The Solo Musician’s Guide to Playing with Oneself

Technology is an amazing thing. These days, all you need is a computer a few select software packages to make yourself sound like a professional musician. Often enough, these music-building applications are really built on samples and riffs played by actual professional musicians, and while it’s fun to muck about with that sort of thing, samples and an editing program do not a professional musician make.

However, I do have a romantic fascination with the concept of one person, in a studio, playing every instrument and singing every part of harmony without a backing band or other vocalists. It could be my own shyness at work, but I’ve always thought that’d be a very cool thing to do. I have a low-end consumer-grade home studio myself, and I do quite a bit of instrumental work myself along those lines. I’m not going to try harmonizing with my own vocals until the UN lifts that pesky Geneva Convention ban on my singing, though. They seem to think that my voice will do harm to nearby property and livestock. Really, those 1500 dead cows must have heard something else.

In the meantime, I can enjoy the works of others who have gone this route. I’ve chosen to focus on four favorites from my own library, so the usual disclaimers apply – these artists naturally fall within my own parameters of musical taste and as such, your aural mileage may vary.

Roy Wood / Boulders (1973). The idea of one person overdubbing enough stuff until he had played the entire song was relatively young when Electric Light Orchestra co-founder Roy Wood started work on Boulders, his truly solo album (even more solo in the sense that he also painted the cover art). Wood had been working on Boulders four years prior to its release, and indeed it contained at least one song that he had written for The Move, his late 60s Beatlesque pop/rock group which later transformed into ELO. (Why has no one but me ever heard of Roy Wood? Because he bailed out of ELO after their first album in ’71.) Some of Wood’s more impressive feats on this album were “Dear Elaine”, on which he overdubbed so many self-played cellos that it wound up sounding like an orchestra, and a mock-Irish jig called “The Irish Loafer And His Hen.”

In some places, Wood employed early tricks – such as slowing down or speeding up the tape while recording background vocals – to increase his already considerable singing range. On one song, this sounds rather silly – I’ve used the analogy of “the Chipmunks singing harmony with Jabba the Hutt” before in describing that one — while on another, “Miss Clarke and the Computer”, it’s very effective and very much a part of the song’s subject matter.

Boulders has been available on CD only as a Japanese import for the better part of the past 15 years, but was issued in the U.S. on vinyl at the time of its release. A remastered edition is due to be issued from the U.K. late this year, possibly with unreleased music from Wood’s solo sessions for the album. It’s worth the price of an import CD to hear this stuff – and also amazing in that the big advent in technology at the time was really nothing more than multitrack recording, hence the four-years-in-the-making time span of the album’s production. Wood continued to make all-solo albums in later years, stepping up to such technological innovations as synths and drum machines in the 1980s, but somehow that robbed his later works of the grandeur of the sheer amount of work involved – and nothing he’s done since has sounded as good as Boulders.

Todd Rundgren / A Capella (1985). Sampling technology existed in its early evolutionary stages by the time rock icon Todd Rundgren got around to making this record, and he used it in force – but only in service of the album’s unique concept. A Capella was to feature music made solely by Rundgren’s vocal cords and mouth. Every sound was created vocally – even what sounded like instruments and percussion. Sure, it may have been processed to give it the necessary “oomph” to stand in for a bass drum, but it was a truly unique sound – something no one had tried before and no one has tried since.

If I recall correctly, Rundgren’s fans were up in arms about this album, since it saw him delving into such diverse styles as soul, barbershop quartet, and anything but his usual rock stylings. But the mighty wall of vocal sound on such songs as “Pretending To Care” and “Hodja” makes it a worthy diversion.

“Blue Orpheus,” in its opening moments, both tips its hat to and simultaneously parodies the closest anyone else had come to making this kind of music its own genre: Bobby McFerrin. The song starts out with a simple opening that isn’t anything that McFerrin, of “Don’t Worry Be Happy” fame, couldn’t have done himself – and then literally slams into the sound that Rundgren really had in mind for this album. This one is still available, and is highly recommended – I’ve got a few hundred CDs, and Rundgren’s A Capella still stands out as one of the most unique things I’ve ever heard.

