Tag: andrija tokic

Son of the San Lorenzo

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Jesse Daniel is carrying on a family tradition with his fifth studio album, Son of the San Lorenzo. As a kid growing up in Northern California, specifically in the San Lorenzo Valley, Daniel spent hours upon hours in his dad’s truck, listening to the songs that defined ‘70s rock and country radio. When the opportunity arose to create a new album inspired by those sounds, Daniel booked the Bomb Shelter studio in Nashville, recorded live with his band, and enlisted harmonica player (and Country Music Hall of Fame inductee) Charlie McCoy to add an unmistakable flourish to the new recordings.

Just as country fans have come to know their favorite singers as the Coal Miner’s Daughter, the Possum, or the Storyteller, Daniel’s hometown is enthusiastically embracing his alter ego: the Son of the San Lorenzo. Daniel dialed up Good Country to talk about how bluegrass music played a role in his musical development, the silver lining of his checkered past, and what he’s looking for in his fellow musicians when it’s time to hit the road.

For this album, you wanted to go back to the music you grew up on, which is ‘70s country and rock. How did you get introduced to that era of music?

Jesse Daniel: My dad was – and still is – a musician. Growing up, he was playing in bands and always just raised me with a guitar in my hand. Whenever we’d go on road trips, or we’d drive up to Oregon to go see family, we would be listening to Led Zeppelin or the Eagles, bands like that. There was a classic rhythm & blues influence on rock and roll, but a lot of that stuff had a very country influence, too, from Creedence Clearwater Revival to the Eagles. A lot of the bands were California bands, also.

I just heard that music growing up. That’s what was played by my dad’s band, and at birthday parties, events, and school gatherings. That was just good-time music, aside from what we were listening to as kids, when we were getting into metal and punk rock. But I guess that’s what all our dads were listening to, and the older people. So I went back to that, now that I’m in my 30s. That music has such a spot in my soul for that nostalgia, and it’s just so good.

Can you describe the experience of having Charlie McCoy on these sessions?

That was incredible. He showed up on his day to cut some harmonica and he was a very humble, unassuming dude. He told us the coolest stories about old Nashville, all the stuff he’s cut on, and all the people’s personalities back in the day that he used to know. I asked him all kinds of questions, soaking it all in. From the moment he blew on that harp and played some licks, Andrija [Tokic, the studio engineer] and I looked at each other like, “Yep! That’s the sound right there.” He just nailed it.

When I listened to “Child is Born,” the first track, I sensed you’re making a statement with this record. It’s a powerful way to open it. What was on your mind as that song was taking shape?

That song is about generational traumas or generational patterns within families and raising children. I pretty much wrote it from the perspective of trying to give some advice on how to raise a child, almost like a template. Throughout the verses, it talks about the pitfalls and what will happen if you focus on yourself and don’t raise your children right. That’s happened in my family and to so many other people. These fathers and mothers aren’t there for their kids, and when it ends up being their time to be taken care of, when they’re elderly, nobody’s there for them because they weren’t there in return. It becomes this vicious cycle that’s perpetuated. That’s where I was at with writing that one. It was an emotional one. It’s an emotional type of record in general, but I just wanted to start it off with that, for sure. A good, heavy starting place.

One of my favorites is “Son of the San Lorenzo.” I think you have had that title for a while.

Yeah, that one is a special one, too. I wrote that song in 2019 and I included it as the last song on my Rollin’ On record. I decided to re-cut it for this one and name the record after it, because since I wrote and released that song, it’s become a fan favorite all over the place, but especially where I grew up in the San Lorenzo Valley.

Whenever I would go back home for hometown shows, people would call me “the Son of the San Lorenzo” after that song. They would always sing that song. That became my nickname over the past five or so years. I thought, what better title for the record than that? With this record going back to my upbringing, to where I’m from, and identity and all that.

You’ve got references on this album to Highway 9, the Sierra pines, and the redwoods. You’re skilled at setting the scene in your songwriting. Why is it important to bring Northern California into these songs?

