What was your musical background growing up in Westborough, MA?
My mom is a rabbi, and she would play guitar and sing in the services. My dad gave me a [Sony] Walkman with a cassette that had Borscht Belt comedy on side A and Billy Joel's The Stranger on side B, and I must have listened to that a thousand times. In a subconscious way I'm chasing The Stranger every day. That beautiful, sad melody that he whistles on the beginning of the title track. My parents got me a Tascam 414 [cassette 4-track recorder] when I was 11, and I’d record myself playing bass over and over again. My friends and I were into De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, trying to make hip-hop on the Tascam or in Cool Edit Pro on the PC. Just goofing around listening to the Jerky Boys, Grateful Dead, and a lot of Miles Davis. Then I went to school for jazz and put recording aside until I recorded with a bluegrass band and asked the studio owner if he’d teach me Pro Tools. We would play loud and hit our instruments really hard. It was aggressive. Then, when I saw the shreddiest players – Sam Bush, Béla Fleck, and Brian Sutton – they were playing so freaking quietly! I started investigating that on my guitar and bass, and it sounded way bigger.
You moved to New York around this time?
Yes, I've been here for about 20 years; starting bands and doing more recording. I was working in a restaurant, and my dear friend, Michael Rains, invited me to his studio. It was in a basement on Rivington and Allen, in the Lower East Side, with a hole in the ceiling. But it was a cool studio built by Dave Snyder of Guilford Sound that was being used as a rehearsal space. There was a control room that wasn’t being used, so I learned how to install DB25 cables and I got it wired up. Now I could record my band. I could record my friend's bands. I ended up taking over the operations of the studio and converting it from a rehearsal studio into a shared studio space. It still operates today as Rivington 66, and there's a session happening there every day. It's a humble space, but now it has a Studer console and it's really vibey. It's super quiet down there, remarkably.
What led you from Rivington 66 to Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn?
Shahzad Ismaily [Tape Op #151] took a share at Rivington with us and meeting him was a big deal. He's very gregarious and inclusive, and he wants to make things happen. He’s become one of my dearest, closest friends and mentors. One day he called me at my day job and said he’d bought a building in Prospect Heights [Brooklyn]. The company I worked for imploded and all of a sudden I didn't have a job. The next thing you know, I was helping build a studio. Luckily, Shahzad brought in Eli Crews [#88] who came from New, Improved Recording in Oakland, California. He and I built the studio together and lived in the building. Shahzad really trusted us; he was very hands-off on the build and the design, and kind of just showed up when it was done.
And he was happy, hopefully?
He was so happy. I remember the first time we sent a signal through the studio: We had a Neumann M49 [microphone] going through the Neve 53 Series console, and he just sat in front of it and rubbed his hands together. For those who don't know Shahzad, him rubbing his hands together is like a symphony. [laughter] He rubs his hands together and you hear the music of the cosmos. From that day on I just became a full-time recording person, through Shahzad kind of pushing me, "You can build a studio, right? And then you'll make records here." I was like, "With who?"
At Figure 8, you recorded [Marc Ribot's] Ceramic Dog, and engineered for Damien Rice, Cass McCombs, and many others. What were you learning about production there?
Eli is such an incredible engineer and really knows the best practices. I learned everything from Eli on that technical side. Shahzad taught me how to interact with musicians and artists, and I think one of his gifts is he knows how to navigate the emotional, interpersonal landscape of a session. Because I lived upstairs, he would ask me to come work on all sorts of sessions. He'd bring musicians in from all over the world for two hours to improvise. Watching him interact with them gave me tips on what to say, or what not to say. I engineered this record by Anna Ternheim, and I thought I had done a bad job, so I kept apologizing. At the end of the session, Shahzad said, "Just so you know, you don't apologize in the studio. They don't know it's a mistake until you tell them it was a mistake." I believe that the only way you learn things is with stakes, and he was so beautiful at always creating those for me and helping me learn and get better. One day he asked me to come record him improvising with Sam Amidon and Damien Rice. Afterwards I went up to Damien and asked for his email address so I could send him a bounce, and I ended up working with him for four years.
What led you from Figure 8 to create Sugar Mountain here in Bed-Stuy?
