I thought about doing this interview when you were at Jackpot!, but you were immersed in co-producing and playing on Laura's record. Sometimes interviews are so reflective it takes away from the project at hand. I didn't want to chance that!
That's totally true. Plus, if the day goes well – if a lot of emotional energy has gone into the recording that day – I feel weirdly so wiped out; I generally want to go straight to the Airbnb or hotel and just crash.
You've already spent the day making a million little decisions.
It's true. I'm trying to do my best to be a good dad, and I get little tidbits as I'm coming across information about parenting. I read that kids get equally physically tired if they've been running around or if they've been working their brain.
We spend a lot of energy keeping these brains working. That's something we always have to take into account, both in the studio and in creative pursuits. Don't you think?
Absolutely.
What are your views on being asked to produce an artist?
I'm maybe being unnecessarily dualistic here, but if I imagine two poles of producing, one being the producer that walks in and is able to boss the song and the artist around. I don't mean that with a negative connotation. Think of any singular effective leader person, like James Brown, Prince, or Laurie Anderson – any of these people who have intense vision. There's the pull of a producer who walks in and says, "Okay, you came in with this one way, but now we're going to double the tempo. We're going to have horns on the B-section. We're going to make it into this new thing." That's magical and remarkable. A visionary who can see the object in a totally new reflected way, and manifest that.
Right.
The other pole is a producer that allows the artist to feel so self-inhabited that exactly what they want to say comes out into the light in the most real, vulnerable, safe, and true way. Then, all of a sudden, a different kind of magic takes place, where the person feels, "I don't know if I would have said that, had it not felt the way it did in the room today." That's the side, so far in my life, that I've been able to live in. As an analogy, it's like when the forest is dark, quiet, and still enough. And then some of the rarest animals come out into the meadow, if only for a little while. That's what's exciting. Maybe that comes from being quite ostracized as a kid, knowing how to get the rare, hidden self to come forward.
True. In what ways were you ostracized when young?
In my case, I grew up in 1970's small-town Pennsylvania. This was well before the internet, where there wasn't the ability to find a culture of the weird. What we all received was what was on Saturday morning cartoons, evening sitcoms, and Friday night football games. It was very white in the area I was. Unfortunately, between being an immigrant, being Pakistani, and being brown, we have what are given to us as normalized beauty standards. I was well outside of those, in terms of race and culture, but also in terms of the way my body looked, and these kind of unusual deformities. I was on the outside of everything. It was quite grim. But I had the counterbalance of loving parents, so that was lucky.
That's good. I think a lot of us that end up in music feel like outsiders. Sometimes these environ-ments force us inward and make us creative.
Yeah, I totally agree. It's also wild what, thus far to me, has seemed to be the open embrace of musicians in the music community. If I walk into a room and pick up an instrument, and I'm elevating the feel of what's going on, instantly I'll have a connection with the people around me. What race you are, what you look like, what your background is, is instantly totally subterranean. It makes me think about those photos of jazz groups from the '30s, '40s, and '50s that are multi-racial, and how powerful those photos are. The level of racial identification when you walked out the door of your house in those eras was so powerful. Maybe I'm being optimistic, but it feels like it disappears when people are playing music together; the groove is moving everybody, and the sound is moving everybody.
I think you're right. To me that's one of the beautiful aspects about a recording studio. All that matters is what someone is bringing in, and that it is working. The end result of the recording is the only thing that needs to be judged.
That's an interesting point. I never thought about that. If you think about a workplace, and how built into a workplace are a possible set of assumptions of what the person entering in the door is supposed to bring, then the recording studio is one of the most open-ended versions of that. You can walk in, be almost anyone and do almost anything. If it flows with the sound of what we're needing, all of a sudden, you're completely welcome in that space.
Versus a job where it's more the identity of the human coming in and how they function.
Sometimes it's a surprise. We'll bring someone in to do one thing and they end up doing another. I've seen sessions where tensions were high, creativity was low. Then one person walks in and all of a sudden everything opens up.