With my identity as a songwriter and an artist, it shaped a huge, huge amount of that. I always do things through the lens of being from Northern California. Going back to that sound, so much of the music I grew up on was from that exact area – bands like The Doobie Brothers, Larry Hosford, guys like that, who were making this country-rock and roll-blues stuff that really influenced me a lot.

Painting a picture of where you’re from, and of these things that are important to me and my music – I feel like that’s something that’s lost in music nowadays. People don’t do that as much, or if they do, it’s pretty well dominated by Appalachia or Texas. They have a lot of identity and pride in their musical heritage there and I just feel like it’s missing from California in general. And it shouldn’t be. It’s an amazing place, an amazing landscape, an amazing musical history. I see it as my cross to bear to try to carry on that legacy as best as I can.

Has bluegrass been an influence on you?

It definitely has. When I was in high school, I had a teacher for a short period of time who had a bunch of burned bluegrass mix CDs. She was the person that turned me on to bluegrass. I remember listening to that Tony Rice and Norman Blake song, “Eight More Miles to Louisville,” and I was like, “This is incredible!” The songwriting, the picking, the tempo. That made me fall in love with bluegrass. I’d been playing guitar for quite a while at that point, but that’s when I started learning the banjo rolls and trying to emulate some of those bluegrass things I’d heard and adding them into my chord progressions. Even though I don’t explicitly do bluegrass, I always have a bluegrass song on my records, or something that’s at least along those lines. For this record, it’s “Mountain Home” It’s got the banjo and fiddle and a little bit more bluegrass texturing. It’s a big part of my influence.

I was listening to “One’s Too Many (And a Thousand Ain’t Enough)” on Spotify and I couldn’t help but notice your mug shot from Santa Cruz County [as the Spotify Canvas] in the player. How did that come to be?

Yeah, that’s my mug shot from one of the times I went to jail. During that period of my life from 18 through my early twenties, I was a heroin addict, a methamphetamine addict. I was in a vicious cycle of addiction I had gotten into in high school. Once I was out of high school, it accelerated and I became a full-blown junkie, a full-blown drug addict. So that took me on frequent trips to jail for a week here, a week there. I never did any serious time, thank God. I should have, but I didn’t. I was constantly in and out of jail or rehab programs.

That mug shot is a reminder of that past and of that period of my life I wrote about in that song. That song is comprised of all the advice I had gotten from older people who had gotten their stuff together over the years, including some of my own family members who have been sober. They would tell me all these little bits of wisdom and try to help me, and I was just too deep in it to really see. But that song is basically the advice I’d give to somebody now, made up of all the advice I got back then when I was in that position.

Do people who know your story approach you for advice when you’re out on tour?

Quite a bit. There’s a cool, cathartic element to it for me, because I get to put my story and struggles into these songs and they help me. Then it becomes that for other people. I had a woman come up to me at a show, and she told me that my song “Gray” helped her mother get clean. She sent this song to her mother and it broke her down so much that her daughter was sending it to her, saying, “Hey, listen to the lyrics of this song. I care about you and I want you to get help.” And she did. She’s been clean for a couple years now and she says it’s because of that song.

I’ve had a lot of people reach out with similar stories, that they’ve gotten their stuff together after hearing my story or listening to my music. That’s the ultimate form of redemption for me, that I could take my destructive past and turn it into something constructive in helping people. That’s my whole mission. Aside from making the music I love, that’s my mission in my contribution to music.

That’s interesting to hear your mission statement, because you’re the head of your own organization now. I don’t know if you think of yourself that way, but you’re a businessman.

Yeah, more recently I’ve started to think of it that way. And it’s true, especially doing it independently like we have for so long. We’re just now starting to work with a bigger booking agency, a bigger management. We’re stepping things up. But my fiancée Jodi and I really built this together ourselves, brick by brick.

I’ve often heard you shouldn’t get in a relationship with someone until you know you travel well together. What do you remember about those early years with Jodi on the road?

