Tag: producers

Four Women Producers and Engineers On Studio Challenges and Successes

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Over the past couple of decades, the music industry has seen more women rising to become leaders in audio engineering and producing. However, even as access, acceptance, and opportunity continue to improve, women are still painfully underrepresented in these career paths, making up just five percent of engineers and producers worldwide. Over the past few weeks, I’ve talked to a handful of these remarkable women, in person at coffee shops, over the phone, and via email, about how they built their careers and the challenges they have faced in a male-dominated industry. These women are trailblazers, often without career models to follow, often the only woman in the room when they work. Their tenacity, talent, and dedication are evident, and I feel honored to share their stories.

As a musician who came up in the the bluegrass scene, the first female producer I ever knew of or worked with – and now that I think of it, the only female producer I’ve worked with who was not hired by me – is the legendary Alison Brown, virtuosic banjo player and co-owner of Compass Records. Since Brown has seen a lot of generational change over her tenure in Nashville, I thought I should start by getting her perspective.

Brown had already solidified her reputation as an instrumentalist, winning IBMA’s Banjo Player of the Year award in 1991 and touring with Alison Krauss, when she decided to start a record label along with her husband, Garry West. “We were talking about how to have a sustainable life in music,” she said, “And it was one of those napkin drawing in a coffee shop moments.”

The two were on tour in Sweden with Michelle Shocked, for whom Brown was the bandleader. “When I look back, I can see how a lot of the opportunities I had were carved out for me by other women. I was about to go to law school when Shocked asked me to be her bandleader and then we went on a world tour. At Compass, I never thought of myself as a producer, Garry was more interested in that role. But when Dale Ann Bradley was going to make an album she asked me to produce it, so I said yes, and that’s how I started producing.”

Since then, Brown has produced seven Grammy-nominated records, as well as winning a Grammy for her own song, “Leaving Cottondale,” off of her 2000 record, Fair Weather.

When asked about her production style, Brown interestingly observes that she may come at it from a traditionally female perspective, by observing and predicting other people’s feelings and needs. “Especially in the studio, you need to make people feel at ease…” she explains. “Ultimately your job is to draw the best out of the musicians. Everyone has that thing they’re afraid of having to do under the microscope, but the goal is to make the musician feel comfortable enough to reach out and hit something new.”

“Sometimes with the older guard guys, I’ll say, ‘OK, lets try to play through the chart’ and they will act like they don’t understand me. ‘What did she say? What does she want to do?’ … Like they want someone to translate it for them, because it’s coming from a woman. It’s annoying, but I know they’re acting that way because they are nervous and they don’t want to look stupid. So when I’m producing, I try to intuit those things about people, and stay focused on the end goal of making a great record.”

Engineer and producer Shani Gandhi has been in Nashville since 2011, and has been been nominated for two Grammys, winning Best Engineered Album (Non-Classical) for her work on Sierra Hull’s 2020 album, 25 Trips, which she engineered, mixed, and co-produced with Hull. Originally from Singapore, Gandhi was raised in Perth, Australia. She moved to the U.S. in 2007 to attend Ithaca College, where she received a BA in music with a concentration in sound recording technology.

Gandhi was drawn to engineering and production because of her love of music and her simultaneous dislike for performing. “As a kid, I didn’t even know that that side of music existed as a career, but once I found the Audio Engineering Society, I immersed myself in it, I was obsessed.”

Gandhi told me about her philosophy for building a community you can learn from and create with. “It’s really important to have a strong community of both mentors and peers,” she explains. “I had people that I was looking up to that were holding me to a very high standard, and then I had friends and colleagues where we were all working really hard and trading favors, and that’s how I built my freelance career. So you need really good people at all levels to make it work. You don’t want to feel like the smallest person in the room all the time, but you also need someone around to tell you, ‘I know you think what you’re doing is really cool, but it’s really not,’” she laughs.

Although she works on every stage of recording and producing, Gandhi’s great love is for mixing. “My approach is to always remember that it’s not my record, it’s the artist’s art when it comes down to it and they’re the ones who have to live with it for the rest of their lives. I do like things to be lush and tall and wide and pristine. I don’t go immediately to that tape or garage sort of sound, but I can do it. If that’s what the artists wants, that’s what the artists gets.”

Also hailing from Australia, producer and engineer Clare Reynolds – AKA Lollies – came to Nashville via LA, where she was signed as a songwriter for hip-hop producer Timbaland’s company. She essentially taught herself production and engineering on the job. “I was in a lot of big studios with big producers over those three years. It was really intense, I was almost always feeling out of my element, but I learned a lot. I would be writing the song, but also watching the others work, asking questions like, ‘Why are you using that mic?’ ‘How are you getting that sound?’ And trying to absorb everything they were doing.”

In Los Angeles, Reynolds tells me, she learned how to enter a room like a man: “I was with so many different, very big personalities that were at the top of their game and their egos were massive. They were just hyped … and if you want to be respected, you can’t go in tentative, you can’t code yourself as female. You have to act how they act, which is to say, you can’t care if other people like you. I would have this attitude like, ‘We don’t need to be friends, but we’re gonna write the best song ever.’”


Reynolds says that she will always love writing songs, but at least for now, production and engineering have taken a hold on her. “I will be forever learning,” she says, “But I do think that my experience with writing helps me approach the audio side from a very musical and song-based perspective.”

Engineer and producer Diana Walsh echoed Reynold’s sentiment about the typical energy in a recording studio. “With women being so critically underrepresented in these technical roles, it can sometimes take a minute for the gender biases in the room to dissipate,” she told me. “My focus is always on doing great work, and treating everyone in the room with the same respect I expect in return.”

Growing up in Houston, Texas, Walsh played guitar, but was always more interested in how she could record her guitar than how she could perform with it. Her mom bought her very first Shure SM57 microphone, which still gets used today in her sessions.

Walsh recorded her own music at home before heading to Belmont University to study music business, with an emphasis on production. While in school she started freelance recording for friends and classmates and after graduating, she began working at the historic RCA Studio B, where she is now the Studio Manager, as well as maintaining a busy freelance engineering schedule.

 

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Her engineering and production credits include Matchbox 20, Amanda Shires, JD McPherson, and Sister Sadie. Walsh believes that representation is key for getting more women into the studio: “Working at RCA B, I have the opportunity to talk to a lot of school groups. After our sessions, I often speak with the students and ask about their goals for their future in music. Through these conversations, I’ve been thrilled to hear that more and more young women are taking an interest in engineering/producing.”

Throughout my conversations with each of these women, one point they all emphasized was the importance of staying focused on making great work in the face of difficult environments. “Nobody can argue with good work,” they each told me in their own way. And as we continue to see beautiful records being made by women, I have to agree.

Photo Credit: Alison Brown by Russ Harrington; Shani Gandhi by Joshua Black Wilkins.

The String – Producers Rick Clark and Neilson Hubbard

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Recording producers are often the best people to speak with to gain extra insight into what makes some music more effective than others. And that’s what we do this episode with two Nashville leaders with very different stories.


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Rick Clark came of age in Memphis and moved to Nashville in the 90s. He’s been a DJ, a compilation curator and a music supervisor for film and TV. He’s also getting back into songwriting and recording his own music. Neilson Hubbard is a key player in the modern Nashville music scene, with albums to his credit by Mary Gauthier, Gretchen Peters, Nora Jane Struthers and Matthew Perryman Jones. His own band of late is called the Orphan Brigade.

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.

The Producers: Jamie Mefford

Posted on by Editor

Producer and sound engineer Jamie Mefford sort of fell into this whole music thing. Recording friends' bands for free ended up snowballing into a fully fledged career. Aside from having produced a handful of excellent records — notably Gregory Alan Isakov's This Empty Northern Hemisphere and Nathaniel Rateliff's Falling Faster Than You Can Run — he also hits the road with many a touring band, offering an expert touch to the house boards of rock halls across America. 

One of the reasons I'm enjoying writing this series on producers that I secretly want to be Quincy Jones. What producer would you secretly like be?

I’m a big fan of Daniel Lanois and Ethan Johns. There are a lot of them, actually, but those are the first two who come to mind.

What is it about their work that impresses and inspires you?

They seem to have a sound that’s theirs, especially Daniel Lanois. It’s a sound I recognize and appreciate. He has an ethereal quality to his work, especially the stuff with Brian Eno. I’ve always enjoyed that.

Is there an album he did you’re particularly fond of?

Some of the U2 stuff. The Dylan record [No Mercy] that he did. Emmylou Harris’s Wrecking Ball is a record I love.

Those are the three I would pick, too. They’re his iconic records. And Ethan Johns did Ryan Adams’ Gold album, right?

Yeah, and the one I really gravitate toward is Heartbreaker. It’s an album I always reference when I’m working. I really love the sounds on it.

Give me a short bio on Jamie Mefford, starting with the first song or album you remember hearing as a kid.

[Laughs] I don’t know. I grew up with two older brothers and they listened to a lot of harder rock and metal — weirdly. That’s what I grew up on: AC/DC … stuff like that … Pink Floyd. Heavier stuff than I would listen to now.

Did you play in a band? Was “rock star” at the top of your career list or did you always want to be a producer?

When my first band went into the studio, it just fascinated me — the whole process. I wanted to learn how to do it myself because I thought I could do it better. So slowly, over time, I just kept learning and learning. I’ve gotten good enough at it now that people call me to do it for them.

It’s been a slow process, really, of me just learning sound, learning how to record things, how other people made things, trying how things fit together, listening to other people’s records. It took me a while to figure it out.

Every producer I talk to says almost the same thing: "I was fascinated when I went into the studio and I’m always trying to figure out how things are done.” Seems to be universal.

Yeah, I hear other people’s records and I think, "Man, how did that happen? What is it about this that I really love? What draws me in?" And then I try to pinpoint it. I feel like I never get there — like everyone else’s work is always better. I’m always trying to translate that emotional quality into the recordings.

When I talked to Steve Berlin, we referenced Arif Mardin’s production on Hall & Oates’s Abandoned Luncheonette. He said the same thing: "I’m always trying to reach that level of work." How did you win your first job?

