Author Topic: I AM A RESIDENT (Project of the Week for.. awhile)  (Read 1421 times)

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goatie

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Re: I AM A RESIDENT
« on: June 09, 2018, 08:34:18 am »
As an album, I AM A RESIDENT! ended up being much better than I had expected.  Here's the thing about tribute albums: they're usually pretty boring.  It seems to me that only one band knows how to cover The Residents well, and that band is, well, The Residents.  Residents covers generally follow one of three patterns: 1) make it heavier/edgier (boring), make it weirder (you're trying too hard and it shows), make it sound like the original (what's the point?).
   
So I was delighted with the submissions that did something very different with the songs.  I've already publicly expressed my love for the OK Glass version of "Moisture," but there were several submissions that seemed to break down the song into basic pieces and then rebuild from there.  They didn't sound like covers, but originals.
   
But even so, a collection of cover songs isn't really exciting.  As originally conceived, I expected that I'd listen to it a couple of times then put it away for a few years before listening again to see if I happened to like it.  But the collaborative aspect really changed things.  This is really a new Residents album with a bunch of new Residents participating... or I guess I could just shorten that to "this is a new Residents album" because who knows and/or cares how many times there's been a change to the roster?  It ceases to sound like a collection of songs and begins to sound like a piece that was always conceived to be this way.  If you told someone the original idea behind this album was to gather a bunch of musicians and have them record parts to be mixed into the suite, they'd probably believe you.

And for any contributor whose track was augmented with actual Residents, that's got to be the thrill of a lifetime.  I can't imagine the pants-wetting joy that comes from the double whammy of "hey, that's me!" quickly followed by "holy amazeballs, that's The Residents PLAYING ALONG WITH ME!"

We also got to see a little bit into how The Residents functions as an idea factory.  The original plan was just to collect about a dozen songs, slap them on a disc, and call it a day.  And after submissions started coming in, everything changed.  We normally only see the finished project, but in this case we got to see it evolving, which is perhaps the closest we'll get to a kind of in the studio documentary.
   
As for my part... since I was managing the submissions side of things, I got to see a lot more of how ideas spring up and course corrections are made in order to reach the final destination (or, in this case, to discover what the final destination is).  I'll be honest: it was frustrating at times when something new came up and I had to scramble to figure out how to implement my part of it.  The Residents are very willing to shift to a new idea, and from a distance that can look unfocused or scatterbrained, but it's actually a very determined drive to produce the best end product.  Given what I now know, I definitely would change some of how it all got handled, but I wouldn't step away from the opportunity to be a part of something so ultimately satisfying.