You guys worked on Dripfield together. What did you learn in that process that filtered into making Everything Must Go?
Rick Mitarotonda: You want to go first Dan?
D. James Goodwin: I can only speak from my perspective, but a big thing for me was not repeating what we did. I do a lot of multiple records with artists, and the first thing that I think about when we talk about a second, or third, or fourth record is how to not make it like the previous one. Sometimes the music is similar and I’ll have to shoehorn a way in that's different, but in the case of Goose, these guys write so much different types of material that it wasn't hard. Rick wanted to make a record that was much more a capture of the live band energy. Even though we tracked Dripfield mostly as a live band, this was tracked even more as a live band, and there were more extended jams in this record. A big one for me was on the first record they came to me to do a certain thing, and on Everything Must Go it was important for me to trust them more because I knew them. We had a relationship at that point. They really trusted me on Dripfield, and it was my turn to trust them and their instincts more on Everything Must Go. We found a way to blend those two languages together nicely.
RM: Yeah, that was the big thing for me. We talked about it beforehand, honoring what we do live. Honoring our pre-existing approach to a lot of these things, and then abandoning it when it felt exciting, or when there was an authentic pull to something else. But for the most part, we were pretty faithful to the bones of what we were already doing and dressing it up and playing with the aesthetic aspects of it. It's an interesting record in a lot of ways, because it encapsulated a pretty long period of time, and was a companion to a lot of evolution that we went through as people, and as a band. All of that is in there. It's always strange when something is recent and close, the way your perspective shifts on what you've made after time goes by. I'm curious to see how that's going to evolve the perspective of this whole thing. But yeah, it was definitely a poignant experience, and I feel like a lot of growth occurred throughout the period of the making of this record.
Beyond going in with the intent that you were going to try to capture these songs live, and get to the essence of what the band is doing live, was there any other plan going in? How much did that shift? Rick, you mentioned going off the path.
RM: I'm sure we can think of a handful of examples. The title track is a big one for me. We had been playing it with a more of a straight ahead thing, and I wanted to bring it to a different place. The song and its bones is a relatively simple thing, but it felt like it could live in a more experimental or interesting way. That was one of the most exciting parts of the whole process to me. It was exploring that and finding the language that it ended up living in.
DJG: One way we made Dripfield, and the way I prefer to work, and I think Rick now has expressed this too, is working on one song at a time and staying in it for as long as you feel like you've exhausted your creative potential in that song. Whether it's a day, two days, three hours even. Whatever it is, staying inside of that world and exploring all the boundaries of the landscape as much as you can, until you feel like you've exhausted that. We went into making this record knowing that we couldn't quite do that because the band was touring in between sessions, so we couldn't quite work in that way. We all agreed when we finished this record we never want to work that way again [laughs]; splitting it up, and checking back in. We get into this thing, we call it the checklist mode, where now we need rhythm guitars on this track, or percussion on this track. It’s creative, but it's not creative in the same way as when you're in the world and you're like, “Let me see how this weird tambourine sounds through a contact mic through the guitar amp just because I'm interested in it,” and then maybe that goes somewhere else. You don't have a checklist rushing you through the process. That was the one big procedural way in which this record differed, and we kind of had to adjust to the plan. It was a little bit more like, “Okay, what curveball are we being thrown today, and how do we get over it? How do we get through it?”
RM: Definitely a lot of that.
When you set up a session are you setting up stations so that there's a good work flow and you are not stopping the creative process?
