Tag: jon brion

Billy Strings Could Play Whatever He Wants – And Still Chooses Bluegrass

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The first time I heard Billy Strings’ name was in 2014, from a guitar picking pilot friend of mine from northern Kentucky who was working up in Michigan. I first met him at the Frankfort Bluegrass Festival in Illinois two or three years later, by which time I’d played a song or two from the Fiddle Tune X album on the satellite radio show I was hosting with Del McCoury. Billy had either recently gotten or was about to get his first IBMA Award for Momentum Instrumentalist of the Year (his then-roommate, Molly Tuttle, got one at the same time).

After that, I’d see him from time to time – I was already writing songs with fellow Michigander and Billy’s across-the-street neighbor Lindsay Lou – but it wasn’t until June 18, 2018, that we got together to write our first song, “Love Like Me.” We wrote a few more after that, he went into the studio, and put most of them on 2019’s Home. Since then, working as a team with another Michigander, Aaron Allen, we’ve written many more, for Renewal and now for Highway Prayers, too. To be honest, it’s been a little life-changing – a taste, at least, of what it must have been like for Music Row songwriters back in the day.

One striking feature of Billy’s trajectory has been his ability to keep the enthusiasm of the normative bluegrass industry and community that the IBMA generally represents; my social media feeds regularly remind me that most of the stalwart traditionalists among my friends – people who grew up immersed in scenes that trace back to the music’s earliest days – aren’t dissing Billy Strings. They’re cheering him on. That hasn’t always been the case with bluegrass artists bringing the sound and the songs to larger-than-usual audiences, but it’s indisputable here, as three successive IBMA Entertainer of the Year awards (finally supplanted this year by Del, another traditionalist admirer) demonstrate.

The reason, I think, is that, as BGS Editor Justin Hiltner puts it in his Artist of the Month reveal essay, “the most innovative and revolutionary aspects of Billy Strings and his version of bluegrass are not what he’s changed, but what has stayed the same.” When the BGS team invited me to have a chat with Billy for Artist of the Month, I figured it was, among other things, an opportunity to dig deeper into that idea – and so I did.

Together, we talked about recording Highway Prayers, about working in a band, about writing songs and making set lists. We talked about a number of things, but somehow always wound back up, again and again, at the endlessly rewarding music of Mac Wiseman and Larry Sparks, “Riding That Midnight Train” and “Cumberland Gap,” “Uncle Pen” and more.

Does it get any more bluegrass than that?

You didn’t record Highway Prayers all at once, did you? Wasn’t it recorded over a while?

Billy Strings: Right. We started in January out in LA at EastWest Studios, with Jon Brion the producer and Greg Koller at the helm as engineer. We recorded a few tunes out there. I really love what we got sonically, but I just don’t know if being in LA while trying to make a record was right for us – we were right downtown in freaking LA, man. I felt like, “What the hell am I doing out here in this big city where all these movie stars are, trying make a record?” I was working with Jon [Brion], who is a genius, that’s where he likes to work and the sounds we were getting were awesome and everything was cool, but I think it was also at a time where I was wanting to get the guys together without a producer and just throw stuff at the wall.

So we threw a makeshift little studio together and brought in Brandon Bell, and that’s where we recorded a good bulk of it – just threw up a couple of mics with a little lunch box of pre-amps and went for it. We would sit there and work a song out and then go upstairs and cut it. The great thing about being at my house was, it’s like there’s no authority figure there and it doesn’t feel like a studio – it just feels like we’re at band practice. And if you wanted, while somebody’s trying to do a overdub or something, you could go for a bike ride. Just that in itself was mentally freeing.

I will say that the tones we were getting out there with Jon were unquestionably better to me. But I’m kind of in the spot where I’m just, like, “Does it really matter?” Well, even if most people listen to music on their damn phone, it does matter. That’s how you make a sound that can evoke emotion. But also, as a bluegrass musician, any time we get with somebody or something, it’s like, “We should record you guys on these old ribbon mics and straight to tape with no edits,” and it’s just like, “Well, dude, it’s 2024.”

I feel like in some ways when people do that, they’re kind of privileging the process over the result, when the result is what people are gonna hear and what they’re gonna relate to.

