Was there a new concept going in to make Loss of Life?
Ben Goldwasser: Not necessarily intentionally. We're not a very prolific band, and it's not like we're always recording or always putting ideas together. When we start working on a record, it's a culmination of a lot of things that lead up to a moment. Like it's a snapshot of where we are in time – but once we start working on a record we have to decide, “Okay, now we're working on a record.” There tends to be a moment when it picks up, or it starts to make sense, and what the vibe of the record is going to be.
How was making Loss of Life different than previous releases?
Andrew VanWyngarden: Well, without spending too much time talking about Covid and lockdown, that obviously made it a little bit tougher to do this in person. We started the first couple of sessions for this album in 2021 and had sent many tracks back and forth before. We went back up to Tarbox [Road Studios] with Dave Fridmann. We had a more experimental writing session, and it was pretty productive. At the time, it was hard for us to understand what it was that we had. We hadn't come together to discuss what we wanted to make. While "People in the Streets" and "Nothing Changes" both took shape in those sessions, it didn’t feel like the album started to make sense until the next year: That was when Ben was coming over to New York, and we were working at [co-producer] Patrick Wimberly's studio. We did do some sending of files back and forth, but to get the momentum going it was the in-person sessions that we were doing where it started to make sense.
What were those initial experimental sessions with Dave Fridmann like?
BG: Well, the first sessions were funny because he'd gotten a nice, new console in his studio. He'd been working on an old Otari [Concept Elite] console for forever. Most of his well-known records were made on it, and it definitely has a sound when pushed. But then he built an addition to his studio, and he moved the Otari into the new studio B room, and that's where we did the first sessions up there. We were doing a lot of tracking on that without him while he was working on other jobs, and if we wanted to record drums he would track them on the new Neve [88RS]. What's interesting about the idea of someone having a “sound” is it's so much not about the gear. He was mixing through this new board with way more headroom; it was cleaner and more pristine, but it still ended up sounding like a Dave Fridmann record.
Yeah, Dave's use of compression, and the way that he coalesces elements, is very much a signature. I like the way his records sound unique, but also never losing what the artist is about. It's always the artist's record through his filter.
AV: Yeah, we've been working with him for so long. It's fun to go up there because the time it takes to get into the creative mindset is chopped down since we're so comfortable there. Everything is exactly the same as it was in 2006 or 2007 when we first went there. It's fun to get into this rhythm where we're working with Dave in a collaborative way, and there's always this element of uncertainty and experimentation. None of us are ever trying to do something exactly the same or recreate something we've done before, and it makes it exciting. We never know when Dave has the first mix ready. We’re always, “Oh god, what's it going to sound like this time?" It's fun to still have that excitement, even after that knowing each other and working together for so long.
Do you feel that he's wrangling it so much that you don't know what's going to happen when you walk downstairs?
AV: Well, it's all relative, because Ben and I are so particular and detail oriented. “That 2.4 second reverb… I can't believe he did that! That's way too long!” But then, that's when we get into the fun stuff.
BG: For the first record we made [Oracular Spectacular], which he mixed, we had a bunch of demos that we had recorded in this makeshift studio in Brooklyn that we brought to him. We were insecure about using any of those recordings, but his first impulse, which is obvious to me now, was, “These recordings have a vibe to them and sound like human beings did it. This should go on the record.” To him, the quality of the recording doesn't matter. It's the performance. We brought these [Apple] Logic sessions that probably had 90 tracks in them. None of the tracks were labeled.
AV: If they were labeled, it would be something like “bullshit” and “bullshit4."
BG: We really had no sense of how to fit things together in a mix. We just knew we made a bunch of sounds that we thought were cool, and they were all very important to us. So, we gave him this and we wanted to hear all of these sounds. We didn't want to cut anything out. He labored over that. To me, now, it’s so impressive that he was able to do that, where you can hear all of the sounds that we had made on the record. But it must have been challenging!
Did you feel he was able to take all the ingredients you provided and make something out of it, or was there some learning along the way, in terms of accepting some of the limitations?
BG: He has been such a mentor to us. A lot of it is that every recording process is different. Every time he records a drum kit, he mics it up differently. He doesn't have one way of doing it every time. I think, for him, that keeps things fresh and interesting. So much of it is about not making assumptions or not falling into old habits to the point where we lose sight of the big picture. One of the most amazing things that's ever happened to me in a recording studio was we were A/B’ing some effect that was on a track. It was a little bit of a tense moment creatively, where it was like, “All right, we're going to try to do a blind test. What do we like better?” We all were weighing in. This went on for a while, and then Dave said, “I have some bad news for you guys. I thought that this button was A/B’ing this effect. In reality it hasn't been doing anything the whole time. We've just been listening to the same thing, over and over again.” [laughter] It was this incredible moment of realizing how much your mind can play tricks on you. We all heard differences. Everyone in the room heard it differently. Yet in reality nothing was happening at all.
