Friday, September 09, 2005

Pete Townshend Just Keeps Cranking Them Out

Here's some news about the "upcoming" Who record, from rollingstone.com:

Who fans anxiously awaiting a new album may have to wait indefinitely, according to Pete Townshend. Though the guitarist had hoped he and Roger Daltrey would begin recording a disc tentatively called Who2 in 2006, Townshend now says that the process of writing songs worthy of the Who could take another five years or more.

In a recent post on his Web site, petetownshend.co.uk, he compares his songwriting to reproduction, saying that for every ten songs he writes, just one is "right for fertilization by Roger"; and for every ten they record, "four sadly die at birth."

According to Townshend's calculus, he is required to demo more than fifty songs just to get one finished Who track, and each demo costs him close to $900 to produce. "If I keep at it," he writes, "with luck we should see a great new Who record before I drop dead."
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The best thing about this is that I guarantee there is no discernible difference between any two of the fifty songs. Advanced artists—and I'm not totally convinced that Pete Townsend is one—usually talk about their current project in grandiose terms, even though it typically sounds like the same old stuff. Of course, it only sounds the same because we aren't Advanced enough to hear the differences.

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