Jason Falkner / Author Unknown (1996) and Can You Still Feel? (1999). Power-pop hero Jason Falkner, late of that sadly short-lived early 1990s collective of rock saviors known as Jellyfish, meandered around after bailing out of that group. He later formed The Grays with Jon Brion, another skilled songwriter who has gone on to tackle movie scores such as Magnolia, and later struck out as a producer and solo artist. And as is the case with others whose works I’ve profiled here, Falkner is a true solo artist, playing everything on his own.

Atypically, Falkner is notorious for actually laying down the drum track before anything else. This is a sign of someone who has the songs seriously worked out in his head. The most recent of Falkner’s albums was produced by Nigel Godrich (who has produced Radiohead), but Godrich’s participation ended at the window between the control room and the studio – the sounds were still Falkner’s. Falkner dips into the 70s for his influences, with sonic tips of the hat to Rundgren, Joe Walsh, 10cc, Pilot and other originators of power pop. Both of these albums are highly recommended and highly addictive – and it’s frustrating to note that Falkner’s only product since then has consisted of compilations of his much-sought after CD and vinyl single B-sides as well as demo recordings.

Electric Light Orchestra / Zoom (2001). Bringing things nicely full circle is the latest album attributed to the group which Roy Wood helped to form. ELO, that much-maligned 70s group well-known for its big-screen orchestral-backed rock songs, is unfortunately remembered for that one 1979 album where the group slipped into a disco rut (and then chased it down with half of the soundtrack to the movie Xanadu, an unfortunate occurrence in and of itself). ELO was disbanded in 1986 by frontman Jeff Lynne, who tired of the constant promotional duties and touring, and later turned out an excellent but criminally underrated solo album, Armchair Theater, in 1990. Lynne later went on to produce everyone from Joe Cocker to those two “new” Beatles songs in the mid-1990s, and has also manned the control room for George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney on their own solo projects.

ELO, in the meantime, was reduced to what amounted to a cover band consisting of former members who had been ousted during the band’s heyday, until Lynne initiated legal proceedings to regain control of the name in 2000. Late 2000 saw the arrival of a three-disc retrospective box set (with the prerequisite deluge of unreleased tracks, forcing diehard fans to buy it) called Flashback, but the big news lately has been the new album, Zoom, which is mostly another Lynne solo project, only he’s finally wised up and realized that he could pay his mortgage easier by selling it under the ELO name instead of his own. Roughly half of the tracks are all Lynne, all the time, recorded on low-tech analog tape, and it’s a marvel that the man can sing so many parts of harmony, even if it is all a studio trick. “Moment In Paradise” and the almost illegally catchy “State Of Mind” are two standout tracks, and I have high hopes that the latter might actually make a dent in radio sometime later this year.

Thus ends my study of musical hermit crabs, these mystery artists who hole themselves up in a studio for a few months (or years) and emerge later with a thing of beauty (with any luck). There are many others to be sure, but one could do worse than to start with these selections. I’m sure there’ll be a message board on this topic, so feel free to alert us to other musical hermit crabs whose works are worthy of attention.

Why go solo?

An interesting question raised by these projects is why one should perform an entire album’s worth of material alone. In some cases, and I believe this was the case with Rundgren’s A Capella, it’s probably the novelty value, which may have also been the driving force behind Wood’s Boulders. In the case of Falkner, who abandoned Jellyfish after he felt the other band members denied him any significant creative input, and ELO’s Jeff Lynne, who ejected several of that band’s players from the early 1970s onward, it may be that the artists have a little bit of the control freak in them.

Or maybe it’s something altogether more embarrassing.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve dabbled in the art of making an entire song by myself before, and this is mainly because I can’t read music – so it’d be difficult, if not impossible, for me to convey the sound I want to someone else. Sheet music is Greek to me (actually, if anything, I know the Greek alphabet better), so it falls to me, myself and I to execute any of these musical ideas I have (and, in some cases, execute is the proper term for it). In any case, I continue to admire the musicians who can pull off this elaborate one-man-band trick – if only because I wish I could do it myself.