DJG: The station thing is definitely big. We spent probably two days at the front end of each block of tracking to do set up. That setup would be a couple of different keyboards for Peter [Anspach] to have so that he had the grand piano, Hammond, [Roland] JUNO, Oberheim, and a Wurlitzer all ready to go. Peter geeks out on this. He's got a massive Emerson, Lake & Palmer keyboard setup in the studio, and that takes a good seven hours to set up. I'm super into it, but it's pretty wild. Rick’s setup is pretty simple, and now that he's got a live sound that’s amazing, we start there. When we do overdubs, we experiment with amps and pedals, but for basics, it's Rick's live comfort zone setup so that he doesn't have to fuck around with feeling comfortable. Peter wants to be comfortable, but Peter's more interested in, “Let me screw with this and see what happens.” He likes that breathing room, and Rick likes the comfort zone. For drums, we set up a kit in the big room at Dreamland [Recording Studios] and then we set up a kit in the dry dead room – which we ended up using for most of the record – and a big percussion setup. I always have a station for me, whether it's I'm doing a guitar overdub or maybe a weird synth overdub. That's in the control room ready to go, so that at any point there's not much we have to do to get a sound on something. There are times when some weird instrument makes itself known and we spend a little time carving it out. But yeah, for the most part I like to spend the time up front getting set up and dialed in so that we can work and be creative and not fuck around with set up. It's super important to me to not think about set up after day one.
RM: That's what I've always loved from the beginning working with Dan [D. James]. I remember the Dripfield times… so much about it felt sneaky. We weren't thinking about the technical at all, which was so liberating. There was never a period where we'd spend hours getting a kick drum sound or anything like that. The conversation, the emphasis, and the focus was all based around the music and the creative. It was enlightening. That's what made it so much fun. And similar to what we were talking about before, being in checklist mode, it starts to feel like work as opposed to when we're in the world. And in that state on both accounts, it's all just play, and that's ultimately the goal; to feel like play and have the childlike excitement of messing around with it and chasing whatever the thing wants to be. Not getting bogged down. Obviously, sometimes things fail and we have to deal with it. But for the most part, I feel Dan does an amazing job of handling that and not getting lost in the weeds, or getting caught on it too much in a way that takes us out of whatever weird creative avenues we want to be exploring.
DJG: I have a little tiny guitar setup that I keep in the studio, so when we're working if I have a quick idea, I can throw it down. It's not to take steam from anybody, it’s more like, “I have this quick idea. It could be cool.” I want to try it, and then we can shed it later. We can explore it later if need be, but more often than not it ends up getting used, and it's me plugging my old [Fender] Jazzmaster into a fuzz pedal, a delay pedal, and then right into my Telefunken V76 [preamp]. I don't even think twice about it. It's like, “That's a cool sound. It works.” Half of my guitar shit on the record, what little there is, is like that. I'm not thinking about it. I'm not like, “Oh, I need to change amps and tweak this,” or put a new mic on the amp. I hate that shit. I love talking and thinking about gear, but not when I'm working.
To Rick's point about maintaining that childlike enthusiasm, that flow and process is about jumping into the stream, and hopefully the stream keeps flowing and you're trying to get to this end destination. When you all jump in the stream together, and there are not a lot of roadblocks, or things slowing down that creative flow, you're gonna get to somewhere more advantageous quicker.
DJG: When I was in my 30s, I went through this long stretch of feeling like I was stunted in the studio. I was working on great records. My career was great. It wasn't that. It felt like, “What's happened to my perception of work over the years?” I went back to when I was a kid in my dad's basement, and how I would work on my 4-track. I had a TASCAM 4-track. What I recognize is that what people love about 4-track recording is the “less rules the better” vibe. What I identified was that I needed to get back to this place, where if I have a microphone in the room, it doesn't matter what it is. I can throw it in front of anything and work. Like when you were a kid, you would put a [Shure SM]57 up over the drum kit, bash out a quick drum thing, and then you would swing the 57 over to the guitar amp. Then you would swing the 57 back over to the bass. It didn't matter what you were using, and that's why it sounded cool. Because your intention was cool, your intention was free, and it wasn't about the microphone or the preamp or whatever expensive cables you use. It was about the freedom of swinging a microphone this way or that and not thinking of it. I don't give a fuck what microphone I'm going to use on an acoustic guitar if I need to do a quick acoustic guitar overdub. I'm going to pick something that I think will work quickly, and we get on with it. That’s how I like to make records. With Goose, being a bigger four piece band that is constantly playing and constantly working together, we need that environment where I can swing a mic around and put something down. It's critical.
Rick, the foundation of Goose is a live band and you are out playing live a ton, stretching out on stage, and improvising a lot. How do you feel that translates from the stage to studio? There are probably benefits and drawbacks. Where does it work and where does it not work?
