You were in Gamma with Ronnie Montrose right?
Wow! Yeah I was in that band for two seconds.
On his new solo album 'Dopamine' which features music by Froom and lyrics and vocal melodies sung by David Hidalgo, M. Doughty, Lisa Germano, Suzanne Vega, Mark Eitzel, Sheryl Crow, Steve Donnelly, Miho Hatori, Louie Perez, Jerry Stahl, Ron Sexsmith and Mark Feldman:
Tony Berg at Geffen gave me the go ahead to do it. But it took three years to do it because our budget was really small and I had a lot of people's schedules to work around. By the time it was finished, the hierarchy at Geffen had changed and they had gone in a different direction, so it end up on Atlantic. Initially it was really fun to make. Towards the end I scheduled a couple of weeks to finish everything off and it got kind of scary then. I had to come to terms with it which I'd never had to do before. When I produce records the individual or the band, the highlights there. With this record that wasn't really there. When it's yourself it's quite different. So I started to think in terms of it being an arranger's record and then it started to make more sense to me. In the tradition of people like Henry Mancini, I hoped to make something in that vein.
On Not Losing an Artist's Identity with Production:
You look at each artist and see what their strengths are and you push them right to the forefront. The trick is to make everything around it strong and not too overly respectful because if what you add is very, very subtle you tend to soften down the result. So, each album comes with it's own set of problems.
Working With Tchad Blake:
Our relationship began to be more successful when we gave each other more space. When we first started working together I was more concerned about the sounds and it got a little bit strained for a while but all of the sudden we started finding our way around the Kiko record. It's a real delicate thing and it's continually evolving. Tchad will continually evolve new techniques and I try to bring new things to the table. We work at the relationship a lot. I would say in general I'm a more conceptual guy. I work with the artist, improvise and get arrangements together. Tchad doesn't spend time with the music beforehand, he just reacts and I think that's a good combination. The kind of thing I'm interested in is musical hybrids. I'm not interested in making records that are retro records. I like a lot of kinds of music and if you can somehow manage to make the music a bit of a hybrid of different things it seems to be more lively
The early days:
I was a struggling musician for a long time. There weren't a lot of opportunities for me in San Francisco. In 1983 or 84 I scored a film that started to take off in the midnight movie slots called Cafe Flesh and the soundtrack was on Slash records. At that time they had signed the Del Fuegos and nobody wanted to produce them and the people at Warner Bros were saying how could you sign a band this bad. Now the soundtrack I did was done on an 8-track so the president of Slash said, 'well you're good with 8-track tape decks, why don't you take these guys and make an 8-track tape and if it works out, we'll let you make the record. So that's what we did. And then we did their second record and Warner Bros. really liked it and they seemed to think I was good at my job if I could take a band that nobody liked and make them sound good. The next band I did was Crowded House and things kind of got rolling from there.
Choosing Projects:
It would feel presumptuous for me to pursue a project. If there was an artist I really liked, why would they need me? I already like them the way they are. It has to come from the band or the artist. If the project engages my imagination and I have some good ideas then it's something I would want to do. Sometimes for whatever reason I simply can't hear anything except what's there and then I'll say you're wasting your time and money. That would be more like a job, I can't find my way into it. It's really good but it's not the right thing for me.
On Not Getting Burnt out:
Not letting it become a job. Keeping a sense of adventure to things. Sticking to a true collaboration where you feel you're going after things. I don't like the music business, but I really love music.
Balancing Studio Work with a Personal Life.
It's a struggle.
Session length:
Eight or nine hours, after that it's diminishing returns. You need to be able to concentrate and have fresh ears. It's better to come back to something later with fresh ears.
Other Interests:
Besides Suzanne and our child, my personal life, and my job I don't really have any hobbies or other artistic outlets. Music is plenty for me, I'm always working on it in one way or another. I'm very interested in it in a lot of different ways. I like to drink wine and read at night. Right now I'm reading Underworld by Don Delillo.
The importance of recording technology versus musical performance:
Wherever I go in the world, when people talk to me about records of mine they've liked, nine times out of ten they talk about the Latin Playboys record. That record was recorded on a four track cassette recorder and then bounced over to 24-track tape. It's all feel and performance. Not only that, but people say that's one of the best sounding records I've worked on, which made me feel kind of peculiar. It's so beautiful and the 4-track cassette tape is the sound of that. You get these peculiar things that are part of the sound of the record that people say is the best sounding record I've ever made. What that tells me is that it has a lot to with performance, and it has a lot to do with musical ideas. Those are the main things. Whoever feels that you can't make a great record with a 4-track recorder because of the quality of the 4-track sound? Don't think that. Don't try and make it sound like a 24 track recording, sometimes you'll get something that's much better than what you would have gotten. It's like trying to over reach on an instrument and make it do things that it really can't do.
