Winning a Grammy for his engineering on Alabama Shakes' Sound & Color album might be a recent highlight of Shawn Everett's career, but he's had a hand in many albums over the years, working with producers Tony Berg and Blake Mills [see his interview this issue] , as well as helming his own productions. His sessions have included Lucius, Weezer, The Growlers, Pete Yorn, and Julian Casablancas from The Strokes. We met up with Shawn at his private studio and living space compound, Subtle McNugget, in L.A.'s Downtown Arts District.
This is a cool building.
There's so much extra space that, at some point, I'd like to maybe make the live room the control room. Right now I'm renting out a spot to a yoga studio, but if they ever leave then this will be the control room. This building is pretty wild and big, but when you're in here you don't really realize where you are. Beyond the yoga place is my house.
LC: In the same building?
Yeah. I spend all my time in here, but my house is way bigger. I don't know why I didn't switch it.
LC: Everyone has to have a place to work these days, even if you're working out of other studios a lot. You've got to have some place you can come back to.
Yeah. I've been working at a bunch of other studios, but I always keep ending up back here. It's cheaper for everybody's budget. I kind of like working in here more than most spaces anyway.
LC: You get comfortable and work faster, right?
Plus I know what I'm listening to.
LC: You came from Alberta, Canada? In that area?
Yeah, Bragg Creek. A little outside of Calgary.
LC: Right. I saw that you studied at Banff [Centre for Arts and Creativity]. You had a metal band in high school, right?
Yeah, it was fun. I guess that's how I started, with this metal band.
LC: Were you trying to record that?
Yeah. At first we were just trying to mimic Slayer, or something like that. Then we started listening to Pink Floyd or Radiohead.
LC: Getting more atmospheric?
Yeah. It was like, "Oh, how do we do these kinds of things?" There was no way to figure out how to do it, except maybe we needed some kind of recording device. I convinced my dad to buy me one for Christmas, one of those Roland machines, the VS- 1680. Right after that, I started recording our band. I was already getting into more experimental music. I stopped with all the metal and was listening to other things. I remember hearing a Tom Waits record and was like, "Wow!" The sounds were incredible. I wanted to do something like that. I tried to figure it out. When I was young, my dad had a burger restaurant — he wanted to create a chain, like McDonalds. He sold the business, and they were going to destroy the building so he moved the whole burger restaurant onto our property, and that was my band rehearsal room and studio for the whole time while I was a kid. I was obsessively in that room.
LC: Were you working with friends?
Yeah, my band, and then I started recording local bands a bit. I was in there constantly. When I was right at the end of high school, I started getting these crazy panic attacks. I finished high school and don't know where I was going to end up in life. I couldn't go past certain parts of the city and problems like that. I was really losing it. But for some reason the only thing that would kind of calm me down was peppermint tea and recording. I did that for a year and a half straight.
LC: Were people coming to you commercially at any point back then, or was it mostly friends and as a hobby?
People were coming. Nothing big at all. Local bands would come down and I'd try to do something with them. That's how you learn best, by doing it.
LC: How did you end up studying recording at Banff?
I grew up down the road, but didn't know about it early on. I lived about 45 minutes away from there, in a smaller town. There was a guy who lived in my smaller town who owned an all-analog studio in Calgary. He was teaching me, and he would let my band record there all the time. He was like, "You're a weirdo. There's a place, Banff, and they've always got these artists up there. I think you'd like it." At that point I had just finished high school. He said, "Let me introduce you to this lady who runs it, Theresa Leonard." She had been the President of AES. He called her up and asked if I could come over and meet her. I met with her that day, and we got along great. I still didn't understand if it was a school or what it was. She called me the next day and said somebody dropped out of the next semester that was starting. Did I want to come up, because I was close? I quit everything I was doing in my life, drove up there the next day, and started.
LC: How many years was the program for you there?
It was supposed to be three months, but I was there for four years.
LC: How did that happen?
