Anyone who’s been reading my stuff for the last 7 years will know that I constantly bang on about listening to Britney with good quality headphones. A reference to them is an essential part of every “In-Depth” review at NewBritneyology.com. I know some people think this is hilarious, but I can’t legislate for those who are determined to embrace their own ignorance. My enthusiasm for headphones isn’t some kind of weird, perverted fetish - you really do miss a lot if you never use them.
Obviously I don’t expect people to go rushing around on buses, trains and bicycles with massive “cans” clamped to their heads. Perhaps I should clarify that by “headphones” I mean the things that surround your ears rather than going inside them. For listening on the move, there’s no realistic alternative to those horrible little in-ear things known as earphones. But if you want to pass judgment on Britney’s singing ability (and let’s face it, who doesn’t ?) you should be prepared to take the trouble to be properly informed, and to get some proper headphones for home use.
I’m not saying you should get rid of your speakers. Goodness knows, I’d be the worst hypocrite if I said that - my home set-up involves a 300-watt amplifier and 150-watt subwoofer. A good thing my nearest neigbor lives 150 yards away. But speakers give you a very different listening experience to headphones. Music fills the room and the big fat bass (or maybe the kick drum) makes the windows rattle. But it’s not an analytical approach. It's a wall of sound. I would never write a review of a Britney album based on hearing it on speakers.
But why headphones? Aren’t earphones pretty much the same thing and just as good? The simple answer is - no, they’re not. I’m not going to bore you with a lot of technical stuff, but the way the sound waves communicate with your ears is totally different, and with earphones there are too many factors that compromise what you’re hearing. You may think you’re hearing everything that’s on the record, but you aren’t.
In my Britney reviews I always talk about the virtual “soundstage” inside your head, and where the various components of the track are located. With earphones, you get a more constricted, compressed “soundstage” and it can be difficult to separate the components. As someone recently told me, “With earphones the music plays "inside" your head rather than coming at you from the outside, to left and right.” In my experience earphones also fail to give you any sense of depth to front and back. On headphones, when you listen to “The Answer”, P. Diddy’s words “Talk to me” seem to come from behind your left shoulder. So do Britney’s words “Don’t hang up” in the eponymous song. On earphones, everything is placed in a 45-degree “V” around front-center.
Earphones fail to reveal many subtleties. For example, on “Shadow”, the swirling atmospherics can’t be “placed” at all whereas with good headphones you can detect their circular motion between the center and right “channels”. Headphones also reveal that, during the chorus, the effect has been created of Britney standing front center, with a group of backing singers arranged in a semi-circle behind her. In the last 2 lines of each verse and during the middle-eight, three Britneys sing in harmony, one left, one right, one center. But with earphones, as with speakers, these individual elements simply merge together.
On “Piece of Me”, the majority of people are convinced that Britney’s voice has been electronically altered. Wikipedia, for example, comments “Spears's voice is heavily synthesized”, But this is untrue. With the benefit of good-quality headphones you can distinguish the vocals from the effects and it turns out that a few words, and ONLY a few words, in the song are overlaid with a kind of muted electronic fuzz. It’s like seeing something behind net curtains. But with earphones this effect cannot be isolated from an overall impression of fuzz.
Reviewing “Blackout”, Kelefa Sanneh says “Even when not buried in electronics, her distinctive singing voice sounds unusually vague, and sometimes it’s hard to be sure it’s hers. It isn’t always. On this album, unlike on previous ones, Ms. Spears isn’t credited with doing any of her own backing vocals.” From those remarks it’s clear that Sanneh wasn’t listening with a decent set of headphones, because if you do, you’re never in any doubt that it’s Britney, AND that she’s singing almost all of the vocals herself.
It’s almost universally accepted that Britney hardly sings a natural note on “Femme Fatale”. The mind-numbing cliche is that her voice is “heavily autotuned”. She herself remarked in an interview that she’d decided to use more electronics this time. But with good headphones, what do you actually hear? In fact, her lead vocal is natural on about 90 percent of the album! There are maybe two or three songs where her voice is electronically altered in the verse, here and there a few words are blatantly synthesized for dramatic effect, and one track a synthesizer is mixed in with her vocal on the center channel, but that’s all! I won’t spoil your fun by saying where these things happen - you’ll have to buy some headphones...
But which headphones? They don’t have to be crazily expensive. One of my dad’s friends had Stax electrostatic ‘phones that were too pricey for us, even though we all were mightily impressed by hearing Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along The Watchtower” seemingly circling our heads like an angry hornet. My own headphones are Sennheiser HD580s, which were five-star rated and said to be studio quality in their day but are no longer available. I would recommend that you buy something in the same category. Don’t spend less than about $200. If that seems a lot, consider that custom-fitted in-ear phones can cost over $500!
Finally, I should say that the analytical quality of your ‘phones will be somewhat nullified if the music source is a compressed sound file like an MP3 or an AAC, which will have a high level of distortion, and severely limited frequency and dynamic ranges. It would be best to listen to Britney on CD. Yes, in physical form!! And if you do.... I can guarantee a revelation! It will be like hearing these albums again for the first time, but in high-definition and 3D! You’ll be amazed at how good they are, and probably surprised to find that most of the shade thrown at Britney’s voice is based on misinformation and prejudice.
In Part Two of this article, next week, I’ll take you on a guided headphone tour of Britney’s albums.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Saturday, May 21, 2011
The Great Britney Vocals Conspiracy Theories!
They say seeing is believing, and it certainly does seem that Britney Spears’ unwillingness to be witnessed singing live on stage has spawned a fascinating industry of conspiracy theories. I won’t say she has an “inability” to be witnessed singing live, because the theory that she basically can’t sing is itself the fundamental theory that all of the others are designed to prove.
No matter that there are actually quite a few videos on YouTube of Britney singing live. We’ve seen them here at PoorBritney. Conspiracy theorists prefer conspiracies and theories to facts, and, although they believe their cynical and suspicious attitude is proof of superior intelligence, they actually tend to be pretty gullible. You only have to examine what they believe for proof of that.
But anyway, who are the conspirators? Well, obviously there’s Britney herself, her past and present management team, her A&R managers and various others at Jive Records. You’d expect them to be loyal.... I guess.... but what about her embittered ex-security staff, and the ever-floating multitude of hangers-on and freeloaders, including ex-boyfriends? What about Sam Lutfi? Why would you expect any of them to keep quiet on Britney’s behalf?
