It’s mediocre.<\/p>\n
This album should not have been produced by T-Bone Burnett, but Rick Rubin.\u00c2\u00a0 Rick is famous for getting his acts to get back into the headspace they inhabited when they did their best work and forcing them to write and write and write until they come up with material just as good as they composed in their heyday.\u00c2\u00a0 Where was the editor on "The Union"?\u00c2\u00a0 Where was the guy saying…HEY, WE DON’T HAVE THE TUNES!<\/p>\n
Great concept.\u00c2\u00a0 I love both Elton and Leon.\u00c2\u00a0 Great that Elton is now about the music and not the hits.\u00c2\u00a0 But if you’re about the music, it’s got to be great.<\/p>\n
I mean we endured all that buildup and the endless hype for THIS?<\/p>\n
We knew mediocrity was in the offing when the first single was released.\u00c2\u00a0 Huh?\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t know anybody who liked it.<\/p>\n
Today we only have time for great.\u00c2\u00a0 Forty years ago, when these acts broke, we’d buy the albums based on the rep, play them because we possessed nothing else, and ultimately know them.\u00c2\u00a0 Anybody who plays this record that much is either involved or related.\u00c2\u00a0 With so much music at our fingertips, why listen to this?<\/p>\n
There are too many midtempo songs that you wait to go somewhere that don’t.<\/p>\n
Sure, there are a couple of tracks that capture a bit of magic.\u00c2\u00a0 "Hey Ahab" for Elton, "A Dream Comes True" for Leon.\u00c2\u00a0 But there’s nothing close to their strongest work.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s no "Stranger In A Strange Land", never mind "A Song For You" or "Delta Lady".\u00c2\u00a0 If only Elton’s contribution yielded something as good as the obscure but great "Can I Put You On".<\/p>\n
I remember dropping the needle on "Friends".\u00c2\u00a0 The title track hooked me immediately.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s not one track that hooked me on "The Union".<\/p>\n
And the mainstream blather.\u00c2\u00a0 The reviews in every paper known to man.\u00c2\u00a0 How old school a selling technique for supposedly a breakthrough concept.<\/p>\n
Wanna know a breakthrough concept?\u00c2\u00a0 Record an album so good that it has legs and sells itself!\u00c2\u00a0 Something that people hear and testify about, play for their friends.<\/p>\n
I remember being at my next door neighbor’s hearing Mary Chapin Carpenter’s "Come On Come On".\u00c2\u00a0 I didn’t think I was interested,\u00c2\u00a0 I certainly wasn’t a fan.\u00c2\u00a0 But I was infected listening to this album in the background, I had to ask what it was, I had to get it and play it and play it and play it.<\/p>\n
That’s not the experience anybody’s gonna have listening to "The Union".<\/p>\n
First and foremost the material must be great.\u00c2\u00a0 This sounds exactly like the hype.\u00c2\u00a0 That they found a window when both performers were available, wrote the songs in two weeks and recorded them immediately.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not saying that can’t work, maybe Elton did it that way in the old days.\u00c2\u00a0 But it doesn’t always work.\u00c2\u00a0 Not every date is a success.\u00c2\u00a0 You may have sex, but you don’t meet your soulmate.\u00c2\u00a0 Wasn’t there anybody in this process who could put up his hand and say WAIT A MINUTE, WE JUST DON’T HAVE THE MATERIAL!<\/p>\n
Projects like this illustrate that classic rockers still live in the old world.\u00c2\u00a0 We don’t need an album, we don’t need fourteen so-so tracks, we need ONE PHENOMENAL ONE!<\/p>\n
Elton’s burned his rep here.\u00c2\u00a0 We’re gonna be suspicious when he touts his next project.<\/p>\n
This is how it works in the modern world.\u00c2\u00a0 Either you put out a limited amount of great material or you inundate your fans with a constant stream of stuff, let them investigate and judge it, separate the wheat from the chaff, extricate the nuggets.<\/p>\n
DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE!\u00c2\u00a0 This album is a dud.<\/p>\n
And today a dud is anything that’s not great.\u00c2\u00a0 Sorry, that’s the way it is, I don’t make the rules, the public does.\u00c2\u00a0 A public that’s inundated with diversion and only has time for the very best.<\/p>\n
P.S. It’s not about the short term, but the long haul.\u00c2\u00a0 Otherwise, most YouTube clips would have a lifespan longer than a day.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not about the initial hype, it’s not about the first week sales, it’s about the cumulative effect.\u00c2\u00a0 Don’t frontload your campaign, your project will be forgotten as quickly as last weekend’s movies.\u00c2\u00a0 No, now the game is to make something so good that it finds its own way in the marketplace, doesn’t instantly die but grows and grows over time.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, Elton & Leon are touring this now, but wouldn’t it be better to put out an album that people want to hear six months or a year from now, when they’re truly fans of the music and not just curious because of the hype?<\/p>\n
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It’s mediocre. This album should not have been produced by T-Bone Burnett, but Rick Rubin.\u00c2\u00a0 Rick is famous for getting his acts to get back into the headspace they inhabited when they did their best work and forcing them to write and write and write until they come up with material just as good as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-Ty","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3444"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3445,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3444\/revisions\/3445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}