I was super young, like 17. Everyone else there was way older than me, at least 30. Pretty much everybody who was there had some kind of degree, or had done something in recording and learned a lot. I was in over my head, but I really took to it. They gave me keys to the studios and I had access all night long. I just went crazy. I was staying up all night long, every single night, every single day. I also made my own studio in the bathroom. If I couldn't get into one of the studios, I was in my own. I was piping through all the stairwells, using them as chambers. I was obsessively there. There's a real kind of ski culture in Banff, which I don't relate to in any way at all. I didn't become friends with anybody in the town at all. It was completely different, culturally. Anyone who I made friends with who was there would leave in three months. It could be lonely, but I loved it because it was kind of this solitary confinement for work, and I could do it for that amount of time. They started realizing that this was going to be my education. We have a great relationship. Theresa's like a second mother to me. Because we became friends, she allowed me to continue on so that it would become my education.
LC: Did they put you to work?
Yeah, that's what they would do as well. Every Monday they would have different projects come in, and they would assign those things to different engineers that were there. It has a big classical program, and 95 percent of the people there were from a classical background. I wasn't, at all. They'd put me on classical things, so I'd learn a lot, but that wasn't totally my interest. I always got the weirder things. There are a lot of artists there who made sound installations and such. I loved doing that. People who weren't even musicians, but wanted music with balloons. I remembered recording a lady who collected rocks for 30 years and wanted to rub them all together. It took days and they all sounded the same!
LC: Well, that's how you find out.
There was a lady with bananas we were making music with.
LC: What do you mean "music with bananas?"
Peeling them and getting the sound, and then creating synth tones. Whenever it was a weird one, they'd just say, "Put Shawn on it."
LC: That's really good experience though.
Yeah. There was this great guy, John Sorenson, who had actually come from L.A. He was one of the elder statesmen of engineers and usually was the one who taught everybody. I really got along great with him, because he was the other kind of rock guy who would show me techniques. He would always be pushing me in that way. But then Theresa would always be the yin to his yang and be like, "Oh no, Shawn needs to learn more about classical," so she'd take me up there.
LC: I think they really want to make sure you don't come out of there with one focus. That's a really important curriculum there.
The other incredible thing that I really don't understand is that there aren't any classes. You don't go to class. You just do sessions. The only classes we ever had were Bob Ludwig [Tape Op #105] would show up, or we'd do a morning with Elliot Scheiner. The best "class" you could have, really.
LC: Yeah, someone with a lot of experience.
Yeah, it was really amazing.
LC: Do you still go back and do programs there now?
Yes. They've been doing this indie rock program there for a while. It used to be just bands from Canada, but now I think it's from America as well. They apply, and it's an amazing two weeks where everyone gets to write in these music cabins in the middle of the mountains. Broken Social Scene are running it now, so they're all up there writing songs with everybody. I'm in the studio the whole time and record whatever they're writing. It's really fun. It's like a vacation for me, even though it's the hardest I work all year.
LC: It's nice to know you can give something back to the place that really informed your career.
Yeah. I feel like I'm taking [from them] when I go there, because I'm still learning. It's fun, because I work with a different band every day.
JB: How long are you there for when you do those?
Two weeks. It's super intense. It's really fun.
LC: Banff Centre seems to be all about throwing you into sessions.
It's crazy. You're recording projects immediately. I think it's unlike any other school I've heard of ever. When you get there, you get an automatic tuition, and then you get a weekly stipend. Then they pay for your food and your housing.
JB: That never will happen in America.
When I left Banff, I had saved money. That's how I moved to L.A. I was debt free.
LC: Was Tony Berg the first person you hooked up with before you came down here?
Yeah. I had actually taken a break from Banff. There was a famous Canadian boy band called The Moffatts. They had moved to my original small town. They were breaking up, so they wanted to do this other thing with the singer [Scott Moffatt]. They started this project, and I was drumming for this band [The Boston Post], which was a really weird experience. It was a really dramatic and wild period where we toured across Canada. I was probably 19, and they still had this huge fan base of young girls we were playing for at all these shows. I was recording that band as well, up in Banff, so those guys were living in my dorm room. At the time, they were still really famous, so it was my first experience on a big project, even though it was not the way a big project would normally come about. It was really crazy. They had been famous in Canada since they were children. It made me better, immediately, because the record they recorded a year before [Submodalities] was produced by Bob Rock. As much as Banff was doing for me, I had to immediately be way better in order to record these guys, because they'd been dealing with top people since they were kids.
LC: A super pro situation.
