Profonde Musique
May 19, 2026
Do-It-Yourself has many connotations in every walk of life, whether home improvement, auto repair, cooking, fashion, or using technology to create, but in the music biz it is a rarity. So many producers, engineers, and studio musicians, never mind bandmembers! But when it does occur, it can be magical, the way something insular and without outside influence can enhance the creative process. There is a high-wire-without-a-net sense of danger that emerges, including times when the artist may go “too far,” although some fans might dig that journey, even if the music travels beyond what they expect.
Sometimes DIY is due to need, as in it is cheap and compact, but then that means the singular voice and accompaniment must be of a higher level than what can be achieved with a full arsenal of assistance. Although that is noble and endearing, there is also the singular statement made from choice, the desire to strip away the accoutrements of the pop life to parse it down to the essentials – song and artist unencumbered.
I use the singular to frame my DIY Top 10, as I steered clear of bands going off on their own and achieving a masterwork outside “the system” – the most famous of these would be the Rolling Stones, seminal Exile on Main St., written and performed on the fly in a French basement far from music business interference, or The Band’s debut album, Music From Big Pink, another homemade creation with the five members hacking away at songs while a reel-to-reel captured the proceedings. But this list is primarily one artist toiling alone (and one very young duo), sometimes in a proper studio, sometimes at home with their own equipment, and in one instance captured on tape by a campfire.
When it’s done right, either by design or happenstance, a musical DIY is a thing of pure beauty and most times reveals an underlying aspect of the artist, his/her methods, personal expressions, and themes never achieved in any other format. In some cases, the artists never quite get to this level of unfiltered brilliance again, forced to chase it during their career arc, and in others, they view it as a one-off wherein they had to escape the parameters of their oeuvre to reset and begin anew. Regardless of reason or execution, this list is a celebration of the quality and surprises music lovers get when we stumble on a DIY album.
There are very little guidelines for this one, beyond these records must be made with almost, and in some cases, no creative support beyond maybe an engineer to capture the performances or minimal complement added after the original sessions. Again, some of these might be bold artistic statements and others reduced to a solo venture due to circumstances beyond their control. There are many to cite that didn’t make the list, so let me know what I missed, share your favorites beyond these, or perhaps your thoughts on what you may have discovered from the truly great albums below.
10. Ani DiFranco – Ani DiFranco
We begin with Ani, because we must. This could easily be #1 on this list, and certainly higher when considering all that goes with it. But she goes first, because Ani Difranco remains at the forefront of this exercise for not only creating her debut album (it was originally a cassette she recorded and whisked around New York City in 1990) by her lonesome, but putting it out with zero assistance. And so was born Righteous Babe Records, a singular operation run from her hometown of Buffalo, New York that would go on to produce all her subsequent work, hire a host of hearty souls, and launch or usher along many careers (not the least of which my pal, Dan Bern). Along the way, she refused millions thrown at her from big record companies to instead win Grammys and build a dedicated fanbase.
This all begins with Ani Difranco, featuring her uniquely percussive guitar playing and a penetratingly staccato vocal delivery that is adorably trenchant and unwaveringly powerful. The black and white photo on its cover of a bald and defiantly impenetrable 20-year-old songsmith, who appears to be looking beyond limitation and into the infinite, tells the tale of what is inside – songs that cover the gamut of love, lust, regret, fear, anguish and longing that are lyrically beyond her years but nevertheless evoke a sense of earned wisdom.
When I saw Ani preform in the mid-90s, she was backed by her famous rhythm section of Sara Lee on bass and drummer, Andy Stochansky, an intrepid power trio that provided unique insight into how DiFranco would have sounded by herself bouncing around dives in Greenwich Village while conjuring this music. It was one singular rhythm machine, chugging and bopping beneath her quasi-rap delivery that sparked an underground female revolution.
