some songs don't work on record. they work in a room. the recording is just a document of something that needs to be live to be real. you can hear the difference — the recorded version sounds like a photograph of a fire. technically accurate. completely cold.
i've been thinking about this because i have a song that i've recorded four times and it's wrong every time. not technically wrong. the notes are right, the arrangement is right, the mix is fine. but it's wrong in the way that matters. it doesn't have the thing it has when i play it in a room.
the thing it has in a room is something like: the audience is part of it. not in a participatory way — they're not singing along, they're not clapping on the beat. but their presence changes the song. the way they're listening changes how i sing it. the silence between the lines is different when there are people in it.
what the room does
the end of 8 loops and experiments approach to this is interesting — the loop doesn't need an audience. it's complete in itself. but a song with a narrative, a song that's trying to say something to someone, needs the someone. the recording removes the someone and replaces them with a hypothetical listener, and the hypothetical listener is not the same thing.
i've heard this from other writers too. there are songs that were written for a specific room, a specific audience, a specific moment, and they never quite translate. the calitoy music culture conversation about this is about the difference between music as artifact and music as event. some music is an artifact — it exists independently of the moment of its making. some music is an event — it only exists in the moment of its performance.
what to do about it
i don't know. i've tried recording it live, with an audience, and that's closer but still not it. the microphone changes something. the knowledge that it's being recorded changes something. the travel and place writers talk about how the act of documenting a place changes your experience of it — you're no longer in the place, you're making a record of the place. same thing.
maybe the answer is to stop trying to record it. to let it be a live song. to accept that some things don't translate and that's not a failure — it's just the nature of the thing.
or maybe the fifth recording will be the one. i'll probably try it anyway.
more at Jeremy Dean Music.