I’ll be talking about music and recording it and mixing it and producing it here, with no knowledge of the technical terminology or theories in those domains. I’m sure people with expertise in that regard will pop up in comments to help. Be gentle. My girlfriend and I watched the new Alanis Morrissette documentary on HBO recently. The movie was… alright. There’s a Bill Simmonsy feeling to it that I find distasteful, but the footage is great and Morrissette is candid and sweet. They do try to cram a narrative or two in there - there’s this whole diversion about how the members of the touring band needed to understand that Alanis was the draw, not them, but there’s literally no evidence that they ever disagreed - but it’s not as egregious as
one tidbit I couldn't fit in: that year the very influential magazine Entertainment Weekly said that Alanis Morrissette was all hype and would be quickly forgotten, while Joan Osborne of "One of Us" fame would endure lol
The point about overproduction not necessarily being a lot of production is key. Overproduction is when - precisely as Freddie says - production gets in the way of the music. It's when it becomes an end of itself, either to try to hit a stylistic note that's very "of the moment" but doesn't sound natural, or because the producer likes his studio toys a bit too much.
In movies, it's when the director's clever angles take you out of the moment. Or layering reference upon reference so the film is really a film about how much you know about films.
In fine dining - easily the most dissolute and decadent of interests, and therefore the one in which excesses are most easily used and abused - it's when a quality ingredient is surrounded by a phalanx of gels, granitas, snows, reductions, edible flowers, gold leaves, and single-origin first-growth shitberries, all to show off how cute and radical the chef is.
In literature... Cormac McCarthy can get away with his spare style and his zero punctuation because, at bottom, he still hits the narrative notes and memorable, often shocking characterization that one expects of the novel. People trying to be McCarthy usually can't do that, so picking through their prose is like picking around the edible flowers trying to find some protein.
And in music, the likes of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson used the studio as an instrument and produced the hell out of their music - but not at the cost of coherence and a level of naturalism. That, for me, is what overproduction is. It's not elaboration, it's not even artificiality, but it's *an excess* of these things to the point of intrustion.
To (over)simplify it: production succeeds when production isn't detectable.
something that's gotten worse in recent years is that all producers now have a huge sample pack of every perfect instrument sound known to man, and it's pretty easy to have someone lay down, say, a drum part and then have a megalomaniacal producer go in and replace each hit digitally with whatever he considers the platonic ideal of a drum hit. if you're a young band and you have a limited amount of studio time, this can be done totally without your consent, and then you face the choice of living with it or spending against your advance while going against the wishes of big name producer x who can make or break your career.
i'm not sure if this was happening in the 90s but it's definitely happening today. it's really bad in modern country, since it's the only modern pop music that still relies on live instruments to a degree. once you start hearing the same drum sounds on country radio you won't be able to stop.
i always show people this willie nelson cover to demonstrate how overproduction can completely ruin a song. the original one is just guitar and pedal steel and lets the lyrics and the vocals breathe (it helps that willie is a vocal genius ofc). the cover adds a bunch of unnecessary stuff including the shittiest, most sample pack-y snare hit in the world.
I’m a metalhead the same age as you, and I’m friends with some younger guys from my union local who are really into Chelsea Grin-style deathcore, and while I appreciate the sheer terror that bands like that can generate I really do not appreciate the overly slick production. It’s hard explaining that to dudes who are too young to have been into black/death/sludge when it was truly grimy, that I WANT this music to sound like that, that very few metal bands are done any favors by the Era of Perfect Music.
Regarding the Beatles' "Let It Be", Phil Spector was not the original producer; he was brought in to "re-produce" the album a year after the Beatles abandoned it. The tapes he had to work with were a mass of rehearsals and experiments with different arrangements, and few of the songs had been brought to the point of making a final take for release. Spector did what he could to make a releasable commercial pop album out of all that, but it was an exercise in putting lipstick on a pig (even if it was a very nice pig -- this was the Beatles, after all). His natural tendency towards excess is certainly apparent on "The Long and Winding Road" and "Across the Universe", but most of the album isn't nearly that bad, and there was never any chance that the resulting album was going to be a masterpiece.