9. Dirty Mind – Prince
Okay, so when you think of a “solitary entity” pop artist – as I put it in my latest book, Revolution – Prince, the Band, the Era, you think of Prince Rogers Nelson, as many of his albums boast: Produced, Arranged, Composed and Performed by Prince. He was the ultimate control-freak taskmaster, who wore down engineers, as he jumped from the drums to guitar, then bass, and a host of keyboards like a madman on a mission. But Dirty Mind sticks out for me, because as he put it in a rare 1980 interview upon its release, Dirty Mind was his “bloodstream on vinyl.” Although unlike his previous two records, For You and Prince, this one featured keyboardist, Matt Fink on a ripping solo for one song and pianist, Lisa Coleman’s voice in a spoken-word cameo for another, the rest, however, is pure Prince.
Alone in his Minneapolis home studio on the banks of that town’s many lakes, and away from the prying eyes of his label, Warner Bros, who amazingly granted him full control of his music as a teenager, Prince tackled several genres, from new wave to funk, soul to punk, distilling the essence of new and powerful pop music. But beyond its sonic schizophrenia, the subjects covered on the songs inside his “dirty mind” were a buffet of sexual deviancy. These included masturbation, incest, bisexuality, infidelity, sexual addiction, along with the thorny subjects of war and social revolution.
Prince, well known for building myths, put himself at the center of this maelstrom, becoming, as he preached to his touring band, “pure sex.” In many ways, this is the album that propelled the theme-heavy, world-building Prince that went on to dominate the 1980s, not only as an iconic pop star, but a shapeshifter and paradigm-exploding phenomenon. The promise of this ascent is in the grooves of his most compelling, controversial and singular proclamation that floored critics and eradicated the racial boundaries of his era’s musical landscape.
8. The Campfire Tapes – Michelle Shocked
The making of Michelle Shocked’s first “album” is a tale of many DIY heroes. Starting with Pete Lawrence, who had never been to the United States before he attended the Kerrville Folk Festival that ran from May 23 to June 1 1986 in Central Texas. As founder of a brand-new independent label, Cooking Vinyl (very DIY), the hearty Brit was intrigued by the festival, founded by husband-wife team, Rod Kennedy and Nancylee Davis, in 1972 (super DIY), in a town 65 miles northwest of San Antonio. There he met 24-year-old proto-anti-folk antecedent, Karen Michelle Johnston, who was going by the name of Michelle Shocked. Searching for unsigned talent, the fish-out-of-water Lawrence found Shocked, who was looking for a label that believed in her hybrid folk/punk/jazz compositions played exclusively on a beat-up acoustic guitar (mega-DIY). The two landed by a campfire on the outskirts of the festival where the budding record exec pleaded with her to play some songs. Shocked entertained Lawrence with a dozen of them.
Shocked has always claimed that Lawrence ran his Sony Walkman secretly as she casually demoed the songs – the crickets serenading in the background, as a fire crackled in the foreground. Lawrence remembers telling her he’d needed to tape the proceedings to present to his staff. Regardless of the purported serendipity, what Lawrence captured that night was a strange combination of impassioned singing of insightful to playful lyrics, accompanied by an acoustic guitar and the sounds of a Texas night. Good ol’ by-the-campfire crooning – rural, Southern American style with a strong female edge.
Lawrence was, as the English say, gobsmacked by what he heard on that tape and convinced Shocked that she should release it as her debut, free of stale studio environs or adorned by seasoned pros who didn’t get her organic stylings. To her credit, because there are a bevy of imperfections that could have been tightened by takes in a proper studio, Shocked agreed. After moving to Europe, the two released the aptly titled, The Campfire Tapes later that year.
The album’s unfiltered charm became a humble curiosity in a world of big-hair pop-rock, rap, and mega-superstar releases, rising to #1 on the British independent record chart. It was later picked up in the U.S. by Mercury Records, which is how I discovered it whilst working at Record World in Westchester, NY and began my love of stuff like this – raw, independent music made by artists unafraid of the warts of playing that music from the heart. I immediately began recording my own songs this way into tape machines, further inspired by some of the works further up this list.
