Research Vision

As we approach 100 years of rock and roll music, I believe it is time to start taking it seriously as a field that is ripe for rigorous musicological research. The 1960s were an unusually fruitful time for popular music, with many unique innovations in songwriting and arrangement. Unfortunately, since a lot of this music is still seen as a commercial product rather than art. One of my primary goals is to encourage record companies and artists to think of their holdings as cultural heritage, instead of simply fodder for Spotify. By making it easy for researchers to explore the music of the 1960s, it helps ensure that the cultures that created this music will not die out. I would like to found a research institute, associated with a university, that is devoted to the task of converting this music into systematically preserved cultural heritage. Because the Beach Boys are my primary area of interest, and because they have such a sprawling archive and broad legacy, I believe the music of the Beach Boys is a good place to start this process.

The 1960s allowed a much larger variety of instrumentation to be expressed in popular music arrangements. There were also many inventions and innovations in creating new electric instruments; guitars, keyboards, synthesizers, etc. My research seeks to explore how these new instruments mixed with older, acoustic, orchestral instruments to create a sound unique to this era.

Recording to a limited number of tracks with a live band is a lost art. The number of living engineers who remember this unique workflow is dwindling all the time. I am concerned that the art of producing popular music live to tape will be lost, not only in practice, but more devastatingly, in knowledge recorded for posterity. Much of my research is devoted to documenting and analyzing the workflow of a 60s recording studio.