On Wilco, Joe Meno, and Editors.

Interesting post from Patrick at Vroman’s looking at Sam Jones’s film I Am Trying To Break Your Heart and how its subject — the recording and release of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot — relates to many current debates on the evolution of media. I’m glad to see someone raising the subject of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, because I do think that the issues surrounding its release are worth revisiting — though my angle on things is more in line with the argument that the YHF debate, along with a number of copyright and distribution issues currently up for debate, long predate the popularity of digital formats for music.

Where I find myself disagreeing with the post comes towards the end, where Patrick argues:

…the film stands as a testament to how flawed many media conglomerates are at selling content, and how other, smarter companies (or even the artists themselves) might be able to replace them.  It doesn’t seem to me to matter very much whether those comanies are selling CDs or books.

While I do think that there are more similarities than differences between popular music and creative writing, I don’t feel that a one-to-one correlation between the promotion and distribution of both makes sense. The example given begins with a touring band; Wilco spend an impressive amount of time on the road, and singer/guitarist Jeff Tweedy has done a fair amount of solo tours as well. Generally, touring musicians are going to have the opportunity to try out new songs in a live setting. They’ll have an opportunity to see how an audience reacts and to explore the dynamics of a song long before they head into a studio to record that same song.

An example: when I interviewed Oxford Collapse for Death+Taxes last year, they commented that the Daytrotter session that they had done a few months prior to recording their album Bits had given them the ability to hear some of their songs-in-progress committed to tape. And if the artist in question is working with a producer, that’s yet another layer of feedback that’s introduced into the process. Writing fiction, by comparison, is a relatively solitary act, and I don’t think a writing group is a direct analogue to playing new songs repeatedly onstage.

All of which suggests to me that, for all that there’s an attempt to set up a correlation between large record labels and large publishing houses, there’s one key difference: the editorial aspect is in place for a musician in a place  (in theory) separate from the institution charged with promoting and distributing their work, while on the publishing side, the editorial component is not. Also worth mentioning might be the fact that a number of novelists whose recent work I’ve admired (including John Wray and Joe Meno) have made the case for the importance of editors in the context of their work.