You guys are obviously on tour.
Billy Bob Thornton (BBT): Yup; we're in a hotel room in Lowell, Massachusetts, right now.
Aren't you playing Pennsylvania tomorrow?
BBT: Yeah, we're performing in Sellersville, Pennsylvania. It's a place we play every year; one of our normal stops. It's always good to play those places. At least half to three quarters of the audience we've played for every year. It's a friendly town.
I know you both met making one of Billy's solo records [Beautiful Door], right? And J.D., you came in as an engineer. Is that correct?
J.D. Andrew (JD): Yeah.
What started the path to having your own studio space to do the records in?
BBT: Well, originally, before I knew J.D., in late '99 or early 2000 I bought Slash's house. Slash and I made the deal at The Whisky Bar at the Sunset Marquis Hotel, where I used to live in L.A. Slash and I used to hang out in the bar there with Billy Gibbons [ZZ Top] and all these guys. Slash said, "Dude, you've gotta buy this house. I don't want to sell it to some moron who's going to turn it into something else." He had the Snakepit, which is the studio where he did the Slash's Snakepit recordings. He had it before Guns N' Roses had parted ways for a while. They would do a lot of overdubs down in that studio. We called it The Cave, as it was a basement studio, which was pretty rare for California because of earthquakes. It was an amazing studio. It wasn't as big as the one we have now, but it was really good. It came with a Trident 80B board from the '70s that we still use. It had these big Tannoy speakers in the wall that were indestructible. Believe me, because we tried to destroy them. [laughter] It was not possible. My old engineer, before J.D., would mix at 2 or 3 o'clock on the dial, which was about 120 dB. He was used to mixing bands like Cinderella and Ratt.
Just blasting.
BBT: Yeah. At one point, we had some [Yamaha] NS-10s – which we still have. We had a switch to listen up on the big speakers, listen down on the NS-10s, and also some Genelecs. He thought that he had it on the big Tannoys. I watched him turn it on and it literally shot the cone out of an NS-10, and it was sparking. It caught on fire! I've never seen that before. It blew out!
I've got to try that. I hate those monitors.
JD: They're a necessary evil, I believe.
BBT: We had that studio for 13 years, and we made the early Boxmasters records there, once J.D. and I formed the band. Then we didn't have a studio for years, so we would record over at A&M [Henson Recording Studios] in Hollywood, which we loved. I'd been recording there since about '97 or '98. I even did a couple of movie scores there. We did that for a long time and made a lot of records there. Then my wife, Connie [Angland], was like, "I'm going to keep your ass at home!" She and my daughter, Bella, were determined that I was going to have another studio, so we bought a place out in Agoura Hills [California]. That's the studio that J.D. and I have now. It's a 2,200 square foot studio. It's world class. We bought it from Jason Wade from the band Lifehouse.
Oh, sure; yeah.
BBT: Really nice guy. He had a lot of gear in there. He said, "I'll sell some of this." Of course, everything J.D. and I wanted, he goes, "No way." But we had our whole studio from The Cave. When we left there, J.D. took the wiring out of the walls. He took everything.
JD: Yeah. A back doctor bought the house, and he was like, "I don't know what I'm going to use this place for. Maybe I'll put a screening room in, or maybe I'll make it a playroom for my kids." I thought, "Well, that means I'm going to take every single thing out of here." [laughter] It came in handy, because when we were putting the studio together I had all these multipair wires that we could re-use. We sent the console off to The Desk Doctor [Bruce Millett] and got that looked over. We've been up and running since last fall. We finished mixing a [new, upcoming] record two days before we started rehearsals in April. Honestly, [the console] sounds so good. It's like, "Wow, this has a little bit of extra sonic goodness."
How big is the live room?
BBT: It's pretty big.
JD: Yeah, a big chunk of it. It's a good third or half bigger than Studio B at Henson. It's three times bigger than what we had at The Cave. It's a spacious room. Everything is mic'd and ready to go. For us, being able to walk in and be ready is everything that I've ever wanted.
Just walk in and roll if you've got ideas.
BBT: Everything's wired just right, the way we want it. The live room is in an L shape, which is really interesting. It's like a long area, which is the main live room, and then it goes into an L. Over in the L part is where all the keyboards are. My drum kit is set up on a riser at the back of the main part of the live room. We've got this whole long distance there. The drums, if I walk in and play them in there, not recording them, they sound great already.
On your last album, Help…I'm Alive, "Focus on the One" has a great room sound, like John Bonham.
JD: That was over at Henson.
BBT: Yeah, "Focus on the One" was in Studio A, I believe.
