In his memoir, Born To Run, Bruce Springsteen writes of his frustrations in getting the sound in his head down on tape in the Darkness on the Edge of Town sessions:
"… you can’t feature everything, for in effect you’re featuring nothing. Phil Spector’s records aren’t sonically big. The technology wasn’t there. They just sound bigger than your world. It’s a beautiful illusion.”
This is something we’ve been slowly learning, as we blunder our way through making recordings of our music. In fact, it appears that if you pursue technical “perfection" too much, you can easily break this illusion. It’s a vision through a dirty and clouded window, where the fogginess is part of the picture. Clean that window too much and the spectacle doesn’t have the same effect. Distortion can make a vocal larger than life, compression causes drums to explode. Your rock ’n’ roll track just ain’t gonna cut it if you can’t make it seem like it’s bursting to break out of the speakers.
Springsteen’s own work is interesting when viewed from this angle. Each of his albums, up until, say Tunnel of Love (1987), has its own sonic signature. And from reading Born To Run, it’s apparent that this is partly the result of chasing down an ideal, that each album represents some kind of development in how he and his production team approach producing music. This is fascinating and inspiring. They start off with the same punk, DIY, attitude that we’ve adopted and just do their own thing. The zenith of this might be Nebraska (1982) where he released the home-made cassette tape recordings originally intended as demos. The whole album is spooky and distorted, with a mood so thick you could touch it. After Tunnel of Love, however, I can’t say that his work has quite the same appeal sonically. There’s some pretty good stuff going on musically in some of his more recent albums but the production is just very… professional.
Something strange happens when the production values are a little bit too slick. Music doesn’t reach into people when recorded that way because it lays bare the beautiful illusion. This is not always bad - Uptown Funk doesn’t really need to connect with you on that kind of level, it just needs to get your bum shaking. However, the danger is in always making music that way by default. Without thinking about how that affects the song and how the listener will respond to it. In any other art form, the effect that different tools and the choice of medium used is generally well understood. Painters will vary the type of brush, paint, and canvas; analogue photographers will select different films, cameras, and lenses. Even writers will decide to pen things by hand, use a typewriter, or even a smartphone over a computer with a keyboard. It’s all done to control the end result.
Another classic, storied, example of using production thoughtfully is Led Zeppelin's When The Levee Breaks (1971). From the unconventional drum sound to the fact that the instrumental tracks were recorded faster and in a higher key then slowed down for the vocal all help to create the swampy, sludgy texture that’s brilliantly evocative of the floods in the lyrics. Even the mix supports the illusion by slowly burying the lead vocal as the song progresses and adding a chorusing effect to make it sound as if it's being washed away. The song just doesn’t work the same way live and indeed Led Zep only played it a handful of times despite it being from their early period. As music professor Ethan Hein puts it, Jimmy Page’s production does a lot of “musical heavy lifting” to create the effect.
More recently, Neil Young recorded A Letter Home entirely in Jack White's restored "Voice-O-Graph" direct-to-vinyl recording booth for a super old-timey roughed up sound. The album just wouldn't be compelling in the same way without it.
As a final example, we did an entire podcast episode on the Queens of The Stone Age album Songs For The Deaf. Who would have thought you could create a classic rock album by boosting EVERY mid control within reach on the guitars? Usually, people are trying to take the mid-range out of modern rock guitars. But not only does it create a cool sound in its own right, but it also fits into the "listening to a car radio on a road trip" concept which runs through the album. The middly guitars and dry, hollowed out drums sound like they're already busting up a poor little speaker.
They are bigger than your world.