Three dynamic shots of
The Producer in action
I've got a new job. For the last few years I have been a 'musician', and sometimes a 'freelance musician' (which is the same except you get paid), and also a 'songwriter'. I've enjoyed it, the travelling, the performing, the tourbuses, the aeroplanes, the Unbelievable Glamour of Everything. To be honest, 99% of this experience has been to do with Aqualung, which is the name of a Musical Entity, which is a kind of creative exoskeleton worn by my brother Matt. Look <<< there's part of him there. Aqualung has been the most successful Musical Entity that I've ever been involved with in terms of recognition and record sales, and it has taken up a great deal of my time since it began in 2002.
Aqualung was like one of those babies that comes as a surprise to its mother. It popped out four years ago and took off with an alacrity that was almost insulting to the decade Matt and I had just spent believing in the failed rock band we'd formed. I wasn't sure whether it had anything to do with me at all, but as time went by it became clear that, naturally enough, I was Aqualung's Uncle. It wasn't my kid, but I would still have to change its nappy every once in a while. Although the truth is I haven't had to change any nappies for his actual child.
Which brings me to my new job. I am going to be what is called a 'Co-producer', and my job is to 'co-produce' the new Aqualung album. I'm not quite sure what this means. I think I must be the new album's midwife, or perhaps its Nanny. Or if this is my brother's child's child, then perhaps I am its Great Uncle.
Producer ["Daddy"] is of course Matt himself, but there is also a further Co-producer ["Great Aunt"?] whose name is Dan Swift. Between us we have to ensure the safe delivery of the new progeny to its wicked stepmother (Columbia Records), who will then whisk it out of our loving grasp and set it to work sweeping chimneys and/or flaunting its young body for sensory pleasure, by which I mean 'they will sell it at music shops'.
The concept of an 'Album' is rather amorphous these days. I'm beginning to wonder if it's even a word that people use anymore, so me using it just sounds quaint. But it is the word I use, perhaps because I am
To me, an album represents a Serving of Creativity delivered by an artist. Because records tend to be made one after the other, each one is the product of a particular period of time, thought and experience, much like this morning's poo is made out of last night's lobster. Or vice versa. That seems to be why some artist's albums come out so much better than their others. It's part of the reason why being a music fan is so exciting - you get these strange coded messages from your artists' lives and you have to try and adjust your own mind to understand it. It also explains why you get brilliant first records followed by turgid sack-of-shit saxophone-solo second albums followed by 'oh shit we're going to lose our jobs' brilliant third albums followed by the intermittently brilliant, 'we don't like each other any more but we love being rich' fourth album followed by a few irrelevant solo projects followed by creatively-bankrupt-but-brilliant-by-mistake fifth album (which will also contain the massive hit you despise) followed by death. Followed by the Greatest Hits.I used to refuse to listen to Greatest Hits collections because I hated the way you were sick of the hits when you finally got all the original albums. I figured if you liked all the greatest hits you were bound to like the rest of the stuff. But there's a lot of stuff by the bass player on the original albums, isn't there?
That's how it used to be when I was growing up, anyway. I suspect that the market is changing in favour of individual songs, now that music is almost always shuffled out of its original context, and that's fine - it means that individual songs have to be better because it gets less important who's singing them. But the album will never really die, because it corresponds to the way artists' minds work.
The record is just the final result of a long period of work that begins immediately after the last record. People don't make three records a year like they used to when Pop was young, which dictated that virtually everything anyone wrote was released, so albums genuinely were untidy snapshots of a few months. The whole process has slowed down to allow for maximum exposure of each product, so there is a lot of time and a lot of agendas at play when it comes to the statement your new album is going to make.
Aqualung's case is interesting. Matt has an advantage because it is his project, and he's also the producer, so he gets the final say on every creative decision. That doesn't mean he gets to have his own way in every decision, because as with any artist who is under contract to a record company, he has to accept that this commercial business has a huge interest in the music he's making, so he can't just tell them to fuck off. Happily, Matt has never been interested in making music that is hard to understand, so both parties have the same objective (for now at least).
This is going to be Matt's third album. He's never made a third album before. The first Aqualung album was made with absolute freedom because he made it for free. The second album was remarkable because it was the first time he'd made an album that someone actually wanted, but that came with quite a lot of pressure attached for the same reason. A lot has happened since 2003 when we made Still Life. Aqualung is now effectively an American artist, and we find ourselves in the highly unusual position of increasing success. The last eighteen months of near-constant touring in America has really paid off. The Strange & Beautiful album approaches a quarter of a million sales - nothing extraordinary in American terms, but a very real achievement for Matt - a professional mandate, if you like, to keep making music, with a growing audience to fire it at. It changes things.
Because Aqualung began with the huge exposure of a TV commercial in the UK, it was always going to be difficult to judge whether people were connecting with the artist or just the familiar song. In the US, despite extremely fortuitous early TV and film exposure, success has not been predicated on a single factor. It has been a nice little snowball, starting very small and getting bigger and faster in a very organic way. It hasn't really been that long since Matt and I played a semi-disastrous gig at Shuba's in Chicago in January 2005 (that there were nearly 100 people there that night was already amazing), to our last visit in March 2006 when we sold 1000 tickets at the Metro. I am generally cynical about the definition of 'success' ("so long as it sounds good!"), but that is as clear an indication that Something Has Happened as I can imagine.
So this is the backdrop to Aqualung's new album. Matt was thirty four in January. He was twenty when we got our first 'record deal'. It's been a long and convoluted journey, but somehow it's all led to this pivotal moment. Will Aqualung be another one of those promising bands that just sort of fizzled out, or is this going to be the moment when everything went crazy?This is a rhetorical question; you're not expected to know yet.
It's a little bit intimidating.