In the early years, even before we started touring in a band together, I would play regionally and Jodi and I would go on road trips together, camping trips, whatever. We just wanted to keep going. That was always part of our relationship. We traveled really well together. We had similar interests. We’d just listen to music and talk and go pull off at roadside swimming holes up in the mountains. We loved that sense of adventure and going places. It was one of the main things that drew me to her when we first got together. She had just as big of a sense of adventure as I did.

So, in the music aspect of it, that’s really helped because we both have that wanderlust and we’re just down to be on the road and to go play new places. When one of us gets tired and burnt out, or maybe sick of being on the road, or something’s not going right, we have the other one to put it in perspective and help balance things out. You lean on that person, which not a lot of people have. A lot of times, your wife or your husband or whoever is at home and you’re out there, alone, missing them. So, I do have the luxury of being with my person out there.

What did Jodi think about the song “Jodi” when you played it for her?

She loves the song. Just like I say in that first line, “To write a love song for you was not an easy thing to do.” It really was a hard subject to tackle, because it’s so vulnerable and true. I had to sit with that one and try to make it as meaningful as possible, so it didn’t come off as a corny love song or too cryptic. I wanted it to be straightforward, but really meaningful.

What do you look for in musicians as you start to put together a band for a tour?

First off, they’ve got to be a great musician. That’s number one. They’ve got to understand the styles and the stylings that I like to go for with my music. I know it’s not for everybody. Sometimes the guitar style is a little bit outside of their bubble, so the playing has to be there.

On top of that, personality-wise, it helps to have people with good attitudes. That’s a huge one I’ve learned over the years. If somebody isn’t there for the right reason, or if they’re halfway in, halfway out, or maybe they’re partying a whole bunch on the road. I’m clean and sober on the road, I don’t do anything, but my guys will go out and have a beer or whatever. That’s totally fine. But if guys are going out and doing drugs or drinking and having it affect their performance or attitude… That is something that happened in the past, so I have a pretty strict policy with that. If you’re going to be in my band, you don’t have to be a teetotaler, but just try to keep it pretty mellow. It’s about the music. That’s what the focus is.

When you listen to Son of the San Lorenzo front to finish now, what goes through your mind?

I see a pretty complete body of work. Sometimes I’ll listen to some of my earlier records and I’ll look back and think, “Oh, I’d change this,” or “I’d do this a little different,” or “Maybe I would have put this song here…” I think that’s easy to do, to pick things apart, especially when you’ve grown as an artist and a songwriter. But when I listen to this record, I put so much time into the song arrangement and into each lyric and each part of the production. I wrote all the guitar licks. Well, ninety percent of the ones you hear on here are ones that I wrote, and then I showed them to the guitar player and he played them better than I was able to play them. [Laughs] All these little things, I put so much effort into this record that I listen back and I’m just really proud of it.

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Photos courtesy of Lightning Rod Records.

Artist of the Month: Sunny War

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Sunny War has done it again. Her brand new album, Armageddon in a Summer Dress (out February 21 via New West Records), is yet another anarcho-punk-roots masterpiece in her already deep-and-wide catalog of superlative recordings. The project builds on the sonic and rhetorical universe of her critically acclaimed and triumphantly received 2023 release, Anarchist Gospel, further expanding her charming, down-to-earth doctrine of mutual aid, community, and truly radical ideas – musically, and otherwise – exactly when we need them most.

That fact – the apropos timing of this collection of songs and their release – feels most striking because this music wasn’t written expressly to be a response to the current critical mass of fascism, oligarchy, and attacks on human rights in our country and around the world. Instead, the messages and morals in these songs are well-placed, not as slapdash reactions to the current political discourse or as activist-branded cash grabs in a terrifying societal moment, but by focusing on the real day-to-day implications of such imperialism as evidenced within War’s own life and her own inner circle.

On Armageddon’s opening track, “One Way Train,” she sings:

When there’s no one left to use
And no police or state
And the fascists and the classists
All evaporate
Won’t you meet me on the outskirts
Of my left brain
Close your eyes and take a ride
On a one way train

This album is exactly such a refuge on par with the singer’s “left brain” – and stemming directly from it! – in “One Way Train.” Armageddon is a respite from the noise of the news cycle and the sensationalism of consumerist media that needs not deny the realities we all witness and live through in order to be a resting place. This isn’t toxic positivity or “joy” and “hope” as cudgels to smack down criticism of inequalities, corruption, and ruling classes, thereby reinforcing the status quo. The songs of Armageddon in a Summer Dress do feel hopeful– but because they acknowledge and grapple with these issues, instead of willing them away under the rug or into hiding.

