Beau Sorenson:
A Person Who Likes to be in Studios and Help People Make Music
You started out in Madison, Wisconsin, at Smart Studios [Tape Op #11], but you'd gone to a recording school?
Yeah. I'm going to step back a little bit. I grew up in northwestern Wisconsin, in a very small town called Springbrook, and there wasn't much to do. When I was in high school, music was a big part of my life, both playing in garage bands and in school: jazz band and concert band. I was doing some recording in my bedroom at home. I never thought of music as a possible career path. I had moved to Madison, and I was working at a hardware store. I was recording my own music at home, and I wanted to understand how to do some of it better. There were big gaps in my knowledge – because I was recording mostly direct, I didn't even understand what phantom power was! I went to this small, two-year community college called Madison Media Institute that had an Associate of Arts degree in recording. I went there without any intent of becoming an engineer and producer; I just wanted to understand what I was doing and get better at it. While I was there, I realized how much I enjoyed these overlapping sensibilities of music, technology, and problem-solving. As I was getting out of school, I was trying to find an internship. I had a possibility of an internship at a studio in Los Angeles – that was probably going to be a lousy experience, and it felt like one of those places that grinds through interns. But it was my only opportunity. I was two weeks away from moving to Los Angeles to work at that studio when Mike Zirkel, the manager and chief engineer at Smart, called me and asked, "Would you be interested in interviewing for an internship here?" An instructor of mine, Doug Olson, had worked at Smart on a lot of records. We connected over a shared love for Television's Marquee Moon. Apparently, Doug had told Mike to call me, so I went and interviewed. It was supposed to be a 15-minute interview, but Mike and I ended up talking for three hours, going into tangents about [The Beach Boys'] Pet Sounds box set. It was clear, very quickly, that I was going intern there. I cancelled my moving plans, stayed in Madison, and started working at Smart as an intern. I was there for about five years, until it closed.
That was where you met Chris Walla, working on one of the Death Cab records?
Yeah. I met Chris on Plans, which was mostly because they had tracked Plans at Long View Farm [Studios]. Long View had a pretty rare Trident A Range console, which Smart famously had as well. At that point, Chris wasn't excited about any of the studios in Seattle for mixing. He wanted to mix it somewhere else. He stopped by to tour Smart and quickly fell in with the whole vibe and ethos of the place and ended up coming back to mix the record there. That's how we became friends.
When you say "the vibe and ethos," did that studio have a distinct community about it? How involved was Butch Vig at this point?
It definitely had a sense of community and history. Butch wasn't as involved on a day-to-day level by the time I started; Mike was running the studio day to day. However, at that moment, they were finishing up a Garbage record [Bleed Like Me], so he was there all the time. I was interning then, and I got to know all of them at that point. There was a creative thread from the beginning, when Butch and Steve [Marker] started the studio in 1983. They started it, as a lot of people do, to have a space to do their own music, to record bands, and to experiment. There was a strong feeling of encouraging experimentation and freedom and doing whatever you want. If we had an idea for something, we'd build it. There was a homemade plate reverb, and tons of discarded lab gear and test equipment. Mike and I became obsessed with the Cooper Time Cube [garden hose-based mechanical delay]. We couldn't find one, so we built our own "Cooper Time Tube" out of garden hose and some [Shure] SM57s. There was a lot of very playful, open-minded "go for it" attitude there. Nothing was ever a problem. Have fun and be creative!
After that you moved to Portland, Oregon. Was that through Chris?
