Where were you when the pandemic hit?
Let's see. I was in L.A. with Annie and our daughter, Clarabelle. We had gone there to start working on the new Fruit Bats record [The Pet Parade]. Fruit Bats is essentially a rotating cast of musicians, but mostly it's Eric D. Johnson who's become a close friend and a bandmate [Bonny Light Horseman]. We were supposed to be there for a week. Then we got there, and a day into it, it felt really uncomfortable. We cut the trip short and came home.
Did you guys get to record at all?
We have some funny voice memos on our phones. We didn't do any proper recording, but we did a lot of playing guitars and working on songs.
Were you co-writing for that album?
Only on one song did we formally co-write. We were originally going to have Eric come upstate [New York] where I usually make records, and have this almost Van Morrison Moondance-style record, where it's a fun, grooving band. Eric's such a beautiful singer; I wanted to focus on that. That didn't end up happening because he wasn't able to come out. It wasn't safe to do it. So, we decided to make what now would be a "classic pandemic album." I played most of the instruments at home, sent them back, and Eric sang over it. Or Eric would send a vocal, a guitar, and a click track, and then I would play to that and send it back. We worked that way, for the most part. We had some collaborators; a couple of friends played drums on a few songs. Annie, my wife and collaborator, who was super pregnant at the time, would come down and play bass or sing some harmonies. Clarabelle, our 6-year-old, played tambourine on "Gullwing Doors." It was a family zone.
That's great. What's your home studio setup like? You relocated from Brooklyn to upstate New York after being in Brooklyn for a very long time.
Are we lifting the veil here, Dawn? Are we saying that we're friends and used to play together all the time?
Yeah, we're lifting the veil, totally. Lift it. [laughter]
Okay. Where you and I used to record all the time, Saltlands [Tape Op #80], I had a place upstairs from that for a few years. I worked there a lot in an overdub or a pre-mix capacity, or a place to come hang and write. Then I moved everything from there up to Kingston, New York, in June of 2020. We rented a house that had two living rooms, so we set up one as a studio. It was pretty rad. It was this very old house from the 1800s, kind of crumbling in a lot of ways, but it had plaster walls and hardwood floors. The ceilings were 11 feet high. I had no neighbor on that side of the house, and there was a little piano in there already. It was pretty good to go. I set up all my gear, and I guess I had a home studio.
The beauty of not being in Brooklyn. Here you can have silence around you.
Yeah, totally.
Or just birds.
They can sing in any key, on top of any song, and it still sounds good! We've moved again since then, and now we're in a place and have a studio in the basement. That's working great so far. We have two pianos, a few organs. It was 25 guitar cases, seven bass cases, and tons of amps, preamps, modest mics, some speakers, my Wurlitzer, and Conrad Doucette's drums.
It must have been so cool to see it all together, and in a different space.
You look at a place with nothing in it, even with our personal stuff, and it's this exciting blank canvas. "Oh, we're going to become these kind of people who live in this new space." Then we put all our shit in there and we're like, "Wait, it looks like our old place!" We'd been in a one-bedroom apartment with our kid; we were on top of each other, so there wasn't any way to work at home.
How do you deal with recording at home? Do you have a schedule, or is there enough isolation?
When I was making the Fruit Bats record – one of the few records I've done completely at home – I would wait until [my daughter] Clarabelle went to sleep, and then I would work from 9 p.m. until 3 a.m. I would do that every night and then take weekends off. Similarly, when we were still in Brooklyn, I did overdubs for the Taylor Swift albums. I did that on a little Apollo Twin and a laptop in my closet.
In your apartment?
In our apartment when we were still in Brooklyn.
Wow. I know that closet. It's tiny.
Yeah, it's wild. I don't know. You figure out a way.
The pandemic way. I've been working on a theater piece [ROW], and they provide all the actors with mics and tell them to go into their closets because the clothes absorb the sound.
It really works. For music, if you're working with people who you're familiar with and have played with already, you've already done all the hard work.
The vetting.
Yes. The spiritual connection is there, as well as the anticipation of playing with each other. Even though it's not happening at the same time, that's still there. Not feeling that this is a foreign noise coming at you that you don't know. For instance, if I send it to Joe Russo or Matt Barrick or someone who I've played a lot with, and they've played drums on it, when it comes back, I'm like, "Oh, yeah. That sounds like them." I know how to play bass to that, or I know how to chop up the piano to play to that. It ends up feeling pretty normal. I can fudge the fact that it's overdubs, and I can make it feel like a band.
But it's not quite as fun.
No, no, no. It's a different beast. But can you imagine not making music at all?
No, I cannot.
Yeah, exactly. I would completely lose it. It's the thing that holds it together for me. If I'm not doing music, then I'm a mess.
Did you record all of your parts for the Taylor Swift albums remotely or did you make it out to Aaron Dessner's Long Pond Studio [Tape Op #141]?
I did some at home, and then some more once we moved up to Kingston. I went there for a few days; got tested and wore a mask. His place is very remote, so it felt safe. A calculated risk, I guess.
How did you and Aaron first meet?
We met in 2002 through Bryan Devendorf, the drummer in The National. We were playing a lot of the same places, the same dumpy gigs with four bands on them, and were music friends. We'd hang out in this studio in Red Hook called DrummerMan Studios, owned by our friend Geoff Mann. The National recorded Alligator at Geoff's studio, so I was hanging around and helping out, loaning guitars to Aaron and Bryce [Dessner].
Did you guys connect over The Grateful Dead at that point? The Bridge Session [webcast with Bob Weir] came around much later.
Yeah. That came around in 2012.
In 2016 you did the Day of the Dead covers compilation album.
That was a charity record for The Red Hot Organization [raising funds and awareness for HIV and AIDS] that we did. That was insane. That was almost 80 Grateful Dead songs. That was totally wild. And they're not simple!
Did you have a book in front of you? How did you remember?
Well, a lot of the songs were in me from when I was a kid. A song's easier to learn when you've had time to live with it.
Would you say that the Dead were one of your biggest musical influences growing up?
Definitely. At first, I didn't like them because when I was in junior high school, all the jock-y guys who would push me around and make fun of me, they were all Deadheads. Also, the artwork kind of scared me. I was such a wussy little guy. My assumption was, "The Grateful Dead? That must be heavy metal music that's got all this aggression and anger." Plus, all these guys were wearing skeletons on their shirts and looked mean. And then I was going through someone's record collection and there was a copy of Workingman's Dead, but the cover of the record was so faded that I couldn't tell what it was. It looked kind of beautiful, almost like a fossil. I put it on, and I loved it so much. Then my dad told me it was the Grateful Dead, and I was like, "No, you've got to be kidding me!" It was peaceful and beautiful, but also super deep and not aggressive at all. To a fault. Anyway, it completely captivated me. That was probably when I was 15. I had just started playing music around then. Those hit at the same time, which was powerful. It's like young love. There's nothing quite like that. You never shake it.