I had to pretend I was better, right away. The pressure was on. I was doing that in Banff all night long as well. Banff was into it. We'd gone on tour, and then I came back to Banff after that fizzled out. I was there again, and this guy who worked on Lord of the Rings, Mark Willsher [scoring engineer and mixer], was there. I showed him some of the projects I'd done. He said he thought I'd get along really well with a friend of his, Eric Valentine [Tape Op #45]. I really loved that Queens of the Stone Age record [Songs for the Deaf] he'd done. I took a trip down to L.A. and met with Eric. He said, "Oh, if you ever get down to L.A., maybe you can come assist." I was still working at Banff, and IgotitinmyheadthatIwasgoingtoquitandgoto L.A. I'd been there long enough. I got in my dad's old van and drove down to L.A. I had maybe a few thousand dollars saved, so I got a crappy apartment in Hollywood, and then I called up Eric and said, "Hey, I moved! Do you still need an assistant or anything?" He's like, "Oh no. No, I already got one, but let me call somebody." He called me back and said, "There's this guy named Tony. Go to his house tomorrow." I didn't even know his last name. [Berg] I just randomly showed up at Tony's house. Tony brought me to his living room and was asking me questions about music I liked and whatnot. He asked me what I'd done. He said, "I'm starting a project tomorrow with Pete Yorn. I didn't hire an engineer, so can you just come here?" The next day I started that record. I was working with him forever after that.
LC: So he trusted you pretty quick?
Yeah. When I was touring with that band [The Boston Post]; we got stuck in some town in Canada for a while and I'd run out of money. I'd seen that there was a job opening at a radio station for a Pro Tools engineer. I went to apply for this job and had this really weird interview. I realized halfway through the interview that he'd screwed up my resume and thought I was interviewing to be the DJ. He was like, "Let's check your voice." I went into the booth and I did this crazy voice. He said, "That sounds fantastic! Start on Friday." So I started this show that went to like 6,000 bowling alleys across North America, as well as all of Canada, the States, and Mexico.
LC: A bowling alley show?
Yeah, it was broadcast to all the bowling alleys. It was going for a while. I started going to these bowling conventions and signing autographs.
LC: Wait a minute! What?
We'd go down to Miami and I'd be at these bowling conventions. They'd have these huge posters of my face as this bowling DJ. When I went back to Banff, he wouldn't let me quit. He made me bring a computer that would send back the information to him and he'd satellite it out. I'd be doing a session, and every five minutes I'd be like, "Hold on!" I'd go in the corner and have to announce a song. Then I'd go back and keep the session going. When I was thinking of going to L.A., I thought, "Oh, I'll make a resume, but I'll be the DJ of my own resume. So I was doing this voice! I brought it to Tony Berg and he was like, "Who the hell is this guy?" Now he loves the CD. He keeps it in a frame and shows it to people when they come. When I came to L.A., the bowling guy still wouldn't let me quit. So even if I didn't get a job, I could be doing this bowling thing. I'd be in my friend's apartment in Hollywood screaming into this mic, and he'd be covering me in blankets so the neighbors wouldn't complain.
LC: That's just surreal. When you started working for Tony, did you get out of that gig?
Well, now I know Tony enough to know that he would have thought it was hilarious if I told him about it and asked if I could do it in the corner. But at the time, I was super nervous. He was a legendary music man. I didn't want to ask him if I could do a bowling show in the corner of his studio, so I had to quit. I told the guy I wasn't going to be on the air in two weeks' time.
LC: Did you feel like all the skills you built up applied when you started doing something like the Pete Yorn record? Were you well-equipped to do a session like that?
Yeah. I still felt like I was a little in over my head. Because of my unique education, and the way I had been brought up, no one was ever showing me the way to do things "properly." Everywhere I went, people were into the approach I was taking, which was a weirdo approach. I thought, when I went into a session like that with a big album, I was just supposed to put headphones nicely in front of the mic and do it the way you're "supposed" to do a recording. I did that and thought, "Well, that's not really what I do." The first day I was recording Pete, I thought, "Let me show them what I like to do." I asked if I could try something. Tony said, "All right, what do you want to do?" He had this chair, and I was dragging it across the floor and made a horn part on the song out of this chair. Tony said, "Fantastic!" Then I realized that Tony was the kind of guy who would also be down with the approach I had always been doing. I was there with him for years. He's still one of my best friends. We've done tons and tons of records together. He taught me so much. He signed Beck, which is so cool. That's the kind of thing that he's into. He heard a song like "Loser," and thought, "This is a huge song!" He was the perfect guy to work with in L.A.