I started recording friends for free, just to learn. It kept snowballing. I owned a studio, at one point, worked as just an engineer for a long time. There was really not one moment where I was, like, "Oh, this is it." It just evolved into this thing and became a full-time gig. When I look back, I guess that was the moment where I thought, “Wow, I’m doing this.” I didn’t have another job. [Laughs]

That seems to the qualifier — when I didn’t have to do anything else to make a living. Let's talk about a couple of your productions, starting with the “West” portion of Stephen Kellogg's new album. I like to learn about the process behind the production.

I co-produced it with my friend Gregory Alan Isakov. It was the two of us, working together and separately. Stephen basically showed up with nothing; he didn’t even bring a guitar. We just worked on the songs first. Gregory worked with him on lyrics; we found tempos, we found sounds, figured out where we wanted to go sonically with it. Then he picked up a guitar and we built the record up from just guitar and vocal tracks, mainly with Gregory and me playing the other stuff. At the very end, we brought some friends in to sing and play some extra things we couldn’t do. It was a thoughtful record in that we didn’t record it live with a band. It was about what works — what we wanted, how we wanted to build it up.

I assume that having an artist show up at the studio without a guitar is somewhat unusual.

[Laughs] Yeah. That’s the first time that ever happened. I think it was because he was on tour at the time and his guitar was on a tour bus. It wasn’t an intentional thing. He also knew we had a lot of great, old, vintage guitars that he could play.

This morning, taking my kid to school, we were listening to Gregory Alan Isakov's The Weatherman record. He actually had his earbuds in listening to something else, then he said, "Hey, wait, that’s Weatherman, isn’t it?" So that record appeals to 15-year-olds and 50-year-olds equally.

I’ve actually been out of the road with a few of the bands I’ve worked with in the studio, just doing live sound, just to get out of the studio a little bit. It’s been interesting to see the fan base because I get locked away in the studio. I make these records and move on to the next one and never see what they do. Then I go out with these artists in the real world and think, "Oh, people really like this work." It kind of hits me in a really interesting way.

And that record specifically … it’s kind of a slow, thoughtful record, and I really loved it. But it wasn’t until I went out with him and saw the reactions to the songs, that I realized how good it is. For that one, we went into a studio in the mountains of Colorado — just the two of us — and worked really hard on it, off and on, for about a year. It was kind of the same process as with Stephen. We started with acoustic guitars and vocals and were really thoughtful about how we wanted to build the songs. Some of them we recorded 10, 12, 14 times to really get them right. We weren’t afraid to throw anything out. We actually threw out an entire record we made at the same time, just as part of the process of searching for the right songs.

Besides the symphonic album I know you’re producing with Gregory, what else is coming up for you?

That’s the main thing on my schedule right now. I have a few other things in the works, but nothing that’s super-solid. And right now, I’m out on the road with another friend of mine, Nathaniel Rateliff, doing live sound for him. Then I’m heading back to finish Gregory's record.

Photos courtesy of Jamie Mefford

The Producers: Lex Price

Posted on by Editor

Lex Price started early. As an eight-year-old growing up in Maryland, he became obsessed with the mandolin after seeing his cousin’s bluegrass band. When his father bought him one, he taught himself to play by listening to Sam Bush and David Grisman. Later, he graduated to guitar and bass.

But it was his Tascam four-track that held special interest for him. He turned his bedroom into a makeshift studio and turned himself into a one-man band. “I think I was 10 or 11,” he recalls. “I had a Tascam four-track that I recorded with constantly, just overdubbing myself over myself. That was my favorite thing. I didn’t put the pieces together that I could make a career out of it.”

And yet, that’s just what Price has done, albeit gradually. After recording his first album at 12 years old and gigging with alt-country bands in the ‘90s, he moved to Nashville and started playing bass for k.d. lang. During that time, he gradually migrated to a spot behind the board, never with any set plan, but with an adaptability that has become his calling card.

Through his work with Mindy Smith, Robby Hecht, Peter Bradley Adams, and others, Price displays considerable range and a sensitive ear for nuanced roots arrangements that complement but never overpower the vocals. On his records, the music usually works like a soundtrack to score the stories told in and the emotions conjured by the lyrics.

How did you move into production?

The first time I even considered it was when I was working with an artist name Clare Burson. This was 2003, I think, and we had been playing together for a couple of years. She was talking about making her first record, and it just seemed like a natural thing that I would play on it. Then she asked if I wanted to help produce it. Up until that point, that hadn’t been something I was pursuing, but I helped to produce that record and it sparked something in me. I loved it. That was the beginning.

So this wasn’t something you set out to do. It wasn’t necessarily a life-long ambition.

No, not at all. I wanted to play on records. That’s what I wanted to do since I was a kid. I always thought that was the end goal. I hadn’t even considered producing until we made Clare’s record, which I think we did in three days. I had moved to Nashville in 1998 or 1999 and, the first few years, I was trying to figure out what my place was here. I worked some odd jobs and started playing with people. I gravitated toward singer/songwriters — being a sideman for them. Clare’s album was about four years after I had been here, and that was really my first studio experience in Nashville. It really hit me hard, and I fell in love with the process.

That was your first studio gig? That’s really a trial by fire.

It was. But it wasn’t that scary, because we had been working together and we were friends. We just went in the studio, spent the three days, and that was that. There wasn’t time to overthink it. We had a great band and that was all we needed. And that’s still my favorite approach — to have a roomful of people and everyone feeding off each other. I enjoy that a lot more than building tracks, at least at this point in my life.

How do you prepare for a session? What kinds of conversations are you having with artists before you go in the studio?

The first conversation is always about the songs. I like for them to send me as many songs as they have, even stuff they might have forgotten about. Everything. At that point, I listen to all of them and start to choose songs and talk to them about that. You can get to know someone discussing their songs over a period of time. That’s the doorway into the next part of it, which would be figuring out what kind of vibe they’re going for.

Then we talk studios — what type of surroundings would be comfortable for them. Everybody’s different. For some folks, making a record means going to a very expensive studio. Well, maybe “expensive” isn’t the word. A very professional studio. But some people find that intimidating and they’d rather do it in a small studio, maybe a home studio. It’s all about the different situations you can get yourself into. And budget always plays a big role. Ultimately, it’s just getting to know someone and trying to figure out what’s going to make them comfortable, what’s going to make them feel like performing and having fun. I guess making them comfortable is a big part of my job.

Tell me about your studio. Where are you most comfortable?

I have my own studio that I mix out of, where I do overdubs. Then, for tracking, Nashville is a great place for studios. Specifically, I like Sound Emporium and Southern Ground. I’ve worked at those two quite a bit. The rooms just sound really good. The folks that run them and work there are fantastic. And great gear, for sure. Everything is dialed in really well. I have some friends with great tracking rooms, as well. It’s all budget dependent, wherever we end up. My process usually involves tracking at a studio that’s not mine. I get as much done as I can in that room, then bring it back to my place where I can finish it out with vocals or any overdubs that need to happen. Then I mix it and that’s it.

It sounds like those experiences as a musician inform your production work, but does it go in the opposite direction? How has your work as a producer informed your work as a sideman?

My hope is that I can see the big picture better while I’m playing and not just worry about myself. Mixing, too, informs how I play. If I’m hired as a session player, it definitely helps knowing what the engineer and the producer are going to have to deal with at the end of the project.

One distinctive aspect of your production is the emphasis on the vocals. Everything revolves around the singer’s voice, complementing it but never intruding on that space.

That’s incredibly important to me. I think I attract singer/songwriters who want that, as well. They want the lyric and the voice to be the center of it all, so I try to stay out of the way. The longer I do this, the more my goal is to be transparent as a producer and not put too much of my sound into it. I really want to get the song over. That’s what I’m thinking about going in and that’s what I’m thinking about through the whole process — somehow staying out of the way, but also helping to steer the whole project.

It’s like the Wizard of Oz: You have to stay behind the curtain but still pull all the strings — on a technical and aesthetic level, but it sounds like also on a social level.

A lot of it is social. That’s the trick. I don’t even know what to say about that. But it is true. You’re working with so many different personalities, and it’s so stressful for the artist. There’s always so much to worry about. My job is to do whatever I can to take your mind off those worries.

You’ve worked with artists on multiple albums — four albums for Peter Bradley Adams, two or three by the Westies. Is it easier to reach that point of comfort after you’ve gone through the process together, or does it reset itself every time?

I think it does make it easier. Peter and I have worked together for years now. We’re just wrapping up a new one, in fact. So we know each other very well. I think that helps. It’s a good question. I did a few with Robby Hecht. I think I’ve done three with him. It’s always nice to have people come back to do more records, and knowing their personalities certainly does help. It’s not like it’s any easier making the record, but there are certain aspects that you can foresee.

The first record you make with somebody, there are a lot of unknowns and that’s really exciting. You’re getting to know each other, and there’s a lot of fun in that. I’ve been fortunate that the folks I’ve been working with are all such cool people, and they have a good vision of what they want. We just all collaborate really well together. And we’ve ended up being friends, too, which is one of the best parts of doing this.

How did you meet?

With Peter, the way we met is, we ended up playing shows together. We played some shows with Clare Burson years ago as a trio, and we got to know each other and started making records together. With Mindy, a friend of mine brought her over to my house. My friend was like, "Hey, you have to hear her sing." This was before she had put out her first record. Our friend was trying to introduce us as music people, and we sat there and jammed for an hour or two. It was incredible. She played all of her songs that would end up on her first record. I was just blown away. We became friends and started playing together, then she made her first record and invited me to play on it. We worked together for years after that. When it was time to make a second record, she asked me to co-produce it with her. So it all stemmed from playing shows and working on tours.

We were talking about the emphasis on the voice, but it also sounds like you work with a lot of storytellers. Does that inform your approach? I’m thinking in particular of something like Mindy’s Long Island Shores, which has a very cinematic sound.

I don’t know exactly what my approach will be, but I am thinking about it. When I listen back to a song, I’m listening to the lyrics and the voice and I’m trying not to get caught up in all the little details. I’m just trying to listen to the song. If the song has made it through, then I know we’re on to something. I feel like that’s something I’m getting better at as the years go by — not getting caught up in the details. If the song is good and the performance is good, then you’re golden.

Photo credit: CJ Hicks

The Producers: Lari White

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“We called it the Holler because we live out in the country in the woods,” says Lari White of her home studio, located just outside of Nashville. “Our house is tucked back in the Tennessee hills, in this real Loretta Lynn holler. We thought it was funny to have this very high-tech studio and call it the Holler.”

