Hack???

[willr]

Since I'm pretty new to this board maybe this was discussed in the past. Anyways I remembered the old ASD interview on youtube and it got me thinking about all the complaints about his drumming and such. Around the 5:25 mark he starts talking about letting someone play your music if they can do it better and thats the difference between an artist and a hack.....So in his own words would he consider himself a hack today? Or maybe his opinion on the subject has changed since way back then.

[scoOter]

i think it is easy to imagine one's opinion changing as one gets older, and maybe more "attached" to the songs s/he is producing. fundamentally, i don't disagree with early 90s paul in that the artist has a vision for a work of art, and in the head of the artist it is perfectly realized. but if s/he can't put it to paper or tape effectively due to shortcomings in the physical world then maybe it is better, for the work of art itself, to let other people help produce the dream. it is heady stuff, but i don't disagree with it.

but it isn't cut/dried, either. a "true artist" might well best serve his/her art entirely solo; warts & all. there's no right answer, and just because early 90s paul said that it doesn't necessarily mean he meant it 100%. he could well have been having an inner monologue at the time he said that contradicting, or at least questioning, what was coming out of his mouth at the time. it happens to me quite often, actually.

in the end, i think it all depends on just what sort of art you are trying to produce, and i think we all know that his current go it alone style has a lot to do with how he was treated during the "14 songs"/"eventually" days. he tentatively threw away outside help, i'm sure he felt it made sense to the material in his head, with "suicaine", and here we are today.

myself, i think his current stuff is less like "suicaine", though, and might in fact be better served by involving other talented, trusted folks, but that is a discussion for another thread.

one takeaway from this interview, for me, is that i would really, really like to hear a completed "all shook down" that was produced without scott litt anywhere near it.

[mrblasty]

I think that it was just a convenient excuse to allude that Chris Mars wasn't capable of doing the songs justice with his drumming abilities. The drumming on the finished ASD is not complicated, and I find it hard to believe that Chris was not involved because there was "somebody better".
Seems to me that PW was tired of being in a band, and tried distancing himself from the other members during the making of this album, and wanted players that would do what they were told, and have little input with other ideas, as a band member would.

Just my opinion, of course.

[adamapple]

i seem to recall paul being asked why he doesn't have any other guitarist play on his records and his response was that no one else could manage what he hears in his heads. he then explained this as being not so about his skill, but just someone else cannot know what you really want to hear...i think this applied to his work now, and he just doesn't want to bother anyone with venturing over to his house to play on his songs, which he would be the first to dismiss in his wonderful self deprecated way....

[FreeRider]

i take what he says with a grain of salt. i'm sure what he says in the moment is exactly how he feels...but it doesn't necessarily mean that will be his view point years later. who knows?

i recall as well that he's said it's easier for him to play with people he's "comfortable with" and that people who claim to be fans of his work and play with him get lost. He also said it was because bass players look at his hands to see what chord he's playing so they can get back to the root note of the chord, but the problem is that he plays in open tunings. That might be on the WXRT radio interview.

And in some other interviews, he has mentioned that the only person he could play with that seem to know instintively where to go was Tommy, that all he had to do was give Tommy a look or something and he'd know what Paul was going to do. I have to figure that Paul functions differently than most musicians and that's what makes him unique in his work. He obviously hears things we don't.

Neil Young is the same way. Someone brought up to him the one note solo on Cinammon Girl and he said it doesn't sound like one note to me. He said it wasn't a one STRING solo, he was playing two strings, same note but to him, he could hear a difference, so to him it wasn't a one note solo. Ohhhhh-kay.

[DoseOfThunder]

I can dig what Neil's saying - and not because I'm a crazy Neil Young fan. It just makes sense to me

This can apply to PW, eh?
"There's a lot of frustration in trying to get music out when you're the only one who hears it, especially if you have something in your head that's not normal." -Neil Young

[FreeRider]

hey dose,

nice NY quote, I hadn't heard Neil say something about having things in his head like that. I suspect highly creative people are simply different from the rest of us---I guess that's what makes them unique and able to create things that people enjoy!