Michelle Shocked would go onto a fair career of pushing her un-style to the masses, but for me, this was her apex. She seemed to understand this too, later releasing a version of The Campfire Tapes in 2003 as a two-CD set called Texas Campfire Takes by her own label, Mighty Sound (mega-meta-DIY).
7. Life’ll Kill Ya – Warren Zevon
When Warren Zevon made Life’ll Kill Ya essentially in his apartment during the final months of the 20th century for indie label, Artimas Records, he’d already authored one hell of a “career” of wild abandon: Greek-level-tragic missteps, spectacular alcohol and drug abuses, insane antics aimed at the very hands that fed him personally and professionally, and general mayhem that only he could engender. Label founders, Danny Goldberg, former manager of Nirvana, and Daniel Glass, an industry titan, had mercy on him, because through it all, including a truncated time when everyone knew him as the “Werewolves of London” guy, Zevon was a master songwriter with few peers.
The trail of tears in his wake attested to this. As I covered in my 2018 book, Accidentally Like a Martyr – the Tortured Art of Warren Zevon, the Californian satirist cum songsmith put it all on the line in every one of his compositions that usually covered a wide range of crazies, criminals, outcasts, and the broken-hearted. It may have been difficult to be around Warren Zevon (his son, Jordan described it to me like “trying to hug a hand grenade”), but it was apparently well worth it.
Zevon did not know he would only live another four years when he wrote and recorded the songs on the ironically titled, Life’ll Kill Ya, which was released in the first month of the new millennium, but it sounds like he may have intuited it, for it confronts a lifetime of irrational behavior with some regret and a ton of that Zevon dark humor. The album is a paean to the experience of dancing on the dangerous edges with an intimate forlorn penance. But Zevon, as always, leaves plenty of space for bizarre turns. Having been sober for nearly 15 years, he noted to journalists upon the album’s release that although desperation and lack of funds forced him to confront such isolation, it brought out the best/worst in him that was thankfully captured on tape.
6. Metal Machine Music – Lou Reed
The most famous FUCK YOU ever handed to a record company, Metal Machine Music was Lou Reed’s most avant-garde statement of a career swollen with grand avant-garde statements. It is hard to find anything from a rock artist, even one as contrarian as Lou Reed, that resembles this record on any level of dissonant ambient craziness. The entire (double album!) consists of screeching, moaning and careening from electric guitars into and out of amplifiers at incomparable volumes. I wish I could properly explain how unlistenable this is, and how I can barely make it through four minutes of any of it. It is less album than a test of one’s tolerance.
Irrespective of its unpalatable aural assault, Metal Machine Music, featuring only Reed, his guitar, a cranked amp and a lot of chutzpah, make it a DIY extravaganza. No songs, no production to speak of, or certainly no mixing decisions here. Mind-bendingly horrific and concussive aural explosions emanating from one man.
Now, if one deigns to fathom that Reed, infamous for his truculent press interviews and general ennui, was not fucking with RCA in the summer of 1975, then to hear him tell it, this was a genuine attempt at musical exploration. Firstly, his tuning all the strings of his guitar to the same note was his homage to the mid-1960s drone music of La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, whose members included previous Velvet Underground bandmates, John Cale and Angus MacLise. But while Young’s atonal machinations can be a direct link to the Velvet’s work, its connection to this chaos is stretching credulity. When pressed further on whether this was an actual attempt at art or just spiteful meandering, Reed began citing Beethoven, which was lost on critics and fans.
Much later, after Reed’s death, live performances of Metal Machine Music were attempted with minimal interest, but at the very least cemented Reed’s candid expressions as legitimate music and not just an elaborately blaring prank.
5. When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? – Billie Eilish
Billie Eilish was 17-years-old when she began the proper sessions for what would become her debut album alongside her brother, Finneas O’Connell, who was 21 at the time. As many creative siblings might do – pooling their imaginations and resources to make something fun – they retreated to a bedroom in their Highland Park, California home and started making songs. Well, they started making sounds: slithering, beat-orientated music beds that evoked dread and allure with sinisterly impish delight. You know, kids being kids.