As for Alanis Morissette, I don't mind women singing about being angry, but Morrissette's apparent inability to reflect, as demonstrated by her constant attitude of "It's all your fault" (as one of the songs said flat out), is a big turn-off to me. There is a difference between making art and just blasting your feelings out. (And then there's the irony of writing a song called "Ironic" when you don't know what the word means... but that's a cheap shot.) She was different from run-of-the-mill pop stars, true, but she wasn't deep, and being different from Mariah Carey isn't much of a recommendation. Tori Amos and Fiona Apple were (and still are) better artists than Alanis Morissette on every level imaginable: more insightful, more able to translate feelings into art, better musicians, better singers.
I agree with what you say about the overly-slick production, but as you say, that was the sound of the time. Actually, it's been the sound of the time for a long time. Overproduction and slickness have been a thing in pop music at least since the '70s when 16-track and 24-track recording equipment became available, and it's still the case today. The "VH1 drums" are a particular mid-'90s thing, but other eras had their equivalents, such as the "gated reverb drums" of the '80s (think Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight").
The art of record production and mixing progressed along with the technology (actually a bit behind it, since producers and engineers needed time to figure out what could be done with each new piece of gear). Back in the '50s, making a record just meant setting up some microphones and recording a performance to tape, then releasing it. If you wanted reverb on the vocals, you had to set up a spring plate behind the singer. The introduction of multi-track recording, studio effects, and eventually digital workstation software like ProTools have gradually transformed the art of record-making to the point that it bears very little resemblance to the art of live performance, and accordingly, the finished product has, over time, come to sound less and less like real performance, and more like a sculpted and polished representation of music, which is pretty much what it is.
A lot of electronic music is overproduced. If you listen back to old house and techno records, the ones that sound the least dated in my opinion tend to be more minimal. Sometimes less is more.
Great post, Freddie. I *hated* this album when I was in high school. Alanis and Joan Osborne were only good for mockery at the time. I've softened a lot over the years to a lot of 90s music that I couldn't stand at the time because nostalgia worms its way into our brains whether we like it or not. (I'm a lot less critical of 90s pop than I was as a teenage boy, to the point where I'll happily sing along to 'Don't go chasing waterfalls' when back in the day if it wasn't grunge or gangster rap I wasn't interested--unless it was older music).
That decade was weird because there were a lot of terrific bands and albums and then there was a lot of "overproduced" stuff like Jagged Little Pill that could have been so much better if it had been more natural. Go sit around a fire and jam those tunes and record the results.
There's almost an audial Uncanny Valley sometimes. It's hard to put into words. Like adding too much sugar to something that needed more salt.
The 2000s suffered from many of the same problems, though I think a lot of smaller labels started moving in the right direction eventually. You can have pretty "lavish" productions on songs like Pure Comedy by Father John Misty but it never feels unnatural. It's big and orchestral and dramatic but it's supposed to be, and it feels natural rather than forced. Bands like The National put a lot of effort into instrumentation but always manage to stay true to their sound in the studio.
Still, a lot of great 90s stuff. Nirvana (and I still like Nevermind and think Cobain is at least partly to blame for its over-production no matter what he said later) and Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead and so many other great bands sprouted up that decade.
I was 12 when Jagged Little Pill came out. When I heard the hidden track that plays at the end of the album (“Your House”) I thought I was the only one who had it, and that when I came forward I would be on the news.
Anyway, my friends crushed that dream—they all had the track too—but “Your House” is an interesting contrast to the rest of the album because there are no instruments. I wish they’d ditched the heavy echo effect on her voice, though, so it would feel truly stripped down. Even for an unofficial a capella track, they felt the need to distort the vocals somehow.
