http://www.vimeo.com/5222227

In one day, Beck Hansen and friends recorded an album-length cover of a beloved pop music album. They did it by setting aside time, lowering their guard, and letting creative work happen. Anyone with a side-project could learn a lot from them.

Hansen, better known as the singular Beck, is known in popular culture for a cut-and-paste, information-overloaded sound that takes a lot of time to produce, and far more time to release, promote, and tour on. For the Record Club project, he took a step back from the standard conception of “Let’s make an ‘album.’”

He rang up like-minded friends and cohorts, got them to agree on an album—the Velvet Underground’s debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico—and limited the project to 24 hours. There were no practice sessions or pre-arranged song structures, and no intention to, as Beck put it, “‘Add to’ the original work or … recreate the power of the original recording. Only to play music and document what happens.” The result? Some pretty striking, and strikingly pretty, music. A total of eleven tracks and one alternate take, and, at the end of one really long day, there’s this new thing that anyone can listen to, watch videos of, and obsess over.


Any musician with a few musically gifted friends could try the same project, but there’s a wider lesson for programmers, writers, and hobbyists of any stripe. When you’re contemplating a new project, or stuck on a big one, consider how Record Club demonstrates the payoffs of creative constraints, definite time frames, and a ban against external expectations to your Big Serious Project.

The joys of creative constraints

Why does Flickr’s video service allow for only 90 seconds of footage? Cynically, you could assume it’s to save on bandwidth and storage costs, but Flickr says otherwise: It’s actually about emphasizing original, condensed, in-the-moment content rather than super-awesome World of Warcraft screengrabs. Spending time randomly clicking around Flickr’s video pools is scads more tolerable than randomly browsing YouTube’s user clips, which, aside from the occasional bit of brilliance, mostly serve as primers on the pitfalls of poor lighting and sound and having a huge amount of time to talk about popular music feuds.

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