The view from 2005: This was another early article (1992) I wrote for Recording Magazine (Home and Studio Recording then), who published it in somewhat reduced form. Here it is in original form. Just so you know, I incorporated parts of this article into a section in my book, Total Recording.

I remember when I discovered music, as a preadolescent kid, that I really preferred tunes without vocals. When my folks gave me a dime to play the jukebox, I would scan the song list for selections labeled “instrumental.” Often, I would get hooked on intros, and would listen to one I really liked over and over, always getting bored when the singing began. This preference stuck with me for a long time. Throughout high school and into college, I really preferred my music without singing. I was into horns, drums, long improvised solos, weird electronic music, symphonies and string quartets. I continued to get bored when the singing began. Later on, I actually got into singing at a somewhat professional level, and began to develop an enjoyment for religious choral music that has lasted throughout my adult life. Nowadays, I still tend to prefer instrumental music, but there is more balance to my listening diet and preferences.

In this respect, I always figured I was different from most people. It was obvious to me, from the very small number of “instrumental” selections on the juke box and from the obviously greater interest the audience and dancers had in our high school band’s lead vocalist (would you believe Ann Margaret?) than in my playing, that my taste wasn’t typical. And this is a prejudice that I’ve carried with me: that I’m peculiar not to be very interested in vocals. I’m just a music junkie, is what I always figured, and I like my music pure.

Nowadays (meaning 1992), there is a course that I am occasionally allowed to teach at Berklee about recorded music that is where our department starts to get our students to carefully, critically and thoughtfully listen to recordings. In this course we do a lot of listening, we study producers, their styles and approaches, and, for the first time in the Music Production and Engineering curriculum, we really start paying attention to the music as opposed to stuff like technology (“this is a microphone”), business (“this is a record contract”) and studio chops (“this is how you get reverb on just the harmony vocal”) and other clever details like that. And in this course, I have discovered that while I may be peculiar, I am not alone in my lack of sensitivity to lyrics. When I first ask the students to tell me what they think is important in the recording, they will talk about the drum mix, the great reverb, and the intensity of the rhythm tracks, but they almost never mention the words. This is why I think it may be a problem for many musicians, including recording engineers and producers. It is the problem of listening to the words in a recording.