Gosh we want the recording artists we love to be behind the music we listen to, don’t we?
Well. If you you still are enjoying that delusion, then don’t read this book!
Because most popular music is made much like laws are made. It’s sometimes ugly. And dozens of people often have their hands in it.
Discovering this reality feels something like learning that your favorite musician can’t read music…
I mean, this book was a superb peak behind the curtain at songwriting, but Seabrooks’s son gets it right.
“Disillusioning” is the perfect word for it.
But he does sometimes seem nostalgic for those golden days before I got interested in the songwriters and producers behind his music (thanks in large part to him)—those salad days when he innocently assumed that the songs were created by the artists who sang them. “I sort of wish you hadn’t told me this stuff,” he said, when we talked after the book came out. “It’s kind of disillusioning.”
-John Seabrook, The Song Machine