White has made a lot of music at this remote studio, both as a recording artist and as a producer. There is always a bustle of activity there, whether she’s writing songs with her husband (Chuck Cannon), tracking sessions in the studio, or running overdubs. Recently, she manned the boards for Shawn Mullins’ latest album, My Stupid Heart, and for Old Friends, New Loves, a double-EP of covers and originals that marks her return after a 10-year hiatus.

White is one of the most eclectic producers in — or just outside of — Nashville today, but she’s also one of the most ground-breaking. After establishing herself as a recording artist in the late 1980s and 1990s, she took on more and more producing gigs, including Billy Dean’s 2005 breakthrough, Let Them Be Little. When she helmed Toby Keith’s 2006 album, White Trash with Money (arguably the best entry in his sprawling catalog), she became the first woman to produce a platinum-selling album by a male country star.

Producing, however, is only one creative outlet among many for White. In addition to her six solo albums and a greatest hits compilation, she also appears in movies (Cast Away, Country Strong) and on Broadway (Ring of Fire, featuring the songs of Johnny Cash). But recently she finds herself drawn more and more to the Holler, where she is currently working with two up-and-coming acts: the Fairground Saints and Julia Cole, a young singer/songwriter from Houston.

“Right now we’re in the sweet spot, because there’s not a record label involved in other of those projects. So there is this blissful freedom of just being in the creative playground, where you write and record for the joy and the challenge of it.”

You started out as a performing artist. How did you make the transition into producing?

It really started as a kid, as a music fan. I just loved records. I loved the experience of music, and I loved making music. I loved live music. Really, I became a lover of music because of recorded music, the records that my parents had in our house. I was fascinated with playing records, back in the vinyl days. I would sit next to our turntable and just play records over and over and over. Even as a kid, I loved not just the song experience, but the record experience — how the guitars sounded, what kind of space the vocals were in, the sounds they created on Dark Side of the Moon, the soundscape, the whole environment of it.

I’ve always been fascinated by records, but I didn’t really understand that, as a gig, until I went to college and got into the music engineering school. I knew I wanted to be a recording artist and, when I got to the University of Miami, I discovered a whole new program that I’d never heard of before. The music engineering students got to have the studio in the school from midnight until 8 am. There were many, many all-nighters pulled while we were recording somebody’s new song. It was a great experience, and it made me realize: This is how you do it. This is the equipment that you use to get those sounds. This is the kind of microphone that you use to get this kind of sound. This is the kind of microphone you use to get this totally different sound. That’s when I thought, "I’m going to be a producer."

So that pursuit went hand-in-hand with becoming a performing artist.

Pretty much everything I’ve ever done in my life has been to support my performing habit. I looked for anything that would help me get up on stage in front of an audience and make music. That’s why I started writing songs — so I would have material that I could get up on stage and sing. It’s all about performing and sharing that experience with an audience. So I would have to say my first love is the stage. That’s just my happy place. I’ve really grown to love the experience of making records and being in the studio. It’s a very different animal, especially having a studio of my own and having the luxury of being able to be home, raise a family, have a somewhat normal life, and make music. That’s as good as it gets.

Does having a home studio allow you to have a routine as far as working and making music?

There really isn’t so much of a routine, except to make something every day. To sustain a creative life over the years and decades, you get to where you try to make it happen any whichaway. Starting with a song or with a groove, or a piece of poetry — however you can spark it. So I don’t know if there’s a routine, except just trying to listen to a song and get a feel for what it wants to be. It always starts with a song, either one we’ve written or one another artist brings in. Every song has its bones, and the bones might be a programmed drum loop or a guitar riff or some melodic signature. There can be a lot of information in there: Is it a rhythm section kind of record? Or is it a layered wall of sound? Does it need thick, dense textures? We try to figure out what it wants to be.

I’ve read some stuff about Michelangelo, who believed there would be a sculpture inside a rock. The sculpture already existed inside the rock, and he was just taking away what didn’t belong in the sculpture, getting rid of the extraneous material. It’s a little bit like that with a song. It feels like there’s a lot of inherent information in the song itself, and you have to get rid of everything that doesn’t belong.

So you’re not coming into the studio with a finished song. It sounds like you’re doing a lot of exploration in the studio, a lot of trial and error.

Until recently, most of my work in the studio has started with a complete song, but that’s just because I’m coming out of the Nashville songwriting community, where you have to be able to sit and play a song with just a guitar or just a piano. That’s how you test the song and know if it’s alive, if it can live on its own, just stripped down to the bare bones like that. Most of my production has been in that context, where we go in with finished songs.

But recently, I’ve been more into writing loops or creating instrumental environments that we can flesh out into a melody or a lyric. I’ve been writing with a couple of different artists, and the writing and recording process has been much more integrated. The track informs the writing of the song, and the song informs the development of the track. I’ve read about how Fleetwood Mac and a lot of rock bands will go into the studio with no complete songs, and they’ll generate songs and a complete record. That sounds like a really exciting way to work, and I’m getting a taste of that right now.

How do you balance the aesthetic demands of writing a song and the technical demands of working in the studio? Are you trying to keep them compartmentalized?

Like a left-brain/right-brain kind of thing? I can say this: I personally do not engineer my own tracking dates. If I’m producing a session with a studio full of musicians, I hire an engineer because I don’t want to be thinking about microphone placement on the kick drum. I want to be listening and responding to the sounds and to the emotional experience. So maybe that’s a partial answer. I hate to say "compartmentalize" because it’s never that neat. It’s more of an emphasis. On a tracking date, my emphasis is on the overall picture of how everything sounds together, how it feels — the emotional environment that the musicians are experiencing and the music is creating. I’m not ignoring the technical. It’s just a question of emphasis.

I really like engineering overdubs, where I can work really closely one-on-one with a musician to get a particular sound to drop into a track. I love cutting vocals and engineering vocals, because I work well with singers. I know how critical it is to hear your voice coming back at you, how important that can be to how you perform, how you use your instrument as a singer. It’s easier for me to integrate the technical into the musical in those situations, where it’s just one singer or one musician overdubbing. But I don’t like to be thinking of technical stuff at all, really. Unless it’s like, "We’re not getting the right sound, so let’s try another microphone."

You definitely seem to have a facility with singers. Something that struck me about Shawn Mullins’ new record, as well as Toby Keith’s White Trash with Money, is how you put their vocals in all these different settings, yet you allow them to move very fluidly from one style to the next.

I think I’m hyper-sensitive to that, being a singer who has had great experiences in the studio and some really miserable experiences, as well. When you’re giving a vocal performance that’s going to be captured forever and that’s going to define your identity as an artist, it can be really high pressure. So it’s important for me to create an environment where the singer feels comfortable and excited and energized and free to experiment and be spontaneous, yet safe to find their outer limits. That’s a big part of my process — making sure the vocalist feels good and empowered.

How do you do that?

I can’t tell you. It’s a trade secret.

I honestly don’t know. You just feel your way. It’s a very personal process with each singer. I don’t do a lot of passes. I never make somebody sing something more than a handful of times. Sing it just enough to warm up, make sure their instrument is ready to use, then sing a few passes. Then comp it up and let them listen to it, let them take it away and live with it for a day or two, so they can listen and make decisions about what they want to accomplish, so that next time they come in, they can still execute those choices with a sense of spontaneity.

Also, I have a kickass vocal chain. I have a serious M49 microphone that Bill Bradley did some beautiful work on, and I’ve got a lovely vintage tube tech compressor. I’ve got a hard pre-amp that is so transparent and so robust. I’ve had some great results with that vocal chain. That’s a big part of it — creating a sound that sounds like the singer. There isn’t anything in the chain that is coloring or noticeably filtering or altering the quality of the singer’s instrument, so that when they hear themselves back in the headphones, they feel like themselves. They feel natural and honest. That’s a technical part, but it’s a tender thing.

You just produced and released a double EP under your own name. How is producing yourself different from producing another artist?

It doesn’t feel different, except that I know my personal goals. As a producer working with other artists, I’m always making sure they’re happy and feel like this is the record they want to make, this is the sound they want to put out there. When I’m doing it for myself, I know whether I’ve nailed it or not. But it’s a pretty similar process, a similar mission, to ring some internal bell. You work on it and mold it and play with it until you’re ringing that bell.

Recording artists are always asked about their influences, but I’m more curious about producers’ influences. Who has been a guide or an inspiration for you in this particular field?

I’ve worked with some great producers, starting with Rodney Crowell. I owe him a great debt of gratitude for opening that door professionally to me as a young artist and as a young woman at a time when there weren’t many women producing. There was Gail Davies and Wendy Waldman, but female artists weren’t given that credit or that opportunity very often. Rodney watched me work with his band out on the road and, when I got a record deal, he said, "Listen, you know what you’re doing, so why don’t you and I producer this record together?" That was a very generous gift to me, professionally. I got to watch him work, and he’s a master at working with musicians and walking the line between spontaneity and craft.

And then there’s Garth Fundis, Dan Haas, and Josh Leo. I’ve really learned a lot from working with every one of those guys, but I also learn a lot from just the musicians I work with. In Nashville, we have an embarrassment of riches. You can pick up the phone and have these world-class musicians out to your studio in 24 hours. I’ve learned so much just picking the brains of Tom Bukovac, Michael Rhodes, and Jim Horn.

Does that factor into who you work with? Are you calling up people you want to learn from?

I think it has more to do with casting. You cast certain actors in certain roles for a movie and you cast certain musicians in a song. Or you cast them to complement an artist or create a rhythm section. But I’ve definitely reached out to musicians that I wanted to work with, just to tap into their genius. It’s all about collaboration. Very few records are made alone. Rarely is it a solo effort. It’s all about a team, and every team is going to look different: The collection of skill sets, the collection of experiences, the collection of wisdom … it’s all going to be different. What a producer does is make the most of whatever team they have the opportunity to work with.

In every context, the producer will have a different skill set or a different level of experience, even a different personality. Some producers bring a lot of technical skills and some bring more musical skills, but in the end, what it’s all about is having the intelligence and the humility to maximize the varied resources you’re applying to the project. And that’s what human beings do better than any other creature on the planet. We’re incredibly good at collaborating with each other and making the most of our individual potential. What can be accomplished by a group of human beings with a shared intention is formidable. That’s a lot of power to unleash. It’s beautiful.

