Gil Norton, The Pixies and Song Length

Great Sound On Sound article about  The Pixies recording “Monkey Gone To Heaven”. I especially loved the bit about how Gil Norton (Producer) was trying to convince them to lengthen the songs:

“I remember the second afternoon I spent with Charles, after we’d gone through this process of me constantly trying to lengthen the songs from a minute and a half and provide them with more complex arrangements, he said ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ so that’s what we did, and we went into a big music store where he picked up a copy of Buddy Holly’s Greatest Hits and handed it to me. He said ‘Gil, look at the times on these songs.’ And when I looked at them, they were nearly all under two minutes.”

There’s a good lesson in that, I think.

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