It's the old school producer trick. You have a fader that doesn’t do anything and let the bass player or singer make level adjustments. They'll be like, “Yeah, I think that's better.”
AV: Yeah. When we were making records on Sony there would be somebody who would be approving and making suggestions. We would say, “Sure!” We would “do" all their suggestions, but usually not change anything.
Just send them the same mix and say, “You mean like this?"
AV: Same mix. Yeah.
BG: But always say, “Thank you for your suggestion. That really helps.”
Did you guys do bits of this record on your own, or was it fully conceived and tracked at Tarbox with Dave?
BG: A lot of passing tracks back and forth. We also had [co-producer] Dan Lopatin [Oneohtrix Point Never] involved on the record. One of the things I liked a lot about that process was that we were all working on different systems and different DAWs, and we didn't have the same plug-ins. If we sent anything back and forth it was always stems. We would do every individual track but print it with all the effects on it. I've never worked on tape much at all, but to me it felt like recording to tape, where you get the idea down and that's what it sounds like. There's not this sense of going back and tweaking it endlessly later. Committing early on was really cool.
BG: Yeah. There were very few times that we had to go back to an original session, or pull an earlier version of something because we heard some click we needed to fix or something like that. Most of the time the final tracks would be "whatever" after this game of telephone, like passing something back and forth ten times.
AV: It definitely went through more people's hands. We worked in more studios and with more collaborators than we have ever done before. That led to some funny and frustrating things. We'd be in a final mix session with Dave Fridmann and be like, “Oh, there are actually three fretless bass tracks playing right now. Why don't we delete two of them?” At some point somebody did a new version and we missed it. That was one thing that was a little bit frustrating. It took more oversight to keep things streamlined.
Who in the band is in charge of session management?
AV: That's more Miles [Benjamin Anthony] Robinson. We worked with Patrick Wimberly and Miles on our last album and this album. Miles is the engineer whiz, and Patrick's more executive producer who also does some engineering. But Miles is good at organization. Everybody involved is; it's not like there was a slacker who was screwing things up. It was just more like there were a lot of people involved so sometimes things were getting missed.
While I was listening to Loss of Life, I wrote down what came to mind: David Bowie, The Beatles, Air [Tape Op #39], Pink Floyd, Flaming Lips, and Wings. There's a moment on “Nothing Changes” that sounds like a Chuck Mangione record. There's another with a little hint of Jon Hassell. You mentioned that that was an earlier song. Was it a seed that the record bloomed from?
AV: Yeah, that's a slightly earlier idea. The basic chord progression and that intro melody has the one off note. The verse vocal melody had been circulating in my head. Ben and I had worked on it for a while, a couple of years before we started making this album. I knew it was going to go somewhere and we worked on that one a little bit during Covid lockdown. There's a field recording that I made at the start of it. I played this weird, old messed-up guitar that was out of tune as the main guide track that made the final. It's a simple chord progression, but there's something a little bit unsettling and off about it. The biggest silliness about it is that it's called “Nothing Changes,” and it has the most abrupt and shocking genre change right in the middle. That's the classic MGMT joke there! [laughter]
BG: The horn arrangement on that is Dave Fridmann’s son, Jon, who we've known since he was young. That was cool getting him on the record. He has a brilliant musical mind.
You mentioned another song that you did in those early sessions.
AV: “People in the Streets.”
BG: That one started from Andrew on this E-mu [Systems]…
AV: Proteus.
BG: Was it the 2500? It's an all-in-one rackmount workstation thing with every sound you need on it, plus a sequencer. It's really easy to build up loops and layers on it. A lot of those tracks ended up on the final recording.
AV: That’s another song that we had a solid version of early on in the album process. We felt good about it, and it incorporated all of the collaborators like Dan Lopatin. And I got Ben to play a synth solo, which is difficult to do!
BG: What? Difficult to get me to play a synth solo? I was very begrudging! [laughter]
AV: You played it, and you're like, “Uhhhh!” I was like, “Finally, I got Ben to play a keyboard solo! That's amazing.”
Have you been adverse to solos in the past because of the “muso” factor?
BG: In high school, I came from this jazzy prog rock thing that I was into, and there was a certain moment where I was thinking that it was uncool to be into that. That’s when I started getting into The Velvet Underground, Kraut rock, and stuff like that. Super minimal, one note solos. I've come full circle where now: A) I don't care about what's cool at all. And B) I’ve come back to a lot of that music. King Crimson was my favorite band in high school. I just watched the screening of the King Crimson documentary [In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50], and it's incredible.
You mentioned the Velvet Underground. I heard that you had asked Lou Reed to sing on a song.