 

For another female perspective on producing, read Stephen's conversation with Alison Brown.

Photo courtesy of Lari White

The Producers: Wes Sharon

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Wes Sharon was 11 when he bought his first punk record. He was just like any kid growing up in Oklahoma in the ‘70s, except he was fascinated by this music where adults acted like kids. “I went to this place called Peaches Records & Tapes. I remember this very well: The girl behind the counter had a perm. I asked her where the punk records were and, as bitchy as she could say it, she said, 'What’s punk?'”

The kid struggled to answer the question, but all he could come up with was, “Like, the Police?”

Fortunately, the clerk took pity on him and sent him out the door with the Clash’s London Calling under his arm. “I went home, read the lyrics, saw the F word.” To say it changed his life would be an understatement. “The Clash did everything. They did all kinds of music, and they made a lot of mistakes, too. That really informed my listening.”

The kid took that lesson to heart. As a teenager, he learned to play bass and joined as many punk bands as he could. Soon, he started recording other punk bands — obscure groups that pressed only 500 seven-inch singles or a handful of CDs. He took a job at Prairie Sun Recording Studio, just north of San Francisco. “I thought Tom Waits owned it,” Sharon says with a laugh. “But he didn’t.”

And, eventually, he moved back to Oklahoma, settled down, got married, and opened his own studio in Norman. True to his Clash fandom, he doesn’t just record punk; in fact, his name has been connected with a recent resurgence of Sooner singer/songwriters who marry country twang and folk sophistication. In addition to Parker Millsap’s 2014 self-titled debut, Sharon helmed both of John Fullbright’s albums: 2012’s Grammy-nominated From the Ground Up and his 2014 follow-up, Songs.

What these and Sharon’s other projects (including the Grahams, Pat Travers, and the Turnpike Troubadours) have in common is a sense of intensity, an emphasis on performances that can be almost punk in their volatility. Sometimes they are wild and raucous, as with Millsap; but other times, they can be restrained and quiet, as with Fullbright’s Songs. Taking the Clash’s example, Sharon draws from a wide range of styles and settings and techniques, giving the sense that anything is possible at 115 Recording.

Tell me about 115 Recording. What’s your studio like?

The space has been here forever — well, something like 40 years. It’s built inside a warehouse, sort of a box within a box. Different people have had different studios here. I rebuilt it for a guy about 10 years ago, and he ended up wanting to get out of the business, so I bought it from him in 2008. It has a bit of a punk rock vibe.

How do you mean? Graffiti on the walls? Toilets ripped out like CBGB?

Only that it reminds me of the places I worked when I did punk records. It’s quite a bit nicer than any of those records, actually. It’s set up a bit like Studio B at Prairie Sun, where I used to work in California. It’s a rock 'n' roll studio, and it had a Trident console in it. That was a real punk rock desk. A lot of recordings were made with that series in the ‘80s. Now I think they’ve got Pete Townshend’s old Neve in there. I have a desk that reminds me of that Trident. It’s a good room. I don’t think Beyoncé or somebody like that would be very comfortable, but the bands I work with think it’s great. It’s got everything I need and not a whole lot of what I don’t … other than pianos. For a guy who doesn’t play piano, I seem to own a lot of pianos and keyboards. It’s a good workspace. People come here to work. There’s not a whole lot to do besides that.

Does that tend to keep people focused on the work? There’s always trouble to get into in New York or Los Angeles.

That’s a good point. Sometimes I wish maybe a bar was closer, so that people would have a place to go. It’s not like we’re out in the sticks. We’re actually close to a lot of stuff. There are restaurants within walking distance, so you can check out for 15 minutes. But there’s not a huge amount of distractions. We’re not next to a strip club or anything.

When you left California, what brought you back to Norman?

When I first came back, it was because I had broken up with a girlfriend. That was it. I just needed to get out of town. I came home and was around the people I needed to be around to get through that. And then I started recording. I’d just finished a session that paid quite a bit, so I had some money. I moved in with one of my best friends, April Tippens, who was in a band called Radial Spangle. They had a record deal with Beggars Banquet. We made some recordings there and that got me started on the idea of working out of a house. I did that for a while and just ended up staying. Oklahoma in the ‘90s was pretty cheap. It was cheaper for me to live and work in Oklahoma and fly back to sessions in California than it was for me to live and work out there.

Eventually, I found a place in a warehouse — another box inside a box — and I worked there for a while. We christened it the Devil’s Workshop. That was all about my grandma. We weren’t Satanists or anything. She was always asking me, "What do you do again? You listen to music all day?" She used to say idle hands were the devil’s workshop, and my friends and I thought that was funny. We printed these shirts that said, "If it sounds like hell, it was recorded at the Devil’s Workshop." It became a popular place for people to work. That was in Oklahoma City, but then I ended up getting married and my wife started working for the University of Oklahoma. She’s got a real job. So we moved to Norman. Go Sooners.

Has there ever been a temptation to move to a bigger city, like Nashville or Los Angeles?

I did John Fullbright’s record in 2012, and it was nominated for a Grammy, so the two of us went out there for the ceremony. And I ran into Don Was. I’d never met him before, but he’s the kind of guy who’s always the coolest person in the room all the time. He knew about John’s record and his first question for me was, "Did you do that record in Nashville?" I said, "No, I did it in Norman." He says, "What’s in Norman?" "Well, I am." And he says, "Right on!" I thought that was the greatest answer.

People ask me this all the time. It’s tempting. But if you go to Austin or Nashville or some place like that, you’re just another dude who does the exact same job. There would be a million of me. There’s a different attitude here. You’re not going to have business meetings out here. It’s going to be pretty laidback. When people come here, they come to work. And when they want to go somewhere else, they take me along.

I’ve made small records for a really long time. I did bigger stuff at Prairie Sun and worked with a lot of great people. I got to learn a lot. And, honestly, I missed that. I missed working within the culture of a community. At the end of your session, you walk out the studio door and there’s another guy walking out of another studio door: "How did your day go?" "Well, I did this and I did that." You know exactly what they mean. I miss that. In smaller markets — I hate to use that term — there aren’t a whole bunch of studios, so people in the business don’t tend to communicate. I’ve tried really hard to change that.

How so?

I’m actually a partner in another room here in Norman. I don’t work out of that room, but I helped the guy get started. He had worked in Nashville and Austin and had come home. His focus is completely different from mine, and it was good to help him. If I’m going to talk about community, I have to put my money where my mouth is. And when we want to geek out over something, we have each other. There are actually some guys here in town that I really admire. Norman, of all places, has quite a few recoding facilities. Trent Bell has a place here. He used to play in the Chainsaw Kittens. We’ve been friends since we were 18.

So there is a small community there.

There’s a lot of good stuff going on here. Tulsa is the same way. There are all these little pockets of music scenes around the state. That’s the thing I like about Oklahoma. It’s not like the rest of the country. It’s not Texas, and it’s definitely not L.A. or Nashville. Nothing against any of those places. I have friends who work and live in all those cities. But Oklahoma’s its own little thing. It’s my belief that the Flaming Lips could have come from no other place than Oklahoma. It used to be more obvious that this place was different. Our filter was different. In other places it seemed that everybody was influencing everybody else. Out here there was nobody to influence you at all. By the time it got to us, it was a little different. It had changed somehow.

I could pontificate and act like I know what I’m talking about, but there does seem to be a rhythm that’s very specific to this place. There’s something about the music that just feels right, and there’s a more direct lineage to things. If I’m working with Fullbright, I can hear the music of generations before him. He’s not doing an impersonation. It’s just a feel. But there are other artists and what they’re doing is an exact replica of something else.

So they’re not pushing anything forward?

This is only my experience, but I do remember when I was a kid, I had a very specific outlook on music. I really liked punk rock, and what I mean by that is, I could appreciate the Sex Pistols, but I really loved Big Black. It seemed like everybody in that scene was being themselves, and then it reached a point where suddenly everybody was wearing a uniform. I was probably late to the party figuring that out. I liked the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, and it was really uncool in that world to like those things. That’s what I mean by people doing an impersonation. They just like that one thing and that’s all they want to do.

Are you surprised to see some of the Oklahoma singer/songwriters get so much national attention?

It’s a little weird. But I can tell you this: At any point when I was working with John or Parker or the Turnpike Troubadours, I knew something was going on when we were making those records. It was unbelievable. I remember distinctly working on Fullbright’s first record and thinking, "Oh man, people have no idea what’s on the way. Either I am crazy or this is one of the best things I’ve ever heard." You don’t always feel that way. You might get that feeling about one song now and then, but it’s weird when you’re sitting on 10 or 12 songs that you think are going to be a huge deal. That record got a lot of attention. And then it happened again and then it happened again. What the hell?

All of those guys, they’re great songwriters. Evan Felker, John Fullbright, Parker Millsap, Jared Deck. They all have something. And there’s a whole stream of great songwriters coming up behind them. The thing about Norman and Tulsa is, there’s usually a club or two that becomes the hub for all these people to spin out of. It’s like Spin Art. So, by the time I get these guys in my room, they know where they’re headed. The thing that was so unusual was how young they all were. When I was that age, I didn’t have anything to say. My attitude was a bit more hedonistic. I just needed songs to play in front of people. But these guys have something to say. That’s so refreshing.

If they’re coming to you with an idea of where they’re going, how does that affect your role as a producer?

I happen to be friends with some of these guys now, but when they’re working with me, I’m just trying to be a good listener. They don’t need my friendship. They need a critical assessment of what they’re doing. I’m their audience. I have to be a good listener. I play bass, and I think bass players are really good listeners. They have to focus on the rhythm section in a way that other people might not. So we’ll work on the stuff that needs working on, but on a good day, I’m just here to capture the music. Some days you want to archive it, like field recording: This is what happened at that moment, and we didn’t touch a thing. But you always want it to be the best example of that song that it can be, and sometimes you want those songs to sound like it’s the first time they’ve ever been played and sometimes you want them to sound like the band has been playing them for years.

