Stuart Epps, Led Zeppelin’s longtime engineer, recently chatted with Rock History Music, discussing whether new music ‘sucked,’ and how Ed Sheeran was a remastered version of the Beatles.
When the question, ‘Does new music suck?’ made its way to Stuart, the producer was quick to give an example of Ed Sheeran, claiming how the singer’s music was nothing new but just a reworked version of the Beatles. Still, that wasn’t necessarily a problem, as he explained why ‘kids’ nowadays thought it was ‘new.’
Epps stated:
“Over here [Britain], we’ve got an artist called Ed Sheeran, and you’ve got to say he’s new music, but the fact is if you study what he’s written and what he records, it’s rejigged Beatles, that’s what it is; so, the music now that’s being made, which is still going down extremely well with kids, is a bit like, it’s old music represented, that’s what it is.
So, I guess, for kids, it’s new to them, but for us old-timers, we’ve heard it all before. This is just a different way of presenting it, so it’s not really new music.”
However, he also remarked how there were still new bands and artists who succeed in coming up with different chord progressions and sounds while revealing one of the only names in the industry who had managed to do that before.
The producer explained:
“What’s incredible actually is that I get demos from new bands and artists, and somehow, after all these years, people can still come up with a different chord progression and a different voice sound and a different sound, just gets you going again, and you go, ‘Wow, I love that to bits.’
It’s not like I’ve never heard it before, and of course, it’s not quite like listening to the Beatles’ ‘White’ album or ‘Sgt. Pepper’ or even some of Elton [John]’s stuff where I think we were actually making music that was actually new; new productions, new sounds. But, [does] new music suck? No.”
It felt to Stuart that the ‘music’ nowadays was just a mirror image of what went down decades ago, though there were still artists who surprised him with their ‘newer sounds,’ as his collaborator, Elton John, did once.
