Back to the Future: The Music Production Imagination, Songwriting and Exploring the Past

Abstract

The study of songwriting invites us to enter into the music production process of making a song. Here, we may observe melodic or lyric ideas in their unfinished form. However, within this process there are also ways a songwriter might imagine how the song will sound when it is completed. This article probes this process as the “music production imagination”. Using a practice research approach coupled with brief textual analyses of existing accounts of practice, it examines the imagined futures of a song during the songwriting process. It draws on 1980s pop as an example, where highly mediated production elements, such as surreal reverb, synthesizers, and drum machines, often appear first in the imagination before they are realised in a recording. Show more