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?
The ability to isolate the drums from vocals. I like to have the option of keeping a scratch vocal as the live vocal if it's live drums and piano. I like to get the piano right next to the drums, so the bleed is dry. I hate that far away roomy smear bleed that happens. Cymbals never get crisp again. So, I like to have the drums in a separate room from everything else. My new studio is centered around a drum booth. On the last few records in Brooklyn, I had been finding myself doing more and more in the control room. On the Curtis Harding record [2017's Face Your Fear], we did the backing vocals and horns all in the control room. Some of it we even did without headphones. I panned the mix for playback to one speaker. Then I put a figure 8 mic with the null pointing at the speaker, and I had either two singers or two horn players on either side of the mic. It was canceling enough of the playback so that we could work that way. With no headphones, and everyone in the room, we can be in normal conversational voice. I feel like creativity snowballs better without those obstacles in the way. This studio is an open-concept, with no control room. I have speaker cables run through the floor, so I can plug in a guitar amp in the main room, and it'll play through a speaker behind a closed door. The back room is wired up. There are lots of options, but it mainly feels like a central "hang space." And the drum booth is very connected to that.
What were your first recordings like?
The first time I ever tried to record something was with my band in high school. I tried to isolate things with a mattress. [laughs] That was in my parent's garage, and I recorded to a 4-track cassette machine. It was just an awful recording. My guitar teacher helped me make a record to a DAT recorder. That also sounded pretty lame. Then I went to Berklee [College of Music], but I went for guitar performance. When I got there, I wasn't really vibing on the program. I started a band and wanted to make a record. I realized that if I majored in Music Production and Engineering that we could use the studio time. I was completely focused on writing songs and being in a band. At that point, I had no aspirations to be an engineer or a producer, so it was a very fortuitous decision because we got a little studio time. The recordings came out sterile and unusable, but I did learn some basics that definitely helped me a lot along the way. I learned from those experiences in the Berklee studios, and other early experiences where it was rushed and low budget. I learned that just because we're in there with the good gear, it doesn't necessarily result in a "vibey" recording. That was the beginning of my infatuation with recorded sound and wanting to get the "vibe" to take to the recording. Capturing a vibe became paramount. I often felt the cleanliness and pristineness of recording were damaging. I remember [The Trashmen's] "Surfin' Bird" was a reference for me for a long time. In "Surfin' Bird," the band comes in like an explosion. I ran a mix of a song that we did in the Berklee studio that was super clean to a cassette. I played it on this little, tiny speaker. I thought, "Well, this sounds cool!" I wanted to put a mic on that, because it was better than the way the master tape sounded. It bloomed from there. I had this band, Apollo Sunshine, in the early 2000s. We evolved together, as far as recording ourselves, and that lesson kept being reinforced. That lesson being: Doing it yourself and finding a way to make your sonic vision come true is always better than having the best gear, or even the most skilled people running it. I found out later that there are engineers who "get it," and they will make your record sound how you want it to sound. I didn't know that yet. I hadn't worked with them yet. That lesson really hit home the hardest when we were making the last Apollo Sunshine record, Shall Noise Upon. We did it in this studio upstate in Catskill called Old Soul [Studios]. We were recording to tape – for some reason we were analog purists at that time. Our friend, Quentin Stoltzfus, was helping us with the production and engineering, and we were able to get Dave Fridmann [Tape Op #17] to mix it for us. In our young minds, we needed to leave a lot of room in our arrangements for him to do all his crazy shit. When we went to mix it with Fridmann – who's still someone I admire so, so much – we said things like, "This part needs to be in a giant splash of reverb!" Fridmann asked, "Well… why isn't it?" [laughs] We thought we needed to use his amazing reverbs and Fridmann was like, "Okay? What's the difference?" I didn't fully appreciate that at the time. Now, I completely get it. Who cares?! It's the broad strokes that matter. David mixed the whole record and did a fine job. But we listened to it, and we realized that it wasn't finished. What we thought was us leaving space for our hero mix engineer to do his thing was actually us not putting enough weird, creative stuff in our arrangements. At that point we had completely blown our budget. So, the three of us finished the record on a [Digidesign] Mbox, doing crazy things like running a Radioshack mic through a wah-wah pedal, playing a conga and slowing the tape down to half-speed. Getting weird and creative with it. Then, we mixed it ourselves at this place in Brooklyn that's gone now, called Headgear [Recording, Tape Op #65]. We booked it for three or four days and mixed the whole record in that time. The record's got some wacky sounds on it. But it became a great record at the end when we got completely weird and threw caution to the wind. We threw out the idea that people we look up to, just because they've made great records, could make our record great. I realized very quickly that great records come from the people inside. I stopped caring so much about bringing in outsiders and more about creating an environment that worked. Also, [investing in] getting reasonably good equipment so that if the demo is magic, it doesn't have to be a demo.
