I was going to ask if you had ever considered making a solo record, but it sounds as if you're already doing it!
Yeah. I guess I should learn how to talk about it, because it's not like I've been broadcasting it. Although I've mentioned it on occasion for probably ten years. I'm not a compelling singer. I wouldn't want to sit through an album with me singing, so I wouldn't expect anybody else to. [laughter]
I would have expected it to be instrumental.
I would say it's 75 percent instrumental and maybe 25 percent singing. I'm going to sing a couple of tunes. I have a tune Shawn Colvin is singing. I may have a tune that Sarah Jarosz is singing. As you know, it's much harder in the music business to sell records now. So, I thought, "Well, what am I waiting for?" The tsunami of history when the pandemic hit was almost like a sign. A few months into the pandemic, I gave myself over to the process of doing it. It was a lot of work; I had no idea what I could do that wouldn't make me cringe, because I'm my own worst critic. I'm writing, playing, and engineering everything. So, it's a bit of an audio conceptual Tetris nightmare trying to figure out how to make it all work and fit. I'm slowly getting there. For a while it felt overwhelming, but now I see the light at the end of the tunnel.
How do you fight off all those inner critics?
I gotta say, it's been an interesting journey. I have a pretty strong internal critic. I've had to come up with strategies and protocols over the years to both pay attention to him and keep him at bay. My standards are high, and I want it to be compelling music.
How did you get into session playing and studio work?
The first record I produced was Steady On by Shawn Colvin. We made it in 1987 or '88, and it came out in '89. I had moved to Manhattan around 1981. Before that I had been a gigging sideman right outside of Manhattan, but then I moved to Manhattan when rent was cheap. I didn't have any big goal to be a record producer, but I had always written songs. In tandem with me learning how to play the guitar, right from the beginning I wrote songs. The first time I learned three chords, I took those three chords and wrote a song with them.
How was the first record you produced a major label debut album?
Well, that could probably still happen now. It was an incredibly great confluence of events that took place in the latter half of the 1980s. At the same time, I was writing songs and gigging, starting to do some sessions and jingles. I was also maybe a tad ahead of the curve with the home recording thing. I bought every generation of the Tascam and/or TEAC 4-tracks and 8-tracks. I wasn't super cognizant about every aspect of recording, but I was learning how to utilize multitracks and doing everything myself. The short version is I met Shawn Colvin, and we hit it off. In the beginning we were writing songs and thinking about trying to get hits. Then some little epiphany happened; Colvin and I found our voices as songwriters, and we jettisoned any idea of being commercial. I was never going to be happy as a sideman, so I started focusing more on writing and doing these songs on my 4-track. We recorded a bunch of tunes we wrote that ended up on Steady On, and I guess I did a good enough job making the demos.
So, they let you produce the whole album.
Yeah. I had a certain musicality, and I had a certain instinct for arranging. I was always the guy in the band paying attention to what the bass player, the drummer, and the keyboard player were doing. I always had this intuitive grasp that the parts in the machine had to fit together well. I loved music so much, and had listened to it so much, that I was starting to gain an arranger's sensibility. That's what I brought to Steady On, and thankfully it was strong enough to have some impact. It won a Grammy, and all of a sudden I was a "record producer." I didn't know anything about engineering or mixing.
Were you responsible for getting Kevin Killen [Tape Op #67] on board?
Yes. Shawn and I were both fans of So by Peter Gabriel [#63] at the time. Who made that? It was Kevin Killen. We asked him and he said yes. Kevin and I have been good buddies for 30 years. I go back and listen to that record, and I don't love what's going on there. But I can recognize a certain degree of… I dunno, freshness? It found a little niche, probably more among musicians than the general public. Around the same time I was doing that with Shawn, I had a friendship and was writing songs with Jim Lauderdale, who lived in New York as well. More or less the same thing happened with Jim a year later. I had made his demo and somehow it had ended up in Nashville. Rodney Crowell heard it, liked it, and helped Jim get a deal at Warner Bros. Rodney was gracious enough to say, "Let's have Leventhal come down and produce it with me." Then a lot of songs Jim and I wrote got covered. The next thing I did was I played on and arranged Marc Cohn's "Walking in Memphis." I didn't produce it. [Ben Wisch did. -ed.] This all happened in a two and a half or three-year period, maybe less. Then my learning curve began, and I had to actually learn how to be a record producer.
