The producer, Barry Weeks, is obviously quite talented as a songwriter (”Truth is Marching On,” “Mountain Mover”). He’s produced the Booth Brothers and wrote several songs on that project. So it’s not that he’s unworthy of the cuts as a songwriter. It’s the self-interested squelching of the competition that’s troubling. If he’s at all worth his headphones as a producer, he has to know that the best song selection for an album comes from songwriters competing for a limited number of slots on a project. Stacking the deck is how you make weak records, no matter who you are.

I wonder if this is the same guy whom songwriter Joel Lindsey blogs about here. Even if it isn’t, it’s nice to know that a talented guy like Lindsey appears to agree with me, or maybe I’m agreeing with him. No matter, money quote:

I have said it before and I will say it again… TO THE ARTISTS: If my song is not the best song for your project, DON’T RECORD IT. But if you throw my song into the pile of potential songs for your project and IF IT IS THE BEST, don’t let ANYONE (record company, producer, publisher, etc.) keep you from recording it. I don’t want cuts, if I have get them the wrong way. I mean that. I’d rather fold shirts at The Gap. Of course, I’m just arrogant enough to think that if politics were removed I’d actually get more cuts, but who knows? I just know that I love writing and getting songs recorded and being proud of the work that I do. And I love getting cuts because my songs were the cream of the crop…not because I twisted someone’s arm to manuever cuts on the project.

One point Lindsey doesn’t make is that producer-friendly deals not only shut out potentially worthier songs, but also give the producer/songwriter an incentive to submit less than his best songs, since he knows he’s guaranteed a fixed number of cuts. So not only do other songwriters get shafted. So do the artist and the listener. Of course, I’m sure BFA and their new producer would say that they’re getting the best from everyone all the time, including from Weeks’ songbook, but once you’ve put your thumb on the scale, it’s hard to take a “trust me” terribly seriously.

I see Hope’s Cal signed with Daywind. Good for them, I guess. The few times I’ve seen them they’ve had their act together mostly, and they clearly know how to sing (even if the vocal histrionics are still a bit too often in play). But I would thought they’d signed with Wayne Haun and Kevin Ward’s new label, especially since Hope’s Call has had such a longstanding relationship with Ward – which is to say, Ward’s engineering and producing work was essential in Hope’s Call early years, helping to keep their sound first-rate while they built a fan base and enough professional credibility to launch into the tier above the middling-to-fair category in which they began. Maybe I’ve been watching too much Hee Haw lately but I keep hearing the lyric from that old skit … “you met another and … [thuhhhhht] you were gone.”

And then Loren Harris left the Perrys. No great sound lasts forever, it just remains embalmed in a thousand chat rooms and discussion-board threads about how superior were the “real” Gold City (Tim, Ivan, Mike, Brian) and the “real” Kingsmen (Hammil, Reese, and whoever was your favorite baritone for Hammel to pick on and your favorite tenor who ruined his voice in all-night screech-a-thons) and the “real” Cathedrals (G, G, Danny, Mark) to everything that came before or after. [Interesting tangent: The Hoppers. The same personnel is intact from their heyday back in the mid to late 90s but they’ve managed to lose Shannon Childress their mojo all the same]. Perhaps it’s a mark of excellence or greatness or at least a sign that you’ve passed some magical point in your career as a group when you find that too-perfect sound that depends on something irreplaceable in each person’s voice and creates a cultlike identification among fans. If so, the Perrys found – and with Harris’s departure, lost – that sound.

I’m not sure what Libbi Perry Stuffle was thinking when she claimed that promoting baritone Joseph Habedank to lead and hiring someone else to fill the baritone spot “will keep our sound basically the same as before.” There’s a world of difference in that “basically” — the sound will be basically the same, much the way the Supremes would have sounded basically the same if Diana Ross had gone off to spend more time with her family. David Bruce Murray has described the Perrys late sound that developed with Habedank and Harris alongside the Stuffles as a “hard singing” style – by which I think he means to describe the considerable strength (not just volume, but control, pitch, blend) equally distributed at each vocal position.

I don’t know for sure why Harris left, but the usual cabal of whisperers in my ear who are usually right about these kinds of things certainly weren’t using phrases like “wants to spend more time family.” And Habedanks promotion to lead – coming as it does on the heels of the Perrys putting two songs written or co-written by Habedank on their latest project, despite the fact that the songs were B-list beginners work at best and despite the other fact that the Perrys are, or ought to be, at a place in their career when only the best songs (and not just the ones written by people you really like) get cut – well, these are the kinds of decisions that presage a decline. Let’s hope I’m wrong.

Finally, David Bruce Murray has made sghistory.com a wiki. Go read about why that could be a really BFD.

Except not this time. Instead of classic sg, there’s a little grace note dropped in, a few intentionally slurred notes in the harmony, the rhythm becomes just barely syncopated, and it all combines ot have a loosening effect on the style. There’s a hint of R&B here, some echoes of the blues and black gospel. Just like that, we’re no longer in the stuffy heat of the tent revival. For just a few beats, we’ve been transported to the Brooklyn Tabernacle choir, or a James Cleveland concert. I laugh out loud at this point. The woman next to me shuffles her stale and crumply newspaper, moves away, feigning a cell phone call. Who cares. Let her be skeeved out. This is one of those instances when I get to be right: for all my harping on the inevitable hybridity of southern gospel (in the face of howling protest from the classicists), here’s proof of what I’ve been saying all along, smuggled in under the guise of a noveau-classic quartet number from Kyla Rowland. It’s not like Whitmire or Webb or whoever it may be sits down and says, “I think I’ll throw in a dash of Mahalia Jackson here.” This kind of thing just what happens when studied and careful, attentive and interested musicians listen widely and generously to what’s going on around them, what’s gone on before them, and then return to southern gospel informed by the stylistic contexts of adjacent genres. Instead, they play what seems right, feels natural, sounds appropriate or effective for the moment. And thus can the introduction of a commonplace quartet number morph effortlessly into a wonderful stylistic merger of complementary traditions … and then … in a flash, fall back into line, never (literally) missing a beat. These spots of time are the kind of thing that endears gospel music me (whether I endear myself to gospel music is another thing entirely). And it’s these spots of time that make me come back here, to talk to myself in hopes that someone else will be interested enough to eavesdrop on my publicly private discussion of something that exerts such a shaping force on so many.