Ultimately, you’re just trying to get it to where somebody will want to hear it more than once. The way things are now, these guys are going to make their living playing shows, which means a record should hold up for two years. They need something that they can work for a couple of years, until they’re ready for another one. It should bear repeated listening, and you’re just trying to get the song to that place. I try to be a fan, and I think I’m better at that than anything else. I try to be a good listener and a good sounding board. Your mom and your girlfriend are going to love everything you do. Probably. Unless they’re out to get you. But I need to be able to tell someone his song isn’t good or this other demo they don’t like is the best thing they’ve done.

How did you get into roots and Americana after what sounds like a long career in punk?

The way I got into this crowd was, I started playing with Ryan Engelman, the guitar player for the Troubadours, and I would always make the same joke: The most punk rock thing I could do now is play country music. We were doing honkytonk stuff and playing it loud and fast. But if you look at punk — and I’m not talking about the more contemporary versions of it, but the stuff that was happening when I was younger — it was a form of folk art. The '80s were a good time for music because people had a lot to be angry about. And I was young enough to observe it and eventually be a part of it.

Folk art of any variety is trying to connect immediately with an observer. That’s the part of what I do now that reminds me of what I was doing when I was young. It’s this real immediate thing. It’s not overly polished. What I would consider the most punk rock thing about the guys I work with is that they’re about as close as you can get to an honest subject. Everything on Jared Deck’s record really happened. I know that because I know him; but I think it comes off that way, even if you don’t know him. Fullbright’s the same way. And Evan Felker. They may cover it up one way or another, but I guarantee you that they know about that topic and they’re telling you the truth.

 

Dig producers? Check out this conversation with Joe Henry.

Photo credit: Youngsun Yun

 

The Producers: Gary Paczosa

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It’s almost a cliché to say, but Gary Paczosa wears many hats. He’s a producer who has helmed albums for an array of artists, most recently Sarah Jarosz’s Undercurrent and Parker Millsap’s The Very Last Day. He’s an engineer who has worked with many more artists. He’s an A&R rep for Sugar Hill Records, signing and developing others.

And if that’s not enough, he also runs something like a bed & breakfast at his home in Nashville, a kind of home-away-from-home for local musicians and traveling acts alike. That means cooking and cleaning, making beds, washing towels and linens, mixing cocktails, and even supplying the beer. “I brew my own beer,” he says, adding that, “I’ve got four on tap. Funny how important that’s become.”

Paczosa records most, if not all, of the albums he works on at his home studio, which means there are always musicians lurking around the house. “Even if they’re off making a record of their own with someone else, they’ll come by in the evening and we’ll hang out, talk about what they’re doing in their sessions and listen to what we’re doing in our sessions. It’s a unique situation, and I think the people who stay here really love it for that. It’s a lot of work, but it’s a good way to participate in what’s going on.”

Paczosa has slowly built this community up over long years in the business, playing multiple roles that allow him to work closely and repeatedly with artists representing several generations. A Colorado native and nephew of the country singer Michael Johnson, he started working as an engineer in the 1980s, eventually winning a Grammy in 2000 for producing Dolly Parton’s The Grass Is Blue. Since then, he has worked with some of the biggest names in the Americana field, including Joey + Rory, the Steep Canyon Rangers, Kathy Mattea, and the Lonesome Trio.

His range is considerable, but to each project, Paczosa brings a remarkable facility for emphasizing the interplay between so many instruments and instrumentalists, whether it’s a bluegrass outfit or a rock band. He can make even the biggest superstar sound like they’re tearing it up right in your living room. 

I wanted to start by asking about Sarah Jarosz’s new album, which has a much more minimal sound than her previous efforts. What kinds of conversations did you have with her before you went into the studio?

There were a lot of discussions that started about six months before we even went into the studio. She came through Nashville and played through 12 or so songs in the studio, and we talked about the direction she wanted to go. She knew she wanted to make a very minimalist record. I’m always pushing her to explore other instruments and other approaches, and in the past, we’ve managed to create some new textures combining different sounds. We really went back and forth, because I felt like I wanted to push her further than where we were on the last record, and I thought she was going backwards. In truth, we ended up somewhere right in between. There was a lot of debate about drums or no drums, and I even tried adding them to a few tracks. Actually, it was more just percussion that I was pushing for. In the end, though, she decided not to go that route. I think it serves the record really well, and what people are grabbing on to is the fact that that stuff isn’t there.

When you’re having that kind of disagreement, how do you know when to argue for something and when to back off?

In this case, we started working together when she was 16. This is our fourth record together so the point, first and foremost, is growth. I’m responsible on the A&R side of things to bring in a record we can sell, because that’s what we do at the label. We sell records. If the artist provides the right material, then we can go to radio and have a much better chance of success. We want to make sure we can further her career and bring people out to see her play live. The record is the main tool, so I argue for those elements that I think will help. It’s a tough place for me to be, because I never want to be seen as the label guy. I want to be seen as the collaborator in the studio. So I have to be there to make the best record for her. It’s Sarah’s name on the album cover, so it has to be her vision. It’s her record, so we just have to find something that makes us both happy. Ultimately, it really is up to her what the final product is.

It seems like you really have to balance these different roles, which could potentially have very different goals, or it could give you an interesting perspective.

It’s a perspective that’s really interesting today because it’s so hard to sell records. Sarah wants to be successful selling records. That’s one of the rewards of making a great album, but it’s certainly no indicator of what makes a great record. Sarah treats records as a whole collection, top to bottom, not just an iTunes project where we know people are going to only download their top three tracks or put one or two songs on a playlist. For her, it’s all about a complete musical statement.

In the studio, though, we treat everything song-by-song. That’s just how you have to work. But then you can look at the bigger picture once you get deep into the process and say, "We’ve got a lot of ballads here, so we definitely need some uptempo songs right here." You’re trying to balance it all out. As far as what you’re looking for at the record label, it’s just anything that might work at radio. Our formats are Americana and, hopefully, Triple A.

Can you tell me about recoding these songs — in particular, how you approached tracking the instruments on the record? That’s such an important aspect to so much of your work, that fine placement of instruments.

We definitely wanted as many live performances as we could get on the record. We didn’t want it to sound labored or worked over or overthought, so the point was just to get great live performances — and also to have the musicians play together, whenever possible. Sometimes that’s not always possible, but my favorite songs on this record are the ones that were performed live. Like “House of Mercy,” which was live on the floor with vocals and guitars and bass. It really makes that track special. You can hear that interplay between them. They’re not separated in the booths, but are sitting in the same room face-to-face. You always want that. You always want to get live performances, but I would say it’s possible only about 50 percent of the time. The musicians might not quite know it or they might need more time to get the guitar part down so they can focus on the vocals.

That seems to be the approach you took with Parker Millsap’s record, which sounds very different but plays up that same dynamic.

That record was very similar in that we wanted live performances. I always admire records that do sound live. There are a lot of rough edges and stuff that might be out of tune or out of time, and they don’t fix it. I’ve spent so many years fixing that stuff and trying to make everything maybe not perfect, but close to it. Parker’s record was really fun, because we stuck to the plan to stay live with everybody in the room together.

Part of the process of producing records is one, casting musicians, and two, setting up where you’re going to record. Sarah’s always at my house because she’s comfortable in my studio there. It feels like home to her. We’ve talked about going different places, maybe out of time, but she says it’s home to her, so we just do it here.

But for Parker, we talked about going to Echo Mountain in North Carolina. There was also a studio in Texas, but when I mentioned Lousiana and Lafayette, Parker jumped at that. He’s from Oklahoma, and it just felt like a natural place where we could bring these songs to life. Where we were played into how that record came out — not only because of the studio, but because of the food and the people and the culture around Lafayette. I definitely hear that.

Do you always leave it up to the artist to decide where you go, or do you have any say?

Honestly, it’s usually about the budget. If there’s room in the budget to go somewhere else, I’ll suggest some good places to record, like Echo Mountain. With Sarah, I suggested a few places because we’d already done three records at my place and I thought we needed to change things up. But when I heard the songs she was bringing in and realized it was going to be a bit more sparse, I thought about it and agreed with her that we should stay here. But you have to make sure you’re taking someone somewhere they’re going to feel at home. If you end up going to a place that doesn’t fit an artist, it just won’t work out.

I would imagine that would keep things fresh for you and keep you from getting into too much of a routine in the same space all the time.

Very much so. That is a big part of my reasoning in going elsewhere: I want to be pushed and I want to be stretched. New spaces inspire new ideas. I co-engineered these records with Shani Gandhi, who I’ve worked with for three years now. She really pushes me to try different things. I have a couple of approaches on every instrument that work for me, that are my go-tos. But the point is to try to come at it from another angle. On both of these records, Shani was great at pushing me and coming up with ideas of her own. Co-engineering is fairly new to me, but I’m trying to give her more latitude to pitch sound and production ideas. She was a big part of both of these records. She comes out of a rock world, where she was working with a metal producer. And she’s Australian and has very different musical tastes than I do, so even though we’re in this acoustic world, there’s a lot of what she learned elsewhere that we apply to this. She doesn’t always know the different musicians that I’m talking about — and she might not always know the band we’re referring to — but she’s coming at it from the outside and, therefore, brings a very different take.

How did you get started in this field?

Even when I was a young kid, I knew that music was going to be a big part of my life. I took music lessons and worked hard at that for a while, but it just wasn’t a natural fit. I loved music, especially Pink Floyd and Emerson Lake and Palmer records, which just sounded beautiful. They were layered with amazing textures, so I would listen and try to figure out how they created them. I went to a couple of different schools for engineering, then moved to Nashville and ended up working with Dolly Parton and Alison Krauss. In the beginning, it was a lot of country records, some Christian stuff, some rock, but then a record came through our studio called Strength in Numbers. It was Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush, Béla Fleck, Mark O’Connor, and Edgar Meyer. I spent two weeks working on that just as an engineer, but that’s the first time it really clicked for me. This is what I wanted to do. This is what I wanted to be a part of. So I gravitated toward those types of projects, using gear that was suited for acoustic music. I’m pretty lucky, because it’s been an amazing career making records that I would actually go out and buy.

How have things changed during that time?