What I think is more sinister than any of these is the grand conspiracy involving all of the record producers, vocal producers, studio musicians and their teams who have worked with her since 1998. When you consider that she’s worked with more than 40 production teams in her career so far, it’s pretty amazing that nobody has approached the News Of The World or The Sun with the terrible secret. Amazing too that so many of them have deliberately gone on record to lie about how good she is in the studio when they didn’t have to.
I can’t claim that my list of deceptions and malfaisance is exhaustive, because every time I write about Britney’s voice, somebody comes up with a new conspiracy theory. And the gullible people suck up every word of it. I also don’t expect the conspiracy theorists to have their minds changed by anything I say. I have no doubt that, if there are any comments, they’ll show that some people didn’t even consider the observations, analysis and facts I’m about to lay before them.
“Britney - her real voice! What she really sounds like!”
Yes, I can hear you sigh. You’d think anyone with half a brain would see the fallacy in putting forward, as evidence that she can’t sing, a few seconds of a video where, breathless and dancing hard, and thinking her mic is switched off, she emits a few tuneless grunts. She wasn’t trying to sing and probably wasn’t even aware that she was making any noise at all. All of this is glaringly obvious. Yet this video is trotted out again and again on website after website, followed by the usual bleating of the conspiracy sheep “That proves it! I always knew she couldn’t sing. Thank you for posting this!” Sometimes a Britney loyalist will respond with a shoal of videos showing her actually singing live, but nobody seems to care. I shall pause here for some eye-rolling.
“She doesn’t sing on her own records!”
I guess you could say this about anybody. No doubt there are Beyonce and GaGa soundalikes who could be deployed in the studio in the event that the stars had something better to do that day. But history suggests that this kind of skulduggery can’t be kept secret for very long. It didn’t take the public long to find out that Loleatta Holloway was the real singer on Black Box’s “Ride on Time”, that Manuella Kamossi really sang Technotronic’s “Pump up the jam”, that Audrey Hepburn was overdubbed by Marni Nixon (in “My Fair Lady”) and Juanita Hall by Muriel Smith (in “South Pacific”). The tabloids, with their suspicious minds, quickly discovered that Milli Vanilli weren’t singers at all. Strange, then, that in 12 years they haven’t managed to prove the same about Britney.
“There’s a Britney-button!”
According to this interesting theory, some producers are able to press a “Britney-button” on one of their obscure but impressive machines, and it makes any vocals by demo singers sound exactly like her. There’s an obvious weakness here, in that there would have to be a “her” for them to sound like, and “she” would have had to sing quite a few vocals to provide for the comprehensive programming that is evoked by the Britney-button.
Another problem is that we know the “Britney-button” isn’t a standard Pro-Tools plug-in, or an unofficial one that’s been circulating around the studios, because that’s something that would have leaked on the professional audio websites. So it would have to be a custom feature that each producer programs for himself. And if there is no “her” for the soundalike to sound alike with, how come every one of her 40 producers has managed to come up with the same vocal signatures and tone? Coincidence? Producer David Foster recently remarked that he loved Britney’s voice for her tone, adding “You cannot manufacture tone”. He hasn’t worked with Britney so he has no reason to lie.
“Her vocals are all stuck together from a few small good bits!”
At the extreme end of the spectrum, this theory holds that Britney phones in a few words and phrases to the studio, maybe just a few vowels and consonants, and the all-knowing, all-powerful producer programs them into his computer, shuffles them around a bit and out they come in the right order as a finished vocal track. As against this, we have actually seen many paparazzi pictures of Britney going into and coming out of recording studios, so we may suspect that at least part of this isn’t true!
But what does she do in there? Sing a few random words and phrases then go home? For a producer to create acceptable vocal tracks from them would be a task of unimaginable complexity and take forever. In fact, it would be a lot simpler and quicker from the producer’s point of view if Britney would just sing the complete song right through, however badly. This would be a gigantic shortcut to getting all the words and phrases required, and in the right order, for any amount of diabolical processing to take place. Goodness knows, if she goes off-key a few times, there’s always the Almighty Autotune to put things right. Right?
“Her vocals are blended with other singers!”
According to this theory, Britney has a deep voice and if you hear anything else on her records, that’s someone else’s voice “blended” with hers. Exhibit “A” is a home-edited version of “Gimme More” with the center channel taken out. It is then assumed that Britney’s vocal only appears on the center channel and nowhere else. Everything else that you hear, which is about 90% of the track, is claimed to be Keri Hilson. But. There’s always a “but”, isn’t there? Britney’s lead vocal is only placed on the center channel in the first part of the verse. In the second part, “working it down, etc”, and in the chorus, her voice is split between left and right channels. It’s blatantly obvious, if you listen using a pair of good headphones. And it’s also obvious what Keri contributes, which is a couple of “Aaaah” sounds during the first part of the verse.
The same thory is applied to “Piece of Me”, but here the “real” singer is claimed to be Robyn Carlsson. However, on good headphones, you can detect quite easily how much is really Robyn. It’s the part of the vocals that sounds especially heavily synthesized - the “You want a piece, piece of me….” section at 2.22. She also sings “You want a piece of me” at the end of each verse and alternately in the chorus. And that is all.
But why are we giving the “blending” theory any credibility when it’s pure bullcrap anyway? You can’t blend two different voices together without it sounding like a duet. It would always be audible. And it isn’t. The alternative is that one of the “blended” voices would have to completely dominate the other to the point that it is inaudible. In which case it isn’t really a “blended” vocal at all. As for the idea that deep voice A could be blended with high voice B so that you ended up with the tone of A and the register of B - it is, frankly, ludicrous. You can see why I say that conspiracy theorists are gullible.
“An older black woman....!”
A lot of excitement was generated among Britney-haters and conspiracy theorists in 2008 when musician, writer and broadcaster Henry Rollins said this: "They have the black chick come in and sing, and Britney sings over it, and they mix them together. Britney gets her phrasing basically from this older R&B woman. I found that out talking to an engineer. Britney apparently isn't actually the worst singer, she just has no feel. So they bring in this older black woman who sings the song, then Britney sings to it, and they kind of make a mix of the two voices, and that's what you hear on the records."