RM: It's so case by case. We talk about it. Dan’s and my perspective on that have gotten more and more unified. It seems like our instincts are more and more aligned as time goes on. Sometimes it changes. There's material we've been working on recently where whatever the thought was before, we can accomplish what we're trying to say here with a lot less. A lot less time involved. A lot less chasing it down. There are times when that feels good and it works, and then there are times where we can get the point across in much fewer measures. Which is a challenge, especially because it gets into this thing where we're chasing, searching, and fighting, and sometimes we’ll fall into this attitude of not wanting to stop until it feels like we’ve got it somewhere worthwhile. Sometimes it doesn’t. A good majority of the time it's not realistic. You can't pierce the veil every time you get after it. It doesn't work that way; it never will. Developing the mechanism to know when to exit out the back door, kindly bow your head, and bid that thing adieu. On Everything Must Go, there are a few spots where we chose to do more of a thing like we do live, but in a more distilled way. Obviously, we're not going as deep as we would live. Sometimes the things are more “in the box" and we want to get a nice, tight little solo in there. Sometimes it's like, “Alright, let's try to blow the lid off and see what happens.” Sometimes we do that and it doesn't go anywhere, and we have to figure out another way to make a recording that feels compelling enough as a statement to us. Other times, we try that and something cool happens. There are a handful of times that we've done live solos or improvisations that stand out, and I’m sure we'll continue to pick our moments where we do that.
Was there much editing?
DJG: There was a lot of editing, but editing sectionally. I've done this a lot. I started making live to 2-track jazz records, mostly improvised jazz, so I did a lot of 2-track editing between improv or solos and whatnot. So, it's something I've done a lot of. I'm a huge fan of improvised music in general. I'm trying to say this with humility, but I think I'm quite good at it. Taking stuff that's improvised and totally freeform, but making it feel like it's structured. There was a lot of that. Most of the notes played on this record are improvised notes, aside from the parts that are endemic to the song. Peter will compose keyboard parts that are obviously endemic to the song. Rick too, but then we'll go back over and maybe I have this thing I'll have Rick do, what I call a "winder." And that's like "dude in the room playing along," and then I'll pick moments out of that that go into the song, but they're not "parts." I could think the only person putting "parts" on the record is me. It's like my pop sensibility can't help it, but most of the stuff on the records are improvised to a large degree or at least improvised within some semblance of order. It's like, “Yes I know these are my boundaries, but I'm going to improvise within those boundaries of the song, and from that perspective there's editing." We're editing guitar solos, or maybe an extended jam section, but anything that you hear was played as a performance for the most part. There's very little going in and doing cut and paste, [Avid] Beat Detective, or any shit like that. Most of it's very, very, very loose.
RM: The only times we're carving parts like that is when we're hitting harmonies on a guitar part or figuring out Jimmy Page–style guitar stacks to fit on an improvised part. On “Dustin Hoffman," I was having a brain fart day, and it took me a minute to figure out the harmonies. It was this improvised solo, then we were like “Alright, maybe if we cut it off here, and then stack some harmonies on top of what it's doing there and hit that…” I feel those are some of the only times where we're figuring out a part, but it's in response to an improvised something that happened in real time.
Some of these songs are massive sounding. “Feel It Now” is an epic! This record captured that feeling of being in a large space.
DJG: I wanted to prove everybody in the world wrong and make a great jam band record. Everybody says the last great jam band record was Workingman's Dead, which isn't even a jam band record. It's a great record by a jam band. I wanted to make a great fucking record, and have it be all the things that Goose is, which is a pop band, a rock band, and a dark improvised, free form band. Also, a bright uplifting party band. All of those are in Goose's language, and Dripfield was a stylized way to distill a couple of facets of that onto a record, which was part of the missive. Like, “Let’s not make a jam band record. Let's make a stylized version of what we do on this side of the spectrum.” This was like full color to me. A full spectrum of what the band does, in so many ways. It's really hard to make jams work on record, but I think we successfully did it here.
Rick, why was Dan your choice for working together? What had he done in the past that made you interested in working with him?
