You can almost hear Chicago’s “Already Gone” crying out, “I can’t breathe!” It takes a careful listen to get past all of the compression in Jay DeMarcus’s production — his suffocating penchant for filling all the space with sound — to find what was likely a far better song in its demo stages.
Like much of the uptempo material on 2006’s Chicago XXX, the potential is clearly evident. These were decent songs that had the soul and heart polished out of them. Sure, classic Chicago songs had a lot going on but all of the instruments were given enough room to not only breathe but thrive.
Playing armchair producer, let’s take away the electric instruments and replace them with acoustics. Let’s put Jason Scheff on an acoustic bass guitar, or maybe even an upright bass. Let’s switch Keith Howland to one of his favorite Martin acoustic guitars. And instead of piling all of the instruments on top of one another, making “Already Gone” sound like cluttered noise, let’s open things up more. It would have made all the difference.
“Come to Me, Do” was perhaps the best song on Chicago XXX, because it actually was given some room to breathe – though not nearly enough, of course. “Already Gone” remains a source of frustration because the seeds of a really strong song — a song perhaps even better than “Come to Me, Do” – are buried in there.
There is just too much going on all at once for the listener to really focus. If you were to isolate the instruments, you’d likely marvel at all of the individual pieces: The classic Chicago sound is buried somewhere; there’s even some flute and muted trumpet. But after everything else is crammed in, “Already Gone” is left gasping for air instead of really flowing.
On albums like 1979’s Chicago 13, the material was weak to begin with. On the generic 1988’s Chicago 19, there were too many outside writers and the horns felt like an afterthought. But Chicago XXX was – and perhaps still is – fixable; the source material was strong enough.
Some part of the band’s legacy approach remains, underneath everything else. XXX was at its core a Chicago album, and in the hands of a more adept producer (Lenny Kravitz of “The Only One” fame, or maybe Night & Day’s Bruce Fairbairn or Chicago XXV’s Roy Bittan), it could really have been a great album. It could have been their best since Peter Cetera’s departure.
The blessing in disguise is that it took really bad production to make me appreciate the importance of really good production. A good producer brings out the best in the music; he gives the music the space it needs to be appreciated by the listener. He provides something that Jay DeMarcus failed to provide at every turn.
Chicago XXX isn’t a bad album: This is a good album that was just ruined by poor production.
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