AV: It's actually a happy memory for me. It wasn't like he was saying, “No, I don't want to do this.” We met at Le Pain Quotidien in Chelsea [New York] with our managers and Lou Reed, and he ordered oatmeal. He spent the whole meeting talking about his dogs, because he was obsessed with his dogs. And [when the topic of the song ] came around, he said, "I dig it, but I don't really know what I could do on it.” Then he spent the rest of the meeting talking about how managers are terrible, and that nobody should have a manager, which made me love him even more.
That was the sense I got when I read about that. “No, it's already good.”
BG: Yeah, it's a more exciting headline to say, "Lou Reed turned down MGMT," though.
AV: I saw him not long after that, at the Westminster [Kennel Club] Dog Show at Madison Square Garden. Me and my friends were on mushrooms, and he was standing in a hallway. We were like, “Whoa.” We didn't talk to him, but it was really strange.
Everyone has their hobbies. Yours is apparently eating psychedelics and going to dog shows. [laughter]
AW: Right, it was at the time!
You two have been a tight duo making music together. As your career has gone on, you've expanded that circle to include collaborators. How do you decide who to work with?
BG: More than anything it's come down to, "Who do we trust?" Or, "Who do we have a shared intuition with?" It's a lot of pressure to release something and be like, “I don't want to be the last person to touch it,” because then there's all this self-doubt involved. Having Dave as somebody who we can channel this through is pretty incredible, because it's the amount of trust that we have between each other. He gets us. Even when we feel like we have our own musical language when we talk about sounds, I think he understands that. It might not make sense to anybody else, but he knows what we're talking about. So, that's a big deal. Also, when we're recording there's this sense of family that we have, and everyone who's involved feels like part of that family. None of it's technical or anything. It's about good vibes more than anything.
AV: We're not very good at pretending we like something that we don't. If someone comes and wants to collaborate and we're not into the music, we're not just going to do it because they're hugely famous or can get us some "giant new audience" or something. We just say, "No." The people we end up collaborating with are usually people that we remain close friends with, get along with well, and have shared interests and influences.
Is there ever any thought about how you're going to present the music live when you're creating a record?
BG: Mostly it's laughing to ourselves when we think about how we could possibly do it. It's funny, because this record sounds like a band record, like it could be performed live. But then when you pick it apart there are so many edits and so many different guitar tones that happen through a song. We could play it as a regular band, but it wouldn't sound remotely similar.
AV: It does seem like the most live oriented, because a lot of the songs can be broken down to acoustic guitar. It's funny that the one album that, in my mind, is more conducive to playing live, happens now that we’re not touring or playing any shows.
You're not playing it live or touring it at all?
AV: Yeah.
BG: For me, it's the idea of what it means to perform live. Why is it important that we convince somebody that we're physically playing all of the instruments live? I feel like that doesn't matter, outside of a few nerds who are paying attention. It's more about the energy of the crowd and the back and forth between whoever's on stage, whoever's in the audience, and the dynamic of that. I always feel silly when we play live, and I can only play a maximum of two lines at the same time. I guess if I was better at pedal bass or something maybe I could. We started playing with backing tracks, and sometimes I feel I'd rather just be on stage with a mixer and some effects and messing with the sounds live.
What are you guys listening to these days?
AV: All over the map, for me. I have some beautiful horn speakers and I collect vinyl. I've been getting copies of classics that I want to listen to again, and they sound fresh. I have been enjoying Nick Drake and Judee Sill more than ever. I'll listen to 1999 techno house.
BG: We've done a couple of DJ sets together recently, and it inspired me to go digging for more dance music in general. Somehow I've settled on listening to a lot of random, abrasive techno music, which is super fun. For a while, I was driving around in this ‘70s Mercedes that only had a radio, and I couldn't listen to music in the car that much. I just got a car that has a real stereo in it, so driving around L.A. listening to super loud techno is doing it for me at the moment.
I didn't ask you about any technical stuff, like what cables you use on your mics.
AV: I will say that that I, finally, in this album session, found a microphone that I fell in love with. One that I feel suits my voice. The Neumann M 49.
My favorite microphone.
AW: Is it? The one that I sang on first had belonged to Johnny Cash. I felt it was like a mystical thing. We got a clone of one, I think the FLEA version [FLEA49]. It sounded great. Dave Fridmann loved it so much that he got one of the new Neumann versions. I love that that there's this one microphone that became the vocal sound for the whole album.
BG: Yeah, I thought that was cool. It’s obviously colored in some way, but it also sounds like it makes things sound like music. That's something I like thinking about a lot lately. If you’re in a room listening to people playing on amps and drums, it never sounds like a record, or what you think of as a recording of a band. So, I'm thinking of that all being filtered through these things that we're used to hearing. So, [using the] M 49 was probably the first time that I've heard someone singing on a microphone where I was not even thinking about the sound – the gear aspect of it. Rather, I was just thinking, “That sounds like music.” 
