oneweekoneband:

That final point is one of the most important parts of Kanye’s actual work. He has some heavy auteur signifiers, certainly, but he’s also skilled at working with people. He went from locking himself in a room doing five beats a day for three summers to working in an historic studio with Jon Brion. It was a fruitful — and fitful — collaboration. On the one hand, Brion was like a candyman to Kanye:

I introduced him to the Celeste and it blew his mind, and then to the Chamberlin. I said, “Here is the original sampler, invented in 1946, and there’s a tape player under every key, with recordings on this one of the Lawrence Welk Orchestra recorded in the late ’50s.” I put my hand on the keys and you could see fire shooting out of his eyes, he was so excited. So here we are with the instrument collection, and we are following my obsession of making new sounds appear in a very organic way.

But Kanye clearly didn’t defer. There are Jon Brion-y parts to the album, but it seems like Kanye used Brion’s production almost like another instrument or just one piece, a wall, in his songs’ build. MTV recounts the origin of “Roses”: all the froufrou and bombast of the chorus was, in Brion’s mind, going to be the whole song; Kanye stripped most of it away.

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Daily vanity reblog here. This essay ended up, I think, a little half baked. I thought there’d be a religious theme for today, and the piece was going to be about sophomore albums, but then it came to be about Kanye’s collaboration and how it’s weird that he’s so good at bending his will, and how that’s an almost religious form of self-negation that’s really admirable and puts him on another level. I didn’t really get to making that point as strongly as I wanted to, though.

There was an unexpected offshoot: thinking about Late Registration and Jon Brion got me to really appreciating Aimee Mann a lot more. Did you know that two of her albums were released as Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs versions? Her music sounds great.