It was time to make difficult choices. Aerosmith had spent several months writing songs for what became their now-classic album, Pump. They produced 19 songs and recorded rough versions of them on a demo tape. On January 25th, 1989, the band members convened with producer Bruce Fairbairn to decide which 10 songs would make the album.
“Bruce is very objective about the songs,” said guitarist Joe Perry in the documentary The Making of Pump. “He isn’t as emotionally attached to them as we are, so it’s a lot easier for him to come in and cut and maim and say, ‘This doesn’t work, this is terrible’ or ‘This is great.’” Fairbairn listened to the demos with an ear for which of the song-embryos could be worked into hits.
But for Perry and singer Steven Tyler, the principal songwriters in the band, the process of eliminating songs from the final product was painful. “Those are your babies there and people are coming in and telling you which ones are gonna grow up and which ones aren’t,” said Perry.
They put up an A list and a B list on the wall. The A list contained the songs that would definitely be included on the album. “Love in an Elevator” was a no brainer, clearly a hit. Same with “Janie’s Got a Gun.” But many songs, including “Hoodoo/Voodoo Medicine Man” and “Monkey on My Back” ended up on the B list, which meant they were put on the back burner. And many of the other songs didn’t make the album at all.
Tyler kept trying to convince Fairbairn to put songs back on the A list. “We could have worked on it a little longer,” he said about one song. “’I am the Walrus” by the Beatles took a long time. If it was approached like this it would have been put on the back burner. You can’t dismiss that.”
Aerosmith survived the pain of parting with 9 of their songs. As hard as it was to make cuts, it is a process that is necessary for any high-quality creative work. The pain paid off. Pump sold 7 million copies in the United States alone and produced three Top 10 singles.
In the literary world, the equivalent process is to “kill your darlings,” or eliminate a favorite passage because it doesn’t serve the piece as a whole. The key here is serving the whole. It is a gift to the reader—or listener—for artists to conduct careful editing of their work. If they can’t do it, then having a producer or editor do it will do. As Perry said, by the end of each album they made together he hated Fairbairn, but after a few months he would look forward to talking to him again. He appreciated the important role Fairbairn played in their work.
In the business world, new product development similarly involves the need to constrain, narrow and integrate ideas. In an article for The Academy of Management Review, professor Willow Sheremata of the Schulich School of Business at York University compared successful cycles of product development to the earth orbiting the sun. Gravity, which is a centripetal force, pulls the earth toward the sun while centrifugal forces pull it away from the center. Centripetal force prevents the earth from flying off into space while centrifugal force prevents it from falling into the sun. The earth does neither because of the centripetal and centrifugal forces are equal in magnitude.
An organization trying to develop a new product needs the same kind of balance between processes that create ideas and processes that integrate those ideas to produce a finished product. Tyler and Perry, as the songwriters, are the centrifugal forces in Aerosmith. They generate ideas that become songs. Bruce Fairbairn was the centripetal force, compelling the band to constrain itself to only the best 10 songs.
It’s a tough balance to maintain. The tension plays itself out each time someone says, “Do you want this work to be perfect or do you want to get it finished?” Innovation requires making explicit tradeoffs between forces that keep exploring and those that get things finished.
What happens when centripetal force and centrifugal forces get out of whack? The history of the album is an illustration. In the era of 12” vinyl, albums could only contain about 25 minutes of music on each side. Because of this constraint, unless a band was willing to submit itself to centripetal forces, there would be no album.
With the invention of the CD, artists could now create albums that were 74 minutes long, significantly reducing the constraining they had to do. And increasing the number of mediocre songs getting released.
With the advent of MP3s, albums can now be as long as artists want them to be. Freed from the physical constraints of vinyl and CD, the centrifugal forces are left uncontained. The results have been too-long albums filled with second-rate songs.
It's no surprise that album sales are on the decline and thought leaders claim that the album is dead. According to Head of Music for BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra, George Ergatoudis, the album is on the decline because people prefer to listen to playlists “rather than listening to a rather mediocre body of work, the album.”
It’s true. Most albums contain songs that should have been cut. Now that consumers don’t have to pay for them—as they did in the vinyl and CD eras—they opt to only buy the songs they like. And that’s too bad. When done well, an album is a much grander and more affecting artistic statement, and experience for the listener, than a single. I personally prefer to listen to a good album that takes me on a journey than jump from idea to idea on a playlist.
The album, as a music concept (not a physical artifact) self-destructed because the constraints that forced artists to kill those darlings that did not serve the whole were gradually removed.