RM: It was mostly Bonny Light Horseman. During the pandemic I was listening to that [self-titled] record a ton. That record was on constant rotation in the house we were all renting. We had just finished a record that we belabored for a long time. We did a lot of editing on it, and a lot of it was in the weeds for a long time. It was very much a jam band record, but it was a conceptual jam band record of some kind. By the time we were done with it, I hated it. Now, I love it and appreciate what it was. It seems like it's a pretty common thing amongst artists. It's this knee jerk reaction. Every move is a reaction to the last move. At that time, it was like everything that was that process we wanted to do completely differently, we did, and it was awesome. That experience informed this experience, and then this experience is informing the next one, which has already long been in percolation at this point. Our heroes – I'll hear about their knee jerk reactions to incredible things they made, how they pivoted and responded to that, and going in a completely different direction. That is the most inspiring.
You mentioned something about the people that have come before you. Goose does a ton of covers in the live show, but there are some pretty fun references on this record from a listener standpoint.
DJG: It's funny, because I hate being referential in the studio. We'll do it for shorthand because sometimes it works. There was a track on Dripfield where the only way I could say to these guys what I was hearing in my head was to play a JJ Cale track, and it worked well as shorthand for what we were doing. Not to copy, but shorthand. And the only dogma I ever have is never to try to copy something. If I were to say, "I want this track to feel like [Peter Gabriel’s] 'Solsbury Hill'", it would never feel that way because your relationship to it is so specific, and it's endemic to how you're feeling that day. There's so much baggage in doing that, but if you have the freedom to express these reference points internally, you can filter through your prism, which I think we do. In the studio, we don't talk about references all that much, but we'll throw around a couple words in the beginning of the process. Maybe we'll talk about Michael Jackson. Like, “Man, listen to Thriller… dude, that fucking record kills.” Or Peter Gabriel’s second record. For me, it's a couple of those Yes or King Crimson records that influence a lot of drum sounds that I love. That respect is cool, and it doesn't have to be overly referential. We all have influences. We're at this point in music and making records where it's doing something legitimately new and fresh is pretty rare. And nobody ever did anything new and fresh because they were searching out something new and fresh, they did something new and fresh because they were just free. That, to me, is the important thing; to just be free. If that means that something sounds a little bit like something else, that's okay. That freedom is cool. You have to embrace it.
RM: It's an effective way to communicate in energy, and a worthwhile way to communicate. It's mostly about the communication in the studio when you're trying to describe a feeling that a certain music can evoke. How else do you do it besides giving the reference point of music that elicited a similar feeling? The determining factor maybe is like someone who's able to chameleon, and adopt musical styles, or something versus the core instinct or the core expression of what you're trying to do. Being authentic and coming from a place that you relate to, and that you feel deeply, as opposed to doing it to do it because you're able to. Making all the references and fusing odd combinations of reference points is an interesting thing. It's something that's happening more and more. It's this digital age where we're in; the influences are all like a soup. So, it's the way they blend together in unique ways, and it seems how things are evolving more and more.
DJG: Rick, we were talking about references at some point over dinner or something, and you mentioned how Radiohead was putting up blog posts of what they had all been listening to for a while. And when you go back and look at them, you'll hear it. I guess it was The King of Limbs period, and there was a bunch of Krautrock, other various bands, and electronic stuff. You could obviously hear that Thom Yorke and Johnny [Greenwood] or whoever was filtering all that. That's what they were ingesting all the time at that point. So yeah, even Radiohead, who's consistently doing something new and interesting in the studio, they're obviously referencing things and using it as shorthand.
GS: In terms of the references, that's how in the studio you can communicate ideas. That it’s your job as a producer, and as an artist, to have a massive library of things in your head, to be an active listener, and a music fan.
DJG: It's also how we learn to play our instruments. Every single person who's ever played an instrument ever in the history of mankind has learned it from somebody else, who has learned it from somebody. You're constantly ingesting influences and reference points no matter what instrument you play. No matter how you come to music it, all gets in there.
I'd love to hear about where you recorded but also maybe talk about the importance of a space. The setting is tantamount to making good records.