This made me think so fondly of the music I loved in high school, especially those artists with relatively small-time careers who grew over the time I listened to them. There's definitely an identifiable split - some bands I stopped listening to after whatever album, and it nearly always had to do with the production. They would get enough money and studio clout to get *a* producer, as opposed to mixing on their own or with the help of more-experienced friends, but not a producer who actually cared about making the music sound like *their* music. And there are some (Vienna Teng comes to mind) who slowly notched up their production one album at a time, always trying out new stuff but always in the service of the sound they knew they wanted to make. These days I listen to the Mountain Goats in large part for their production - their lyrics are always knockout good, but every album is now a gorgeous production experiment building on previous work while trying something very new. Getting to follow the journey is a real joy of liking the band for so many years.
...And, still knowing nothing about production, I consider Lorde's "Melodrama" to be an absolute modern masterpiece of the form. The layers of sounds, the whispers, the closeness or distance of her voice from the listener... it's incredibly clean and polished, but exactly at the sweet spot, never overproduced.
i don't know if this is a relevant comment or not but I love your music writing so much and would literally pay for a dedicated music criticism/writing newsletter it's SO GOOD every time
I loved Jagged Little Pill. I have very fond memories of the summer of 1995 that revolve around that album. I was painting house with my friends, where we usually snuck a joint or a beer on the roof (hey, you want your house painted cheaply, you get teenagers smoking pot under the eaves). It seemed like the entire album was on permanent rotation on the radio, and it was one of the few CDs I owned that was released post-1980 or so. It might have been the greatest summer of my youth, and that album was intricately woven into it in the way music is when you're young. I haven't listened to it much since then, but it's so etched in my memory that I can still name the tracks, in order.
I agree that the mix could have been stripped down a bit, something closer to Exile in Guyville, an album I always thought Alanis owed a big debt to (though that could be more because I was listening to them at more or less the same time). That push and pull between heavy production and lo-fi integrity has been around forever. Think of the environment the Stones released Exile on Main St in.
I agree that All I Really Want is the best track by a fair distance. Hand in My Pocket is probably #2.
Off topic, but a lot of video games are arguably “overproduced,” eg too much focus on being movie-like or having a realistic open world at the expense of actual gameplay.
Thanks this is the kind of writing I subscribed for.
One wonders what sort of audio setup FdB is listening on. Sounds like a pretty 'resolving' setup, or a very high quality built-in amp/speaker on the TV. Have you listened to this album on high fidelity headphones?
one tidbit I couldn't fit in: that year the very influential magazine Entertainment Weekly said that Alanis Morrissette was all hype and would be quickly forgotten, while Joan Osborne of "One of Us" fame would endure lol
I'm curious, and to establish a common scale, do you find the song Bohemian Rhapsody overpriduced?
The point about overproduction not necessarily being a lot of production is key. Overproduction is when - precisely as Freddie says - production gets in the way of the music. It's when it becomes an end of itself, either to try to hit a stylistic note that's very "of the moment" but doesn't sound natural, or because the producer likes his studio toys a bit too much.
In movies, it's when the director's clever angles take you out of the moment. Or layering reference upon reference so the film is really a film about how much you know about films.
In fine dining - easily the most dissolute and decadent of interests, and therefore the one in which excesses are most easily used and abused - it's when a quality ingredient is surrounded by a phalanx of gels, granitas, snows, reductions, edible flowers, gold leaves, and single-origin first-growth shitberries, all to show off how cute and radical the chef is.
In literature... Cormac McCarthy can get away with his spare style and his zero punctuation because, at bottom, he still hits the narrative notes and memorable, often shocking characterization that one expects of the novel. People trying to be McCarthy usually can't do that, so picking through their prose is like picking around the edible flowers trying to find some protein.
And in music, the likes of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson used the studio as an instrument and produced the hell out of their music - but not at the cost of coherence and a level of naturalism. That, for me, is what overproduction is. It's not elaboration, it's not even artificiality, but it's *an excess* of these things to the point of intrustion.
