The three key principles of Steve Albini: “If a record takes more than a week to make, somebody’s fucking up”
The sound of Steve Albini is a moot point – a strange thing to say about a producer, no doubt – but the energy of Steve Albini is another matter entirely. To a large extent, that’s what music is: a fuel of sorts; you can’t name it, store it or burn it, but you can feel it. That adrenalising fuel pours off of every piece of music that Albini ever made or produced. You could be subjected to a Russian sleep experiment, wearily stumble into a Shellac, and within moments, you’d be as alive and awake as a squirrel who snook into a Snickers factory.
The incorporeal energy of music is always apparent when you’re younger. Before you fall into adulthood and overthinking, the fizz and pop of rock ‘n’ roll is like a dance-inducing static. It seems this sentiment is one that never left Albini, he clung to it punk barnacle, channeling into masterpieces like Surfer Rosa, In Utero, Rid of Me, and just about everything else he touched.
Making music, to him, was largely about limiting and shunning anything that precluded the production of rarified musical fuel at its most potent. That’s the Albini sound – not a wall of strings, innovative synths or fucking cleverly composed middle eights, just raucous electricity that no scholar has ever defined but every gig goer, flagging marathon runner who staggers upon the right song on shuffle, and everyone else who has found themselves wrapped up in the euphoria of music, has felt.
To achieve this, Albini knew that the process could not be overcomplicated. That doesn’t mean that nuance and depth went out of the pitch, but both had to be sincere enough to conjure in a matter of moments. Thus, speed was an important part of his process. In fact, you can pretty much narrow down his outlook to a sacred triumvirate.
The three key principles of Steve Albini:
Technology is a means to an end and nothing more
When he mused over the worst song ever written, Albini didn’t just go for a grating melody or irritating chorus, as ever he took the soul of sacrosanct music onto his shoulders and laid into a tragic misstep in its modern constitution. “As a recording engineer—someone who is deeply embroiled in the process of making records every day—you see trends and fads run through the social organization of the population of musicians in the same way that they would run through a high school,” he told AV Club.
So, he was always wary of everyone channelling African influences in the wake of Brian Eno. But even more grating than when it is done for a mark of difference is when these progressive angles take hold, and a bandwagon is jumped on with commerciality in mind. In his view, the worst offender in history was the first song to ever use autotune. “’Believe’ is this horrible dance-pop song that Cher did in one of her many vampire-rising-from-its-own-ashes moments that she’s had so frequently in her career,” he viciously claims. “It had one of these synthetic moments that I could tell instantly, that was going to be the go-to gimmick for everyone who was stuck for an idea.”
He concluded: ”All those people who had been sneaking the odd note into Auto-Tune to try to hide the fact that they were bad singers, now they could embrace the fact that they were bad singers. That seemed inevitable, but when it finally happened, it seemed really depressing to me.”
With this in mind, tech in his own work was defined as merely a means to an end. Artists should embrace bad notes and imperfections; it’s what makes something perfectly noteworthy.
Overthinking is an enemy of great art
It’s a quote that defined his outlook: “If a record takes more than a week to make, somebody’s fucking up”. He said that in his pitch to Nirvana, who were, at that time, the biggest band in the world, fresh off the bombastic success of Nevermind, when other potential producers were likely telling them that they would devote every minute of an entire year to fine-tuning their follow-up.
Instead, Albini wanted to get straight to the heart of it. Sure, Les Misérables might’ve taken 12 years to write, but at their peak, the Donald brothers were cracking out a copy of Viz every month and trading the desk for the pub by 3pm, and I know which one I think is better. As he said himself, ”All an album should be is a representation of a band doing its thing presented in a permanent format. It shouldn’t take a month to do that.”
He had three tips to achieve this: brevity, track live, and speak your mind. He might not have produced them, but proof that this works can be found in the fact that Bob Dylan created three of the finest albums in existence – Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965), and Blonde on Blonde (1966) – in a little over 15 months. That’s not a bad trick to beat new bands into a state of sincerity with. Albini used it with aplomb.
Knowledge is power
Much of this has painted Albini as some sort of slapdash heathen who simply hit record and either played or demanded punk at its most simple. Alas, this is also untrue. It’s actually just that he hid the intricacies and fiddly bits from view, creating a more conducive environment for fuel production and consumption, in turn.
When Far Out spoke to David Gedge of The Wedding Present, he explained how Albini paved the way towards perfection, like the planner of Central Park: you barely realised that the magic occurring behind the mixing desk was manmade. “We just really got on. He’s got this reputation of being difficult to work with, but he was absolutely perfect for us,“ Gedge explains. “It’s all boring stuff really, but he just knows about EQs and where to put microphones so that a drumkit sounds right, all the boring stuff that I have no interest in, really.”
With such knowledge and expertise stowed away, this allowed Albini to simply treat what followed his groundwork as play. It was almost like he was trying to get back to the prelapsarian point of childhood where music is merely energy, paradoxically by learning everything there is to know about. It’s hard not to listen to Surfer Rosa and think that he very possibly achieved that Promethean feat.