O’Connell created all this with some combination of a Logic Pro X, a Universal Audio Apollo 8 interface funneled into a pair of Yamaha HS5 studio monitors with an H8S subwoofer because it was convenient and private, which is why kids retreat to bedrooms to make stuff in the first place. But later he and his sister surmised that the environment was the key to the music, as it reflected the type of intimacy that you hear on Eilish’s unnervingly near-whispered vocals that are eerily detached and menacing. And there is plenty of tongue-planted humor in here too – the record opens with the two of them laughing, as if they might let you in on the joke.
What was no joke was the immense effect When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? would have on popular music, the charts, and the zeitgeist in 2019. That little girl stumbling out of her bed in a darkened room on its cover, her eyes, an alien rolled-over white, spoke volumes. This was a missive like no other of its time. The two kids would go onto make more pop records, and to their credit they did not go for a more direct sequel, but none of them has yet presented the original ingenuity of what came out of that room.
4. Pink Moon – Nick Drake
Holed up in his apartment suffering from deep bouts of depression and smoking copious amounts of marijuana, the soon-to-be 26-year-old Nick Drake was determined to express his plight in song alone. The British singer-songwriter with a soulfully English tone to his unique brand of traditional folk had been convinced to make two albums for Island Records, both of which are still sublime listens today, Five Leaves Left (1969), and Bryter Layter (1970), featuring an abundance of overdubs by seasoned studio musicians. Drake felt these embellishments made his intimate songs of love and loss overly saccharine. A recent listen to the stripped-down versions of his first album released as a box set last year bears this out.
Defiant of his record company’s wishes and boosted by the fair argument that his first two albums did not sell anyway, Drake spent nearly a year by himself with only an engineer, who claims the singer-songwriter never once looked up at him, working out the songs for what would become Pink Moon, an introspective foray into the depths of melancholia. This unsettling missive not only perplexed and concerned his dwindling fanbase, but confounded critics, who pounced, spelling the end of Drake’s career, which set him adrift for two more years until his apparent suicide by overdose of the antidepressant pills he’d refused to take earlier in his life.
Drake’s death at 26 in November of 1974, deemed a suicide, left Pink Moon, released in 1972, as his final statement of pain and loneliness. Nevertheless, the album, along with his legacy, was given a boost in the 1990s with the advent of alternative folk and a more elevated and empathetic understanding of depression in artists and young people in general. Many filmmakers have used Drake’s work to great effect, noting his relentless search for truth within his suffering in much of his music, which resonates in its greatest form on this, his final album.
3. Hi, How Are You? – Daniel Johnston
Daniel Johnston, the crown prince of DIY, was a solitary kid, and when he was alone, he was a creation machine – films, animation, comic books, poems, paintings, and songs. Tons of songs. Weird songs. Sad songs. Beseeching songs of sorrow and imagination. Each of these songs, adorned with sound-effects from children’s toys, archaic overdubbing between two boomboxes, and crude percussion accompaniment, as he banged on anything available to him, were recorded hundreds of times in garages and basements on out-of-tune guitars and clunky pianos. Then Daniel, who was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder, collected those sonic and lyrical oddities onto cassettes, drew surreal images of strange characters and audacious creations from his head on their covers, and marched around Austin, Texas, handing them to whomever he’d meet on the street or the McDonald’s in which he worked.
Hi, How Are You? remains Johnston’s most recognizable of those collections, mainly due to its drawing of a frog-like alien creature he called Jeremiah the Innocent that dominates its iconic stark-white cover. He would later paint Jermiah as a mural on the side of a record store. It still exists today as a single wall after the building was torn down, as Austin citizens wanting to “keep Austin weird” welcome the thousands who come to it as if a religious pilgrimage each year. I’ve paid my respects twice.