Funnily enough, I would say the biggest difference is that I’m alone in the studio. Twenty years ago, we were recording to tape, and you couldn’t save a lot of options. You have to work a lot harder with a band or, if you’re doing overdubs with the singer, you’ve got to really work hard to get things exactly the way you want them. You can’t just do take after take. Nowadays, when you have a workstation, you can keep every take and pretty much make anything happen, any kind of performance. If I have enough versions of a take, I can move things around and piece it all together in a way that makes for a great performance. I don’t necessarily think that’s better or worse, but I do miss the days when you worked harder on takes and you couldn’t manipulate it the way you can today. So now I spend a lot more time in the studio by myself.

Plus, 20 years ago, it always seemed like you were in a studio with other rooms around you, multiple studios in the same building, so the camaraderie informed what you were working on. You’d bump into people and invite them to come over and play on your record. So today, on the plus side, I work at a studio in my house, and the bands I work with just stay there, along with other musicians who are traveling through town. Parker might stop by and cut a song with Sarah. The house is full all the time with people passing through.

You seem to have reached a good balance between the technical and artistic aspects of the job.

It’s a good balance for me because I work with the right artists. I’m a producer now more by default — partly because of smaller budgets and partly because I have a home studio. But I don’t really see myself as a producer, certainly not first and foremost. I’m an engineer first and a producer second. I work with the artists more in a collaborative capacity. It’s never just my vision. It’s harder to balance that with my A&R responsibilities, but the label is very forgiving when I’m working on an album. They allow me to be away and not be chained to a desk. I’d much rather be chained to the console.

Photo courtesy of Gary Paczosa

The Producers: John Leventhal

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John Leventhal makes records that are almost impossible to categorize. Is Shawn Colvin’s 1989 debut Steady On folk or country? Is Rosanne Cash’s The River & the Thread country or blues? Are they roots or rock? Americana, perhaps? The man himself, a native New Yorker with a genial sense of humor and a geek-level knowledge of pop history, refers to his wheelhouse as “singer/songwriter,” but he says it in the off-hand way that lets you know it’s merely a placeholder: shorthand for a music much larger and more complicated than one simple term could ever convey.

Call it simply American, then. Nearly 30 years after his first producing gig — Steady On, which won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album — he works with musicians whose songs sprawl across many genres, alluding to various styles without settling into one in particular. In addition to Colvin and Cash, he’s worked with Michelle Branch, Kim Richey, Joan Osborne, Jim Lauderdale, Rodney Crowell, and Loudon Wainwright III, among others. He’s backed many more artists and co-written with even more than that. His fingerprints are on an impossible array of records; even if you don’t know the name, you’ve heard a Leventhal song before.

Fittingly, he defines the role of producer very loosely and admits it can change from one project to the next. He’d rather not sit idly in the control room fidgeting with the levels or supervising a small army of engineers and session players. Instead, he likes to dig in, get his hands dirty, and work as closely as possible with his collaborators, whether that means co-writing songs, choosing good covers, plucking out a bass line, banging a drumbeat, firing off a guitar lick, or laying down a bouzouki riff, if that’s what the song needs. From one moment to the next, he’s a sensitive sideman or a one-man band, Bacharach to your Hal David or Felice to your Boudleaux Bryant.

Perhaps his greatest gift as a producer, however, is that fanboyish excitement over every aspect of the music: his simple joy in the act of creation. That animates the music he makes with other artists, lending it a distinguishing liveliness, a sense of energy and urgency. All of those traits come to bear on Leventhal’s latest project, This Is Where I Live, the first album by Stax soul legend William Bell in 10 years, not to mention his first for Stax in more than four decades. Bell is most famous for penning hits like “You Don’t Miss Your Water” and “Born Under a Bad Sign,” both of which are American standards by now, and, at 76 years old, his voice retains all of it vigor and expressiveness.

It’s ostensibly a soul record, but for Leventhal, it’s something more — it’s a “singer/songwriter” record.

At what point in the process did you come in on William Bell’s album?

Right from the get-go. A year-and-a-half ago, I was doing a show in San Francisco and I was walking to a soundcheck. The phone rang and it was Joe McEwen, who works at Concord, which owns the Stax imprint. He asked if I would be interested in producing William Bell. Really, it was like a lightbulb went on and, within a few seconds, I not only knew I wanted to do it, but knew what it should be. If people even think about me at all, they know I do a lot more singer/songwriter stuff, but I actually grew up playing R&B and soul music. It was the first music I learned when I became a musician. It’s a huge part of my DNA. So I was really excited. I knew all about William. I love his voice and I love a lot of those old records. The only caveat I had was that I wanted to write the songs with him.

Why did you want to do that?

I want to say this in the right way so I don’t sound arrogant. I can’t explain it. I just knew I would be able to do it really well. I felt confident. I do a lot of collaborating and a lot of songwriting, and maybe that’s slightly unusual among producers of rootsy music. But I just felt immediately this intuitive sense that I knew the shape of the record. I knew immediately that it should have some substance to it and that it shouldn’t be a pastiche or a nostalgic rehashing of Stax and Muscle Shoals clichés. I knew it needed to honor that tradition, but move past it at the same time. I can’t explain why, but I just understood that intuitively. So that was how I approached it. I had to woo William a little bit. He’s a reserved guy. I don’t think he had done any real collaborating for a while.

It doesn’t seem like a soul revival album. It’s a bit more comfortable in that style, and it sounds like you put a lot of thought into that aspect of the record.

This kind of project can fail if it gets too enamored of the language and clichés of when the music was vibrant and on the radio — the early '60s through the mid '70s. When people fall in love with that language, they just rehash it and spit it out again. But it can never be as great as it was. So I’m not going to go in and make this the Stax cut or make this the Motown cut. You can hear when people do that. But, for me, it’s always a losing proposition. I trusted that enough of this language was in my DNA, and I know it’s in William’s DNA, so I knew we could honor what had already been done without getting bogged down in it.

But I want to say this the right way. I say this with a creative and loving attitude. I love the tradition of great soul music, but in some ways I’m completely uninterested in re-creating it. That’s not interesting to me, in the least. What it really boils down to is this: It’s just like doing any other record. I really want to write and produce great songs with meaningful vocals and some real feeling at their core. I want to listen to a song and really be moved by it. William was communicating some real feelings, some deep feelings. That voice is so glorious. Even though I love soul music and wanted to make a soul record, at the end of the day, for me, it just boils down to great songs, great vocals, and hopefully some thoughtful arranging and production.

What kinds of conversations did you have to prepare?

It’s hard to put into words. William is a reserved guy, and he didn’t know me from Adam. We had arranged for him to come up to New York and hang for a couple of days at the studio. I was already so inspired that I had come up with ideas for four or five songs … some lyrics mostly. William is 75, and he’s in amazing shape physically and vocally. But when you’re that age, you can’t sing what you sang about when you were 25. You’ve lived 50 more years. You want to pick the songs a more experienced man is going to sing. And William has got this beautiful, dignified reserve. He’s ultimately a ballad singer. He can get down with the best of them, but when you think of “You Don’t Miss Your Water” and “Everybody Loves a Winner,” those are two of the best soul ballads ever written. Those songs cast long shadows.

Short version is, my friend Marc Cohn and I had started this song “The Three of Me.” I had some music and we had a little bit of the lyric. I played it for William and he started singing it, too. So that was a good first song. We finished the lyrics, and he sang on the demo, which basically ended up being the final record. I was lucky enough to play everything.

It sounds like an extension of what you’ve done in the past — the singer/songwriter album as a soul album. Which is interesting because, when most people think of roots music, I feel like they think of country or folk. They don’t think of R&B or soul.

I am so with you on that, man. I really am. I love country music, and I love bluegrass, too, but so much of roots seems to come from those perspectives. I look at what I did with William to be exactly the same thing that I did on Rosanne’s last record, which won Americana awards. I see them coming, in many ways, from the same tradition. The language is slightly different, but I think you’re right. I hope William is embraced by the roots community, because this record sits right there.

You mentioned that R&B was the first music you learned and played professionally.

When I was growing up in New York, if you were going to make a living playing guitar and bass, it meant you were going to play in bars and clubs. If you were going to play in bars and clubs, it meant you were going to play music that people liked to dance to. And the music that people liked to dance to was R&B and soul music. Not exclusively, but that was what you had to play and you had to play it well. I’m very grateful for it.

One of the first gigs I got as a working musician was with this guy Billy Vera, who lives in L.A. now but grew up in the New York area. I was in his band, and we played for dancers. Billy pulled deeply from the soul and R&B tradition. I studied all the great drummers and bass players and guitar players. Cornell Dupree was the premiere R&B guitar player in New York, and I used to go hear him play all the time. My guitar ideas tend to be people like him and Curtis Mayfield and Reggie Young and Bobby Womack. I just inhaled all that stuff. My favorite bass players were James Jamerson and this guy Tommy Cogbill, who played on a lot of great Muscle Shoals records, including “Chain of Fools.” So working on William’s album felt like I was coming back to the beginning for myself. In some ways, soul music is closer to who I am than all this singer/songwriter stuff I’ve done up to now.

How did you transition from that role to producing?

My first successful collaboration as a songwriter and producer was Shawn Colvin’s first album, Steady On, in 1988. I produced and co-wrote most of that album, and it won a Grammy. That was the first thing I did. Up until then, I was a sideman and was starting to get slightly disgruntled. I wanted to do my own thing, whatever that might be. Luckily, I developed this collaboration with Shawn. The next thing I know, I’m a record producer.

It sounds like you play three roles: producer, songwriter, and sideman. Do you feel like a good producer needs to be able to multi-task?

The short answer is, I think it’s unbelievably valuable. But I also think you could probably be a successful small producer without knowing a whole lot about music or engineering. It’s an amorphous job description. It can go from someone who knows when to order the right bottle of wine, to someone who’s hands on and is essentially an engineer and arranger. I’m, at heart, an arranger and a musician. I love songwriting. I love playing. I love arranging great rhythm tracks. I just love all of it. In some ways, my perspective is, it’s my life. I love all of it. So, if I can do all of it, all the better.

In the beginning, I think I approached it in a slightly more traditional way, where I stayed in the control room and cut tracks. Over time, I learned how to be a recording engineer and started playing more instruments. For me, it’s great, but I can’t say if it’s right for other people, particularly current producers — because I’m probably not as up to date as I should be about what other people have been doing. People can make valid records even when they don’t know that much about music. But my heart tends to be drawn to people who are very musical, as well as very soulful and creative. To me, just being musical alone isn’t enough. You have to have a creative, soulful heart and a thrust toward originality. There are a lot of factors that go into making great music for me.