Yeah, I’m just chasing something and I’m not trying to think about it too much. I read something in a book the other day, it’s called Blues and Trouble, by Tom Piazza. He says that sometimes you can push an idea up a hill, and you gotta push and push to get it to the top of the hill, but sometimes an idea gets going and you have to run to keep up. That’s where I like to be – you know what I’m talking about as a songwriter – when it just kind of falls out. Those are the best ones, you know, and quite a few of these songs just rolled off the page. Like “Be Your Man,” for instance, I wrote it in 20 minutes; it just came out. Of course there are other ones you have to work hard on, but, man, those – I just love when they show up like that, it almost feels like you just siphoned it out of the ether. Who wrote the song, you know?

That’s something that I’ve heard a lot over the years from a lot of great songwriters: it’s just like pulling it out of the air, and it kind of falls right in there. When you’re in that zone, you can’t hardly beat that.

No, you gotta keep going with it, you know. It’s hard to get in that zone, and like I said, it’s rare for me, it might only happen a couple of times a year that I write a song like that. That’s how “Dust In a Baggie” was. I wrote it in 30 minutes at work – I didn’t even have a guitar, I just had the melody in my head and a little notepad. I was cleaning rooms at the hotel and I sat there and wrote that. That’s still how the song is today, you know, it was just… it was done. Finished.

Let me ask you a little bit more about your process more generally. What’s the role of the guys in the band? You know, in the bluegrass world, at one extreme you’ve got the Jimmy Martin style of bandleader, which is, you know, “This is my sound, and this is how you’re gonna do it, and I will tell you what you need to do and show you what you need to do.” Then, on the other end, you’ve got somebody like Bill Monroe or J.D. Crowe, who says, “I brought you in to do your thing and let’s see how it fits together with everything else going on there.”

I very much lean towards the latter. I’ve got such amazing musicians that I’d be stupid not to listen to what they’ve got to say, you know? They’re so amazing and each one of them has their own strengths. So it’s a good mixture of like, I’m the band leader, kinda what I say goes, but I also take into consideration everything that the guys say. Sometimes I really need their advice and ask for it– like, for instance, most of the time I write the set list, but sometimes … I’ll go to the front lounge and say, “Hey, what do you guys wanna play tonight?” And then some ideas will come at me.

They’re there when I need them and they also don’t take anything personally when I say, “Hey, no.” It just depends, because sometimes it’s touchy when you write a song and somebody else wants to try to change it. But sometimes, if you hear them out, the idea that they come up with is way better. It just takes you a second to see what they’re talking about.

What you said about Crowe, bringing people in to do their thing, that’s really what I want. I don’t wanna be the dictator. I wanna be somebody who’s in a band. My whole life, my friends have been my family, especially when I was a teenager and started playing in bands. The word “band” means a lot to me. It means my brotherhood, you know, my closest friends and family.

That leads me to something that I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anybody else talk to you about this. You’re constantly bringing new material into the band – not originals, but older songs, old bluegrass songs. You’re always refreshing the repertoire. Are you just listening to old stuff all the time and hear something and say, “Man, that’s cool, let’s start doing that”? How does it work?

There’s a lot of songs in my head just from growing up playing bluegrass and we still haven’t scratched the surface of it. You know what I mean? Like, one night I’ll just be thinking of my dad in the old days, how we used to pick down around Barkus Park, and I get feeling sentimental or something and all of a sudden we’re gonna play “Letter Edged in Black” or whatever.

There’s just a whole well of tunes to pull from the bluegrass songbook and I like to mix it up. Like, if we did “Cumberland Gap” last time, then let’s do “Ground Speed” this time and if we did “Ground Speed” this time, next time let’s do “Clinch Mountain Backstep.” And then sometimes you play a tune and it feels good, so then it will stick around – like we’ve been playing “Baltimore Johnny.”

I guess having the guys in the band that you do helps, because a lot of them already know those tunes – or at least have some idea how they go, so you can work something up pretty quick.

Yeah, and they’re quick learners. Most of the time I wake up at the hotel and I’m stressing until I can write a set list, until it’s finished. Otherwise I can’t take a nap, because it’s a puzzle every day. There’s so many people that come to every single show of ours and we see the same people in the front row every night. I just don’t wanna feed them the same thing for dinner. I wanna mix it up.