LC: What kind of records, besides Pete Yorn's, did you work on with him initially?
The other record we were working on right around that time was this band, Simon Dawes, which then became Dawes. That's how I met the guitar player in that band, Blake Mills, who I still work with as well. We did the Alabama Shakes record [Sound & Color]. Tony and I did tons of records, like Phantom Planet and Jakob Dylan. We probably did 45 records.
LC: That's a good crash course.
Yeah, it was crazy. I was there every single day, for years and years.
LC: Were you working out of other studios, or out of Tony's primarily?
Mostly out of his place. He's got a great studio in the back of his property. He did this soundtrack for this film for Howard Zinn [The People Speak]. They got all these famous people to play on it, so for a couple of weeks I got to record Bob Dylan, Randy Newman, and more who were on that record. That was really fun.
LC: So now you've won a Grammy [Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, for Sound & Color]?
Yeah! I don't know how that happened.
LC: I thought that was such a cool- sounding record. It's such a departure from the first album.
Yeah. I don't know; I wasn't really thinking much about that. I don't think anyone was. Brittany Howard [vocals, guitar] spearheaded that change. There were songs she wrote, and that's what they were. She's such a creative person. She's never going to rest on one thing. She could go in any direction. She just has a unique, interesting, wild voice. I don't think she was even thinking about doing something like her first record. Whatever she thinks is cool is what she wanted to do, which is also reflected in who she hired to do the record with her. Blake was a big name, as far as guitar players, but as far as production, he hadn't done a record of that size. The fact that she heard the music he had done, thought he was so cool, and wanted to work with him, that speaks to what she's into as well.
LC: Did Blake rope you in for the project?
Yeah. We'd worked together tons. We'd done so many albums together. He probably played guitar on 39 of the 40 records I did with Tony. We'd become great friends. I had done his solo record, Break Mirrors, which Brittany had somehow heard. She liked that record, and I had done that, so that's how I ended up on Sound & Color.
LC: Were you guys dividing some of the work up, as far as production?
Blake and I? I guess we've been working together for so long that we have our own roles that we play, as far as how we work. We fall into that pattern. It's a great working relationship, because I fill in the technical areas when he's got his attention on some other part. It's a really fun relationship to have. It's like we're two different clouds that fill in each others' spots.
LC: You were given a lot of free rein to really work and morph the tracks and the band.
Oh, yeah; completely. Total free rein to experiment. It's cool, because she was just down with anything that sounds cool. So many people will think there are certain things you have to do the professional way, like, "Now we're going to mix it and make it punchier!" She doesn't care about that, at all. She'll listen to rough mix one and say, "I like that." Whatever is cool is what's going to happen. We would be experimenting and trying anything. It was this perfect scenario where everyone was into doing it a unique way. Remarkably the label, their management, them [the band], Blake, me — we all were down with this. There're so many times you work on things and, at some point along the line, it gets compromised. For this record it seems like that never happened. It seemed like we were all on a train and there was an endpoint, and we all were in it together the entire time.
LC: Were there discussions where any band members felt marginalized by the process?
No, I don't think anyone felt marginalized. I guess I'd be speaking for them, but not that I'm aware of. I think maybe there was a little bit of nervousness, like, "Maybe this is too much of a departure for some people." Not that they didn't like it, but there were concerns. I was blown away the whole time. I couldn't believe we were getting away with it. We handed in the album and it was mastered. I was like, "Really? We're done?"
LC: Nobody said, "Can you fix this for radio? C'mon."
Yeah, I thought at some point someone would say, "Super mixer here is now going to do this thing."
JB: You mixed it all too?
Yeah. I felt like I was renegade mixing or something the whole time. I sent in mixes and my teeth would be chattering. Somehow I just kept getting away with everything.
LC: Were you and Blake conferring on ways to approach the mixes?
Yeah. When we were tracking, we had a pretty specific idea of what it was going to sound like. The mixes weren't a wild departure from what we were doing in the room. I'm pretty much mixing the whole time I'm recording. It's hard for me to actually work without it almost sounding like a done album. A lot of times I'm tracking with mastering compressors on my master bus the whole time. I'm constantly A/B-ing between other records. I want it to sound like another record the entire time I'm working on it. That's just how my brain works. By the time I left that studio, I wouldn't have been bummed if those were the mixes that had been on the record.
