Liner Notes

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Whatever happened to packaging records with liner notes that specified exactly who played what on each individual song? Does anyone besides me miss that trend?

― Raymond Cummings, Friday, 28 February 2003 17:12 (twenty-three years ago)

I haven't noticed any trend. There's some I buy that credit musicians well and some that don't--I haven't found it to correlate w/the era they were released in

― oops (Oops), Friday, 28 February 2003 17:17 (twenty-three years ago)

I haven't noticed any recent trend -- it seems like they basically quite that decades ago (except for Jazz/Classical, of course).

― christoff (christoff), Friday, 28 February 2003 17:38 (twenty-three years ago)

I think it is no longer considered "cool"--kind of like wearing your guitar or bass too high, or liking Rush a whole lot.

― Lee G (Lee G), Friday, 28 February 2003 17:48 (twenty-three years ago)

yeah, facelessness is 'cool'

― oops (Oops), Friday, 28 February 2003 17:51 (twenty-three years ago)

i guess people realized that unless you have different musicians on every track, then what's the point? it's kind of funny looking at old big-budget records from the 70's or 80's, where they go into ridiculously minute detail about what guitar is played on what song. i can understand it a little back then, though, but these days you may as well just put the gear info on the website.

― Al (sitcom), Friday, 28 February 2003 19:23 (twenty-three years ago)

My philosophy of liner notes: either nothing or everything. Either totally minimal, no info, totally mysterious, or complete and total detail about every step of the process. No in betweens.

― Nick A. (Nick A.), Friday, 28 February 2003 19:28 (twenty-three years ago)

I disagree, I think it'd be great if an album's liner notes said this and only this: On track 8 at 3:58, Josh Hipkin played the triangle

― oops (Oops), Friday, 28 February 2003 19:33 (twenty-three years ago)

I remember I first started paying attention to liner notes when I was maybe seven or eight, back in the early to mid'-70s, the beginning of the Contemporary Overdone Liner Note Era. I specifically remember looking at the jacket of an Allman Brothers album and noticing a several separate credits for "slide guitar," then carefully studying the photographs of the band to see if I could tell which kind of guitar a "slide guitar" was.

― Lee G (Lee G), Friday, 28 February 2003 19:35 (twenty-three years ago)

Well, we do know that Peter Hook often hit the syn drums with his hands on live versions of "Blue Monday".

― Scott Warner (thream), Friday, 28 February 2003 21:04 (twenty-three years ago)

liner notes are fantastic. i loved the ones on the Galaxie 500 albums. my LP was meant to have them but the guy commissioned to write them wrote total crap

― electric sound of jim (electricsound), Saturday, 1 March 2003 07:22 (twenty-three years ago)

Liner notes have always been spotty. There's no trend. I have satisfactory and unsatisfactory liner notes from every year represented in my collection. Maybe mystery is cool, but laziness never is.

But one of my all-time great pleasures is reading the notes from the back cover of an old jazz record.

― Kenan Hebert (kenan), Saturday, 1 March 2003 07:26 (twenty-three years ago)

two years pass...

Does anyone know if the better liner notes are archived anywhere on websites or as text files? As I've been selling off my CDs, I've scanned or copied the notes I wanted to keep (I'll OCR them one of these days), but yesterday I was in a big hurry to send out one of the Woody Guthrie Asch Recordings sets and didn't have time to scan the 32 pages of bio, history and song notes. Also, flattening the booklet out to scan it would have been tough on the binding, and this was sold as "Like New."

If anyone knows of an online repository of liner notes, I'd love to know where it is.

― Rock Hardy (Rock Hardy), Sunday, 2 October 2005 13:11 (twenty years ago)

I love super-detailed liners but draw the line on naming instrument brands (unless a brand name is the only way to refer to the instrument, which is the case with, say, Hammond, Wurlitzer, Rhodes... but NOT Nord, Novation, KORG etc. - these are just "keys," thank you very much).

― joseph cotten (joseph cotten), Sunday, 2 October 2005 14:06 (twenty years ago)

hmm, if a nord is just keys, why isn't a hammond just an organ or a wurlitzer just an electric piano?

― fact checking cuz (fcc), Sunday, 2 October 2005 14:43 (twenty years ago)

i'm a fan of pooh sticks style liner notes, where instead of carefully explaining who played what on every song, they carefully explain who stole what riff or what lyrics from whom on every song.

― fact checking cuz (fcc), Sunday, 2 October 2005 14:47 (twenty years ago)

Weekday bump. Online liner notes, anyone?

― Rock Hardy (Rock Hardy), Monday, 3 October 2005 13:01 (twenty years ago)

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