To (over)simplify it: production succeeds when production isn't detectable.
something that's gotten worse in recent years is that all producers now have a huge sample pack of every perfect instrument sound known to man, and it's pretty easy to have someone lay down, say, a drum part and then have a megalomaniacal producer go in and replace each hit digitally with whatever he considers the platonic ideal of a drum hit. if you're a young band and you have a limited amount of studio time, this can be done totally without your consent, and then you face the choice of living with it or spending against your advance while going against the wishes of big name producer x who can make or break your career.
i'm not sure if this was happening in the 90s but it's definitely happening today. it's really bad in modern country, since it's the only modern pop music that still relies on live instruments to a degree. once you start hearing the same drum sounds on country radio you won't be able to stop.
i always show people this willie nelson cover to demonstrate how overproduction can completely ruin a song. the original one is just guitar and pedal steel and lets the lyrics and the vocals breathe (it helps that willie is a vocal genius ofc). the cover adds a bunch of unnecessary stuff including the shittiest, most sample pack-y snare hit in the world.
original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5pzcHY-Z2g
cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9TGi_wM68o
I’m a metalhead the same age as you, and I’m friends with some younger guys from my union local who are really into Chelsea Grin-style deathcore, and while I appreciate the sheer terror that bands like that can generate I really do not appreciate the overly slick production. It’s hard explaining that to dudes who are too young to have been into black/death/sludge when it was truly grimy, that I WANT this music to sound like that, that very few metal bands are done any favors by the Era of Perfect Music.
Okay, that's an interesting take.
Regarding the Beatles' "Let It Be", Phil Spector was not the original producer; he was brought in to "re-produce" the album a year after the Beatles abandoned it. The tapes he had to work with were a mass of rehearsals and experiments with different arrangements, and few of the songs had been brought to the point of making a final take for release. Spector did what he could to make a releasable commercial pop album out of all that, but it was an exercise in putting lipstick on a pig (even if it was a very nice pig -- this was the Beatles, after all). His natural tendency towards excess is certainly apparent on "The Long and Winding Road" and "Across the Universe", but most of the album isn't nearly that bad, and there was never any chance that the resulting album was going to be a masterpiece.
As for Alanis Morissette, I don't mind women singing about being angry, but Morrissette's apparent inability to reflect, as demonstrated by her constant attitude of "It's all your fault" (as one of the songs said flat out), is a big turn-off to me. There is a difference between making art and just blasting your feelings out. (And then there's the irony of writing a song called "Ironic" when you don't know what the word means... but that's a cheap shot.) She was different from run-of-the-mill pop stars, true, but she wasn't deep, and being different from Mariah Carey isn't much of a recommendation. Tori Amos and Fiona Apple were (and still are) better artists than Alanis Morissette on every level imaginable: more insightful, more able to translate feelings into art, better musicians, better singers.
I agree with what you say about the overly-slick production, but as you say, that was the sound of the time. Actually, it's been the sound of the time for a long time. Overproduction and slickness have been a thing in pop music at least since the '70s when 16-track and 24-track recording equipment became available, and it's still the case today. The "VH1 drums" are a particular mid-'90s thing, but other eras had their equivalents, such as the "gated reverb drums" of the '80s (think Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight").
The art of record production and mixing progressed along with the technology (actually a bit behind it, since producers and engineers needed time to figure out what could be done with each new piece of gear). Back in the '50s, making a record just meant setting up some microphones and recording a performance to tape, then releasing it. If you wanted reverb on the vocals, you had to set up a spring plate behind the singer. The introduction of multi-track recording, studio effects, and eventually digital workstation software like ProTools have gradually transformed the art of record-making to the point that it bears very little resemblance to the art of live performance, and accordingly, the finished product has, over time, come to sound less and less like real performance, and more like a sculpted and polished representation of music, which is pretty much what it is.
A lot of electronic music is overproduced. If you listen back to old house and techno records, the ones that sound the least dated in my opinion tend to be more minimal. Sometimes less is more.
Great post, Freddie. I *hated* this album when I was in high school. Alanis and Joan Osborne were only good for mockery at the time. I've softened a lot over the years to a lot of 90s music that I couldn't stand at the time because nostalgia worms its way into our brains whether we like it or not. (I'm a lot less critical of 90s pop than I was as a teenage boy, to the point where I'll happily sing along to 'Don't go chasing waterfalls' when back in the day if it wasn't grunge or gangster rap I wasn't interested--unless it was older music).