JB: Did any of the early rough mixes survive and end up on the record?
Yeah, there are probably about two mixes on the record that are almost what we left the studio with.
LC: Where were you tracking the initial sessions at?
We were at Sound Emporium in Nashville. We did it in chunks; work two weeks, take a break, two weeks, take a break.
LC: Then you had a month at Ocean Way [now United Recording, Tape Op #106], right? Holy shit.
Yeah. I thought, "This album could be done, but here's a month of studio time. This is the best record I've ever worked on!" I could experiment for a month. They had all this great gear. I was doing the mixes in-the-box, for the most part, while we were at Sound Emporium, so I wanted to do a real console mix after that. I was trying to use all their analog gear to do the mix.
LC: Replace the plug-ins?
Yeah. I would be doing all these weird experiments to figure out how to get all these mixes to be exactly like what I had in-the-box, which was kind of fun. With Waves Q-Clone [plug-in] you can visually measure EQ. If I had a Pultec plug-in on, I could see what the Pultec plug-in had done EQ-wise on the Q-Clone. If they had a [hardware] Pultec at Ocean Way, I couldn't just do the same setting I had in the plug-in because it would be a different sound. But I could move the settings visually so it would match almost perfectly with what my plug-in had done. I was using the analog gear, but it was exact settings, or as close as I could get it.
LC: Wow. You probably ended up learning quite a bit about what the differences are.
Yeah, it was cool. I basically recreated the mix. I was measuring every level. It was crazy. The mix was an exact analog version of the in-the-box mix. It was as close as I could possibly get.
JB: Was it worth it?
Yeah. For the song that was the single, "Don't Wanna Fight," I did this crazy thing. The mix that's on the album is almost an exact replica of the rough mix, but it's an all-analog version. It really did help that one. Then there's a song like the first song, "Sound & Color," where I did the same thing and it didn't help at all.
LC: Did it get worse?
I think it got worse, yeah. I felt that and sent it to Brittany, and she said, "Yeah, go back."
JB: I noticed on that record, and Blake's record too, when I listen to your mixes everything sounds really big, but very localized, the way you pan things and have the ambience contained with the instrument.
Right. We were trying a lot of things with ambience. We had recorded a lot of room mics. Beyond the room mics, we were using a lot of simulated room mics. Blake had started on his own using that [UAD-2] Ocean Way Studios [room simulation] plug-in. We were trying that, which was weird because we were in the exact room that it was modeling.
LC: I'm trying to imagine how strangely ironic this is.
I was using it on different instruments all the time, like putting a little on the snare drum and so on. Yeah, it's ridiculous. I'm using the plug-in, and the room is there.
LC: I love that plug-in though. It's not like just using reverb.
No, it's not a reverb. It sounds like a room. It's incredible. It's hard to get a reverb plug-in to do what that plug-in does.
LC: I love reverbs that tail on for two and a half seconds and do weird shit, but there are times when you've got that dry, dead tambourine track or something...
You don't want a reverb. You don't want it to feel like it's right in front of your ears. I'm obsessed with it. I was doing it before with re-amping, but I'd always end up with this re-amping effect. It can be harsh and not really what I want. That plug-in seems to do another thing, which is put up a microphone that I forgot to put up while I was tracking. I had a lot of room mics we'd recorded; then I'd put it on the room mic, and the room mic would suddenly sound better.
JB: Is the plug-in set mono or stereo?
Stereo, usually. I can set the mix however much I want of the fake room in there. On Brittany's vocals, I tried to track with her in the large room. I was trying to do that Bowie thing.
LC: Like "Heroes"?
Not as many mics. I wasn't doing that thing. I'd have the room mics, but there wouldn't be any compression on them. When she was quiet, they wouldn't really be doing anything, and when she was loud, they would trigger. I would only be sending the room mics to the chamber so that when she sang loud, the room mics triggered the chamber. That way she doesn't have her voice smothered in reverb the whole time, and when she's loud it feels epic.
LC: Do you ever do a bit of reverb automation to get those same effects?
Not really. I was trying to do it naturally by letting the room do that. It was just happening.
LC: Thankfully everyone stayed on the same page making Sound & Color.