Part of this has a limited degree of credibility. It is a widely-used studio practice for a producer to provide guide vocals to show a featured artist the kind of thing he’s looking for, especially when the star hasn’t written the song him/herself. It’s harder to see how an “older r&b woman” would have more “feel” than Britney does for her dancey electro-pop, or more experience in performing it. It also seems less than credible that all 40 producers, in studios across the USA and in Sweden, would use the same older black r&b woman. It has been alleged that Henry Rollins has an agenda though - which is his belief in the superiority of black over white musicians, so go figure.
It may be credible that Britney’s producers would sometimes use guide vocals, but what isn’t credible is that they would “make a mix of the two voices”. I spoke about this ridiculous suggestion in the previous section above. Either you can hear the guide vocal or you can’t. And with Britney you can’t. Which is just as well, because producers go to great lengths to make sure you can’t. This is because it’s not unknown for the anonymous and uncredited singers of guide vocals to CLAIM that their voices are audible and therefore they should get a share of the royalties. This happened to Paula Abdul in a celebrated case, which Abdul successfully defended. The court agreed that only her voice was audible.
“Heavily Autotuned!”
If people want to claim that her voice is usually or always put through some kind of synthesizer then I would have to disagree. On most of her albums, her voice is rarely, if ever, electronically altered. Listening on good headphones shows this to be true. She does use a robotic, metallic kind of voice sometimes, and it sounds electronic or artificial, but that is an effect SHE creates. In a few places, the producer or mixer adds a kind of thin electronic fuzz on top of her vocal line.
“Femme Fatale” is different from her previous albums because it does feature more use of electronic processing of her voice, but these are effects customized to each track and not just a load of generic distortion such as you get by misuse of the notorious Autotune.
The “Autotune” conspiracy argument, however, makes a different claim - which is that Britney is such a bad singer, and requires so much Autotuning to bring her into key, that Autotune is forced into distortion. But, as I said, what you hear on “Femme Fatale” isn’t the Autotune distortion sound, and at least 90% of her vocals, even on “Femme Fatale”, aren’t distorted anyway! Again I say “Listen with good headphones!” I could call upon any number of producers ready to testify that she can sing perfectly well in the studio and needs no more Autotuning than anybody else, but the conspiracy theorists say they’re all lying, so I won’t bother.
“Copy and paste!”
When I argued last week that Britney’s professional qualities as a singer were exemplified by her consistency, in other words that she could sing a phrase identically several times, a number of those who made comments said that this was achieved by copying and pasting. OK, I agree that this may be true. At the vocal comps stage, the producer and artist may agree that a certain “take” of a certain phrase was the best, and it would then be used for as many repeats as possible. All of this is true.
But what I wanted to argue was that Britney isn’t the kind of artist who needs dozens of takes before there are enough good parts for the comps to be of any use. Quite a few producers down the years have commented that she’s really fast and professional in the studio, and doesn’t require many takes. She is said to have laid down the lead vocals for “Till The World Ends” in about 15 minutes, so that seems to confirm it. And here’s a small section of Jenny Eliscu’s 2001 “Observer” article about Britney. She’s with Britney in the studio during a comps session: “Britney's sultry vocals sound near perfect in every version played, and her voice is stronger and more confident than you might expect. 'It's so hard to do vocal comps with Britney,' BT says with a laugh. 'Every take is so good. It's easier to do this with a bad singer.' There we have an independent witness from the press to testify that BT wasn’t lying.
But anyway. The “Femme Fatale” album is full of repeated phrases that show her consistency. My argument is perhaps better made by referring to an instance where they couldn’t be copied and pasted. Try, for example, “Shame on me/To need release/Uncontrollably” in “I wanna go”. Or “Diamond, diamond, shinin’ shinin’, oh boy you’re so fine/Gotta be the finest thing that I seen in my life/I will pay whatever just to get a better view/And yeah, your body looks so sick I think I caught the flu” from “(Drop Dead) Beautiful”. Different phrases, but sung identically. Yes, they may be the best versions of each phrase, comped from 6 different takes, but at least it shows her excellent consistency across the different takes - which is all I wanted to demonstrate and is good enough for me!
No matter that there are actually quite a few videos on YouTube of Britney singing live. We’ve seen them here at PoorBritney. Conspiracy theorists prefer conspiracies and theories to facts, and, although they believe their cynical and suspicious attitude is proof of superior intelligence, they actually tend to be pretty gullible. You only have to examine what they believe for proof of that.
But anyway, who are the conspirators? Well, obviously there’s Britney herself, her past and present management team, her A&R managers and various others at Jive Records. You’d expect them to be loyal.... I guess.... but what about her embittered ex-security staff, and the ever-floating multitude of hangers-on and freeloaders, including ex-boyfriends? What about Sam Lutfi? Why would you expect any of them to keep quiet on Britney’s behalf?
What I think is more sinister than any of these is the grand conspiracy involving all of the record producers, vocal producers, studio musicians and their teams who have worked with her since 1998. When you consider that she’s worked with more than 40 production teams in her career so far, it’s pretty amazing that nobody has approached the News Of The World or The Sun with the terrible secret. Amazing too that so many of them have deliberately gone on record to lie about how good she is in the studio when they didn’t have to.
I can’t claim that my list of deceptions and malfaisance is exhaustive, because every time I write about Britney’s voice, somebody comes up with a new conspiracy theory. And the gullible people suck up every word of it. I also don’t expect the conspiracy theorists to have their minds changed by anything I say. I have no doubt that, if there are any comments, they’ll show that some people didn’t even consider the observations, analysis and facts I’m about to lay before them.
“Britney - her real voice! What she really sounds like!”
Yes, I can hear you sigh. You’d think anyone with half a brain would see the fallacy in putting forward, as evidence that she can’t sing, a few seconds of a video where, breathless and dancing hard, and thinking her mic is switched off, she emits a few tuneless grunts. She wasn’t trying to sing and probably wasn’t even aware that she was making any noise at all. All of this is glaringly obvious. Yet this video is trotted out again and again on website after website, followed by the usual bleating of the conspiracy sheep “That proves it! I always knew she couldn’t sing. Thank you for posting this!” Sometimes a Britney loyalist will respond with a shoal of videos showing her actually singing live, but nobody seems to care. I shall pause here for some eye-rolling.
“She doesn’t sing on her own records!”
