Pale_Pilgrim wrote:
orionmetalhead wrote:
Filler, as Belvy said is necessary. When you install cabinetry, the fillers are important to reach the proper measurements you need to finish your job... it's much the same in music.
Have to disagree with this entirely. What's the need? There is none. The only explanation for filler - true filler, you know - is to pad out the length. And when is that shit ever actually *necessary*? When you're on a major label and some idiot recordhead say "ooooh, I see here this new material only totals up to 27 minutes, we're gonna need more than that to shift these units as full-lengths". Fuck that, fuck them and find a label that actually gives a shit about your music and wants quality over quantity.
Besides, if you're capable of writing a good album/mini/EP/whatever and you're asked for an extra, shouldn't you be able to come up with something,
anything of value rather than tacking on a re-hash? Even just do a neat little instrumental or an acoustic song, just for example. Spice it up.
Leave the filler to major-label pop stars.
That certainly isn't true. Many bands work on a fairly tight 2-year album cycle, the way they work for a living is recording an album, touring and retouring to support it, then repeating it. Most bands who keep up the cycle can't afford to take much time off until they're fairly deep into their career, usually 6-10 years and 3-5 albums deep. The nature of the industry and the ability of many musicians to make a living requires them to put out albums at a regular interval, scheduled long in advance to secure a good studio/producer and label resources. This is what most of the bands signed to labels like CM, NB, MB, and SOM do - their schedules are fairly tight and they don't necessarily have a lot of time to write songs. They usually have time to jam and come up with parts on tour, but they have a limited amount of time to put together a full album, and quality can be inconsistent for a few reasons.
A band usually decides that they're going to take some time to write an album while they're on tour - they have their label book the studio and make arrangements, they take a month or two off to write while having no income, only savings and maybe some advance money. They usually write a lot more material than makes the album, and the producer helps them make the cuts in the studio to some extent. They need to write a lot of material in a short amount of time, and they also have a limited amount of time with a producer if the producer is helping arrange/work on songs. You can often spot that there is a stronger set of songs on an album that have more precise songwriting, stronger hooks that are presented better - these are the more memorable songs. In limited time, bands usually don't make a dozen songs that stand out, they'll have 2-3, maybe 4-5. Some will be experimenting, some will be the band working on something catchy, some will be the band doing their thing - it's really hard to make a good one-dimensional album so bands vary what they do. Write out song charts of an album (but not Rush, that's a bad example) and see if the standout tracks tend to have different song structures than the "filler" - it is fair to consider something filler when the attention to detail in songwriting and production gives preference to some songs, and other songs have similar, simpler structures that are more or less verse/chorus or riff 1-2-3 type things without using arrangement to highlight the quality of the parts. It shows that bands often put more effort into some songs than others, and you can notice it.
Writing an album usually isn't a band writing 40 minutes of material. They start with riffs, odds and ends, assemble songs, have some scraps and odds and ends, and some songs that just worked out better than others - that probably adds up to at least an hour of material. Labels like to have some extra songs too, in a few years they'll want some material for a deluxe re-release and people like hearing new material from the same session (way better than live renditions, which are basically bonus filler). Some retailers like to have their own special edition, labels do different Japanese versions, sometimes an extra track for a compilation or something. A 30-40 minute album with 10 songs will often start as 16-20 songs and 80 minutes, but the band cuts out weaker material, reworks stronger material, and they generally fill out the album with something in between. Filler isn't necessarily material a band cranks out once the good half is done, it's often just similarly formed material that admittedly isn't their strongest.