While, in my opinion, the album as an art form has declined from its peak of cohesiveness in the late 60s and early 70s, albums continued to be the major form of music purchase until the digital revolution. Most musicians are still dedicated to the idea of the album, the process of writing (or vetting) dozens of songs before winnowing it down to 10 or 12 that will form some kind of statement about who the artist is or what sort of music s/he is into at the time.

Thus, unfortunately, there is plenty of room for fans to be disappointed.

Noel Murray at A.V. Club recently discussed his method for not being disappointed. He simply doesn’t become a fan of anyone until their third, fourth, or fifth album, thereby not getting so involved in their early work that any later change/growth becomes “bad” to him. This makes sense, as most artists (especially young songwriters) do not hit their stride until after the first few albums.

He explains: “Many’s the time I’ve started to develop an appreciation for a singer-songwriter or band around the time of their fourth or fifth album, only to hear that old defeatist call: ‘Their old stuff was better.’” By leaving the first few albums “on the shelf”, “we can come to them later and have a whole body of work to dig back into, with a greater sense of context for where an act might be headed.”

This is how (mostly due to being born in 1980) I discovered the Beatles and the Beach Boys. I literally started with a tape of Sgt. Pepper, memorizing every nuance, then worked my way backwards to Meet The Beatles, then forward until I caught up to the present releases of archival and alternate-version material. Then I moved laterally to Pet Sounds, backwards and forwards again until I had a pretty hefty collection of vinyl, cassettes and CDs. And books; I am also a reader of biographies both authorized and non.

Then again, sometimes you can’t help but get in on the ground floor with an artist. Blogger and entertainment lawyer Bob Lefsetz received an advance copy of U2’s new album, No Line On The Horizon, and gave it a spin. He’s been disappointed by Bono et al the last ten years or so, but of the new effort he says, “This ain’t no clunker, this ain’t no ‘How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb’, it certainly ain’t no ‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’, this is a complete return to form. I’m stunned.”

Perhaps for U2, this is a good thing. Per Lefsetz, and also per my own listening experience with U2, they have been more concerned with the bottom line than with artistry, churning out what sounded like the same glossy song over and over again, just with different lyrics. Lefsetz says, “Albums are for fans, they shouldn’t be grist for the mill.” A return to the original formula, then, is approved by U2 fans… much like Coca-Cola.

But should fans be encouraged or allowed to wallow in the past, to put artists in boxes and demand their adherence to the sound that made them famous? If fans want both an old sound and current chart success, is this contradictory or delusional?

Taylor Hicks has a new album coming out on March 10. The Distance has already become an object of contention for Hicks’ fans, although to be honest they can always find something to argue about. The full album is available to listen to on Kids AOL (no idea why…) and thus there are vast amounts of fodder for the fans to chew on.

Hicks has only been on the national stage for three years. He has released one album of new music since winning American Idol, 2006’s Taylor Hicks. He has also re-released his pre-Idol music, which a majority of fans seem to consider “the real Taylor” — the post-Idol release deemed too “commercial”. However, despite going multi-platinum, the album has also been considered a “commercial failure”. The fans want Hicks to be successful, to sell many albums, to be a household name, to sell out stadiums. They also want raw, dirty, bar-singer blues and soul, and they want every album to be entirely written by Hicks, preferably without any co-writers.

Does anyone else see how these things might possibly conflict?

Raw, dirty, bar-singer blues and soul has never sold well. Those bluesmen (and women) who became famous only did so when their music was somewhat cleaned up, polished and made palatable to the average white American radio listener. Currently, even hip-hop and hard rock are more pop-like and glossy than their genre-creating forebears. If Hicks is going to sell soul, he’s going to do it in a clean Motown way, not the way he played (and still plays) it in bars. This is and has been a truth of the music industry: there has to be some homogenization if you’re going to appeal to the masses. It’s true of politics, too!

While I have not yet listened to The Distance, preferring to play it for the first time on much better speakers than those built into my laptop, I have read enough of the preliminary “reviews” from fans that I can say with certainty the following: Hicks did not write a majority of songs on this album; the songs are not necessarily blues or soul; there is at least one song that will get a ton of country radio play.

Do these things make this album bad? No. They make it different from his other albums. Why shouldn’t he be allowed to grow, to learn, to write a ton of songs and then decide they suck so much that he needs to record other peoples’ songs in order to have a good album? More power to him, for that! But when people have such narrow expectations — or not even expectations, but requirements — in order to be satisfied, of course they shall not be satisfied.

This applies to all artists, not only Taylor Hicks. Try to keep an open mind. Try to appreciate an album on its own merits; do not hold it up to past albums. If you love Achtung Baby or Under The Radar or Meet The Beatles so very much that nothing that follows can ever satisfy you, then please do not listen to anything new. Live in your vacuum of the past. Stay off Internet forums, too.

For me, I will try to love each album for what it is. I will try to love each artist both for who they were and who they have become, and even for who they may become in the future. Any human who does not learn, change, and grow is a sad, sad person indeed. Why wish that on a musician you claim to love?