I didn't actually realize how big Alabama Shakes were when I was doing the album. I didn't really feel that kind of pressure even though, at some point along the line, someone told me, "Oh, their last album sold a million records." That's a lot of records! They're so down to earth that you don't feel that energy when you're with them. It didn't feel like I was working on a record where it was like, "This album has the potential to be very big, or this is a catastrophe." They'd have their friends come over and do some cooking, or something like that. It felt very much like a family album. I never really felt the pressure, or was worried about the album. It felt like one of the smoothest, most natural recordings I've ever worked on. Drama-free, super easy, and no problems.
LC: Maybe they're able to keep it at bay for their own mental health.
Yeah. Maybe that's also why the people responded to the record. I mean, it wasn't stress-free, but comparatively to most records I work on, it was very relaxing.
LC: Like you say, it could have been turned into a, "You think that's good enough?" kind of scenario. "Is that a million dollar vocal?"
Brittany was recording a lot of the record on these crappy microphones she got on eBay. I wasn't even recording her vocal well, or "properly." And still people were like, "The vocals are glorious." You realize that it's not anything you're doing — it's the person you're recording. Another recording engineer might have come in and arrested me. "She has a sacred voice. There's no reason you should be recording it like that, with a $10 microphone in the control room and the speakers blasting. That's not the way to be recording her voice!"
LC: That freedom is so important. Sessions can get too uptight, too scary, with too much fear.
Yeah. It's amazing to work on a record where there's no fear. She is fearless.
LC: That's good. After this record started picking up steam, were you getting a lot of queries for working with people?
Yeah, it seems like it went crazy all of a sudden.
LC: Do you feel like people are understanding why that record is a success?
That's a good question. I don't know. On that record there are so many reasons why I feel like it was a success. It's her songwriting, and it's their story. All of those things lined up. It was all waiting to happen. I could have recorded that record with an iPhone and it could have done just as well. The fact that they had such ammunition behind them going into it, I think that maybe it allowed me to get away with things that you couldn't get away with on another record.
LC: Obviously we have to look at every client situation that comes down the pike as new to us. Clean the slate.
Right. I was in New York, and this guy had this electronic project. He sent me files and said he loved the sound of the Shakes record and asked me to mix it. It was full-on electronic music. I sent the mixes back to him, and he's like, "This doesn't sound like the Shakes record!" I said, "No, it doesn't at all. Of course not!" He said, "Do it again, and mix it like the Shakes record." I'm like, "What do you want me to do with it?" I actually had no idea how to make it sound like the Shakes record. "Do you want me to re-record it again with that band?" There were definitely weird things that we were doing. A lot of the guitars aren't amped. It's just that Korg 4-track tape machine. The drum tone on one of the songs is that.
LC: Now we know the secret! That's all you need. Not a great song or performance. If you start looking at recording as having rules, you're probably missing the point.
Yeah. If there were rules involved in recording, if I just had to go set up a microphone, have it go directly to Pro Tools, and then record that, I would hate this job. That is completely not why I'm interested in doing this job. I would rather work at a grocery store. The creative part of it is why I'm into it.
LC: Have you ever felt you have to be tempered a little bit with an artist or client, where you're trying to do something and they say, "No."?
No, I don't think really ever. It was these situations where all the people I met and worked with kept evolving in that way. I never felt like I ended up on a project where it felt like it was this really conservative project. Thankfully it never happened. I accidentally stumbled into these situations with musicians I kept meeting, and their friends were like-minded in a way that it never really happened. I'm borrowing from approaches I've done on other records with every album I start. But all of a sudden, in a few days, I've figured out a new thing that's specific to this project that I never really tried before. Whether it's a piece of gear, or a unique way of doing something. But as far as people tempering me, that has happened, but usually it's with mixing.
LC: Really?
Yeah. It's never when I'm tracking. I feel like maybe it's easier to get away with things when you're tracking, because people haven't lived with rough mixes. The experimental approach when I'm tracking something, people can get on board, because it amps up the creative flow in the room, and everybody can jump on. That becomes what it sounds like. But [it's more challenging] when somebody brings you a project and you're supposed to mix it, and they've already been living with rough mixes and things like that. So then the experimental approach doesn't always work. You're battling what people are used to listening to. Then you can go way too deep. People can be like, "What the hell are you doing?"