Sometimes it takes two or three hours to make a set list. I’m doing it all on my iPad, so I’m not actually crumpling up paper and throwing it in the waste basket, but that’s what I’m doing. I’ll make a set list and I’ll go, “Oh, fuck that, that’s garbage.” And then eventually I’ll land on something that I feel is suitable or whatever. But it’s a puzzle every day. And then usually there will be a song or two on there– back in ’23, or maybe ’22, we played a new song every single show of the entire year. Every set that we played, we debuted a new cover. That was a task; once we got halfway through the year, it was like, “We gotta keep it going.”

So these days, it might not be every single show that we’re having to learn a new song, but we’re definitely having to refresh on things and arrangements and stuff. Every day before a gig, if we go out on stage at 8:00, then 6:45 or so we’re getting our instruments and sitting down and we’re starting to talk through some shit. Sometimes we’re learning these songs. And then sometimes we go out there and wing it. I like to be in that space, too. A lot of times, if we over rehearse things and think about it too much, somebody will fuck it up. But if we just get the basic idea down and go out there and somehow believe in ourselves, then we get through these songs.

Leaving the covers aside, I was reading a review of Highway Prayers and the guy who wrote it seemed almost baffled by the fact that it’s really a bluegrass album. And it is, from “Richard Petty” to the opening song that you wrote with Thomm [Jutz], to “Happy Hollow” and even “Leadfoot.” These are songs that, to me, are almost super-traditional in the forms that they use and the melodies.

Do you feel like your ear is kind of trained enough to feel comfortable with reusing folk materials, for lack of a better term? Like “Leadfoot” has this “Lonesome Reuben” kind of sound to it – but it’s not “Lonesome Reuben,” either. That’s gotta enter into your process a lot, I would think.

Not consciously. I grew up playing bluegrass and sometimes when I’m trying to write a song, that’s just how I think about it. When I first started writing, back when I was 16 years old, I would just rewrite “Riding That Midnight Train” or something. Not trying to, I would just write a song and then I would be like, “Oh, fuck, this is just ‘Riding That Midnight Train,’ it’s just the same melody. I can’t even call this my own song. But now, with a song, I show it to the band guys and they’ll say, “I don’t know, I think it’s your tune.”

I’m just trying to chase the idea, and not get in its way, and not let anything – especially from the outside world – into my brain to influence my direction. When I’m writing something good, it’s like I’m trying to write in my diary or something – or like I’m trying to write a bluegrass song that is [reflective] of my childhood and my love for the music. It’s that sentimental feeling that I get when I hear bluegrass music, that I love it so much, that it reminds me of my childhood. That before I knew anything dirty about the world, there was this love for bluegrass music and that’s the kind of music I wanna make.

I’m a bluegrass man. You know, we do all this other stuff, and I write other songs too, but at the core of it all is a bluegrass musician who was fed Doc Watson and Bill Monroe and Larry Sparks. So that’s the stuff that I like. I’m still listening to the Stanley Brothers all the time. I’ve listened to this shit my whole life and I still haven’t heard it all, you know?

You could do pretty much whatever you wanted, and yet you are still, at the core, playing bluegrass music.

What’s authentic? You know? I’m trying to not lose myself to this fucking big monster, you know what I mean? Because, yeah, I could get a drummer and pick up my electric guitar. I could put on a cowboy hat and join that whole bandwagon, too. But that’s not me and it’s not true. I don’t care about that shit. The more that I’m in this industry, the more that I’m just trying to stay true to myself and my music, because I see past all the bullshit and see past the glam of it. And I’m so grateful – so, so grateful – to have a fan base that will allow me to just wear a pair of blue jeans on stage and play three chords and the truth at them.

I feel like if I went and changed it up too much, then I might lose a bunch of those folks. And that’s hard, too, because sometimes I feel like we need a drummer. We’re in these giant arenas, it’s like, “Man, if I had a drummer and I could pick up the Les Paul, we could just fucking chop heads.” And I do enjoy that, too, because that is part of who I am. When I got out of playing bluegrass so much, when I was a kid, I played some electric and some Black Sabbath and shit – so there’s some of that in there.

But what I play is what’s in my heart, man. And that’s why I’m still playing Mac Wiseman songs, and there’s something – it’s almost like a freaking kink or something. I just love it so much. I love playing “It Rains Just the Same in Missouri” to a big crowd of people, or “I Wonder How the Old Folks Are at Home, or “The Baggage Coach Ahead,” or any of these old [songs].

You get out on the big arena stage like that and you play “Uncle Pen,” it’s like, “Fuck, yeah!” It’s kind of like just force-feeding these people bluegrass, and I love it, you know.

