Believe it or not, Im goin as fast as I can, Bruce Springsteen told a journalist who asked why it was taking him so long to get The River finished. The decision had been made to record the album live in the studio. So there were no endless overdub sessions spent fine tuning the details of a song. (Remember those countless hours in the studio reworking Born to Run, rethinking Thunder Road, and reinventing Jungleland?) Instead, for The River, the entire band would reassemble on the sound stage to attack each number again and again until Springsteen felt theyd gotten it right, all of them, simultaneously. And he swore there werent more than ten takes on any of the songs. Most of them were finished in less than five. The only overdubbing on the album is vocal overdubbing, said Springsteen. And thats not on everything. We recorded in a big room, and we got a real hard drum sound. Of all the albums, I think The River is the album that most captures what happen when we play live. What was taking so much time in the studio was Springsteens indecisiveness about which of the fifty—thats right, fifty—songs theyd recorded should be included on the new album. Originally it was a single record, he admitted. I handed it in with just one records worth of songs, and I took it back because I didnt feel it was big enough. It lacked the unity and conceptual intensity I liked my music to have. I wanted to capture the themes I had been writing about on Darkness on the Edge of Town—I wanted to keep those characters with me. And at the same time I added music that made our live shows so much fun and joy for our audience. And even when a two-record version of The River had been sent off to be pressed to vinyl, Springsteen yanked it back at the last moment to remove a song hed changed his mind about. With all the fretting and second guessing over song choices, some critics accused Springsteen of squeezing the life out of his music by worrying it to death. Naturally, he had a reply for them. Elvis Presley did like thirty takes of Hound Dog. And you put that thing on and it sounds spontaneous. If I thought I couldve made a better record in half the time, thats exactly what I wouldve done. Cause Id rather be out playing. https://youtube/watch?v=JP7OV8G7UxQ
Posted on: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 21:36:52 +0000
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