Lindsey Ell - "Worth the Wait"

[travelrocks24]

[.indulgecountry]

Solid EP. I think "Standing There" is the best song on the set, but I like the first four songs quite a bit. The title track and "Stop This Train" I don't care for much, particularly "Worth the Wait" which I think is a total snooze. She just doesn't have a strong or interesting enough set of pipes to pull that one off. "Train" is a little better but still boring.

Also, "Criminal" a bit too noisy and cluttered production-wise but it sounds like it has more hit potential than "Waiting on You" to me. I still think her best chance at a breakthrough hit was "By the Way" so it's a shame that one didn't do it for her. Not sure why they skipped on releasing "All Alright" in the states because it did well in Canada either because it's a lot stronger than anything on the EP, too.

[Deleted]

"Criminal" is exceptional - really loving this song. Rest is fine to pleasant on the ears, but was surprised at how excellent "Criminal" is, given how average "Waiting on you" is.

[avalyn]

I thought I'd put this in here. It kind of explains why the John Mayer cover is on the EP.

www.rollingstone.com/country/news/lindsay-ell-kristian-bush-talk-musical-bond-ells-ep-w473607

Before she could get down to the business of working on a record, singer-guitarist Lindsay Ell was given an odd assignment and a set of rules by her new producer, Kristian Bush. The Sugarland co-founder instructed the Alberta, Canada, native to isolate herself and re-record her favorite album on her own, as an exercise in understanding how the songs work and what elements she preferred to hear in a production. The album she chose was Mayer's Continuum, and the process proved to be just the lesson she needed to complete her own project on her own terms.

"On my iTunes playlist, it is like at the top of that flippin' list," Ell says of Mayer's 2006 LP. "But I learned so much about that record, dissecting Pino Palladino bass parts and I'm like, 'Oh, that's what it does.' And it's different when you need to record something compared to when you're just listening to it."

What questions was he asking and how did it open up your thinking?
Ell: One of the first things he asked me was, "What's your favorite record? What do you like to listen to?" I go through my influences list. And I'm like, "My favorite record would be Continuum by John Mayer." And he's like, "Ok, I want you to go record the whole record." And I sat there blankly and I was like, "Record the whole record?" Meanwhile I'm on the road playing shows. And he's like, "Yeah, I want you to record the whole record, but the only rules are you need to sit in your office—

Kristian Bush: [You] can't be at home.
Ell: —using a computer and you need to play all the instruments.
Bush: You gotta do it all by yourself.
Ell: Whatever you wanna do.
Bush: Another rule was you could change any melody, you could change any lyric, you could change any key, anything you want. This is not an exercise in painting a Van Gogh.

Why can't you record it at home?
Bush: You will do things in private and sing in private and make choices in private that you wouldn't make if you were observed. It's like singing in the shower: you will go for it. It's human nature. But the problem is, as artists, we have this weird relationship with the world around us where we need people to help us and to tell us what we're doing and whether it's any good. But we're too scared to go past a certain point. It's like a speed limit.
Ell: It was like performer brain to creative brain and they're different spaces. When [I'm] in front of even my own mother, [I'm] in performance brain and it's like I have to perform even though she's seen me play this song a hundred times – compared to when I'm with my laptop by myself, I can make any mistake I want. So I cleared my schedule for two weeks and sat in that little room 8 am to 3 am and just grinded it out. At the end of two weeks, I handed him the "Continuum Project," as I called it. And I was like, "I am speechless. I've learned so much about myself. I've learned so much about how I loved to hear a band recorded in the studio." Sometimes I'm like, "Yeah, let's put 18 instruments on a song!" [But now] I'm like, "I really only like five on a song – really, that's all it needs." And there's a magic spot in that space. He smiled and he was like, "Well, now it's time to do that with your own music."

Did your cover of Mayer's "Stop This train" come out of those sessions?
Ell: Yeah, it's the complete raw version. It's as imperfect as imperfect could be. But there's just a humanness in that, and it was part of my journey of getting here and it was just such a part of this discovery process, of me figuring out my sound and what I want to say and how I want to say it and really discovering the reason why I love doing this so flippin' much when before, I kind of lost sight of that.