There's a moment in the new Tragically Hip album, We Are the Same, when Gord Downie sings, "Bring on the requisite strangeness / It always has to get a little weird." The music shifts gears from driving rock to string-laden prog balladry, and the Hip show they've evolved from a band that writes charging anthems about hockey players to one that writes songs about writing songs; next thing you know, they might, say, hire a prize-winning novelist to pen liner notes.
Which is, in fact, is what they've done. Earlier this month, music journalists were greeted by the 21st-century version of the liner essay in their inboxes: Accompanying a download of We Are the Same was a 750-word text about the band penned by Joseph Boyden (whose Through Black Spruce took the Giller Prize last year) and his wife and fellow novelist Amanda. While the piece does conclude with the rather lofty phrase, "this album is bread, water, love," it wouldn't be fair to castigate Downie and his pals for pretension instead, credit them with giving a boost to the vanishing art of the liner-note essay.
Nowadays, such essays are common only in the classical and traditional jazz genres, and of course in reissues -- in all three cases, they offer a historical angle on the music. In the '50s and '60s, the golden decades of the LP, liner notes had a contemporary feel and strove to be cool, gracing the backs of record sleeves and offering a writer's take -- whether analytical, zany, or oblique -- on the music inside.
Many LP liner notes, as York University music professor Rob Bowman observes, were essentially promotional "puff pieces," but others offered a creative perspective. Bob Dylan's own notes for releases such as Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, for instance, have a crazed, poetic energy, and reading them, says Bowman, is "like consuming Dylan in another medium."
Some of Dylan's peers also contributed memorable notes to record sleeves in the '60s. Consider Frank Zappa's militantly countercultural notes for Freak Out! ("Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system.") More often, musicians preferred to hire others to add their own perspectives, occasionally resulting in gems such as Ralph J. Gleason's forceful notes for Miles Davis's Bitches Brew ("it's not just the horn. it's a concept. it's a life support system for a whole world"), and Johnny Cash's ode to Dylan on the back of Nashville Skyline ("So where are your mountains / To match some men?").
In the '70s, liner notes lost their cachet. As singer and songwriter Robyn Hitchcock recalls, "When we moved into stoner culture, and everybody got hairier, and gatefold sleeves developed, and the music got longer, the old days of 'Hey friend, have you heard The Byrds?' gradually gave way to pictures of the artist as a star and sort of druggie doodles or photographs."
Since the '80s, Hitchcock has been one of the few musicians who regularly contributes liner-note essays -- or short stories or poems -- to his albums. They have allowed him to spin out his singular surrealistic narratives at greater length than in his songs, or, in the case of his major-label debut, 1987's Globe of Frogs, to alert new listeners to the kind of music they would hear.
The best liner-note essays allow the artist a degree of modesty while providing a kind of cachet, conferring significance on the music.
Downloadable "digital booklets" in .pdf format exist, but they don't seem integral to the music, and they've yet to catch on. Still, Rob Bowman, who has written liner notes for reissues for over 20 years and won a Grammy for The Complete Stax/Volt Soul Singles, Vol. 3 (1996), holds out a degree of hope: "Space is unlimited on the Net, or when you're including something digitally (with a purchase). So you could actually get even more in-depth liner notes, if record companies are willing to pay for them."
As Hitchcock notes, cross-platform creativity might flourish: "You can download artwork, and there would be no difficulty downloading a novel or a novella" along with an album. For that matter, if downloading enables us to combine art forms in new ways, why not hire a musician to write a song that would be packaged with, say, Amanda Boyden's next novel? "Oh, wouldn't that be good!" she laughs, "but that would take somebody way too long."