I guess you could say this about anybody. No doubt there are Beyonce and GaGa soundalikes who could be deployed in the studio in the event that the stars had something better to do that day. But history suggests that this kind of skulduggery can’t be kept secret for very long. It didn’t take the public long to find out that Loleatta Holloway was the real singer on Black Box’s “Ride on Time”, that Manuella Kamossi really sang Technotronic’s “Pump up the jam”, that Audrey Hepburn was overdubbed by Marni Nixon (in “My Fair Lady”) and Juanita Hall by Muriel Smith (in “South Pacific”). The tabloids, with their suspicious minds, quickly discovered that Milli Vanilli weren’t singers at all. Strange, then, that in 12 years they haven’t managed to prove the same about Britney.
“There’s a Britney-button!”
According to this interesting theory, some producers are able to press a “Britney-button” on one of their obscure but impressive machines, and it makes any vocals by demo singers sound exactly like her. There’s an obvious weakness here, in that there would have to be a “her” for them to sound like, and “she” would have had to sing quite a few vocals to provide for the comprehensive programming that is evoked by the Britney-button.
Another problem is that we know the “Britney-button” isn’t a standard Pro-Tools plug-in, or an unofficial one that’s been circulating around the studios, because that’s something that would have leaked on the professional audio websites. So it would have to be a custom feature that each producer programs for himself. And if there is no “her” for the soundalike to sound alike with, how come every one of her 40 producers has managed to come up with the same vocal signatures and tone? Coincidence? Producer David Foster recently remarked that he loved Britney’s voice for her tone, adding “You cannot manufacture tone”. He hasn’t worked with Britney so he has no reason to lie.
“Her vocals are all stuck together from a few small good bits!”
At the extreme end of the spectrum, this theory holds that Britney phones in a few words and phrases to the studio, maybe just a few vowels and consonants, and the all-knowing, all-powerful producer programs them into his computer, shuffles them around a bit and out they come in the right order as a finished vocal track. As against this, we have actually seen many paparazzi pictures of Britney going into and coming out of recording studios, so we may suspect that at least part of this isn’t true!
But what does she do in there? Sing a few random words and phrases then go home? For a producer to create acceptable vocal tracks from them would be a task of unimaginable complexity and take forever. In fact, it would be a lot simpler and quicker from the producer’s point of view if Britney would just sing the complete song right through, however badly. This would be a gigantic shortcut to getting all the words and phrases required, and in the right order, for any amount of diabolical processing to take place. Goodness knows, if she goes off-key a few times, there’s always the Almighty Autotune to put things right. Right?
“Her vocals are blended with other singers!”
According to this theory, Britney has a deep voice and if you hear anything else on her records, that’s someone else’s voice “blended” with hers. Exhibit “A” is a home-edited version of “Gimme More” with the center channel taken out. It is then assumed that Britney’s vocal only appears on the center channel and nowhere else. Everything else that you hear, which is about 90% of the track, is claimed to be Keri Hilson. But. There’s always a “but”, isn’t there? Britney’s lead vocal is only placed on the center channel in the first part of the verse. In the second part, “working it down, etc”, and in the chorus, her voice is split between left and right channels. It’s blatantly obvious, if you listen using a pair of good headphones. And it’s also obvious what Keri contributes, which is a couple of “Aaaah” sounds during the first part of the verse.
The same thory is applied to “Piece of Me”, but here the “real” singer is claimed to be Robyn Carlsson. However, on good headphones, you can detect quite easily how much is really Robyn. It’s the part of the vocals that sounds especially heavily synthesized - the “You want a piece, piece of me….” section at 2.22. She also sings “You want a piece of me” at the end of each verse and alternately in the chorus. And that is all.
But why are we giving the “blending” theory any credibility when it’s pure bullcrap anyway? You can’t blend two different voices together without it sounding like a duet. It would always be audible. And it isn’t. The alternative is that one of the “blended” voices would have to completely dominate the other to the point that it is inaudible. In which case it isn’t really a “blended” vocal at all. As for the idea that deep voice A could be blended with high voice B so that you ended up with the tone of A and the register of B - it is, frankly, ludicrous. You can see why I say that conspiracy theorists are gullible.
“An older black woman....!”
A lot of excitement was generated among Britney-haters and conspiracy theorists in 2008 when musician, writer and broadcaster Henry Rollins said this: "They have the black chick come in and sing, and Britney sings over it, and they mix them together. Britney gets her phrasing basically from this older R&B woman. I found that out talking to an engineer. Britney apparently isn't actually the worst singer, she just has no feel. So they bring in this older black woman who sings the song, then Britney sings to it, and they kind of make a mix of the two voices, and that's what you hear on the records."
Part of this has a limited degree of credibility. It is a widely-used studio practice for a producer to provide guide vocals to show a featured artist the kind of thing he’s looking for, especially when the star hasn’t written the song him/herself. It’s harder to see how an “older r&b woman” would have more “feel” than Britney does for her dancey electro-pop, or more experience in performing it. It also seems less than credible that all 40 producers, in studios across the USA and in Sweden, would use the same older black r&b woman. It has been alleged that Henry Rollins has an agenda though - which is his belief in the superiority of black over white musicians, so go figure.
It may be credible that Britney’s producers would sometimes use guide vocals, but what isn’t credible is that they would “make a mix of the two voices”. I spoke about this ridiculous suggestion in the previous section above. Either you can hear the guide vocal or you can’t. And with Britney you can’t. Which is just as well, because producers go to great lengths to make sure you can’t. This is because it’s not unknown for the anonymous and uncredited singers of guide vocals to CLAIM that their voices are audible and therefore they should get a share of the royalties. This happened to Paula Abdul in a celebrated case, which Abdul successfully defended. The court agreed that only her voice was audible.
“Heavily Autotuned!”
If people want to claim that her voice is usually or always put through some kind of synthesizer then I would have to disagree. On most of her albums, her voice is rarely, if ever, electronically altered. Listening on good headphones shows this to be true. She does use a robotic, metallic kind of voice sometimes, and it sounds electronic or artificial, but that is an effect SHE creates. In a few places, the producer or mixer adds a kind of thin electronic fuzz on top of her vocal line.
“Femme Fatale” is different from her previous albums because it does feature more use of electronic processing of her voice, but these are effects customized to each track and not just a load of generic distortion such as you get by misuse of the notorious Autotune.
