{"id":2290,"date":"2009-08-12T11:53:42","date_gmt":"2009-08-12T15:53:42","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2009-08-12T11:53:42","modified_gmt":"2009-08-12T11:53:42","slug":"what-is-fantastic-songwriting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/what-is-fantastic-songwriting\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Fantastic Songwriting and How Can I Spot it on an Album with a Production That I Cannot Stomach?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"image_block\" style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/media\/blogs\/rth\/townhallpatric.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/div>\n<p>In a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/index.php\/2009\/08\/11\/you-re-fired-i-quit-music-fans-lose\">recent thread<\/a> on bands that were irrevocably weakened by the loss of a key member, Townsman jungleland2 made an interesting comment:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I too call Bullshit on Bob Stinson. Paul played most of the guitars anyway. Slim Dunlap gave them a new more textured sound. Don&#8217;t blame the strange late 80&#8217;s production of Don&#8217;t Tell al Soul..the songs are fantasic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>What interested me most was the last part, about the songs on <em>Don&#8217;t Tell a Soul<\/em> being &#8220;fantastic&#8221; despite the album&#8217;s generally acknowledged bad production. I&#8217;ve never been a Replacements fan, so I&#8217;m not equipped to argue whether the songs are on par with their more beloved works or not, but I&#8217;m scratching my head at the moment, asking myself if I own any records with songs that I believe are &#8220;fantastic&#8221; despite production that I don&#8217;t like. If I like the production of an album I feel fit to judge the quality of the songwriting, however if I really don&#8217;t like the production of a record I don&#8217;t have a clue as to how to judge the songwriting.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m reminded of the thing people say about flawed films that have &#8220;great scripts.&#8221; Do these people get a copy of the script handed to them when they sit down to watch a film? Why can&#8217;t I ever tell anyone about the &#8220;great script&#8221; behind a poorly made film? I know a lot more about music than I do film, but I wonder: <em>Am I so tied to the <strong>sound<\/strong> of records that I can&#8217;t tell if the song itself is actually good?<\/em> How about you? <\/p>\n<p>If you have examples of fantastic songwriting smothered by production you can&#8217;t stand (as opposed to lo-fi production, for instance, that you may like despite it being considered technically deficient), I&#8217;d love to hear them. Most importantly, for my growth as a human being, I&#8217;d like to hear how you managed to discern the nuggets of nutrition within the aural turds.<\/p>\n<p><em>I look forward to your comments!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a recent thread on bands that were irrevocably weakened by the loss of a key member, Townsman jungleland2 made an interesting comment: I too call Bullshit on Bob Stinson. Paul played most of the guitars anyway. Slim Dunlap gave them a new more textured sound. Don&#8217;t blame the strange late 80&#8217;s production of Don&#8217;t <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/what-is-fantastic-songwriting\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[43],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2290"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}