I’ve been thinking a lot about my favorite songs, and how they’re sometimes a little bit unfinished, or imperfect. I famously love when a singer sounds kind of bad (Wilco is my favorite band) and I’m always excited to see an original demo on a deluxe album, but my interest in imperfection goes beyond vocal texture and acoustic guitars. Pop music is satisfying in its own way, polished until the shine is nearly blinding, but hearing an artist perform a raw version of a song is often more moving, somehow more present and real.
I got obsessed a few years ago with the Adrianne Lenker/Buck Meek b-side “A Better Time to Meet,” in which Adrianne Lenker says audibly towards the end, “Oops,” as she strikes an incorrect chord, and then another. Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek are both known for their virtuosic guitar playing, so it’s unsurprising but still impressive that the rest of the song is perfect. She falters only at the end, on the last chorus:
But you came swiftly as a snowstorm in October
Unexpectedly, you turned me into sleet
And if I could, I guess I'd love you ten times over
It's just I'd choose a better time for us to meet
Her voice is small and delicate on these early pieces, before Big Thief’s louder albums like Two Hands (2019) showed the harder, grittier side of her vocal range. Coming to these demos after being a longtime fan of Big Thief, and knowing the band’s personal history (Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek were married for a time), gave a lot of tender context to my listening experience of these really beautiful live recordings.
When I think about what I would consider to be “precise” music, I think about Prince, and his protégés. His hits’ heady energy, like in “I Wanna Be Your Lover”, rely on the dead space, the anticipation of sound, more than the sound itself. The staccato sounds give the song a sense of buoyancy, of never touching the ground but floating just above it. Notable Prince disciple Janelle Monae, in my memory, broke the Internet with the release of “Make Me Feel.” The tension built through precise silence in the verses is released in the prechoruses, which feature more traditional “wall of sound” production. “Window” by Carly Rae Jepsen, produced by Vulfpeck’s Theo Katzman, is a very egregious example of this technique; it retains its listenability, but just barely. In the chorus, there’s half a second of complete silence, without the ring of guitars, or vocals, or random reverb from anything at all. When everything cuts, it feels like all the air is sucked, instantaneously, out of the room—it’s intoxicating.
In stark contrast, the music of folk musicians like Adrianne Lenker features continuous, ringing sound, usually made by a plucked instrument. They feel notably grounded, almost rooted, in fact. The Maria BC song “Devil’s Rain” on this playlist features another continuous sound, Maria’s humming, creating an even tighter weave in the sonic fabric. The ringing notes are not always entirely consonant, creating some static tension in the song. The use of reverb and delay on the vocals on many of these songs, like “Waitless”, gives that same effect.
Music is many things—it exists on a spectrum of planning to improvisation that extends far beyond the discussion in this piece—but I’m very interested in the even narrow range of expression that exists in the commercial music that I generally consume. The perfection of form can be satisfying, but there is also beauty in human error and indecision, in wrong notes and extraneous noise in a recording (the birds chirping in “Sci-Fi Silence” by Florist is one of my favorite examples). Why is it so affecting to hear Leonard Cohen’s gravely rasp plunder around the correct notes and so rarely find them on “Treaty”, from his last album before his death in 2016? Perfection is pristine and dramatic, but imperfection, in its most sublime forms, is moving. Something about it transcends traditional bounds of what we might consider beauty, something about chance and the emotion conveyed by a refusal to revise.
I like to think about what the conversation was like in the room after Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek finished what would become the studio recording of “A Better Time to Meet.” Did they consider rerecording? Did they immediately accept that this version was something special and perfect in its own way? Did they do multiple takes and intentionally choose this one, where the two lovers are heard conversing quietly above the microphone? I hope it’s this third option, in which everyone involved recognized the beauty of this imprecise moment, and chose to share it with the world.
I'm a musician and every time I record, I end up choosing the rough but from the heart version over the version where we got it all perfectly right.... listening to 'A Better Time To Meet' now, what a beauty, thank you