The “Autotune” conspiracy argument, however, makes a different claim - which is that Britney is such a bad singer, and requires so much Autotuning to bring her into key, that Autotune is forced into distortion. But, as I said, what you hear on “Femme Fatale” isn’t the Autotune distortion sound, and at least 90% of her vocals, even on “Femme Fatale”, aren’t distorted anyway! Again I say “Listen with good headphones!” I could call upon any number of producers ready to testify that she can sing perfectly well in the studio and needs no more Autotuning than anybody else, but the conspiracy theorists say they’re all lying, so I won’t bother.
“Copy and paste!”
When I argued last week that Britney’s professional qualities as a singer were exemplified by her consistency, in other words that she could sing a phrase identically several times, a number of those who made comments said that this was achieved by copying and pasting. OK, I agree that this may be true. At the vocal comps stage, the producer and artist may agree that a certain “take” of a certain phrase was the best, and it would then be used for as many repeats as possible. All of this is true.
But what I wanted to argue was that Britney isn’t the kind of artist who needs dozens of takes before there are enough good parts for the comps to be of any use. Quite a few producers down the years have commented that she’s really fast and professional in the studio, and doesn’t require many takes. She is said to have laid down the lead vocals for “Till The World Ends” in about 15 minutes, so that seems to confirm it. And here’s a small section of Jenny Eliscu’s 2001 “Observer” article about Britney. She’s with Britney in the studio during a comps session: “Britney's sultry vocals sound near perfect in every version played, and her voice is stronger and more confident than you might expect. 'It's so hard to do vocal comps with Britney,' BT says with a laugh. 'Every take is so good. It's easier to do this with a bad singer.' There we have an independent witness from the press to testify that BT wasn’t lying.
But anyway. The “Femme Fatale” album is full of repeated phrases that show her consistency. My argument is perhaps better made by referring to an instance where they couldn’t be copied and pasted. Try, for example, “Shame on me/To need release/Uncontrollably” in “I wanna go”. Or “Diamond, diamond, shinin’ shinin’, oh boy you’re so fine/Gotta be the finest thing that I seen in my life/I will pay whatever just to get a better view/And yeah, your body looks so sick I think I caught the flu” from “(Drop Dead) Beautiful”. Different phrases, but sung identically. Yes, they may be the best versions of each phrase, comped from 6 different takes, but at least it shows her excellent consistency across the different takes - which is all I wanted to demonstrate and is good enough for me!
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Britney's voice / singing down the years - deteriorating?
Britney Spears has been a professional singer, on and off, since she was recruited into the All New Mickey Mouse Club in 1993. We’ve seen videos of her performing like a real little trouper on Star Search when she was only 10 years old. You would think, wouldn’t you, that she would know quite a lot about singing? I certainly expect her to, and I think she does.
In fact, despite a hundred thousand sneery websites assuring us - or trying to reassure themselves - that “she can’t sing”, Britney’s recordings show a great deal of professionalism and skillful technique. It’s there IF you know what you’re looking for and are ready to look beyond power and Lea-Michele-style wig-out climaxes. If the sound of innocent little songs being bludgeoned to death by mindless excess is what floats your boat, you probably won’t be open to anything that I’m about to say.
The unobservant, such as hostile critics, try to put Britney in a box, saying she “has” this kind of voice or that kind of voice. “She has a nasal voice.” “She has a thin voice.” “She has a breathy voice.” “She has a robotic voice.” “She has a babyish voice.” And so on. Actually she has all of those voices and a lot more. A better way of expressing it would be to say that she possesses and USES those voices and isn’t limited to any of them.
Britney is an actress in song, you see. Consciously or unconsciously, the voices she applies to particular songs are her artistic choices. We may not especially like it, but the whiny, brattish voice she uses for parts of songs like “(Drop Dead) Beautiful” is supposed to create the image of a saucy, scheming little sex-vixen. But she’s not stuck with that voice. She only uses it in the verse and changes it for the chorus.
The voice she used in “Piece of Me” was also a little whiny, but it was very different from her sex-vixen voice. She sounded metallic and robotic - and did it so successfully that many unobservant critics thought her voice had been Vocoderized. If only people would listen through a decent set of headphones before they pass judgment.....
I guess it’s too much to expect from busy reviewers that they would take the time and trouble to pick up the subtle differences in the ways in which Britney treats each and every song on “Femme Fatale”. It’s a lot easier (and lazier) just to dismiss her and say “Her contribution to the project isn’t clear”. But if you’re interested in vocal craftsmanship, you will pride yourself on spotting the fact that her vocals on “Trouble” and “Big Fat Bass” are very different from “(Drop Dead) Beautiful”. If you can’t see that difference, you shouldn’t be writing about vocalists.
Another faulty approach in talking about Britney’s singing is to categorize her voice by eras and say she was better at this time or that time. One popular theory is that her voice has gradually deteriorated over the years since her first album. The explanations given are that she doesn’t practise enough and that she smokes. This, it is said, is why her voice became more whispery and breathy by the time of “In The Zone”.
But this theory ignores the fact that each era has contained its own anomalies and departures from a consistent timeline. For example, her high, whispery voice makes its first recorded appearance on “When your eyes say it” on the “Oops...” album. But that didn’t mean she had no other choices. On the “Britney” album that followed a year later, she chose to use a whole range of different voices, including the whispery one - but it only made an appearance on one track, “That’s where you take me”.
By the time of “In The Zone” in 2003, the “gradually getting worse because of the smoking” theorists were pretty sure she’d lost all strength and assertiveness from her voice for ever, and sang in a breathy style because she no longer had any alternative. But this album was Britney’s “Erotica” and it was appropriate that she delivered softer, sweeter, sexier vocals on most of the tracks. But there is a continuum of breathiness that stretches from “Showdown” and “Breathe on me” at one extreme, through tracks such as “I got that boom boom” and “The Hook Up” right through to “Brave New Girl”, which is sung with straightforward strength and isn’t breathy at all. Once again, the supposed timeline of steady deterioration looks extremely shaky.
Next we arrive at “Blackout”, and the consensual but completely delusional theory that, by this hopeless and helpless stage in her career, she had to be propped up in the recording booth while she croaked a few phrases into a Magic Autotune machine which then produced the vocals. Hence the flat, disengaged, metallic sound of “Piece of me”. But... ummm.... although that’s what people EXPECTED to hear, “Piece of Me” is the ONLY track where she uses that approach. Every other track, even including “Freakshow”, is totally different. This was the album where she first began to explore her full vocal range, with many songs beginning in a low register then moving into an extremely high one. “Toy Soldier” gives her sex-vixen voice an early airing, and the breathy style is also represented, e.g. on “Heaven on Earth”. But the outtakes are the clearest indication of the vast range of styles she had at her command - think about “Let Go” and “State of Grace”.