David Ford strikes me as a man with better things to do.

Perhaps not at the moment I was talking to him. He was on the road in Idaho, en route to a show in Salt Lake City, when we battled our way through cell phone connectivity issues and spent a few moments discussing music and all the things that seem to come part and parcel with today’s music industry. But like I said, he’s got better things to do. Like, say, writing and performing music.

Ford’s been a working musician in Great Britain for more than a decade, and has even seen some measure of success as part of the band Easyworld. Since 2004, he’s been a solo artist, and has been steadily gaining fans in the United States, among them Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. He has toured with Ray LaMontagne, Suzanne Vega, Sara Bareilles (in April 2008) and Augustana (this month), and in June will be touring with Aimee Mann. (All of his summer tour dates are available in the OFTV events calendar.) His latest album, Songs For The Road, was released last year and is available for download on iTunes.

I first heard of Ford thanks to Kired over at Cursed Monkey Paw, and I was immediately struck by the honesty and sheer musicality of his songs. No pop songs, these, although they could easily do well in a better musical atmosphere than the current music industry. Therefore, I thought he’d be a perfect fit for our readership here — we’re all tired of the current music industry, yes?

Here is the utterly enjoyable and admittedly most “pop” song from Ford’s Songs For The Road, “Decimate”. As Ford says, “It’s a positive song about inviting someone to lay all their problems on you, to take their hardships and lighten their load, wanting everything to be OK. It’s kind of like a love song.” The video, I think, is also the most “pop” of the videos I’ve seen.

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More representative of both Ford’s music and his videos is “State of the Union”. The video was shot live, in one take, with one camera. “It’s a challenging thing to keep it interesting without relying on clever editing and cuts,” he says. “There’s a sense of realness as well, you’re actually watching a moment in time that happens as you see it.”

The song uses what seems to be his trademark, his “sound looping” technique. Watch as he picks up each instrument, then puts it down — the sound keeps going on an infinite loop, the same sound, same chords, over and over again until he changes it. Ford tells me he has “no musical theory at all”, which is not uncommon among incredibly creative musicians. They don’t have The Rules holding them down, they work by instinct, and they end up creating the most incredible sounds and techniques. I do have the theory, however, so I will tell you that this is something like a modified drone, although one that is quite dependent on the technology now available.

One of the reasons Ford uses this technique is because he is a solo artist and it is convenient to use technology for this purpose. Also, “it’s visually interesting, and more challenging for me as well, using the machines live… challenging myself as a solo performer to get as much out of the performance as I can.” It’s the modern equivalent to the old one-man-band, but much, much cooler.

“State of the Union” on YouTube

So watching this, you start to wonder: how many instruments does this man play? Well, quite a few, but with many it’s only enough to get the sound he wants. “There’s a point in music where you get it enough to be able to pick most things up a bit,” says Ford. “I’m not a great banjo player actually, but I like to have a go and get involved. I quite like the fact that for me, everything’s like a little journey.”

As plenty of wise men (and women, of course) have said before, life is all about the journey. Ford’s journey seems to be never ending. When I asked what his plans were after this summer’s tour, he answered, “Vacation, and then another tour, and another tour, and another tour.” That’s the hallmark of a musician who is in it for the music, of course, always thinking ahead to the next opportunity to perform. And of course, vacation usually means time off the road to compose the next album.

What Ford does not spend a lot of time thinking about is his own promotion. “My job is being a musician, and I’m lucky enough to have people whose job it is to… promote what I do. I shouldn’t attempt to promote my own work; the promotion of your work should never influence the input of your work. I want to spend all my energies on creating the best music that I can.” In a time when it seems that there are millions of bands out there promoting themselves because they can’t get professional support, Ford is very lucky indeed to have the support of people who are web-savvy enough to be posting his videos on YouTube, maintaining a MySpace page and a Facebook group, and (thanks so much!) making it easy for blogs like OFTV to do an interview.

Of course, it’s all about the approach you take to the music. We spent several minutes discussing the state of music today, and how in pop music, “The music itself is the final element of a campaign, like launching a new brand of chocolate bar. You have your commercial, your project, your packaging, your demographic,” Ford explains. Then someone says, “‘I guess we need a song’ … and you write a piece of manufactured shit and that becomes your song.”

Ford exists in a parallel universe to that approach. “I wouldn’t want to cross the line and start thinking about that. If you do have any kind of propensity for being an artist, you should make art. If no one likes it, then no one likes it. If they like it, they like it.” This is sort of the if you build it, they will come approach to music. The result is honesty in the music — honesty that attracts people who are looking for more from music than a good beat, and you can dance to it.

If you’re looking for more than superficial noise and a glossy package, there’s nothing more honest (or painful!) than “I Don’t Care What You Call Me”.

I, for one, am eager to follow David Ford on his musical journey.

Would you like a FREE copy of David Ford’s Songs for the Road CD? The first three readers to email Alicia at alicia@oneforthevault.com (with your complete mailing address) will win!

For those who like instant gratification, you can purchase Songs for the Road on iTunes using the link below.