Grammy award-winning songwriter and musician Aoife O'Donovan has released three critically-acclaimed solo albums, is co-founder of the bands I'm with Her and Crooked Still, and has spent a decade contributing to the radio variety shows Live From Here and A Prairie Home Companion. Her new album, Age of Apathy, was produced from a distance by Joe Henry [Tape Op #129] during the pandemic lockdown, but you'd never know it from the incredibly cohesive sound and "in the room" energy of the recordings. Geoff Stanfield caught up with Aoife to chat on the eve of the record's release. This interview is from her Tape Op Podcast, took place in April of 2022, and has been edited for clarity.
I love Age of Apathy. It’s soaring and cinematic and feels so cohesive in the sense of the playing and the vibe, but then I read the credits and realized it was made during COVID, and in isolation where everyone recorded themselves.
It was a pretty crazy process. I was living in New York and then we came down to Florida six months in [to the pandemic] and I had more space, more time, more sunlight. I was very creatively inspired and got everything flowing. Simultaneously, I was introduced to a friend and collaborator, [co-producer] Darren Schneider at Full Sail University [Advanced Recording Course Director], and we started diving into the recording process pretty early on in the writing process. It was the first time I've ever started demoing songs before I had a whole batch of songs written, and that that affected the outcome pretty dramatically.
What were the seeds of these songs? Did you do a rough start with a guitar and a vocal and build out from there?
Yeah, that's exactly how it was. I would go in and record what I thought at the time were just going to be demos. I wasn't sure if eventually, when I had the 13 or 14 songs done, how we would build them up. As I started working on these demos – and sending them to Joe Henry – it became clear that maybe they were a little bit more than demos. We were putting a lot of time into recording them. It was more time than I would probably put into just making a demo of a tune to see how it sounded. We were layering and getting good sounds. Darren is a total wizard in getting sounds, and we were putting electric guitars, acoustic guitars, sometimes keyboards, and sometimes piano and harmony vocals. We were making a track that we would be using as a demo, but what we ended up doing was stripping them back to the essentials of the demo. I would have recut the vocal to get a final vocal, and then we would send those tracks of guitar, vocal, and sometimes keys first to Jay Bellerose, on drums, and then he would send that back. He was recording at home with his partner Jennifer Condos. He would send them back to us and Darren would mix them in. I would show up at the studio, we would check out what Jay did, and once that got the green light and all those parts were organized, we would send it to the bass player, David Piltch, and do the same. He would send Joe an idea via voice memo, Joe would say, “Yes, go for it,” and then Piltch would send Darren his tracks. It was a very scatter shot situation, but it ended up sounding super cohesive. I think because a lot of the musicians, like Jay and Piltch, had played together a ton and for some reason it worked. It ended up feeling like these real musical contributions from these guys who I hadn't played this music with.
Darren did a great job on tying it all together. Joe Henry produced this record. I love his work! How did he produce from afar?
Joe is such a great guy; he has so much wisdom in his pinky finger. He's amazing. It's crazy to make a record with Joe producing and not be in the same room as him. What draws people to wanting to work with Joe is that you want to be in his presence. You want to be hanging with him. You want him in the control room saying, “Go," “That was a great take,” or “Let's try this again.” Because his energy is positive but it's musical and it's lyrical. It has so much depth. Doing this record remotely with him was a totally different experience, but he had just made his own solo record in this exact way, so he was no stranger to the concept of recording tracks and having people send him stuff back. He had also relocated from the West Coast to the East Coast, so we were both dealing with a newness in our...
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