Time & Perspective Quote by Ray Davies

Ray Davies is politely diagnosing the moment pop stopped being a conversation with a room and became a conversation with a machine. On its face, he is talking about process: more studio time, more tracks, more tools. Underneath, he is pointing at a shift in what songs are for. When the studio becomes the main venue, songwriting doesn’t just get “better produced”; it starts getting written to survive close-up scrutiny, to reward headphones over a dance floor, to justify its own cleverness.

Davies comes from a band era where a song had to land fast. The Kinks built classics on lean structures, sharp observation, and a kind of narrative sting. You can hear the implied contrast: earlier songwriting was engineered for immediacy and live translation; later songwriting increasingly anticipates overdubs, edits, and sonic architecture. The studio invites perfectionism, but also indecision. It turns the band into a committee, and the song into a project.

There’s a quiet ambivalence in his “I think.” It’s not a cranky “everything got worse,” but it is a warning about incentives. Extended studio time can expand the palette, yet it can also sand down the weird human edges that make a song feel inevitable. Davies is circling a cultural pivot: rock moving from public performance to private consumption, from capturing a moment to constructing one. The result is a new kind of authorship, where the producer’s choices and the technology’s possibilities start rewriting the definition of “song.”