If ___ Produced ____

I had a thought experiment once which was, “What if this person produced that person?”. What if Brian Eno produced Metallica, what if Trent Reznor produced a Sting album, and so on. With the passing of David lynch, I've also been thinking about his role in music, and how unique it is. I think Lynch probably would have made an excellent record producer because he looks at things in a different way than most people and he'll see things that other people don't, which I think is important in the production process. If you do everything yourself you're having to play several different roles which is probably not optimal. I think using the film metaphor in terms of making records is that the producer is the “director”and the engineers are the cinematographers and other people that are on the the film crew.

If you examine it more closely you'll see a lot of overlaps between music production and film production. Two examples come to mind: the scene in Lost Highway where where Robert Loggia wasn't talking loud enough, and had to do several takes in order for him to be heard. In the final take he's actually screaming–something that was extreme that you would predict or allowed. The other example is Peter Gabriel's Modern Love, where Bob Ezrin duct-taped him up on a pillar to get him to sing with more emotion. Very often if you're in a performance role, you can tend to be very shy and timid, and the producer has to be there to get people to be more free with their emotions. People don’t automatically get into gear without some motivation.

It's also interesting how “immigrants” to different mediums look at it in a fresh way. I like what Lynch did with differently tuned lap steels, which didn't require much musical skill (if any), but he came up with something that was more interesting in a cinematic kind of way. His approach is to get a mood from an initial spark of an idea and work from it from those roots. The typical producer is working by finding sounds on an instrument and then writing the song from the sounds, which I think is a valid way of working, but it can move towards cliche because you're spending all your time on a drum sound, the equivalent a cinematographer taking hours to experiment with different looks, when everybody is waiting around and there's no creative energy left.

What's happened over the past couple decades is that everyone is now doing everything themselves, which can be effective in some cases, but mostly not. It's good for making music that is like painting, but music isn't always like painting. Every domain has its core skills, and producers also have to work with that as well. Lynch was just extraordinary in his ability to work with actors and “sell” his eccentric style. Camille Paglia once said that film is the highest art form, and that's actually true.
Gilmore used a different producer on his latest album, which was an interesting choice. he had said that he was considering using Rick Rubin. He probably should have. Could David Bowie have been a record producer (other than a Lou Reed)? I don't think he could be because in some ways he wouldn't be able to pull everything together because I don't see him as really being a “team player” kind of a producer like David lynch is. There's certain archetypes that film directors have to have, and it's not only the artist archetype. There's a constellation of them. David Bowie would be more of an Eno, a “drifting clarifier”.

What's interesting about the advent of AI in music is that it's easier to play all the roles because the production is almost completed, You're not having to get everyone motivated to do a performance. What's left for the artist is to contextualize it in some way based on a central idea, or ideas that arise when you're working on the visuals that go with it. That's where the unique vision is.