The deft and artful positioning of these incisive songs is directly tied to the ways anarchy, mutual aid, and solidarity have been woven into War’s life as an artist – and as a human, since even before she picked up the guitar. These are embodied, real concepts to Sunny, not just intellectual ideas and hypotheticals.

Punk and blues, folk and grunge ooze out of songs ripe for protest and resistance, but never packaged in a pink crocheted pussy cat hat or internet-ready bumper sticker quips. Sunny War knows the violence and tyranny we all face – she has faced it her entire life – and gives it the treatment it deserves, but without ever preaching or finger-wagging. The beliefs evident in Armageddon in a Summer Dress are never contingent on which team, “red or blue,” holds the power. Rather, the hope and tenacity in these songs feels derived from an intrinsic understanding that it’s always been “the many versus the few” and “the powerless versus the powerful” where the battle lines are drawn, instead.

“Walking Contradiction” – which features punk icon Steve Ignorant – is searing in its indictment of toothless neoliberalism having landed us in this exact political and social scenario:

…While the war pigs killed more kids today
Picket signs were made 6,000 miles away
And all the lefties and the liberals were marching so you know
Just because they pay their taxes doesn’t mean that they don’t know
All the pigs and the big wigs foaming at the mouth
Look down at us laughing like we’ll never figure out
All the war outside starts here at home
If they didn’t have our money they’d be fighting it alone
Doesn’t matter what your silly little signs have to say
‘Cause the genocide is funded by the taxes that you pay

Stopping and inhabiting this song, one of the project’s singles, and its message is illuminating. Especially when you realize it was written under the prior administration, but applies to the current one as well. And, perhaps, to every other presidential administration in U.S. history.

Armageddon in a Summer Dress still feels light and rewarding, though. It’s flowing and intuitive, and decidedly charming, even with these stark messages. Because, like most of Sunny War’s creative output, it actually drives to the heart of the issues we all turn over in our minds and on our screens each day, rather than tilting at superficial, sensational windmills that end up reinforcing our oligarchic status quo.

Of course, this album is not solely political and anarchic and intellectual. In fact, it’s not attempting to be cerebral and be-monocled at all. These are songs of love, of grief, of being an individual with a collective mindset in an individualist world with collective blindness.

There are songs of introspection, of perception, of self growth, of regression. Each feels fully realized in production, lush and deep. But there, in the gaps, in the bones of each track, are War’s signature fingerstyle licks, hooks, and turns of phrase on the guitar. She plays banjo throughout the project as well, and though the referenced genres evident on the project are endlessly rootsy, the blues and folk approach that charmed much of the bluegrass, folk, and Americana worlds previously serve a more subtle purpose here. War’s personality on her instruments is still prominent, and is ultimately successful playing more of a support role to the greater whole. Above all else, you can tell creating this album and these songs must have been so much fun to make.

Tré Burt, Valerie June, and John Doe – along with Ignorant – all guest on the record, which was produced by Andrija Tokic and recorded in Nashville, just up the highway from War’s current hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Like Anarchist Gospel, seeing War’s community of collaborators grow and morph on the new project again speaks to the way this guitarist-songwriter-performer’s mission is an active, constructive one. It’s never merely a mantra hung on the wall to be admired from afar.

As we all face an ongoing apocalypse, as we each reckon with the indisputable fact that we are already living in dystopia – and have been – Armageddon in a Summer Dress is the perfect album to bring along with us. Dancing and flowing and twirling through the end of the world is certainly not a winning strategy, but dancing, marching, caring for one another, and lifting each other up despite Armageddon and imperialism might just do the trick.

