Posted: Fri May 12, 2006 6:43 am
I heard the same thing, but don't know any of the details. Usher was interesting to work with. We would finish a chunk of a song and have four or five harmony parts with voice-mults and all the instruments down on tape and be feeling pretty good about it. Gary would say "How 'bout we add...." and he would come up with some obscure little harmony line or instrument part which seemed totally off the wall and quite unnecessary. But when you added it in, suddenly the piece sounded complete and without it, something was missing.
A few years later we did a bunch of session work with Bob Gibson doing the producing, working on some of his stuff and some of our stuff. We noticed the same sort of thing, even though he was the old, genuine folksinger with the growly voice and the big acoustic twelve and our stuff was much more contemporary. After a while, you start to understand that self-produced recordings are often pretty inbred and that some of those seemingly strange artist/producer matches that you find listed on album covers may be exactly what the music really needed.
A few years later we did a bunch of session work with Bob Gibson doing the producing, working on some of his stuff and some of our stuff. We noticed the same sort of thing, even though he was the old, genuine folksinger with the growly voice and the big acoustic twelve and our stuff was much more contemporary. After a while, you start to understand that self-produced recordings are often pretty inbred and that some of those seemingly strange artist/producer matches that you find listed on album covers may be exactly what the music really needed.