LC: Are you getting many projects that are just mixing lately?
Yeah, lots of mixing projects.
LC: Are you doing them in your space here?
Yeah, a lot here. I've become most used to listening in here, somehow. I'll be working on a record somewhere else, but if a mixing thing comes up I like to be able to do it [here]. I like to have my personal space available at all times.
LC: It's not a very big room, for a control room.
No, it's pretty small.
LC: And you're tracking full records in here, in the live room?
Yeah. I'm doing a Growlers record right now. We tracked the whole thing live in here. It works great. People come in and sometimes they're nervous, like, "Oh, how are we going to do this?" I'm like, "We'll do it. It'll be fine."
LC: You ask clients what they like, and they say Motown, and Elvis, and all these things. Then they walk into a smaller studio space and say, "How are we going to make this work?" Guess what?
I was just working in EastWest, and behind us was the Pet Sounds room. It's a small room. It's such an epic, world-defining album, and it's just this tiny little room. It doesn't look like anything. I don't know what people expect, really. I'll record a record in a closet. That sounds fun to me. I feel like you're going to end up with a more interesting product if you just try something. I have no problem recording anywhere. Anything that someone wants to throw my way, I'm stoked. I want to try it.
LC: Challenges.
Yeah. The Local Natives were here and were like, "Are you sure?" We did a song, and it turned out great. We got super experimental. We got a ladder and were tracking on the roof. Because it's an industrial neighborhood there are no noise constraints, so we set up drums on the road and were recording on the road. Then we had band members across the street with microphones, moving them around, and holding them. We were trying everything.
JB: Was that late at night, with minimal traffic?
Yeah, late at night. We took over the road. Then this ballerina showed up out of nowhere. She was dancing. Then a rapper showed up, and he was rapping. I was recording and I heard rapping. The guy was rapping in the middle of the take. It was amazing.
LC: That's surreal. Are you sure David Lynch wasn't running around out there somewhere?
Yeah, it felt like David Lynch! On their demo, they had this one song that had this filtered effect. The drums kept weaving in and out of these filters. Instead of using filters, we had all these water jugs. We filled them up with water and put [Shure SM]57s in condoms. I mic'd the drums normally, and then put the water drums in all the same spots as where the mics were. I had two different versions of the drum set, so when they wanted to do their filtering effect that they'd done on their demo, I'd bring up one kit or the other so you could do it without using EQ.
LC: What did it sound like in the water?
It sounded so cool. It sounded like you filtered all the high-end off, just like you would with an EQ, but it had this weird kind of reverberant water echo thing. It was like what they'd done on their demo, but a more unique and interesting version. How many times have you heard a drum get filtered? Boring. If you can do the same thing, but approach it in an analog way, that's where it's a real version of that. The Beatles could have done the same effect. It sounded cool. It was fun.
LC: What informed some of the gear choices for your space? I noticed the MCI 2-inch deck over there, and the small console.
Oh, yeah. Pretty much everything has a different reason. There's a guy across the street who sells gear, and we needed a 2-inch. That was the easiest way of getting one here, just walk it across the street. I wanted some kind of console in here. They're selling these API 1608 consoles right now, so I bought one. I've always loved the look of the white APIs visually; the old ones.
LC: Like the one in Electric Lady?
Yeah. I love the way they look. That is the coolest-looking console I've ever seen, and I love the sound of API as well. If I somehow expand this space, I'll see if there's someone I can sell this one to and buy that one.
LC: Spray paint this one.
Yeah, just make that one white.
JB: Are you mixing through it, or using it for tracking, or both?
Both.
LC: I was talking to the Lucius crew about working with you, and I know you kept getting dragged away to work on Sound & Color.
Yeah, we were in here doing Lucius' Good Grief album. That was fun. They're starting to be in-demand session singers, on top of their career [as a band].
LC: They [Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig] sound great, right? It's a special thing.
I don't know if I'm supposed to say this on the interview, but Blake and I are doing a record right now — I don't think I can tell you who it is — and we just brought them in for all the background vocals. They sounded great.
LC: What else is on the horizon for you?
I'm doing the Growlers album. I'm working with Julian Casablancas, from The Strokes, on his record. And Broken Social Scene, though I don't know if it's going to work timing-wise.
LC: Are you keeping enough time for yourself to stay sane?