She perhaps encapsulates this feeling best alongside wailing organ on “Bad Times:”

Had nothing so I had to borrow
What I owe’s gonna double tomorrow
Maybe now or in an hour or so
I’m gonna have to let everything go

So long room and board
And all the other things I can’t afford
You’re overrated anyway
I’ll be good soon as you
Bad times stay away
Bad times stay away
Bad times stay away
Bad times stay away…

This affirmation is not the end game, it is merely the beginning. If we take Sunny War’s ideals to heart, if we sing along at the top of our lungs, if we do mutual aid on a daily basis, if we take each moment, one individual second at a time– we, too, can navigate through Armageddon in a Summer Dress, emerging on the other side in a better, more just, more sunny world.

Sunny War is our Artist of the Month. Check out our exclusive interview with Sunny by her friend and peer Lizzie No here. Make sure to save our Essential Sunny War Playlist below while we gear up for the new album on February 21. Plus, follow BGS on social media as we dip back into our archives every day for all things Sunny during the entire month of February.

Photo Credit: Joshua Black Wilkins

WATCH: Tomato/Tomato, “Take it on the Road”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Tomato/Tomato
Hometown: Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada
Song: “Take it on the Road”
Album: Canary in a Coal Mine
Single Release Date: November 2, 2018
Label: Denim on Denim Records

In Their Words: “‘Take it on the Road’ was recorded on 16 track tape, at the Bomb Shelter Studio in Nashville, Tennessee. and mixed by Andrija Tokic (Alabama Shakes, Langhorne Slim, Hurray for the Riff Raff). We wanted it to sound like a party that everyone is invited to — hence the mariachi trumpets! Written on John’s army green Olympia typewriter, ‘Take it on the Road’ expresses the need to pursue one’s goals and leave behind all the negativity that surrounds us in our day to day lives.” — Lisa McLaggan

“The video includes footage from our kitchen to London, England and, everywhere in between. We really wanted to give a behind the scenes perspective of what our life on the road involves. Planes, cars, boats — sorry no trains — it’s all there.” — John McLaggan

Photo credit: Nienke Izurieta

LISTEN: Kashena Sampson, ‘Greasy Spoon’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Kashena Sampson
Hometown: Las Vegas, NV
Song: “Greasy Spoon”
Album: Wild Heart
Release Date: August 18, 2017

In Their Words: “I bartended my ass off to make this record. I payed for everything with cash! I moved to Nashville without ever being here, didn’t know anyone. I just had a feeling it was where I needed to be and I went with it. I had to make this record. It’s been four years in the making. Some friends mentioned the Bomb Shelter to me, so I met up with Andrija [Tokic] and checked it out. The studio is just awesome. He put me together with Jon Estes, who worked with me on the album, producing and mixing. It was a perfect fit. Like magic! He understood what I was going for right from the start. We tracked all the songs in two days to tape with Jon Radford on drums, Jeremy Fetzer on guitar, and Jon Estes on bass, and a bunch of other instruments. The whole record was recorded in six days total. It was great. I wish I could record at that studio everyday.” — Kashena Sampson

Photo credit: Jonathan Rogers

The Producers: Andrija Tokic

Posted on by Editor

When he modified a shotgun house in East Nashville into the “analog studio wonderland” known as the Bomb Shelter, Andrija Tokic wanted to bring the outdoors inside. He decorated with wooden slats and rustic stonework, creating something woodsy in the middle of a busy neighborhood. “If you’re going to be in one room for 10 hours, why not have something to look at?” he says. “For me, it’s stuff that’s usually outside — trees and rocks. There are other studios using wood as an acoustic treatment, but I just feel better being able to sit on something like a porch. It just takes the pressure off.”

If he feels any pressure, it doesn’t show. Over the past few years, his name has become synonymous with a rough-and-tumble branch of roots rock, ranging from the raw blues rock of Benjamin Booker to the scorched-earth Southern soul of Alabama Shakes to the tightly wound garage pop of Denney & the Jets. Although he works in no particular genre, Tokic’s projects are bound by an essential grittiness, an urgency that lends everything a live dynamic regardless of how it was recorded.

