Great comparison between the studio and live versions -- you definitely put your finger on something I've always felt about the live versions of this song (which I very much enjoy), but never really took the time to analyze. Additionally, there are a few minor details that make the studio version feel tighter --- the backing vocals in the chorus, the way Eddie actually hard-stops the phrase "wanted to get right," as opposed to wrapping it into the next line, and fully articulates "with you" instead of adding that weird stutter ("wi-hith you" -- something that always felt like a choice, rather than the corrective measure it would become in later years).lvc wrote:Get Right is great as a studio track because of the almost magical excellence of the engineering of the entire Riot Act album. It sounds like sitting in the room while the band just plays. Every instrument is perfectly mic'ed and the final mix is no-bullshit and impeccably balanced. The drums and bass are out front in the verse like they should be, Mike McCready drops in a really fun solo and keeps riffing through the outro so the song finishes with more detail than it starts. So the song has a movement and structure, at least plenty for a sub 3:00 blitz.
They lyrics are objectively dumb.
Get Right suffers as a bootleg recording because the drums and bass -- the intended heart of the song -- aren't mixed more prominently. Probably an unfortunate by-product of releasing every show, I suspect the instrument levels are all pretty much set in a template and not much adjusted. So a song like Get Right endw up sounding a little heartless until Mike starts his thing. I mean, the entire verse, guitar-wise, is pretty much Stone playing one note to a rhythm. But he's further forward in the mix template so there you have it. And Mike never quite gets the solo timing right because the Riot Act studio process was designed to capture lightning in a bottle and they never played the song enough for him recapture that moment of inspiration from the studio.
The lyrics remain objectively dumb.
When Riot Act came out in 2002, I was about a year or so into really discovering "indie rock" for the first time -- bands like the Dismemberment Plan, Built to Spill, Death Cab, etc., stuff that had been all over Pitchfork in the previous few years. I remember hearing songs like "Get Right" and "Green Disease" and feeling like musically they were so close in spirit to that stuff -- the way Stone hangs on that one note, set against that steady pulsing drum/bass part, in a way that feels kind of mechanical and deliberately cold before moving into a simple, catchy chorus, always felt very Dismemberment Plan-ish to me (thinking of a song like "Gyroscope" here). I remember this being the first time I was really struck by how differently certain groups of people thought about bands like Pearl Jam, simply because they were the band they were with the public profile they had, as opposed to what they were actually doing musically.
So much fondness for this song, and this whole era of the band. I'm glad it was so exhaustively documented.