And what about “Circus”? According to the theory of Britney’s steady vocal deterioration, an album that emerged a full 5 years after “In The Zone” should show her in a state of total vocal collapse, yet it contains some of the liveliest, most varied singing of her career and very little whisperiness. Again there are songs where she switches from low to high register for the chorus, and here her high voice is stronger and better integrated than previously. “Womanizer” and “If U Seek Amy” reveal her bratty sex-vixen, but only in the verses, while “Lace and Leather” shows us a non-bratty vixen. In “Kill the lights” and “Mmm Papi” she’s mid-register fierce. “Shattered glass” is assertive enough, but with a softer edge. “Unusual you” and “Blur” aren’t breathy, yet somehow they’re still dreamy and poignant. Even the ballads, “Out from under” and “My baby”, while sweet and affectionate, are sung in a stronger, more open-throated voice than (for example) “Everytime” and in “My baby” she also displays uncharacteristically sustained notes and a more obvious vibrato.
And finally “Femme Fatale”. Britney got a bashing from many critics for sounding unnatural and electronic, but that’s a product of lazy listening, as I said at the start. Her approach on this album is basically to put the songs out there as vigorously as possible and with relatively little of her usual ornamentation. Yet there are still differences in the ways in which she sings each track. And there is much unobtrusive professionalism. On “(Drop Dead) Beautiful” she repeats the line “You’re beautiful” many times, and every time is identical to the one before. That isn’t an easy thing to achieve. On “Don’t keep me waiting” she belts the song out as aggressively as anybody, and shows that even at full power she can hold a note AND repeat it perfectly again and again - which is something the haters said she couldn’t do.
Now, you may want to turn all of this against her and argue that this recourse to basic pop techniques is in itself a sign of diminishing vocal skills and loss of finesse. And indeed, only one track on the entire album contains any vibrato at all. But that is “He about to lose me” where all of her great qualities are shown to be intact in one song, and available for use any time she requires them. It’s almost as if she gave us this one little, anomalous track to tell us in her usual modest way “Hey, I can still do this y’know!”
In fact, despite a hundred thousand sneery websites assuring us - or trying to reassure themselves - that “she can’t sing”, Britney’s recordings show a great deal of professionalism and skillful technique. It’s there IF you know what you’re looking for and are ready to look beyond power and Lea-Michele-style wig-out climaxes. If the sound of innocent little songs being bludgeoned to death by mindless excess is what floats your boat, you probably won’t be open to anything that I’m about to say.
The unobservant, such as hostile critics, try to put Britney in a box, saying she “has” this kind of voice or that kind of voice. “She has a nasal voice.” “She has a thin voice.” “She has a breathy voice.” “She has a robotic voice.” “She has a babyish voice.” And so on. Actually she has all of those voices and a lot more. A better way of expressing it would be to say that she possesses and USES those voices and isn’t limited to any of them.
Britney is an actress in song, you see. Consciously or unconsciously, the voices she applies to particular songs are her artistic choices. We may not especially like it, but the whiny, brattish voice she uses for parts of songs like “(Drop Dead) Beautiful” is supposed to create the image of a saucy, scheming little sex-vixen. But she’s not stuck with that voice. She only uses it in the verse and changes it for the chorus.
The voice she used in “Piece of Me” was also a little whiny, but it was very different from her sex-vixen voice. She sounded metallic and robotic - and did it so successfully that many unobservant critics thought her voice had been Vocoderized. If only people would listen through a decent set of headphones before they pass judgment.....
I guess it’s too much to expect from busy reviewers that they would take the time and trouble to pick up the subtle differences in the ways in which Britney treats each and every song on “Femme Fatale”. It’s a lot easier (and lazier) just to dismiss her and say “Her contribution to the project isn’t clear”. But if you’re interested in vocal craftsmanship, you will pride yourself on spotting the fact that her vocals on “Trouble” and “Big Fat Bass” are very different from “(Drop Dead) Beautiful”. If you can’t see that difference, you shouldn’t be writing about vocalists.
Another faulty approach in talking about Britney’s singing is to categorize her voice by eras and say she was better at this time or that time. One popular theory is that her voice has gradually deteriorated over the years since her first album. The explanations given are that she doesn’t practise enough and that she smokes. This, it is said, is why her voice became more whispery and breathy by the time of “In The Zone”.
But this theory ignores the fact that each era has contained its own anomalies and departures from a consistent timeline. For example, her high, whispery voice makes its first recorded appearance on “When your eyes say it” on the “Oops...” album. But that didn’t mean she had no other choices. On the “Britney” album that followed a year later, she chose to use a whole range of different voices, including the whispery one - but it only made an appearance on one track, “That’s where you take me”.
By the time of “In The Zone” in 2003, the “gradually getting worse because of the smoking” theorists were pretty sure she’d lost all strength and assertiveness from her voice for ever, and sang in a breathy style because she no longer had any alternative. But this album was Britney’s “Erotica” and it was appropriate that she delivered softer, sweeter, sexier vocals on most of the tracks. But there is a continuum of breathiness that stretches from “Showdown” and “Breathe on me” at one extreme, through tracks such as “I got that boom boom” and “The Hook Up” right through to “Brave New Girl”, which is sung with straightforward strength and isn’t breathy at all. Once again, the supposed timeline of steady deterioration looks extremely shaky.
Next we arrive at “Blackout”, and the consensual but completely delusional theory that, by this hopeless and helpless stage in her career, she had to be propped up in the recording booth while she croaked a few phrases into a Magic Autotune machine which then produced the vocals. Hence the flat, disengaged, metallic sound of “Piece of me”. But... ummm.... although that’s what people EXPECTED to hear, “Piece of Me” is the ONLY track where she uses that approach. Every other track, even including “Freakshow”, is totally different. This was the album where she first began to explore her full vocal range, with many songs beginning in a low register then moving into an extremely high one. “Toy Soldier” gives her sex-vixen voice an early airing, and the breathy style is also represented, e.g. on “Heaven on Earth”. But the outtakes are the clearest indication of the vast range of styles she had at her command - think about “Let Go” and “State of Grace”.
