musical innovation
Being deeply immersed or enmeshed in the synthesizer electronic world--well any world, you come across purists wherever you look. And don't forget about your internal purist. Maybe this one is the most insidious of all!
They always say something like this: the people doing it in the early days did it like so and it was the best way. But the thing that they always leave out is that those people were at the beginning, the innovators.
Meaning, you.
So if you're doing something now, you too have to be really far ahead of the game.
One of my touchstones is Upstairs at Eric's by Yaz, crazy innovative because those were the tools that Vince Clark loved at the time, but also he wasn't a player, he was a sequencer, but the sequencer spoke to him and he was able to take it somewhere where other people couldn't and I don't know enough about that particular sequencer, I can't remember what it was, doesn't matter.
But he could take it probably in a place that maybe wasn't even intended and totally change music forever, which he did with certainly the first Depeche Mode album and then subsequently Yaz and all that.
Maybe Erasure didn't change the world, but then his songwriting got incredible on a different level.
His songs were great before, but then he just, you know, if you end up something, you work your whole life or at least his life up into one point, coming up with a song like Respect.
So you really do have to think about that when you're doing your work and you're making your music and you're worried that whatever off things pop in, but you certainly, part of it is that the innovation has happened, that's part of your vocabulary now if you've internalized it and now you've got to go somewhere else with it.
But still, upstairs at Eric's was monophonic synthesizers, several different sequences, simple melodies and great programming and great songwriting.
And those remain, but no one wants to hear your version of that record.
Thank you.