(Editor’s Note: Continue exploring our Billy Strings Artist of the Month content here.)

Photo Credit: Dana Trippe

The Producers: Gabe Witcher

Posted on by Editor

Gabe Witcher has a superstition about shutterbugs in recording sessions. “I’m a strong believer that all photos that come out of the studio must be in black and white. Color photography is too real. It loses mystery to me. Black and white has enough fantasy in it, where you can use your imagination to create the world that existed at the time the recording was captured.”

It is, he admits, a “weird little thing that I think about,” but he’s not wrong. Most iconic music photos — whether it’s Paul Simon smashing his bass onstage or Johnny Cash furiously flipping the bird — need no other hues beyond black and white. Anything else is a distraction: too flagrant, too revealing, too matter-of-fact. Witcher would rather let the creative process retain some sense of fantasy and wonder.

Thirty years into his career, he has yet to tire of the mystery. Something like a child prodigy on the fiddle, he paid his dues in the Southern California bluegrass scene, appearing on Star Search in the 1980s before joining Herb Pederson’s band, the Laurel Canyon Ramblers, as a teenager. Witcher has recorded with Béla Fleck, Dave Rawlings, Eric Clapton, and many others, but he’s best known as a founding member of the renowned prog-grass group Punch Brothers. Comprised of superlative musicians, they’ve recorded four albums of adventurous acoustic music with such producers as T Bone Burnett, Jacquire King, and Jon Brion.

Throughout his career, Witcher has gravitated toward the other side of the glass, gradually accepting more production responsibilities within Punch Brothers and without. He helmed Sara Watkins’ breakout third album, Young in All the Wrong Ways, in 2016, and this year he produced two new records by his Punch Brethren: Universal Favorite finds banjoist Noam Pikelny going truly solo, just his voice and banjo in a variety of styles and settings, and Witcher ensures it sounds both intimate and expansive. For Mount Royal, the second collaborative album by guitarists Chris “Critter” Eldridge” and Julian Lage, the producer emphasizes their masterful technique as well as their subtle and insightful arrangements. They’re representational albums, he says, but full of verve and skill and even a little mystery.

How did you gravitate toward this particular role?

I had a band with my dad when I was young called the Witcher Brothers, and we made a record when I was 11. That was my first foray into the studio, and I remember having so much fun. Back then, it was all tape. I remember the feel of the machines, getting the microphone set up and coming into the control room for the first time and hearing the sounds of the instruments coming back at me through the speakers. It was a thrill. At that moment, I was hooked on recording. I got a four-track machine, and I spent a lot of time at my cousin’s dad’s house — I guess my mother’s cousin. His name is Don Was, and he’s a huge record producer. He had a bunch of recording gear, and I was always in the studio, setting up equipment and recording for fun. It was something I loved to do in my spare time. When I was about 14, I was asked by someone I didn’t know to play on their record, and that started my career as a session musician in Los Angeles. I got asked to play on other things and, little by little, I managed to build up a reputation. So I’ve always felt at home in the studio.

Were there any particular albums where you started to notice the production?

One of my earliest musical memories was listening to Abbey Road on my parents’ turntable. I couldn’t have been older than two or three, and especially as I got a little older, I remember listening to that record and realizing that there were only four guys in the band, but the sound they were making was much bigger than that. This guy plays the drums, these two guys play guitar, and this guy plays bass. How are they able to get all this other stuff going on? That really opened the door to figuring out what the technology was and what overdubbing was: “How does that work?” I started to think about how they were building tracks and, from then on, a world of possibilities opened up.

When Punch Brothers started making records, I was already an old hand at it and could instinctively take on the role of producer with those guys. Everybody finds his own role within the band, and that became mine. For the last record, Phosphorescent Blues, we had the amazing T Bone Burnett to produce, and I had already been working with him as a co-producer on a bunch of projects — and as an arranger. When you work with T Bone, it means you’re going to hear him say something like, “I’d love for you to write a string arrangement or a horn arrangement for this song.” So you’d do that and, “Okay great, now go record it.” He’s giving you the keys to the kingdom. Sometimes he would show up for sessions and sometimes he wouldn’t, and to have him place that level of trust in me gave me the confidence to think of myself as a producer.

How did that affect the sessions with Punch Brothers?

