Andrew Gerhan: Hi! Are you in Marin?
Sonny Smith: West Marin, past where proper Marin ends. It's hippies and ranchers out here; a new life.
AG: I'm in the Catskills, doing dual citizenship with NYC. I'm in the process of converting a barn built in 1900 into a studio and performance space. I want to discuss how we've worked together in different ways, as well as the evolution of our collaboration.
SS: Since it's Tape Op, we should start with tape. For Tomorrow is Alright, what tape machine was that?
AG: Oh, boy… we tracked some on a Pro Tools Digi 002 that Rogue Wave had in the space in West Oakland that I shared, where much of Tomorrow is Alright was tracked.
SS: How come it has such a tape sound? So many people over the years have asked, "How did you get that? It sounds like '50s and '60s tape."
AG: We mixed at Tim Mooney's [Tape Op #47, American Music Club, Sleepers, Sun Kil Moon] studio [Closer Recording]. We mixed to [digital] stereo and then bounced mixes to 2-track tape. I can't remember what his 2-track machine was. He has since passed, so I can't ask.
SS: Some of those songs were tracked on a TASCAM 388. I recorded at Tim Cohen's house with Tim and Shayde [Sartin, both of The Fresh & Onlys]. For "Planet of Women," I remember bringing the 388 to our rehearsal space and recording Kelley [Stoltz] on drums and Shayde on bass, so I must have brought some music to your studio to dump to digital. I remember tracking "Too Young to Burn," "Lovin' on an Older Gal," and "Strange Love" at that studio with you.
AG: You had "Death Cream" mostly recorded. We added hand percussion and backing vocals. You brought the 388 to that space. That's how we did "Loving on an Older Gal" and some others.
SS: That would make sense, because it sounds so warm. The 388 definitely has a sound.
AG: Yeah, it does.
SS: We were all using the 388 at the time. Kelley Stoltz was an influence, a "vintage gear guy," and a lover of the '60s. I hadn't discovered it. I was still "whatever makes a sound." Once I realized that a 388 and [Shure SM]57s were a great sound, recording became fun, easy, and not expensive. Richard Swift [Tape Op #120], who has since passed away, was enamored with Tomorrow is Alright. He asked me how I got that stuff – he was a "vintage gear guy" too. There are people who pursue the vintage sounds, but they use $10,000 microphones, $20,000 tape machines, and $50,000 boards, so they get this shiny, modern version of old music. They're always perplexed at how to sound like Dead Moon or something. It's so easy: You give $100,000 to charity, then you buy $500 worth of equipment, and you make your record. You have to have songs but, technically speaking, the reason you can't get that sound is because you have too much money.
AG: One of the big factors that colors '50s and '60s records is that they were played more live than '70s, '80s and '90s records. There are exceptions, of course, but "Loving on an Older Gal" was 85 percent of the band playing live. And then we added…
SS: A guitar.
AG: …and a couple little things – handclaps and backing vocals. We digitized, did some editing, mixed it through the board at Closer, then dumped all the mixes to tape and back into the computer. It does sound "tape-y." The album is uniform sonically because everything went through the same board and tape machine, even the tracks that weren't 388 but were tracked with Pro Tools.
SS: That's the way to do it.
AG: Mooney had a great Trident board, and we used his groovy outboard reverbs and stuff [Orban 111B and Roland SP-555]. I don't think there's much in the way of plug-ins on there. We were doing as much analog as we could. We were tracking through a [Roland] Space Echo, and we used an [Electro-Voice] RE20 on vocals.
SS: That sound was en vogue in San Francisco at the time.
AG: Are you always writing? When you have eight or ten songs do you say, "All right. Time to do an album." Or do you map out an album and write what you envisioned?
SS: Somewhere in the middle. There are people who conceptualize everything before they embark on the project, but I find that crazy. There has to be a time of unknowing; that intuitive crawling around in the dark and messing around with lyrics in your notebook or your guitar, piano, or whatever, not thinking about the long game. You have to be immersed in discovery, which is hard for artists – it's hard to be in the dark and not know. To me, that's the only way things are created, out of this subconscious place. The conscious state gets in the way. Some songs are maybe, in hindsight, subconsciously influenced by what I was obsessively listening to that year. But, at some point, maybe four or five songs in, I look at it consciously and think, "Wow, I've been making country songs. That’s weird. I didn't realize I was leaning that way." That's what came, and then I can apply conscious will and try to write a few more country songs. That's how I end up with a cohesive record.
AG: Your latest record, Self-Awareness Through Macrame, has a song, "ESP," that we tracked in the Tomorrow is Alright sessions. How did that find its way through the time warp of 15 years and end up on this one?