The role of the producer, especially in the roots world, is so nebulous that people can define it very differently. They can be hands-on or hands-off. They can play or they can find the right musicians to play. They can write songs or help others write songs.

For me, it’s really hands on. I think the hands-off approach has value to it, as well, and I should probably try it occasionally, but it’s just not as much fun for me. I get really excited. That’s the musician in me — the fanboy. On one hand, the producer part of me needs to retain a detached perspective on what’s happening in the studio, but the musician part of me gets really excited and wants to get in there and play bass. So it’s really hard for me to resist, and at the point it’s like, "Why even bother resisting?" It’s such a joyful thing, and I have to say this: Making this record with William was one of the most joyful things I’ve done in my life. Hopefully that comes through when you listen to it.

Like a lot of the albums you produced, This Is Where I Live was recorded at the place where you live. But it doesn’t sound like all of these records are coming from the same place or the same studio.

Some effort does go into not repeating the same old strategies. If you do this job long enough, you’ll start to develop some paths or strategies — certain ways to record instruments, certain ways to write a song, certain ways to arrange them — which will give you decent results but nothing new. That path will be too well worn. So I have definitely put some effort, spiritually and specifically, into not doing those familiar things all the time. I try to inject some element of mystery and surprise on all levels. I’m always looking for moments that end up having a little bit of surprise — an unexpected chord change, a surprise lyric, a mysterious piece in the arrangement. All that stuff is important to me, and I think it keeps the listener involved, as well.

How does that work for an artist that you’ve had a long-term collaboration with, like Shawn Colvin or Rosanne Cash?

You always needs a break, at a certain point, to recharge, but there are certain people I just click with. Shawn Colvin and I, we just get each other. She’s done plenty of records without me, but the records we’ve done have been pretty successful. Rosanne and I have a complicated deal since she’s my wife. Our collaboration is awesome now, but if I go back to the beginning, maybe it wasn’t quite as awesome. It took us a while to really find the best in each other. I’m always up for doing new stuff.

Rosanne’s most recent album, The River & the Thread, grew out of a road trip that you took together.

We had been looking at whatever her next record was going to be. I really wanted to write with her, and I kept thinking it would be great to do … I hate this word, but it would be great to do a "concept" record. What I really wanted was to find something to write about other than just the random collection of your next 12 songs. Not that there’s anything wrong with a random collection of your next 12 songs, particularly if they’re great songs. But I thought it could be amazingly powerful and fun to find something to hang it on, and we just happened to be taking a trip to Memphis and rural Arkansas to look at the house that her dad grew up in. It had been falling apart, and Arkansas State University was making plans to rehabilitate it. So, we decided to make a road trip of it.

We had a friend in Muscle Shoals, and I had always wanted to go there because so much great music has come out of that area. A few things happened on the trip that seemed incredible — like something you could write about — and we had this vague idea that we could write an album about these places and these people. We wrote two songs right away, one called “Etta’s Tune” and another called “A Feather’s Not a Bird.” One is bluesy and the other is country. I took those as the parameters of what we were gonna do, and we just ran with it. It was really fulfilling for both of us, and thankfully it seems to have connected with a lot of people.

I associate your records with a strong sense of place, especially that album, but also others like Rosanne’s Rules of Travel and the Wreckers’ Tennessee. Is that something that’s important to you?

It certainly was on [The River & the Thread]. You know what, I don’t think it’s ever come to the forefront in the way I think about myself or how I’m inspired, but I do think you’re right. Both Rosanne and I travel a lot. We do 50 shows a year. I love going to American towns and cities and trying to soak up some of the vibes on all levels, musically and spiritually, just to get a feel for places and people outside of my own New York experience. I think that’s inspiring. Shawn and I wrote a song called “Wichita Skyline,” and I remember thinking that, when we were kids, that tradition of writing songs about places and folding a compelling story into a place was a big part of some of the great songwriting when I was younger. I think it has a lot of power, but I think I carry with me this sense of being an outsider when I go to a new place and just hover. There’s a gulf between being somewhere and feeling like you belong there. What is the idea of home? What does that even mean? That’s a thing I always carry with me.

Especially since home is a place not only where you live but where you have your studio, where you create, where you turn those experiences into music.

There’s a song on William’s record along these lines. Part of my job as his producer and collaborator was to get a sense of him on the record. He has a slight reserve to him, and I wanted to inject … I didn’t really care about injecting a lot of Autobiography with a capital "A." But I thought it would be great to have elements of his story in some of his songs. We were in the studio one day, talking about how we knew all these musicians who, as they got older, maybe they grew up in Shreveport or New Orleans or wherever. At their heyday, they either went to L.A. or Nashville, but when they got older or the recording scene dried up or the vibrant part of their career ended, they ended up moving back home. That happens with a lot of people. And Williams said, "People just want to go home." Everybody wants to go home — metaphorically, spiritually, literally. So the last song on the record is us playing around with that idea. Everybody wants to go home. Everybody wants to have that place that feels like them, that centers them.

I heard that as a gospel song, where home is heaven. Everybody wants the comfort of salvation.

It’s definitely a gospel tune, and of course it could be read as heaven. The soul tradition is heavily indebted to the church. A lot of those feelings people can have toward Jesus, a lot of those feelings people can have toward their lover. The yearning is similar, I think. We all need it. We all want it. It’s why we write all these damn songs.

The Producers: Tucker Martine

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Tucker Martine had to move as far away from Nashville as he could before he could have a career in music. Just out of high school, he headed to college in Colorado, then kept heading west until he reached water. He settled in Seattle in the ‘90s, when that city was a center for American alternative music. Then he moved down the road to Portland, Oregon, just as that city was becoming a hub for indie rock.

In the 21st, Martine has become a central figure in Portland’s bustling roots music scene, producing national hits by almost every major local artist. He has added a spacy shimmer to almost every album by singer/songwriter Laura Veirs (who happens to be his wife) and, when the Decemberists graduated from a regional indie label to a Capitol Records, they hired Martine to conjure detailed backdrops for their diorama-songs about Russian shapeshifters and Irish gangsters.

Martine anchors the West Coast roots scene so strongly that even non-locals head west to work with him. Abigail Washburn hired him to combine Asian and American folk traditions with indie-rock techniques on her 2011 breakthrough, City of Refuge. More recently, he produced The Waterfall, My Morning Jacket’s darkest and most daring album in years.

While Martine does not thrust any particular aesthetic onto his projects, he has developed a distinctive ambience: a clarity of sound that is both ethereal and earthy, elaborate and direct, engaging but somehow mysterious, as though he’s reluctant for any album to spill all of its secrets on your first listen. Emphasizing the distinct tones of each instrument in the mix, he helps to convey a rich intimacy, as though even an acoustic set can sound like a headphones album. One of his latest projects is also one of the most highly anticipated albums of 2016: a new collaborative record by Neko Case, Laura Veirs, and k.d. lang — out in June on Anti- Records.

At what part of the process did you come in on the case/lang/veirs record?

Shortly after k.d. had sent an email to Neko and Laura asking if they’d be interested in starting a group together — which I think mostly meant making a record together, perhaps doing a tour for the record. I don’t think it’s a band that is going to be a long-term project. k.d. sent an email to them, and Laura and Neko quickly responded with an enthusiastic "Yes," and then they had a little back-and-forth between themselves. Maybe a week later, they cc’d me on the email thread and asked if I’d be up for working on it with them which, of course, I was honored and excited to be roped in, so I said yes.

I think it made a lot of sense — I mean, hopefully, musically it made perfect sense. I had worked with Neko on her last record and, of course, I’ve worked on a lot of records with Laura. I was getting to know k.d. a little bit because she’s a Portland resident now, and she’d done a couple of things at my studio. That brought one common element into a project that maybe, at least on the surface, didn’t appear to have a lot of common elements to start with. I think the process of making that record was about discovering where the common ground was between all of them. And that was really so much of the excitement of that record — and the challenge of it, too.

So figuring out how those pieces fit together becomes part of that process.

I don’t think any of us wanted to make a record that sounded like four tracks that could have been on the next Neko Case record and four songs from the next k.d. lang record, four songs from the Laura Veirs record. They wanted to figure out where all their sensibilities converged and how they could challenge each other to find interesting places outside of their comfort zones. And there was plenty of that, because they’re all used to being the leader, the person who ultimately calls the shots. But this was a bit of a democracy, and the whole dynamic of the group was being discovered while we were in the middle of making the record. It wasn’t like they had discovered some common chemistry beforehand and then thought, "Well, this means we should make a record." I think everybody knew it felt kind of risky. None of us were talking to people about it beforehand, because we were reserving the possibility that maybe it just didn’t quite work. But it did, and it was apparent on the first day that it was going to work. Everyone was pretty thrilled with how it was sounding right out of the gate.

What does your role, then, become for artists who are still finding out how they relate to each other?

There are so many facets of it. Making them all feel comfortable, for one. Assuring each person that their point of view isn’t going to get steamrolled in this mostly democratic process. I’m always looking to find the strength and the uniqueness of the artist, so I’m constantly having conversations with them about what they’re excited about, and checking in with them all the time to make sure they feel like they are being represented. And I would sometimes have to challenge people to maybe not rush to judgment but let it play out a little longer, and listen to the result rather than not try something because the suggestion sounded like a direction they wouldn’t normally take.

I think that’s something that I knew, but never but a fine point on it — that you’re not just overseeing things in the studio; you’re negotiating aspects of the art and trying to usher this person into making the best thing they can or the strongest thing they can.

Absolutely. All three of these ladies have such different working processes. And I had a little insight into what those processes were, in some cases more than their other collaborators did, because I’d spent many weeks in the studio with Neko and made records for years with Laura. I had only done demos with k.d., and she had sung on one of Laura’s records. So it was really just a matter of trying to honor a bit of each of their processes while reminding all of us that this is a new experience and it’s not going to feel like the process of making one of their solo records.

And that was what was exciting about it. Sometimes, when I thought maybe they were reverting to something too safe, I just tried to remind all of us that the exciting part of a collaboration like this is that it pushes us into some places that we wouldn’t normally go. I think most or all artists ultimately do want to get into some territory that feels new to them, so they feel like they’re moving forward and progressing. And I can only guess that k.d. chose Laura and Neko as collaborators because of how different they are from her, yet she still had a lot of admiration for them and their music and, I think, was looking to shake up her own music-making process. And by accepting that invitation, I think Laura and Neko acknowledged that the same thing was true for them.