The son of Croatian immigrants, Tokic grew up in Takoma Park, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., and found a job manning the boards at a neighborhood studio. He recorded anyone who walked through the door, which gave him a strong grounding in a range of styles: gospel, rock, world beat, even go-go — that spry local sound that remains unsung outside the Mid-Atlantic. The experience also gave him the confidence to move to Nashville, although he found Music Row too restrictive and regimented for his tastes.

At his first studio, located in his home, he recorded the Shakes’ career-making debut, Boys & Girls, then moved to the Bomb Shelter’s current location. In just a few years, it has become a waystation for an array of artists who don’t fit easily into any one particular category or scene, who thrive at the fringes of rock and country.

A lot of people I talk to for this column were musicians first who then migrated into the producer role. But you’re a different. You wanted to do this from the beginning.

I grew up playing music at a very young age, but I got into recording as a teenager and preferred it to playing. I liked the diversity in what you do all the time. It’s cool to get involved with more instruments rather than just playing the same old guitar part. You’re able to do different kinds of projects and different kinds of music. It’s like playing in a whole bunch of different bands. That variety is really what got me excited about it. It’s not about how you play the part, but about how you capture it. How do you create an image in a record or a sense of time when the music was being played? How do you convey how that music was being played?

So I try to treat every project individually. At my studio, we don’t resort to the same setup every time for every band. Some places are like that, but I think it’s about how you can get the most out of every project. So I try to vary everything and customize the process for each specific artist and their strengths and weakness. Maybe a lot of people feel like the foundation of every song is the same: “Alright, let’s start with the drums and build from there.” But some things start with the vocals. Or a guitar. Or even a piano part.

When you started out, was there a song or an album that made you aware of the production?

The Beatles was the first time. I was rifling through my parents’ record collection, and there was a weird Yugo Tone version of Yellow Submarine. God knows what kind of editing or recutting happened with that record, but out of all of these records in this collection, it was the one that sounded like color, where everything else sounded like black and white. It was recorded with creativity in mind. I would go back and forth between that and Queen. And I remember loving the Queen record, but it didn’t make me want to grab my four-track.

When I would put on Yellow Submarine, all the parts just had so much character. To this day, the Beatles stand as a new approach to recording music. There’s still something about it that’s never been done the same. There are all kinds of things in their songs that make me excited about making music. How do you make guitars sound like that? What are all these instruments popping in and out? There’s no telling what the long-term impact of that record has been for me. But ever since I started playing around with a four-track, whenever I listen to a recording, I always picture what could be happening in the studio.

You got your start in D.C., a city that I think many people associate with punk. Did you have any connection to that world?

I feel like that was already long gone by the time I got started. I’d heard stories about how cool all that stuff used to be. But there was not a lot of rock ‘n’ roll music to record. Definitely the minority of the work I was doing was band-oriented, and a lot of that was jazz and gospel. Only the smallest bit of it would have been rock. There just wasn’t that much to be found, but I think there’s been a resurgence since I left.

D.C. is such a busy place, though. All of the best musicians I knew were these incredible players who played with all of these great people and had long histories and all had day jobs. There weren’t very many people who were only musicians. It was more like, “I’m a musician, but I also work on the Metro.” I didn’t see much opportunity when I was there, but there are more art spaces opening up, and I think things have gotten more affordable. Bands I work with will tell me about playing such-and-such place in D.C. and I’ve never heard of it.

It sounds like that experience gave you a good grounding in a lot of different types of music.

Definitely. I was able to get very, very hands on. There was definitely a good variety of stuff, some jazz and some world beat with a lot of hip-hop in between. We used to do restorations of old recordings — old reel-to-reel and really old records. We had all kinds of strange players that could play weird speeds with different head configurations. It was all kinds of audio — whatever came through the door. These days I’m working with musicians, and it’s more like curating a sound or working on a project from the ground up.

What kinds of conversations are you having with artists before the sessions start?

The first thing I like to do is try to get a feel for the music in its rawest form. Does the artist write on piano or do they write on guitar? Just hearing how they wrote the songs is helpful, so I love getting an early demo. What are the things they’re hoping to capture? How do they want to record the music and have a great time working on it? So, if I can hear a song with nothing added to it and not really stylized in any way, I get to think about what it could sound like in the studio.

