Olivia Newton-John and Record Production
Using "A Little More Love" by Olivia Newton-John, I illustrate what "Production" means in recording.
PRODUCTION NERDS ONLY: (or if you're curious about what "production" is) –
Listen to “A Little More Love” from Olivia Newton-John’s 1978 album, Totally Hot. You've heard it a billion times, but I want you to NOTICE a couple of things. (There are SO MANY cool things about the production of this song that I can't mention all of them).
First notice how the verse, pre-chorus and chorus all have distinctly different feels. The groove in the chorus is totally different from any other part of the song - more of a galloping disco beat, at least in the "it gets me nowhere…" part.
This is arrangement.
A song like this could have been written by someone sitting at a piano and banging out chords in measure-long whole notes just to establish what the song is, but the process of building up the structure of the song for the recording is arranging, and under the umbrella of production. It’s what makes a song go where it goes. The feel. The atmosphere. The energy. The key. The tempo. The harmonies or lack of harmonies…. All the details that make it not just someone banging out whole notes on a piano with a single melody sung over the top. This doesn’t just happen. These are decisions. Choices. Creative actions that make each recording special.
My favorite part of the production of this song which gives me goosebumps is how with each chorus (there are 4 of them), the melody sung when all the harmonies come in "would a little more love make you stop dependin'/would a little more love bring a happy ending", they are all sung specifically differently, getting more complex each time. It's a small detail to the casual listener, but as a musician/engineer, I know how much work went into pulling that off. Creating the part then singing multiple harmonies and layering them to get just the right angelic-sounding balance. It's not as simple as it might sound. It IS supposed to sound simple, though.
That’s the difference between “pop” music meant for a mainstream audience and something more progressive and challenging, like a band like Yes would do. Sometimes an artist does something “different” just to do it…. Maybe to impress other musicians, maybe just to impress themselves. On the other hand, what casual listener even notices that the verses of the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love” is in a meter of 7/4 instead of the traditional 4/4? They don’t. It just feels effortless and not difficult or challenging. That’s brilliant.
“A Little More Love” is but one perfect example of this particular era for Olivia. I keep mentioning the team that made these records - Olivia, John Farrar (co-writer/producer) and engineer David J. Holman) because this stuff doesn't happen by itself.
Maybe it's the "time" that these records were made (78-82), as that might be one of the last eras of mainstream pop music that, in my opinion, we had popular music that was ALSO technically and artistically “good”. One can’t really argue that a record like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors was not a masterwork of pop music, in songwriting, arranging, production, performance…. It stands up to this day. I’m not sure if most people realize how rare that is. Many serious music fans have long-known that the “best” stuff isn’t usually on the radio, but in that era, some of it was. I might even use the word ‘zeitgeist’ to describe what was happening in mainstream record production at the time. There was an explosion of great stuff that still stands the test of time now. A real heyday for pop music. I consider a lot of the work of the Gibb brothers to be a part of this as well, as they were unstoppable at the time. So much so, that they had to retreat behind the scenes in the early 80s to avoid the backlash from their omnipresence in the charts, and write hits for other artists that you might have never known they did. I would also include Supertramp’s Breakfast in America in my list of absolutely brilliant records from this period.
I’m not sure why I single out these Olivia Newton-John records specifically, other than that I just really love them. I love the sound. I love the songs. I love her voice. It’s not just nostalgia. To me, especially from a music nerd/producer standpoint, these records are as good as it got for post-Beatles mainstream pop music. It was lightning in a bottle
.