And what about “Circus”? According to the theory of Britney’s steady vocal deterioration, an album that emerged a full 5 years after “In The Zone” should show her in a state of total vocal collapse, yet it contains some of the liveliest, most varied singing of her career and very little whisperiness. Again there are songs where she switches from low to high register for the chorus, and here her high voice is stronger and better integrated than previously. “Womanizer” and “If U Seek Amy” reveal her bratty sex-vixen, but only in the verses, while “Lace and Leather” shows us a non-bratty vixen. In “Kill the lights” and “Mmm Papi” she’s mid-register fierce. “Shattered glass” is assertive enough, but with a softer edge. “Unusual you” and “Blur” aren’t breathy, yet somehow they’re still dreamy and poignant. Even the ballads, “Out from under” and “My baby”, while sweet and affectionate, are sung in a stronger, more open-throated voice than (for example) “Everytime” and in “My baby” she also displays uncharacteristically sustained notes and a more obvious vibrato.
And finally “Femme Fatale”. Britney got a bashing from many critics for sounding unnatural and electronic, but that’s a product of lazy listening, as I said at the start. Her approach on this album is basically to put the songs out there as vigorously as possible and with relatively little of her usual ornamentation. Yet there are still differences in the ways in which she sings each track. And there is much unobtrusive professionalism. On “(Drop Dead) Beautiful” she repeats the line “You’re beautiful” many times, and every time is identical to the one before. That isn’t an easy thing to achieve. On “Don’t keep me waiting” she belts the song out as aggressively as anybody, and shows that even at full power she can hold a note AND repeat it perfectly again and again - which is something the haters said she couldn’t do.
Now, you may want to turn all of this against her and argue that this recourse to basic pop techniques is in itself a sign of diminishing vocal skills and loss of finesse. And indeed, only one track on the entire album contains any vibrato at all. But that is “He about to lose me” where all of her great qualities are shown to be intact in one song, and available for use any time she requires them. It’s almost as if she gave us this one little, anomalous track to tell us in her usual modest way “Hey, I can still do this y’know!”
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Remembering the Golden Era of Britney, Brian and Josh
Amidst all the excitement and controversy over Dr Luke’s work with Britney on “Femme Fatale”, Max Martin’s massive contribution to her career, Bloodshy & Avant’s career-saving success with “Toxic” and their continuing innovation, and the nostalgic appreciation for Danja’s high-quality contributions to “Blackout” and “Circus”, it’s easy to neglect some of her past collaborators.
With the fuzziness of 12 years of hindsight, we may tend to forget that most of Britney’s first album was written and produced by Eric Foster White, not by Max Martin. We have possibly forgotten that famous people rushed to work with her. “When your eyes say it” was written specially for Britney by the doyenne of adult-oriented songwriters, Diane Warren. “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman” was penned for her by Dido and reclusive country megastar Shania Twain wrote “Don’t let me be the last to know”.
At the other end of the fame scale, “One Kiss From You” was written and produced by her then A&R manager, Steve Lunt, a much more hands-on studio animal than his successor, Teresa LaBarbera Whites. He was also the producer on “You got it all” and “Heart”, and co-arranged “Me Against The Music”, “Showdown”, “Toxic”, and “The Hook Up”.
It’s interesting, with the benefit of hindsight, to note the huge importance of Steve Lunt’s realisation that he needed to move Britney’s recorded repertoire away from her earlier teenage-angst-laden “MOR” territory to the spacy, saucy electro-pop of “In The Zone”, effectively creating (as Dr Luke recently pointed out) Britney’s own genre.
When the original tapes for “In The Zone” were reworked to create a Super Audio CD, the engineer responsible commented that Steve had an exceptional understanding of Britney’s voice. There was nothing robotic, whiny or nasal about her vocals on HIS watch. In the credits for “In The Zone”, Britney thanks “Steve Lunt - the greatest A&R guy in the world! Thanks for having my back and being on the same page.” Yet to many fans he remains a shadowy, almost unknown and definitely unacknowledged influence on her career.
Also from the obscure end of the spectrum of those who have played a major part in Britney’s career are two remarkable but greatly underestimated writer-producers brought in by Steve Lunt to work with her. Their names are Josh Schwartz and Brian Kierulf, and the tracks they made together represent the high-watermark of Britney’s personal involvement in her own music. She co-wrote songs with them, saying (in the credits on “Britney”) “Thanx for making me feel so comfy writing with you guys” and was deeply involved in bringing each track to completion, always singing her own backing tracks.
And look at the quality of the songs Schwartz and Kierulf brought to the table! Some of these are among the finest and most beloved in her repertoire -
Lonely
Anticipating
Let me be
That’s where you take me
Brave New Girl
Don’t Hang Up
My Only Wish This Year
I Run Away
When I Say So
In contrast to these days of repetitious, two-note tunes, all of those songs are fully-formed and properly constructed, with intriguing verse melodies and memorable choruses. Each seems perfectly adapted to illustrate the many attractive qualities in Britney’s personality, and each draws from her a strong, characteristic vocal treatment.
Brian and Josh also provided vocal production for Britney, and it would be true to say that her vocals have never been better recorded. They didn’t use the current fashion for splitting the lead vocal in a narrow “V” between left and right channels, blurring the boundaries with the backing vocals. And (with the exception of “Brave New Girl”) they didn’t put her voice through a vocoder, or overlay it with the kind of electronic “fuzz” we find on tracks like “Piece of Me”. On Brian and Josh’s tracks, Britney’s lead vocal is crystal clear and placed centrally, and is given its space and separation from her backing vocals which are placed widely in the stereo mix at left and right. Her diction, often criticized, is perfect on every one of their songs.
They didn’t shy away from using real musical instruments either, preferring a proper drum kit and a proper bass melody played on a bass guitar to the ill-defined, ear-numbing, one-note electronic thumping we get these days. On “Anticipating” they add a whole new, unexpected dimension of poignancy by using a real acoustic string section.
They show a mastery of the stereo soundstage too (as perceived by the listener wearing good quality headphones) - and that’s something you won’t find on any of Britney’s albums from “Blackout” onwards. Listen, for example, to how Britney’s little-girlish “la la la la” on “That’s Where You Take Me” appears at about 90 degrees from center on the right-hand channel and is then echoed on the left-hand channel. Or check out the amazing three-dimensional mix on “Don’t Hang Up” where (again on good headphones) Britney’s words “Dont hang up!” seem to come from an actual phone located somewhere behind your left ear.