It’s about trying to figure out the vision. If it’s a band, do they want to create a new sound and get studio heavy, or do they want to maintain a sound they’re already performing? I’m just trying to collect as much data before we set off in a particular direction, because that just makes everything more fun and more productive. But if I hear something and I want to go left and the artist wants to go right, that’s cool. I want to try what they’re thinking, or maybe it’s not going to feel like something I can help with.

You have a reputation for working very quickly in the studio.

I would say I work very efficiently. But it’s such a relative thing. You think about a place where they’re pounding out publishing demos and doing more songs that I’d even consider starting in a day. They have to work quickly. I do think it’s healthy for everyone to get a lot done and always be moving forward, even if there are projects where it’s not necessarily a good idea to set aside however many days to knock out the record. Sometimes you need to spread things out so you can readdress things or reapproach certain parts. Nobody wants to be sitting there running up the clock and not moving forward. You’re going to get burned out and frustrated.

There have definitely been projects where we knew we were going to have to try a bunch of different things. It’s going to be a much longer project. And then there are projects where we know exactly what we’re doing and we have it all mapped out. I always believe in letting the studio be an instrument, as well. I like to get things about 80 percent dialed in before we start, but leave a certain amount of openness to see what happens. You get everybody in a room playing together and sometimes things take on a new life that you never envisioned. “Hey, this is working well. We didn’t think to go in this direction, but it’s working. So let’s not be afraid to go off course a little.”

It also sounds like you’re playing a lot of different roles on these projects — not just what we think of as producing, but engineering, mixing, a little bit of everything.

I guess it’s all so connected! I’ve been hired to make something, so I just use the tools to my utmost ability. Whatever the project is, I do what sounds and feels right to me and to the artist, as well. Those lines get crossed a lot. I can produce this record, but I might as well engineer it, too, rather than run it through a different set of hands. I’ve worked as an engineer. I’ve been hired as a mixer. But I guess I’ve always thought that those jobs crossed each other a lot. After all, arranging a song is just as much about mixing it as sitting down and working out the parts. Some mix engineers spend a long time cutting out parts and moving parts around and rearranging the structure of the song. For me, that’s just part of the production: “Oh, we need something on the second chorus. It doesn’t sound big enough. Let’s throw another guitar in there.”

There are still a thousand definitions of what a producer does and what an engineer does. It’s comes down to what people individually feel. Especially with all of the changes happening in the recording industry, the roles are becoming harder and harder to define. I think they come down to individual people making their own definitions. Also, genre is a big thing, too. If you’re producing a jazz record, it would be closer to arranging, whereas if you’re doing a psychedelic rock record, you’re going to be doing a lot more with microphones, adjusting flangers, messing with gear. It all demands different knowledge and a different role.

You work primarily in tape instead of digital. Does that change your approach?

I think so. I can work on any format, but I find myself most fluently working with tape. I think it’s because it’s the format that I started on. It means more work on the front end and maybe less on the back end. You have to work out the parts and figure out what sounds best in a different way than when you’re working on a computer. Then the big thing is editing. It definitely affects the process, but the thing I’m thinking about is what suits the music the best.

Looking over your discography, I noticed a lot of bands seem to come to you when they’re recording a debut or making a big album, like Alabama Shakes or Hurray for the Riff Raff.

I’ve wondered if that’s the case. Maybe that’s part of my path or something, I don’t know. I definitely feel like a lot of people approach me looking to try something different or take a new step. It’s not always somebody’s first record. It’s hard to say. But I do enjoy developing something new from what’s already there. I like hearing demos and thinking about what we can do with the material. “What can we do to grow this into something new?” That’s always on my mind.

I wouldn’t attribute this to being someone’s first record, but I definitely like recording something where there are no expectations that you have to guide an artist toward. “Okay, we can stay in the same world as this previous record or we can change things up this way or that way.” My favorite people to work with are the people who are uninhibited about the music. I guess people tend to come to me already in that mindset.