This morning, I ran into Michael Patrick Welch, who was waiting to start his day as an extra on Treme. We talked iPods, and he said that while he was recording the upcoming White Bitch album, he’d record and mix a song, then drop it to mp3, throw it on his iPod and listen to it while riding his bike. Then he’d go back, tweak, and repeat the process. That’s the 21st Century version of Berry Gordy’s legendary practice of checking the sound of Motown recordings in cars – listening to songs not on stereo systems that no one was, but on the equipment they have and the way that they hear them.

By the way, the Gordy story’s not exactly right. It’s not that they played the music in the car:

In his still essential Motown history, Where Did Our Love Go?, Nelson George writes, “Motown chief engineer Mike McClain built a minuscule, tinny-sounding radio designed to approximate the sound of a car radio. The high-end bias of Motown’s recordings can be partially traced to the company’s reliance on this piece of equipment.” They knew people would be listening on their car stereos and on their transistor sets and the engineers were going to do what it took to make their songs sound good and memorable. Even if you couldn’t put your finger on it, when a Motown song came on, you knew it.