One of my favorite documentaries is a slightly lesser-known film called Sound City. Sound City Studios was a tiny recording studio that opened up in 1969 in the San Fernando Valley, CA and I dare say it quite possibly should be ranked as one of the top ten most important locations in rock history?
Why?
Ever heard of a little album called Nevermind?
Yeah, that’s where Nirvana recorded it! Other bands and artists such as Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, Rage Against The Machine, Weezer, Metallica, Black Sabbath, and Nine Inch Nails all flocked to Sound City Studios over 4 decades to record some of their greatest albums. Part of the draw was the unique shape of the studio that created some pretty unique acoustics, but it also used a Neve 8028 mixing console to capture all of the recordings on analog tape.
The Neve 8028 was famous for a super gritty and grungy sound. It particularly captured drums in a powerful way which you can hear when you go back and listen to some of these albums. Sound City happened to own 1 of the only 4 Neve consoles that have ever been built. However, despite the insane amount of gold & platinum records produced there, Sound City Studios was forced to shut down in 2011 due to a lack of demand and a massive industrial shift to digital and automated recording tools. It made some sense; after all, analog was hard to record onto. It was time-consuming, and if you made any mistakes you would typically need to re-record entire segments of the song rather than just punch in and punch out the messed up note. Digital tools introduced massive simplicity and deep automation that made it possible to create insanely layered tracks with nary a single note or beat out of place.
Dave Grohl, lead singer for the Foo Fighters and former drummer for Nirvana, was devastated to learn about the studio shutting down. The Sound City documentary follows the story of him purchasing, restoring, and installing the Neve 8028 console into his personal studio to preserve it. But, as a true musician, his idea of “preserving it” it to use it and keep it alive. He and Paul McCartney (I shouldn’t have to tell you who that is) gather many of these former artists who recorded on the console to reminisce, learn from each other, and record new songs on it. Brilliant.
One of my favorite quotes in the movie is Dave talking about what made it special for him. He shares just how insanely difficult it was to record an album like Nevermind at the time because of the analog nature of the tools. But, he says he wouldn’t change a thing about that process or the result. He states that when you listen closely to those tracks you will hear times where his own drumsticks accidentally hit the rim of the snare, or where Kurt’s voice squeaked, or where Krist missed a bass strum, but that was kind of the point. Rather than pushing the analog tape to the limits in an obsession about locking in a perfect track, some of those imperfections were either deliberately or accidentally left in. Dave reminds us that it’s those little imperfections that remind us that a human was on the other side of that creation.
Once he installed the console into his studio, he and the Foo Fighters committed to recording their next album using the console and letting some of those imperfections remain in the finished product. Brilliant!
On the other side of the world in Sardinia, Italy, an unknown-to-me restaurant owner was at some point busy typing out a menu for his (or her) multinational patrons.
This summer my wife and I had the opportunity to travel to Sardinia with my sister and her family on a sailing trip (thanks Chelsea and Bill!) During the trip we stopped at this restaurant for dinner and I was introduced to the greatest menu I’ve ever seen. Whoever wrote the descriptions clearly had poetic intentions, but I also think a bit of a sense of humor. Each page was written first in Italian, but also included translations into French, Spanish, and English. This menu is a tiny version of Sound City’s Neve 8028.
Here were some of my favorite meal descriptors, shared exactly as they were written for your full enjoyment:
Golden crust golden heart, stringy the cheese that tells the peasant soul of the island.
We immediately ordered this and “stringy the cheese” was hands down the best thing we ate that night. Here’s are a few more:
The Sardinian ravioli that doesn’t ask for permission, full belly closure and heart searing.
And the dish that isn’t soup and isn’t lasagna and pure Gallura.
Ancient pasta, a poor relative of malloredus but with a strong character.
Again, each of these is the full description, presented with no picture or other indication of what the food actually was. We literally ordered one of everything. How can you not?!
And my last favorite:
Typical Emilian pasta that looks like a verdict but acts like a queen.
This menu reminded me that a human Sardinian sat down and wrote these out. Knowing Spanish I glanced at that version of the menu as well to see if we just had a lost-in-translation thing going on. Nope. The words still lined up. Our friends who spoke Italian also confirmed that the original text was just as amazing.
Pope Leo XIV just dropped this absolutely beast of a statement and announcement that got me right in the Neve 8028 feels.
“It’s the imperfections that remind us that a fellow human was on the other end of the content!”
In an era when some really powerful narcissistic idiots leaders are pushing for more and more super intelligence artificial intelligence, I stand with Pope Leo on this one and am optimistic thinking that many more of us are instead begging for a renaissance of humanity, human creation, and digital disconnection.
I had previously written about my own uprising against AI music creation agents a few years ago.
I also super appreciated this quote from Nicole Simone in a recent post of hers:
There’s a reason many people who lived through the 1960s or 1990s never got over those eras. They were their own renaissances of time and culture. Not because everything was good. Everything has never been good. People were dying and governments were terrible and somebody’s landlord was still refusing to fix the sink.
But something was alive.
People made things because they had to make them. They dressed strangely. They started bands with people they met three days earlier. They fell in love without first knowing each other’s entire searchable history. They wasted whole afternoons. They were bored enough to become interesting.
Maybe that’s what I miss most. Not the past exactly, but the possibility of being surprised by another person…
…I want people to have hobbies they cannot monetize.
So what say you? Are you ok with letting AI suck the humanity out of your creations? Or are you ready to actually pull out pen and paper and write something? Why not actually learn a foreign language rather than letting AI take over the conversation every time you travel? Sure you can make a highly produced and rather enjoyable song, story, design, or photo by tapping a few buttons on an iPad while sitting on the toilet, but as for me, I am way more psyched by the idea of gathering some friends together and, like Paul McCartney, Stevie Nicks, and Trent Reznor hanging out in Dave Grohl’s basement, making halfway decent and far-from-perfect tracks that will likely go nowhere. Naturally we will end our first international tour in Sardinia and, using extremely broken and freshly learned Italian phrases, order up several platters of “stringy the cheese.”