It does seem like two generations of artists going back and forth.

I think I can speak for myself and Laura and Neko in saying that we’ve all been fans of k.d. for so long, but you have to remind yourself for a minute that, even though she’s this larger-than-life musical figure in our minds, she’s looking for a three-way collaboration between them. They all really got in there and had to fight for some of their ideas — in a healthy way. At the end of the day, each person got a final say in the songs that they were singing lead vocals on.

I had a moment when it was being planned when I wondered what I had to bring to a project for someone like k.d. lang, but she made it really clear that she wanted me to feel comfortable speaking up. I assured them, in the beginning, that I knew it was going to be a challenging record to make, but we weren’t going to call the record done until everybody was happy with it. It gets emotional, at times. It’s tricky to be giving people confidence while at the same time sometimes you’re asking them to be open to trying something new or to just trying to get a better take of it.

You mentioned that k.d. had recently moved to Portland, and I wanted to ask about that. There is certainly a strong roots scene there, and even though you’re from Nashville originally, I feel that you’re at the center of it … or at the very least a prominent figure there.

To me, the Portland community feels like the more immediate version of the larger music community. And a lot of the artists that I’ve been working with the last few years are not from here. Sometimes it’s artists from out of town, but there will be people from Portland who play on the record, or the artist is from Portland and we bring in some people from out of town to play on the record. There is just a ton going on in Portland, and there are some insular scenes — like the old-time music scene, the singer/songwriter scene, the indie rock scene, and all that — but also a lot of those people just overlap and play with each other.

I left Nashville the morning after my high school graduation because, as much as I loved growing up there, I just felt like there was a narrow-mindedness about music and what it could be — all the different ways it could be presented and written and explored. So it was healthy for me to leave at that time. Since then, of course, it’s transformed into something completely different, with all the transplants and musicians of every variety there. I think most of the Nashville scene is, and has always been, transplants. It’s just that they transplanted themselves there to do a specific type of music, where I think a place like Portland draws people — including myself — more for the environment and the lifestyle, and then that informs the music that comes out of it.

I hadn’t thought of Nashville that way. It’s like Portland — a city full of transplants.

Nashville’s a place where people go to make it. For the most part, Portland’s a place where people moved because it was inexpensive and it’s just a great place to live. You can bike or walk anywhere, and it’s gorgeous. You have access to the ocean and the mountains and the rivers. There aren’t a lot of labels and managers and industry stuff here. A lot of times the best music scenes just kind of come out of somewhere that’s affordable for young people to live. And, until recently, that’s been true of Portland.

It also seems like a place where more established musicians end up, like k.d. lang or Peter Buck or Patterson Hood.

If you’re in a position where you feel like you can be based anywhere and still do your work, then you just start looking at where you want to live regardless of what kind of infrastructure that place might have for your chosen field of work. It doesn’t make any sense that I moved away from Nashville and moved to Seattle and started producing records. I mean, to me it makes perfect sense, but people are always asking me why in the world I left Nashville, which is one of the premiere cities in the world for recording studios. But it just felt like a trap to me, at the time. I felt like, if I stayed, my growth would be radically stunted. I think it was the right move. I’ve always thought I might move back someday, because it’s still home to me. I couldn’t be more fond of it, even if it was necessary at that time in my life to be elsewhere and find my own identity outside of the familiar and comfortable.

And it does seem like you’ve developed a signature palette that I don’t hear in Nashville.

My sensibilities don’t seem to overlap a lot with what Nashville’s known for, although I certainly have loved some of the music that’s come out of Nashville. I’m not a fan of overly glossy productions, and certainly Nashville is known for that. But there are countless examples of records that have come out of there that weren’t that way. You had guys like Jack Clement making really interesting, soulful country records, and now you’ve got guys like Dave Cobb, who’s crushing everything he touches. It’s cool to see Nashville having a resurgence, but I feel like I’ve really found the right spot for myself.

But people don’t usually come to me because they’re chasing the latest, hottest sounds or because I have the latest chart toppers. Maybe there’s just some quality in the way the music is translated and presented that speaks to them. To me, my approach is different for every record and every artist; but for somebody less close to it than me, I guess you can hear some continuity — or, as you put it, a sound. And it’s convenient that people like Portland. Someone might be interested in working with me and, when they find out I’m in Portland, they usually get excited about the idea of coming here for a little while.

You mentioned that you approach every project differently, but are there elements that are common from one project to the other …

I really like to be surprised, so I always try to leave some room in the process for some things to happen that surprise all of us. Those often end up being favorite parts of records. I feel like, the longer I’ve done this, the less satisfying it is to just put up some mics and make everything sound perfectly nice, make sure that nothing sticks out, and there’s nothing that could possibly offend anyone. If it came to that, I feel like it would just be time to hang it up. I want to be moved by what’s coming out of the speakers, whatever that means. Sometimes, that means just blowing things up and making it sound ratty and raw. Other times, it means muting everything except for the vocal and the harpsichord.

At the outset, it’s just dictated by whatever the material suggests to me. I try not to take on a project where the songs don’t suggest a lot to me about how they could be presented. You want to leave plenty of room for it to end up going a different direction if something presents itself that is maybe even more interesting than what I imagined. And no record ever ends up sounding like whatever I thought it was going to sound like at the outset. Still, I think it’s important to have some kind of vision as a launching point, or else you’re all just sitting there looking at each other like, “I don’t know — what do you want to do?” Nothing gets done, or what gets done is just lifeless.

Are there any examples that come to mind?

Oh man, it could be anything! You might have an idea of a nice drumbeat for a track, and then you get everything set up and the drummer starts playing some angular, syncopated thing where you can’t even find the one. At that point, you can either say, “No, man, this is like a straight-ahead kind of thing.” Or you could say, “Let’s check this out. And let’s see how the rest of the band responds to that idea.” More often than not, those things end up sticking and being some of my favorite parts.

The song “Down I-5” from the case/lang/veirs record is a good example. The demo was okay, but I think we all knew it needed something — some joie de vivre — and we all had our own vague ideas of what that might be. I had spoken to Glenn Kotche, who was playing drums on that record, and I just told him that it really needed a unique perspective and that the reason he was there to begin with — why Glenn was chosen to be the drummer for that record — was because his default mode is unpredictable. I told him that this was a perfect scenario for him to lean on his instincts. I didn’t want him to try to guess what the singers are expecting to hear, and he just pulled out that wild beat. There was a look of confusion on the faces of the people in the room, but within a minute it had transformed to elation.

So that’s what I mean by surprises. It’s easy to tell people something that’s safe and predictable, and then you can just get it done and check it off the list. But that’s not why I do this. And that’s not why I think most of the people who call me are doing this. I just try to keep myself and the artists honest.

When you were talking about that, one album that came to mind is City of Refuge by Abigail Washburn. Every song seems to have that sense of discovery to it, some new idea to get across.

For that record, we approached every song from scratch. That wasn’t a record where we had a band for five days, pick a song, knock it out, and go to the next one. We would just start with a song, and sometimes the song wasn’t even finished being written, so we would just start with the one thing we knew it needed. Maybe that was Abigail and her banjo. Maybe it was something else. By the time that we tracked that, it suggested the next layer. We really weren’t too concerned with it all sounding like it happened in a short time span with the exact same people set up the same way.

In fact, one thing Abby and I found out was that we both love old Alan Lomax recordings and Folkways stuff, where there might be talking before a song. We approached “Bright Morning Stars” like a field recording. We just went into a church and told a bunch of people to meet us there. Abby showed them the songs, and they’re of course all playing into one mic, which means you can’t fix anything. Other songs, we meticulously put together. We hoped that if we committed to giving each song its own singular treatment, then the variety of production sensibilities would actually be a strength rather than a weakness.

Very often, you start in on the process, and things are pretty ambiguous. You don’t really know what the identity of the record is yet. But gradually, over time, it starts to show you. In that case, once we had enough songs, I started tinkering with the sequence, and once the sequence started making sense, the whole record started making sense. That helps you figure out what the songs do and don’t need, or which songs might transition well into the others, at which point you might add some extra layers to bleed over into each song. That’s the fun of it. You just take the next step and then it shines the light on where to go after that.

It seems like that might be pronounced when you’re working with an artist for the first time, but how do you keep it fresh for somebody like Laura Veirs or the Decemberists, with whom you’ve produced several albums over the years?

It’s unspoken with each artist that you don’t ever want to make the same record twice, even if you loved the last record you made together. With the Decemberists, when it really felt like we needed to shake things up, we went to a barn and just set up some gear out there. That can have a profound effect on the process in a lot of ways, technically and emotionally, for people. The one thing all the best records that I’ve worked on have in common is that we went into them wanting to do something we’d never done before. You do have to be conscious of that, but it’s a very natural thing to make sure that you’re not just rehashing old territory. We always have a dialogue early on about how to approach it in a way that’s unique compared to what we’ve done in the past.

And that starts with the songwriting. I try to be honest with the artists upfront, if I feel like we don’t have the material to make something that’s up to the standard of what we’ve made in the past, or if it just feels like rehashed versions of something we’ve already done. Often, when I hear demos, six of them sound like the bulk of a really strong record, and four or five seem like maybe they don’t fit in. But I do think when the artist really goes to bat for a song that I’m not feeling, it’s important to record it and try it out. About half the time, just on the strengths of their convictions for it, we find a way to get something we all feel is special. So there is a theme here: It’s important to have a vision, it’s important to have convictions for your ideas, but the second you stop being open to other ideas is the moment you stop being a good collaborator. And, for me, producing records is a collaboration.

There is an adrenaline rush when you start a record. It’s like you jump off a cliff into a river. You’re pretty sure everything’s gonna be fine, but you still get a rush the moment you jump, because you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. At the start of every record, I’m always a little bit scared, but I’ve learned over the years that that’s a good thing. It always ends up working out, and it never turns into a disaster — no one ever dies, or makes a record that they regret or are embarrassed about. So it’s just that kind of excitement of not having any idea what’s going to happen.

Photo credit: J Quigley