These days, songwriters are getting very skilled at producing their song demos, to the point that some of them sound like fully produced songs when the artist hears them, which isn’t always a good thing. Mike Eli of Eli Young Band says, “I tend to like something that is more stripped down and a guitar and a vocal because my imagination kind of starts taking off a little bit.”
Bandmate Jon Jones agrees. He says stripped down demos, “gives the band some more room, too. Like, as a band that plays instruments, it’s nice when you’re not given a template, necessarily.”
Sometimes when Eli Young Band is listening for songs to record, if the demo is over-produced, it can actually work against them. “Sometimes demos can just go so fully electronic and then so fully pieced together that you have to kind of let that go for a minute, to deconstruct the song and kind of feel like, ‘Where can we take this?’. What possibilities are there for this melody, and if a demo has already taken it to a certain direction, are you gonna be forced to go that direction? So you kinda have to hear past that. So, I tend to like the stripped down versions.”
Thankfully, the writers of Eli Young Band’s current single, “Break It In,” delivered a demo that allowed the band to hear it as a song they wanted to record and make it their own.
Eli Young Band – hearing potential in demos :42
Mike Eli – “I tend to like something that is more stripped down and a guitar and a vocal because my imagination kind of starts taking off a little bit.
Jon Jones – “It gives the band some more room, too. Like, as a band that plays instruments, it’s nice when you’re not given a template, necessarily.
Mike – “And sometimes demos can just go so fully electronic and then so fully pieced together that you have to kind of let that go for a minute, to deconstruct the song and kind of feel like, ‘Where can we take this?’. What possibilities are there for this melody, and if a demo has already taken it to a certain direction, are you gonna be forced to go that direction? So you kinda have to hear past that. So, I tend to like the stripped down versions.”