How did you start working with Kevin Morby?
I became friends with Kevin through The Complete Last Waltz [tribute shows, Sam is the musical director]. He was a guest singer. I wasn't familiar with him at the time, so I was checking out his records. At the time he had Still Life and Harlem River. I wrote him an email a week after the show and told him that I was digging his music. He wrote back and told me he was looking for a producer for his next record. We ended up doing Singing Saw shortly after that. We've had this long working relationship since.
Whose idea was it to use field recordings on This is a Photograph?
Kevin was driving the presence of field recordings. A lot of that record is written about Memphis, and he gathered the sounds of the places he was talking about. It was incredibly cool. That's really prominent on "Disappearing," with the sounds from the shore of the Mississippi River. At my studio, he'd be walking around while we'd be working. There's a deck right off the studio and a big patio door, so there's a very natural indoor/outdoor flow in this place. I've found a lot of people will be listening on the deck, hearing the speakers blending with the natural environment, and wanting to capture that. That was used most notably on the song "It's Over." There was this bird call – a tufted titmouse – that was happening very much in time with the music. In the hook of that song – where Kevin sings, "It's over" – we sampled the bird. We didn't have to pitch it or change it at all. We doubled it with piano to give it a little more body in the mix, and it became this great hook in the song.
Kevin told me that you built a studio in upstate New York.
The studio grew out of the pandemic-inspired move upstate, which was centered largely around my kids. I've always worked in this area with D. James Goodwin [Tape Op #138]. I'd come up here to get out of the city. I always imagined that moving upstate would be great if we weren't tethered to the city. After Covid, we weren't. We were living upstate in this little cabin that we were renting for a while. Eventually, we bought this house in Accord, New York, which is near Kingston. Coincidentally, it's about five minutes from where we got married 13 years ago. We found this little farmhouse on ten acres of land, and it had this meadow in the back where they had horses. So, we decided to buy it and build a studio. The studio was designed by my friend, Michael Winningham, who is also a musician in Austin in a band called Palo Duro. We've been friends since high school, and we have made a lot of music together. He also builds and designs homes. He made the drawings, and I was able to find a contractor up here to execute them. It's a dream. It's a super open space with 20-foot ceilings. It's got a hallway that closes off where I can do amps, and an iso-booth in the middle, under the loft, for the drums. It's got this big, wide staircase that I love. The loft is open, so I've done brass up there and mic'd them from the bottom to recreate that church effect with the space in here. It's got a little lounge in the back, and a wraparound deck. It's in the woods, so deer come by the dozens and graze. You can see the Mohonk Mountains out the door. It's a big upgrade from the vibey but dingy basement I was working in when I was in Brooklyn. Now, there's a place for people to stay. It has all the things people would need. So far, it's been great. A lot of the people I worked with in Brooklyn have come up and stayed here. They all seemed to love it, and I certainly love it.
Are you recording digitally or analog?
I do digital. I have been for a long time. The last record I did with tape was [2013's] Songs from the Vanished Frontier, which is my old band, Yellowbirds', second record. Even that was a lot of tape into Pro Tools. Splitting the signal and hitting the tape machine so we could monitor from Pro Tools but record everything through tape and then sync it back up. The way I like to work is with the fewest people in the room, which means I do a lot of the engineering myself. I'm always playing on what I produce, so I got in the habit of the most efficient tools. That means digital for me. I want to spend time on the songs. If we need to pivot the arrangement, I want to be able to do that quickly. If we catch some magic before we know the song, I want to be able to loop it, edit it, or do whatever I have to do to use it. I do love the sound of tape, but I'm not one of those producers who likes to be pushed into the old-fashioned limitations of making everything linearly. I want to be surprised. That means making the most of any mistakes. With digital, I can loop a mistake and make a song out of that. A lot of people look at digital recording as having too many opportunities to fix mistakes, but I don't use it that way. I'm not a super technical producer or engineer. I don't know how to use [Celemony] Melodyne, so I never tune anything. With tape, I don't know how to align it or clean it. [laughs] I don't want to deal with that, either.
What's your ideal studio layout?