DJG: Yeah. Space is huge. We did most of the tracking at Dreamland in upstate New York. I was still living in New York at the time, but I've since moved to Virginia and built my studio here. A big part of the reason was that the band was comfortable there. They had done some tape transfers there. Rick and I worked on a project in between Dripfield, this record that's separate, so there was a good deal of comfort there at the time. The room is big and open sounding. It's live and splashy, which is great for acoustic instruments. Not amazing for drums, but I've cracked the code on what I like in terms of drums in the big room. It's also got a small booth. I love super dead drum sounds. Not necessarily '70s, but the ability to compress the shit out of it in staged, layered ways becomes effective in a small dead room. The routine there was great, and most of the tracking was done there. I did some overdubs at my studio, and then we did a ton of overdubs at Rick’s studio, The Chateau. Most of the vocals, some guitar overdubs, and random other bits here and there, but that was the bulk of it.
RM: That process seems to be feeling good for us. We're non-committal to where basic tracking happens. We've been working at a newer place in the same Woodstock area recently that we liked. But the idea of bopping around for basic tracking and then doing a lot of overdubs here tends to be working pretty well.
DJG: Yeah Rick's got The Chateau dialed up pretty well, and we're getting more dialed on gear that we need as we go. Switching studios helps, because we get access to different instruments. So, you have an instrument that plays an important role, and you find these little things that happen in new places, that you haven't worked in before, where you can more easily break patterns and habits, which I like. I appreciate that. Working at my studio in Woodstock for 12 years, I had a bunch of habits and patterns built in, all of which worked well but I was welcome to the change when it happened because I got bored. I like finding a new space. You find creative avenues to utilize that space, and to extrapolate what it's doing for your spiritual mindset and your sonic mindset. It’s important.
RM: Totally. To Dan’s point earlier about continuing to make records together, seeking out that evolution in the records, and efforts to make them have different lives: Going to different spaces, there's the one-to-one, obviously shit's gonna sound different because it's a different space, different equipment, and everything. But arguably more important is the shift in mindset and getting out of any comfort zone. Dreamland was like sleep away camp. We had all of our routines there and we loved it. We went to a new studio recently, and within the first couple of days it was like, “We want to go back to summer camp.” By the end of it, we're like, “No let's keep working here. This is good for now.” It's good to put ourselves in situations where we're challenging whatever wiring we have.
I like the idea of putting yourself in different situations to spark something that is outside of the well-worn path.
DJG: The only time I like the well-worn path is my mixing studio. It needs to be my thing; set the way I like it. There are people I know who like mixing in different spaces, and I am not one of them. I like mixing in my space the way I have my shit set up, and that's that.
Speaking to that, you produced this record, you engineered the majority of this record, you mixed this record, and you mastered this record. How do you maintain some sort of perspective on the work?
DJG: That's a good question. I'm almost inclined to say that I don't need to maintain perspective because if it's good, it's good. I think you follow your instincts, and I've been making records for a minute, so I don't feel like at any point I'd lose perspective. If I do lose perspective, I step back, break it down, and think about it. But, for the most part, it's like I know how I want stuff to capture. I know how I want it to sound, and the mastering thing started happening because I got tired of getting masters back and have them not be as good as my mixes, and I knew what they were doing. Most of my gear was the same gear that somebody like [Greg] Calbi [Tape Op #86] was using. Years ago, when I would work with Calbi, I would find that I liked the sound of a compressor that he was using, so I'd eventually buy it. I realized that the nice thing a mastering engineer can bring is if you've been really mired in the muck for a long time on a record it might help you distill some stuff. But the truth is, I'm pretty comfortable with how I make things sound, and I never really feel that lost. I'm not saying that to be arrogant. I'm comfortable, so I know I make good records, and I'm comfortable with how I'm committal too. When I find a thing that sounds really good, I like it and that's how it's going to be. I don't ever feel there are times where I revisit something and I'm like, “I wish I could have that one back.” But I'm also completely comfortable with the idea that you commit that thing, and then it lives in that state, it's there, you move forward, and you make new stuff. That's how I always feel about it.