He was there for all the tracking and he got all the performances out of us, but when it came time for all the editing and mixing, I knew what the band wanted and I knew what I wanted, so he let me take the reins. I was there with the engineer, Mike Piersante, and we finished tracking all the guys. When everybody else had left, I was sitting there with a bunch of hard drives with hours and hours of music — and it’s up to me to edit and oversee the mixing. It was a natural extension of all the things that I’d already been doing.

The band has worked with a different producer on each album. How were those experiences different?

Each producer brings a different aesthetic and a different worldview to the proceedings. Early on, we were very idealistic and dead set on making only representational documents. With The Blind Leading the Blind, we knew it was an ambitious piece, but we wanted to make sure we could actually perform it live. We were very stubborn about capturing it all live, so Nonesuch recommended we get a classical producer. Because that’s what we were doing: We were making a classical piece, so we needed to record it in a classical way with a classical producer [Steven Epstein]. Looking back 10 years later, was that the best way to present that music? I don’t know. If we had to do it over again, we would probably play most of it live and overdub harmony vocals, but you learn.

Jon Brion had a different method on Antifogmatic. He set us up in a semi-circle because he wanted to capture the energy and interaction of what we do. We played all of the music live, but he was able to get a better vocal sound by overdubbing the vocals. I understand that, but it’s very hard when you have five people imagining trying to play based on what they imagine the vocals are going to sound like. We had to learn on the fly how to do that. We had to learn to listen in a different way, and I think it was successful in its own way.

Jacquire King was a lot of fun. He was down for a lot of experimentation on Who’s Feeling Young Now? By that point, we wanted to utilize the studio as another sonic tool instead of just something take a snapshot. We wanted to use the element of fantasy that the studio provides. We dipped our toes in a little bit with that record. We experimented with sounds and overdubs — anything to introduce new things, but always dependent on the song and what it needs. Jacquire really helped us figure out what works for our instruments, and he had us thinking about ways to capture sound that I had never really thought about before.

And the thing with T Bone is, he’s wide open. He wants to do whatever is going to make the best end product. We had different set-ups for different songs. It was a fun process because he’s a master and keeping the bigger picture in mind. The Punch Brothers have a tendency to overdo things and try to squeeze so much perfection out of everything that we squeeze the life out of it. So it was a real education to see how he worked.

What did you take away from those experiences that you’ve applied to your own sessions as a producer?

The most important thing you can have in a producer is trust. You trust that they’re going to understand your vision and you trust that they’re going to help you achieve your goal. It’s such a deep relationship with the rest of the band, and we understand each other so well, that it made sense that I would be the one sitting on the other side of the speakers telling them if they’ve gotten what they want. And I know what they’re capable of doing, so I’m in a unique position to push them. Someone else might be like, “Hey, that was great.” But I would be like, “Hey, that was great but I know you can do better.”

That seems like it would be crucial, especially on these records where there’s nothing to hide behind. It’s just one banjo or two guitars.

Those are very, very representational records without many studio tricks. You approach that kind of project as though you’re making a document. There’s not a lot of fantasy involved. Your job as producer is to put them in a position where they’re comfortable and playing their best, then you have to make sure you capture the sound they’re making as fully as you can. That all sounds very simple, but you become something more like a psychologist at that point. You’re talking a line between keeping people happy and creative, but also trying to find positive ways to shape what they’re doing, to get the best possible results. It helps that the Punch Brothers guys have been working together for so long that we know how to speak to each other in a way that avoids any bad clashes or setting each other off and making them freeze up.

For instance, Noam is extremely thorough — more thorough than I think he needs to be. There’s an interesting dynamic where we’ll work on a song for a couple of hours, and I’ll be very happy with what we got. I’m confident in what we got, so why not come in and take a break before we start working on the next song. But he’ll say, “Let me just do one more. One more time.” Three hours later, he’ll finally feel okay about it even though we have three times as much material as we actually need. He’s familiar with me, but he might not feel as comfortable with someone else to sit there for hours on end. He obviously does feel comfortable: It’s just Gabe. He can’t get mad at me.

As a producer, you have a couple of jobs. One: You’re a proxy for the artist. You’re basically in a position to say, “If I was an audience member, would this be reaching me? Is this going to impact me emotionally?” Two: You have to make sure there is some underlying theme that ties it all together and makes it work as a whole. All the best records tell a story of some kind. It’s all just storytelling. Even though one song is about one thing and the next song is about something else, you can still construct some kind of narrative out of them, even though it may not be a linear story. That’s a big part of the producer’s job: to make sure everything fits together in a satisfying way.

