I was working on a two-week session for the upcoming fifth Richmond Fontaine album in November, engineering with J.D. Foster producing. One of the first things that J.D. did when we arrived at the studio was to play a few Harry Partch CDs, illustrating some ideas that had been floating around in pre-production. Later, when we were discussing lyrics involving tattoos in one of the songs and I mentioned how it could be a reference to The Who's "Tattoo" and growing older, J.D. pulled out a copy of The Who Sell Out to listen to the track. In the middle of these sessions I had an acoustic date with a rather irreverent band that played Klezmer/Hungarian- style folk tunes. I was reminded of the 3 Mustaphas 3, Camper Van Beethoven and Tin Hat Trio records I own.
Many people who intern for me or write letters to Tape Op pick my brain about becoming engineers. "What school should I go to?" "What mic do you use on kick drum?" "What compressor should I buy?" I'm realizing now that one of the weakest links an engineer/producer can have is a small record collection, or a small knowledge of the types of music that are out there.
We were listening to the new Badly Drawn Boy record when an intern asked if this was "emo" music. What? Besides the fact that journalists come up with these stupid labels with which to categorize music while they hack out another inane record review that does almost nobody any good, I can't for the life of me figure out how he got "emo" out of this record. Did he need to hear some "real emo" punk-based music to be set straight? Did he need to stop thinking within categories? The real answer is that he just needed to hear more music to know where this was coming from.