"Sometimes my contribution [as a record producer] might have been as minimal as just saying, 'Shall we stop for a few minutes?... And then of course, other times I work like a normal musician. I say, 'Why don’t we have a G major instead of that B minor' or whatever. In fact, I nearly always say that, 'Why don’t we have a major instead of a minor?' It’s part of my destroy-minor-chords crusade that has been going on for 50 years or so"
- Brian Eno
Questions for people who know music from a musician's point of view:
- why would Eno take against minor chords? (Is it because they connote a "subtlety" that he finds middebrow, a too easy signaling of sophistication?)
- does Eno in fact avoid minor chords in his work? I haven't inspected them with this in mind (and not wholly confident I would spot their presence) but I can't help thinking that the downbeat, dreamy-drifty songs on Another Green World and Before and After Science might feature some minor chords...
It’s the same energy as the famous Rick Rubin clip about not being able to do anything in the studio: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1MPZ3T8Per/?mibextid=wwXIfr
ReplyDeleteAlthough I have seen someone claim that Rubin is in fact deeply versed in every technical detail of the recording process, and just feigns ignorance to create aura.
He is sort of the horse whisperer archetype, Rubin. Like he'll have some big macro idea - I remember reading in a NY profile of Neil Diamond that Rubin persuaded Diamond to play guitar while singing, like he used to on his exciting 1960s hits. Or it'll be suggesting songs to cover to reinflect the artist's image.
ReplyDeleteI remember someone saying that a big part of being a producer is acting like a kind of therapist, steadying the artist's nerves, or mediating in inter-band conflicts.
Eno is the king of 'blockage'-removing bright ideas - like getting James to record two albums simultaneously, one experimental and the other completely commercial, rather than agonizingly trying to blend the two.
Or with U2, on one album, they had two different studio side by side, and as soon as they reached an impasse with one song, they'd jump to the other studio and start another one, or resume work on something else. Of course this is only possible at a certain stratospheric level of rock stardom, where you have your own studios, or can afford to book two next to each other.
https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab/brian-eno/by-this-river-chords-1498022
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I looked through these online guitar transcriptions (I am almost tone-deaf, this is the best I can do if I try to badly play some music) and in fact the minor chords in Eno's songs I checked are often absent or underused, but there are exceptions of course, such as By This River (perhaps because cowritten with Cluster?).
Maybe just an instance of dry humour not coming across in print? "It’s part of my destroy-minor-chords crusade that has been going on for 50 years or so", Eno said with a wry smile.
ReplyDeleteYeah it's obviously a witty remark but I think he means it. And if that's the case, I'm interested in finding out what would be the reasoning or feeling behind such a stance. I'm guessing because he thinks they are faux-sophisticated, like a cheap of way of evoking subtlety.
DeleteMaybe it's because the minimalist composers and systems music types he's into, they avoided minor chords.... this is just a guess.
I remember Band of Susans, who came by minimalism through a different route (Rhys Chatham), they had a thing about all their songs were major chords.
Seventh chords are always the best chords, and pentatonic scales are always the best scales. Can't go wrong with either of them.
ReplyDeleteHere’s Eno shedding a bit more light on his views on minor chords, in a conversation with James Blake:
ReplyDelete“For songwriters…I really think they often think, ‘Oh, it’s all majors. I better put in a minor’. Fucking why? You don’t have to put sugar in everything you cook. I used to say, ‘Ban all minor chords,’ just to annoy people – just to make them think differently about what they were doing.”
Source: https://youtu.be/iWN-kW-qpfc?si=3tqrjdBtoCJvGYOK
Written up here: https://musictech.com/news/music/brian-eno-hates-the-arsehole-chord/#
Ah, excellent - so he means and not-means it. It's a wind-up but he also thinks they are overrated and over-used.
DeleteI would have thought minor chords corresponded not to sugar but to some other flavoring - salt? something sour?
Isn't it because sugar corresponds to cheap sentimentality? A routine trick for triggering a standard emotional response. We talk about maudlin and mawkish music as being "sugary" or even "saccharine".
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