Through close encounters with Motown machinery, Ken Caillat [Tape Op #96], and Hal Blaine's drum kit, Foxygen's Jonathan Rado has established himself as a modern manipulator of the Nixon-era studio palette. His Richard Swift [#120]-assisted effort, We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic, Foxygen's second album, followed through on its promise of mid-century sonic diplomacy, and 2015's self-produced ...And Star Power outed him as a devoted pupil in the Todd Rundgren school of studio wizardry. Rado discusses the development of the Foxygen model and its modern-day applications, plus recording the music of Tim Heidecker, Whitney, and The Lemon Twigs.
I started on a boombox – I had two boomboxes that would record audio to cassette. I would record on one, then play it back and overdub at the same time onto another one. So it was a weird, early bouncing thing.
That must've sounded ugly quick.
Yeah. I had a band with this kid, Jeff, called Sharp Razor. We did a lot of recording onto this early PC program, Funny Movie Maker, that was meant for animating. You could essentially record your voice into the program; it would roughly approximate you speaking with these animated characters. We recorded audio into that program because it was the only thing that would take audio.
I was going to say that Take the Kids Off Broadway is the Foxygen album with the least nostalgic production aesthetic.
If we had had the means to record on a 24-track tape machine, we would have. In the beginning, we got seduced by the ease of the computer, but we were always using tape in some capacity. We'd take what we had on cassette and send it through a 1/4-inch [jack] into the back of the computer. Really, really janky. I used to work at Gibson Guitars in New York. The Hit Factory had been turned into condominiums in 2005, but they left the bottom floor intact. Gibson bought it and turned it into their showroom, which I had a key to. The gear was stripped out, but all the live rooms were left intact. I went in there and recorded all the drums for Take the Kids Off Broadway into GarageBand, with a USB mixer and one [Shure] SM57. So we recorded the drums where they recorded [Bruce Springsteen's] Born in the U.S.A. A multi-million dollar studio… straight into GarageBand.
You probably met some interesting people.
I didn't really do any hanging out. One time I delivered a guitar to a Lady Gaga rehearsal, and I saw them rehearsing.
I think the title didn't do you guys any favors.
Right. We sort of knew what we were doing. We knew we were making an album that maybe could've come out in the '60s. We didn't know it was going to define our career.
I read that you recorded tracks for that album at some hotels.
We did a lot of the basic tracks in my garage, but there're no windows in my garage and we were in there for like four months. We just had to get out. So we spent the remainder of our record advance on expensive hotel rooms in L.A. and dragged around my little Tascam 488 [Portastudio].
Why?
To do the vocals.
You organized the songs into a double-LP with named sides, which is an old-school model. I'm curious what the impulse behind that was.
Foxygen's always been a very conceptual band, and so every record was a concept. Like 21st Century was, "What if this was a '60s record?" ...And Star Power was, "What if it's 1972 and these guys have a slightly bigger record advance? Then they get in too deep and try to make some insane record that they actually can't fully achieve." We were trying to make it sound like [Todd Rundgren's] Something/Anything?and A Wizard, A True Star. The first side is all the singles. The second side is a big suite. The third side's complete hell. The end is just two more songs. It was overly conceptual.
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