Around the time of this cassette’s release in 1983, MTV came down to Austin to cover its growing music community and after Johnston bugged them incessantly, the influentially hip network put him on the air. This was seen by many in the growing alterative and grunge scene, not the least of which Nirvana’s frontman, Kurt Cobain, who was just one of thousands of us who discovered this wunderkind, famously wearing a tee shirt of the cover of Hi, How Are You? at the 1992 MTV Awards.
This all culminates in the low-fi sonic purity of Daniel’s naive wittiness on Hi, How Are You?, performed with a desperation rarely displayed by most of us who are not dealing with mental illness, who can somehow survive a dangerous and uncaring world with filters unavailable to singular souls like Daniel Johnston.
2. Living with Ghosts – Patty Griffin
The 22-year-old Patty Griffin recorded a batch of brilliant songs with just her acoustic guitar and her magnificent voice hoping to get signed, which she did, by A&M Records. The label then put her in a studio with a professional collection of musicians, as they tried in vain to capture the heart-wrenching beatific quintessence of those songs. No one knew what to do about this. So, Patty queried A&M, “You signed me on the strength of those recordings, why not put those out?” And to the label’s credit, they did in May of 1996.
Patty told me in 2004, “I didn’t really have much choice at the time. I was really pretty down about having my record that I made with all the fanfare rejected, so I was not in a very good mindset to make another one. But that’s how I played those songs then. That was the way I performed them live. I never really played with a band before, so it made a lot of sense to me that that would be the way they would be done best.”
Living with Ghosts is what a singer-songwriter is at its core. There is no artifice, no production, no accompaniment, just a woman and her incredible talent shining through. The songs sound, because they are, intimate and personal and inevitably soar on the strength of the very elements that make us human with all the messiness and imperfections. But it is that voice, the pained, pristine, undeniable splendor of the way she delivers her quaint, brain-scarring melodies, proving that to add anything else to it is artistic malfeasance. And so, this album remains her opening salvo in a career that would grow into more collaborative avenues but always remained true to its source.
1. Nebraska – Bruce Springsteen
The mother of all DIYs (Patty Griffin and Ani Difranco both told me this inspired them on their minimalist quest) has been celebrated now in literary and cinematic form. Famously, Bruce Springsteen took a dramatic left turn from his arc of 1970s albums that followed his and his generation’s evolution culminating with The River, which contained his first ever radio hit, “Hungry Heart,” and disappeared into a room inside a rented Central Jersey ranch house to record alone on a four-track machine. The song themes shifted radically from personal to uber-personal through characters that reflected the eroding times for the early-80s working-class America, desperate outcasts reduced to ghostly romantic figures trapped in a national identity crisis. And when the E Street Band couldn’t make heads or tails of these stripped down, haunted demos, Springsteen tossed the beat-up cassette to master engineer, Chuck Plotkin to make into a record. And what a record!
Nebraska is no mere statement, it is a manifesto, and it is Springsteen at his finest as a storyteller (Bruce has insisted for years it is his best work and I am inclined to agree, as it is the only Springsteen album I ever bought and enjoyed, mainly because he told me and a bunch of kids sitting around the Stone Pony one night what he was doing out at that ranch and how excited he was about it). And the distorted, low-fi grit of these songs resound in the type of heightened rock and roll theater that Bob Dylan once captured so perfectly in his early one-man-with-a-guitar period.
Springsteen pained over these compositions, re-writing lyrics and trying alternate vocal intonations. His constant editing took on a novelist approach to the repetitive rewriting needed to find what F. Scott Fitzgerald called the “high white note.” What is on that tape and the nucleus of Nebraska is a disciplined determination of the craft of songwriting and performance, which served the Boss well throughout the rest of his career that was never a safe foray into rote but a personal challenge to grow without fear.
Ironically, Nebraska may be Bruce Springsteen’s most rock and roll of albums, for there is nothing louder than a man possessed in his own idiom alone and without amplification that seduces grandeur, when all of it, like all the records noted here, reaches this pinnacle of DIY.
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