Is telling a story easier or harder with instrumental versus vocal tracks?

They’re challenging in different ways. To create a narrative on an instrumental record, you have to make sure there’s enough variety to feel like you’ve gone somewhere. When you’re making a record, you’re making a 40- or 50-minute piece of music. It might be divided up into 10 or 12 or 15 segments, but you’re making a piece of music that’s roughly the same length as most symphonic music, so you have to approach it that way. You have to piece it together in a way that gives the material shape and keeps it interesting. For a record with singing on it, you have the added difficulty of that extra layer of words. You have to have the musical narrative and then you have to have the lyrical narrative. There’s some wiggle room in there, but you also have to keep in mind the artist and what they’re trying to say. On the Critter and Julian record, they brought in a bunch of vocal songs that were all great, but I just didn’t believe Critter when he sang them. I had to figure out why, which was tricky, but it came down to what I knew about him — where he comes from and what kind of music he has made in the past. The material had to fit within the story of him as a performer, as an artist, and not just within the context of an album.

How does that work with someone like Sara Watkins? What I love about Young in All the Wrong Ways is how it plays against what we know of her as an artist and takes her story in a new direction.

Absolutely. What makes it work with her is that she acknowledges that it’s something different from her. People change and evolve and grow, and this is where she is right at this particular moment. I really felt the honesty of what she was singing to me in those songs. It all made sense. There was a weird incident in the studio with her. All of the songs that ended up on that record were her original songs, but early in the process, she had brought in a song that Benmont Tench had written. It was a new song of his and we had permission to record it. I thought it was good, so we put it on the list. We were about three-quarters of the way through tracking her record when we got to that song. It was just her singing and Benmont playing. The song is dark, about a relationship that’s past its prime and she’s struggling to break from it. She started singing, and the mood in the studio shifted. It had been very happy and positive and constructive, but it turned really dark really quickly. It had been easy-going up to that point, and I watched everybody get very frustrated.

The next day, Jay Bellerose, who plays drums on the record, was talking to me and asked me what happened. The only thing we could come up with was that the song just wasn’t her voice. Nobody believed it, when it was coming out of her mouth. It was a case of the wrong song for the artist, and it’s the only song that didn’t make the record. Don’t get me wrong: It’s a great song, when Benmont sings it. It’s his experience. It wasn’t Sarah’s experience. There was just something about the vibe of the song that wasn’t right for her.

It’s extremely hard to explain that kind of thing, and everybody feels it in a different way. The studio is such a vulnerable space, especially for the person who’s being recorded. It’s such an intimate setting that interpersonal dynamics become the thing that makes or breaks a record. You’re going for an indescribable feeling — something way beyond playing in time or singing in tune, all the technical aspects that make a good performance. When you achieve that next layer, it’s hard to describe. There’s an energy that comes from getting the right people in a room together. Sara’s record was successful because we got the right people playing the right music, which becomes a positive feedback loop. Good things start happening, which inspire more good things, which inspire more good things, and then you have this wonderful document of that time and those people. This kind of thing never happens, especially when you hire a band, but for Sara’s record, people were hanging out in the studio after the tracking was done. We would play for hours and hours, then we would do overdubs in the evening and people would just hang out. We’d open a bottle of wine and people would just hang out in the studio. It was beautiful.

I feel like people sometimes fixate on gear — finding the right pedal or using a certain kind of microphone. That seems much less important to these sessions.

That’s exactly right. People can get caught up in the technological aspect of the studio — at great detriment to the music. At least in regard to the music that I’m interested in making, we have way too much ability to manipulate sound. I hear so much recorded music that has no vibe, no human quality to it. It sounds like the people weren’t even in the same room and maybe not even in the same country when they recorded it. It’s all been pieced together very carefully, but it’s missing an essential element: There’s no interaction. Some people can do beautiful things that way. For what Radiohead does, it’s great. They’re able to use those tools in a musical way. But the music that I want to make has to feel, in some way, like it’s being passed from person to person. It’s interesting because, when you nail it, it’s the kind of thing that sinks into the background. It becomes so effortless that you don’t think about it. It’s the same with movies: You know a director has done his job right when you can’t tell that they’re even there. The goal is to get lost in the storytelling.

 

Photo credit: Brantley Gutierrez