And consider the range of Brian’s and Josh’s work - from the vigorous, assertive dance beats of “Lonely” and “Let Me Be” through the majestic melodies of “I Run Away” and “Anticipating” to the gentle, wispy, ethereal dreaminess of “That’s Where You Take Me” and “Don’t Hang Up”. And let us not forget that “My Only Wish This Year” is one of the best Christmas pop songs ever made.
I think that with Dr Luke we’re in an age of corporate, rather mechanically created music now. Britney sounds less like a person, less like a featured star with a complex, adorable character, and more like one electronic effect among many. The mix is busy and the elements lack space. Everything is muddled and huddled together and it’s all one big bang-bang wall of sound. Britney doesn’t bother with vocal subtlety any more and her shimmering vibrato only makes an appearance on Rodney Jerkins’ “He About To Lose Me”.
I’d love to see Schwartz and Kierulf make a reappearance on Britney’s next album. I’d love to see her writing with them again. I’d love to hear her rather touching voice properly framed and displayed again. It’s not as if they’re yesterday’s men and no longer relevant - Lady Gaga used them on “The Fame”. I guess they were forgotten in the post-Steve Lunt era but I say “Bring ‘em back!”
With the fuzziness of 12 years of hindsight, we may tend to forget that most of Britney’s first album was written and produced by Eric Foster White, not by Max Martin. We have possibly forgotten that famous people rushed to work with her. “When your eyes say it” was written specially for Britney by the doyenne of adult-oriented songwriters, Diane Warren. “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman” was penned for her by Dido and reclusive country megastar Shania Twain wrote “Don’t let me be the last to know”.
At the other end of the fame scale, “One Kiss From You” was written and produced by her then A&R manager, Steve Lunt, a much more hands-on studio animal than his successor, Teresa LaBarbera Whites. He was also the producer on “You got it all” and “Heart”, and co-arranged “Me Against The Music”, “Showdown”, “Toxic”, and “The Hook Up”.
It’s interesting, with the benefit of hindsight, to note the huge importance of Steve Lunt’s realisation that he needed to move Britney’s recorded repertoire away from her earlier teenage-angst-laden “MOR” territory to the spacy, saucy electro-pop of “In The Zone”, effectively creating (as Dr Luke recently pointed out) Britney’s own genre.
When the original tapes for “In The Zone” were reworked to create a Super Audio CD, the engineer responsible commented that Steve had an exceptional understanding of Britney’s voice. There was nothing robotic, whiny or nasal about her vocals on HIS watch. In the credits for “In The Zone”, Britney thanks “Steve Lunt - the greatest A&R guy in the world! Thanks for having my back and being on the same page.” Yet to many fans he remains a shadowy, almost unknown and definitely unacknowledged influence on her career.
Also from the obscure end of the spectrum of those who have played a major part in Britney’s career are two remarkable but greatly underestimated writer-producers brought in by Steve Lunt to work with her. Their names are Josh Schwartz and Brian Kierulf, and the tracks they made together represent the high-watermark of Britney’s personal involvement in her own music. She co-wrote songs with them, saying (in the credits on “Britney”) “Thanx for making me feel so comfy writing with you guys” and was deeply involved in bringing each track to completion, always singing her own backing tracks.
And look at the quality of the songs Schwartz and Kierulf brought to the table! Some of these are among the finest and most beloved in her repertoire -
Lonely
Anticipating
Let me be
That’s where you take me
Brave New Girl
Don’t Hang Up
My Only Wish This Year
I Run Away
When I Say So
In contrast to these days of repetitious, two-note tunes, all of those songs are fully-formed and properly constructed, with intriguing verse melodies and memorable choruses. Each seems perfectly adapted to illustrate the many attractive qualities in Britney’s personality, and each draws from her a strong, characteristic vocal treatment.
Brian and Josh also provided vocal production for Britney, and it would be true to say that her vocals have never been better recorded. They didn’t use the current fashion for splitting the lead vocal in a narrow “V” between left and right channels, blurring the boundaries with the backing vocals. And (with the exception of “Brave New Girl”) they didn’t put her voice through a vocoder, or overlay it with the kind of electronic “fuzz” we find on tracks like “Piece of Me”. On Brian and Josh’s tracks, Britney’s lead vocal is crystal clear and placed centrally, and is given its space and separation from her backing vocals which are placed widely in the stereo mix at left and right. Her diction, often criticized, is perfect on every one of their songs.
They didn’t shy away from using real musical instruments either, preferring a proper drum kit and a proper bass melody played on a bass guitar to the ill-defined, ear-numbing, one-note electronic thumping we get these days. On “Anticipating” they add a whole new, unexpected dimension of poignancy by using a real acoustic string section.
They show a mastery of the stereo soundstage too (as perceived by the listener wearing good quality headphones) - and that’s something you won’t find on any of Britney’s albums from “Blackout” onwards. Listen, for example, to how Britney’s little-girlish “la la la la” on “That’s Where You Take Me” appears at about 90 degrees from center on the right-hand channel and is then echoed on the left-hand channel. Or check out the amazing three-dimensional mix on “Don’t Hang Up” where (again on good headphones) Britney’s words “Dont hang up!” seem to come from an actual phone located somewhere behind your left ear.
And consider the range of Brian’s and Josh’s work - from the vigorous, assertive dance beats of “Lonely” and “Let Me Be” through the majestic melodies of “I Run Away” and “Anticipating” to the gentle, wispy, ethereal dreaminess of “That’s Where You Take Me” and “Don’t Hang Up”. And let us not forget that “My Only Wish This Year” is one of the best Christmas pop songs ever made.
I think that with Dr Luke we’re in an age of corporate, rather mechanically created music now. Britney sounds less like a person, less like a featured star with a complex, adorable character, and more like one electronic effect among many. The mix is busy and the elements lack space. Everything is muddled and huddled together and it’s all one big bang-bang wall of sound. Britney doesn’t bother with vocal subtlety any more and her shimmering vibrato only makes an appearance on Rodney Jerkins’ “He About To Lose Me”.
I’d love to see Schwartz and Kierulf make a reappearance on Britney’s next album. I’d love to see her writing with them again. I’d love to hear her rather touching voice properly framed and displayed again. It’s not as if they’re yesterday’s men and no longer relevant - Lady Gaga used them on “The Fame”. I guess they were forgotten in the post-Steve Lunt era but I say “Bring ‘em back!”
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