
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Post by Kapitan on Jan 19, 2022 16:55:07 GMT
Controversial take by beachboystalkmatt? "Friends is a better concept album than Pet Sounds." He's not saying a better album, but in terms of as a concept album. He says, first, that it is a concept album, with the concept being peace, calm. And then, "not musically, not production-wise," but as a concept...better than The Big One.
What do you think, folks? Do we burn the heretic?
(And of course, I'm kidding: we don't burn heretics around these here parts. [Special cowboy terminology for Cowboy Al in the emoji.] If anything we are heretics.)
I'm not sure I agree ... but I'm not sure how strongly I disagree, either. And in fact, I'm not sure I'd call either one a concept album. So maybe I'm the heretic who you ought to burn.
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Post by joshilynhoisington on Jan 19, 2022 17:09:29 GMT
I think that either all Brian Wilson driven albums are concept albums, or none of them are. And if they are all concept albums, I don't think it's really appropriate for us to judge whether one has a better concept than another (or a better execution of a concept.)
Brian always just went with what he was into at any given time, filtered through his "unique" (in quotes because I don't actually think Brian understood what made music commercially successful, but maybe thought he did) perception of what commercially promising sounded like.
Now, unlike Pet Sounds, where He and Tony did actually sit down and discuss what they were going for in lyrical themes, I can't imagine there was any articulation of the same for Friends. Can an album be a concept album if the concept is never articulated (even exclusively behind closed doors?)
Can't we just say that Friends has a stronger through-line of thematic unity in its lyrical content (even if it might be inadvertent?) without making it into a concept album.
ALSO -- I would argue that Friends is just as strong musically and production-wise as anything that came before, if not better. It may not be quite as baroque of an expression, and may be a little more uneven, but the ideas are there, and I think Brian was better at being a producer after a couple more years of practice anyway.
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Post by Kapitan on Jan 19, 2022 17:35:54 GMT
And if they are all concept albums, I don't think it's really appropriate for us to judge whether one has a better concept than another (or a better execution of a concept.) I have to disagree here. I think an opinion is nothing but judging better and worse, after all, and we all have opinions on more or less everything we're presented with in life. (Some stronger than others, some more informed than others, etc.) How seriously should we take our own opinions? Well that's the rub: it goes back to how strongly we hold it, how well informed we are on the subject. In the grand scheme, none of our opinions on something like this mean anything at all. But it's fair to "judge," even if I don't necessarily think of it with that term.
But your idea about what is a concept album, that's something I've been thinking of again based on his comment. You can define so many different types of albums as concept albums if you're so inclined: - A set of songs telling a story - A set of songs with a cohesive theme, maybe between a narrative/story and songs with a single topic
- A set of songs with a single topic
- A set of songs whose compositional or production styles bind them together So you can potentially lump anything from a various artists' tribute album, to a greatest hits album, to a traditional "concept album," to an album that's really just whatever Artist X was doing at the time (which likely hangs together cohesively in terms of composition and production).
You could almost say the concept album is in the mind of the listener more than the artist(s). And to me, that makes it a term that's probably best not pushed too hard. It's just too fuzzy in its definitional boundaries. I mean, Still Cruisin was (per Mike Love) supposed to be a concept album because the songs were to have been in movies. So that's nothing about the music itself at all, but where the music had been found in the past!
Generally I reserve the term for the first bullet above, those that are probably also describable as "rock operas" (a term I hate even more). After that it just gets too fuzzy.
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Post by Kapitan on Jan 19, 2022 17:37:42 GMT
ALSO -- I would argue that Friends is just as strong musically and production-wise as anything that came before, if not better. It may not be quite as baroque of an expression, and may be a little more uneven, but the ideas are there, and I think Brian was better at being a producer after a couple more years of practice anyway. This, I think I agree with. I don't think the material is necessarily quite as strong as the best of his previous work--though I do think it's very strong and I love it--but the production is not lacking, in my opinion.
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Post by joshilynhoisington on Jan 19, 2022 18:37:44 GMT
And if they are all concept albums, I don't think it's really appropriate for us to judge whether one has a better concept than another (or a better execution of a concept.) I have to disagree here. I think an opinion is nothing but judging better and worse, after all, and we all have opinions on more or less everything we're presented with in life. (Some stronger than others, some more informed than others, etc.) How seriously should we take our own opinions? Well that's the rub: it goes back to how strongly we hold it, how well informed we are on the subject. In the grand scheme, none of our opinions on something like this mean anything at all. But it's fair to "judge," even if I don't necessarily think of it with that term. I agree with that, and I think what I meant was less "it's not appropriate for us to judge whether any concept album is better than another" and more "it's inappropriate for us to judge a BW concept album as better than another" -- and the inappropriateness is, I think, not down to the judgment part, but down to the, at best, tenuous and inconsistent application of the term to some of these albums. I think the "concepts" behind the two albums-in-question, if we accept them as concept albums for the sake of argument, are too sort of non-fungible to successfully compare using the same scale. One album's concept was born out of a context where the creator had every tool at his disposal -- custom lyrics, any studio or musician he wanted, the luxury to sit and contemplate things, and a certain amount of emotional capital. The other's concept is shaped by more limiting circumstances. It's more personal, in my opinion. Maybe it (Friends, that is) hangs together as a concept better because it came more organically out of Brian's direct circumstances, whereas Pet Sounds was more deliberate. But either way, I still don't think of them as concept albums!
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Post by Kapitan on Jan 19, 2022 18:57:41 GMT
Ah, I was misunderstanding you. That makes more sense to me.
The one that seems inescapably a concept album to me is TLOS. Other than that, they're all gray area at most.
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Post by beachboystalkmatt on Jan 25, 2022 1:19:17 GMT
Great thoughts! I think Friends flows better and is a better concept partly because they were just making music that they wanted to make. They were not worried about the Beatles or chart success. It seems like Friends is the calm after the storm of SMiLE, and there is definitely peace in that. It oozes throughout the whole album. Also, I think the topics are of course a bit more mature than Pet Sounds and not as heavy. It’s almost as if they are content with themselves abs their lives at this point. Just a thought!
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