Hate week is where we share and even celebrate our frustrations at music and its mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes can make you want to slam your head against a wall, but sometimes those mistakes can enrich the listening experience. In today’s guest post, you’ll find both. Thanks to thank my friend Kelly Muse for contributing the following – the man’s a friend, one hell of a good musician and, as you can see, no slouch in the writing department.
In the early days of analog recording, it was important to get a good take. Tape cost money, and editing clips together could be painfully slow. As technology progressed this got easier. Now any boob can throw together a digital recording on their computer and copy/paste it to perfection.
Why, then, a modern recording would have blatant mistakes on it is beyond me. The examples on this list exist for different reasons, and I’ll do my best to deconstruct their origins.
1. “You’re Beautiful,” James Blunt
When I was in Ecuador I went on a long bus ride, and for some reason the driver had this song running on a continuous loop. Every time the beginning of this song came around, I thought it was skipping. Why did he come in early with “My life is brilliant”? And why was it left in the song? This one gets the top spot because I have no idea what they were thinking.
Weird Al parodied this mistake brilliantly in “You’re PItiful”, but Blunt denied him permission to release it, so he put it online.
2. “Head Over Feet,” Alanis Morissette
Setting aside that the expression is “head over heels,” not feet, one could still make the case that this whole song is a mistake. The big gaff comes when Alanis does something she should probably never do – she plays the harmonica.
A quick lesson on harmonicas: they come in two flavors, diatonic and chromatic. The diatonic ones only play the notes in a certain key, so anyone can blow in and out to their heart’s content and it will sound great … as long as the chords stay in the key.
Unfortunately for Alanis, the chords of her song move away from the key and her harmonica solo sounds more and more like it’s being played by a toddler. Maybe she surrounds herself with sycophantic yes men, but a good producer would have put a stop on this train wreck.
3. “Believe,” Cher
This one may not actually contain a mistake, but I’m including it anyway because this is the first song I remember hearing that had that digital voice sound. “That digital voice sound” is actually a computerized auto-tuner; a plugin that corrects singers’ pitches. You can adjust the settings to tell it how long a note needs to stay off pitch before it is corrected, or how gradual the correction should be. If you go too far with some of the settings, it makes that digital sound.
My guess is that the engineers were fixing Cher’s singing in the studio, overdid it with the settings, and decided it sounded kind of cool.
4. “Vertigo,” U2
“Uno … dos … tres … catorce!” Catorce? 1,2,3, 14? I don’t think any of the lyrics to this song make any sense, but the opening line is baffling. In fairness, it does adhere to Bono’s law: Everything Bono does is correct.
5. “Steven’s Last Night in Town,” Ben Folds Five
For the record, I am a big fan of mistakes. As a jazz musician, most of what I do revolves around spontaneity and serendipity. I believe that an imperfect performance is more human and often more emotional than one executed with clinical perfection. The album Whatever and Ever Amen was recorded in Ben’s house, and is riddled with imperfections that only seem to add to its genius. My favorite happy accident is in “Steven’s Last Night in Town.” At 2:54 when the band breaks, you can hear the phone ring. It sounds like it belongs, which is the mark of a really good mistake.