That decade was weird because there were a lot of terrific bands and albums and then there was a lot of "overproduced" stuff like Jagged Little Pill that could have been so much better if it had been more natural. Go sit around a fire and jam those tunes and record the results.
There's almost an audial Uncanny Valley sometimes. It's hard to put into words. Like adding too much sugar to something that needed more salt.
The 2000s suffered from many of the same problems, though I think a lot of smaller labels started moving in the right direction eventually. You can have pretty "lavish" productions on songs like Pure Comedy by Father John Misty but it never feels unnatural. It's big and orchestral and dramatic but it's supposed to be, and it feels natural rather than forced. Bands like The National put a lot of effort into instrumentation but always manage to stay true to their sound in the studio.
Still, a lot of great 90s stuff. Nirvana (and I still like Nevermind and think Cobain is at least partly to blame for its over-production no matter what he said later) and Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead and so many other great bands sprouted up that decade.
I was 12 when Jagged Little Pill came out. When I heard the hidden track that plays at the end of the album (“Your House”) I thought I was the only one who had it, and that when I came forward I would be on the news.
Anyway, my friends crushed that dream—they all had the track too—but “Your House” is an interesting contrast to the rest of the album because there are no instruments. I wish they’d ditched the heavy echo effect on her voice, though, so it would feel truly stripped down. Even for an unofficial a capella track, they felt the need to distort the vocals somehow.
Your House: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIwFsYyroJ0
This made me think so fondly of the music I loved in high school, especially those artists with relatively small-time careers who grew over the time I listened to them. There's definitely an identifiable split - some bands I stopped listening to after whatever album, and it nearly always had to do with the production. They would get enough money and studio clout to get *a* producer, as opposed to mixing on their own or with the help of more-experienced friends, but not a producer who actually cared about making the music sound like *their* music. And there are some (Vienna Teng comes to mind) who slowly notched up their production one album at a time, always trying out new stuff but always in the service of the sound they knew they wanted to make. These days I listen to the Mountain Goats in large part for their production - their lyrics are always knockout good, but every album is now a gorgeous production experiment building on previous work while trying something very new. Getting to follow the journey is a real joy of liking the band for so many years.
...And, still knowing nothing about production, I consider Lorde's "Melodrama" to be an absolute modern masterpiece of the form. The layers of sounds, the whispers, the closeness or distance of her voice from the listener... it's incredibly clean and polished, but exactly at the sweet spot, never overproduced.
i don't know if this is a relevant comment or not but I love your music writing so much and would literally pay for a dedicated music criticism/writing newsletter it's SO GOOD every time
I loved Jagged Little Pill. I have very fond memories of the summer of 1995 that revolve around that album. I was painting house with my friends, where we usually snuck a joint or a beer on the roof (hey, you want your house painted cheaply, you get teenagers smoking pot under the eaves). It seemed like the entire album was on permanent rotation on the radio, and it was one of the few CDs I owned that was released post-1980 or so. It might have been the greatest summer of my youth, and that album was intricately woven into it in the way music is when you're young. I haven't listened to it much since then, but it's so etched in my memory that I can still name the tracks, in order.
I agree that the mix could have been stripped down a bit, something closer to Exile in Guyville, an album I always thought Alanis owed a big debt to (though that could be more because I was listening to them at more or less the same time). That push and pull between heavy production and lo-fi integrity has been around forever. Think of the environment the Stones released Exile on Main St in.
I agree that All I Really Want is the best track by a fair distance. Hand in My Pocket is probably #2.
Off topic, but a lot of video games are arguably “overproduced,” eg too much focus on being movie-like or having a realistic open world at the expense of actual gameplay.
Thanks this is the kind of writing I subscribed for.
One wonders what sort of audio setup FdB is listening on. Sounds like a pretty 'resolving' setup, or a very high quality built-in amp/speaker on the TV. Have you listened to this album on high fidelity headphones?