Not really. It's been too crazy. I get locked in these rooms.
JB: Do you like living this close to the studio?
I do and I don't, because then I work more.
JB: I used to have a studio under my house. I loved it at first, but then...
Is it because of noise?
JB: I was just always working. I couldn't stop. After dinner I'd go back downstairs and start working again.
It's so easy to fall back into it. My wife is back there [in the home part of the building], but she doesn't even know if anyone's in here. She sometimes thinks I'm working in Hollywood, and doesn't even realize I'm in here. No one even bothers her. As far as falling into work, it's crazy. I was in here last night until three or something. It's like how it was in Banff, when my room was 30-feet away from where the studio was. Someday I'll divide it up better.
LC: If you weren't recording, do you have any idea what you'd be doing?
Oh, yeah. I'd probably be making movies, or animating, or painting. As soon as I find a day of not working, which is never, I love doing anything creative. There have been times when I've found weeks where I'll start writing, or painting, or making model trains. I'd love to make movies. There are a million things. I'd like to live ten thousand years, because I'd selfishly like to do it all. Recording is what I fell into, and I absolutely love it; but I absolutely love everything. As soon as I start listening to a podcast about something, I'm fully invested. I love to learn about everything, but I have to pick one thing or else it'll be a disaster.
LC: Do you still play music at all?
A little bit. When people don't have somebody, I'll play. I have no idea how to play guitar — I'm horrible. I love playing guitar on peoples' records, but they have to go away. I'll take an old African record, or something like that, and I'll find a guitar moment. Then I'll put that in Pro Tools, and I'll Melodyne the part so it fits the chords of the song I'm working on. I know mathematically how a guitar works, like where it all is. From the Melodyne I'll create a MIDI structure of the guitar part I want, and then I'll loop bars and learn each, bar by bar, of the guitar part, and then I'll go down the line on the whole song.
LC: Just playing the notes one by one?
No, not one by one. I'll try to learn the parts so it sounds like a human playing. I'll record with DI and then spit that DI performance back out into an amp so it sounds like one performance, not all edited. Then I have this wild, African- sounding guitar part that sounds really accomplished.
LC: That sounds like a process.
Yeah, but when I was a kid I was really interested in animating. I'll watch behind the scenes videos about people animating. I think that's so cool, frame-by-frame. It makes my brain intrigued. There's something about approaching music that way, almost like animating, that I get off on. Even though I don't play guitar, I'll make whole songs on guitar, or instruments that I don't know how to play, and I'll animate my way through the whole song.
LC: Every bit of the song is just a little tiny moment in time.
I'll make my own songs. I'll never release any of it — it's just experiments I don't get to try with other people. Then I can bring them to other peoples' records.
LC: I find if I get left with time like that I don't work conventionally. I'll throw one mic on the drum kit and see what happens.
Totally. Sometimes I just record with one mic to fuck with myself.
LC: To make yourself work harder.
Yeah. I'll have a cool sound in one mic, but if I record all the other mics, then I'm going to turn them on. If I don't have them... Years ago, some friends of mine did this record with Mark Ronson [Tape Op #105]. They called me in to finish engineering and mixing. He was there, and they had done the thing at the Daptone's studio. I opened up the session and there were four tracks: drums, bass, guitar, and vocals. Mark was there, and I was like, "Is this how you did the Amy Winehouse record [Back to Black]?" Mark said, "Yeah." It was a big moment for me. I remember hearing that Amy Winehouse record, and I couldn't believe how good those drums sounded. I thought it was an old record. How did they do this? After that, I was like, "Fuck it. I don't need 16 microphones." Mark was showing me. He'd say, "We just EQ'd it like this." He'd crank one of the API EQs. "You want more kick drum?" Just wildly aggressively EQ-ing. "Oh yeah, there's the kick drum." I love guys who are that successful, but so reckless. They're not thinking about it in this mathematical cut-and-dry way of approaching something. He didn't seem like he was working that way, at all. He seemed like he was a reckless, wild man who's a cool dude. He has a pop sensibility that the world recognizes, but he's not approaching it in any standard way at all.
LC: I assume that you have management for your jobs and your work?
Yeah. That's super helpful. I literally would not charge anybody for anything. I'd say, "Yes" to everything and do everything for free. I just get excited about sessions. "Oh yeah, we'll figure it out."
