Let's start with the first Big Thief record [Masterpiece], which you recorded but did not play drums on and Andrew Sarlo [Tape Op #134] produced. How did that project come about?
My friend Andrew was producing the record – we were pals back in school – and he'd asked me to engineer it. I was aware of Buck [Meek] and Adrianne [Lenker]'s music. I'd seen them play a lot in New York, and we had an overlapping community friend group. I was super stoked to engineer it and to hear them with a full band, because I'd mostly just seen Adrianne solo. They had borrowed a friend's house in upstate New York, and we brought a bunch of gear and borrowed a bunch of gear to make the record. During that session, they parted ways with their drummer. I was already a fan of Adrianne's music and songwriting, but when you get to see behind the scenes it can either be very affirming or disappointing. But during that experience, I was like, "Wow, this is the real deal." Adrianne was writing all the time, and I felt like the music she had put out was just scratching the surface. When they had to part ways with their drummer, I gave it a couple days during the session and then said, "You guys, I am your drummer." They had never heard me play drums. I was playing guitar in a lot of bands in New York and they were like, "Wait, you're a drummer?" But Sarlo chimed in and said, "Trust me. He's going to be a great fit." I knew the songs, and there were a few shows right after the session – at one of those two shows Luke Temple [Tape Op #126] was there and asked us to go on tour with Here We Go Magic the next month, and it just kicked off immediately.
But how did you get to the point where you had the skills to be the engineer for that session?
I had always been engineering and mixing my band's albums since I was a little kid. I got into it early on because of my uncle. I had a band on my block in Chicago called Broken Parasite. We started in fourth grade, and my uncle is this wonderful, eccentric, recording technology hobbyist. His Christmas present to me every year was that he would make an album of me and my friends. It was cute. He would bring a little [Sony] MiniDisc player and a mixer, and he would record us for a day; very lo-fi and simple but he would take it seriously. The first couple ones were in fourth or fifth grade, and we didn't even have influences yet. I was hitting a snare drum, my next door neighbor, Pete, was playing a cello, and our friend Jack from across the street had a guitar that we would put all the tuning pegs at 12 o'clock because we wanted to straighten it out. It was total chaos music. My uncle would say, “Sounds good. Do you want to do another take?" I got the recording bug from him. Then I started recording my own band in high school, and got into making records with my [Digidesign] Mbox.
Did you have any formal training?
I went to Berklee [College of Music]. I went there for drumming but ended up studying Music Production and Engineering. I met some mentors. Susan Rogers [Tape Op #117] was a teacher there who I was drawn to and learned a lot from. I got into formally learning about consoles, tape machines, and all of that there while secretly working on my own records for my bands back in Chicago. I was also recording bands in Boston in all the off hours' time in the Berklee studios.
You mentioned earlier that you were working in a studio in Brooklyn.
It was before the first Big Thief record. I had moved to New York after going to school in Boston; I was mostly playing guitar and computers in bands and recording. I was on a bit of a drum break. I was a little burnt out from the music school experience of drumming, so I was not drumming very much, but I was still playing a lot of music. I started interning at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn, and over the course of a year so I became a staff engineer there. It was, and still is, a great studio. It was mostly a jazz spot, which was good for recording a lot of live musicians together, with a lot of turnovers. A lot of two or three day sessions. Record two days and mix one day. I got to record a lot of amazing musicians. Jazz cats are always bringing in their own kits, and they take pride in the character and sonic uniqueness of what they play. I got to record a lot of different kinds of drums and drummers. It was educational and good practice. I probably did hundreds of all different kinds of sessions. It was a great spot to be able to work in. They had a Neve, an SSL, and all the good mics.
Let's skip ahead a number of years and talk about the Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You record. It's one of my favorite Big Thief albums. The songs on it are just so stellar. You produced it, and that's a lot of trust from the band. But it’s also a fair amount of trust on your part that you guys would survive it, and that after producing them, you would still all be friends, and they'd want to continue to work with you.
The way Big Thief works in the studio with any producer is fairly similar, in that there's a lot of input from the band. We each have our own strong opinions, and there's a consensus to get to the final thing. That's been consistent between all the records, and I just had this idea of how I could hear us recording in a bunch of different locations and configurations. The different locations matching up with the different kinds of songs that Adrianne was writing, because she has all these different worlds and so many songs – there are always way too many to fit on one record. We're often feeling, "Oh shit. Which ones are we going to record?" I was building this idea in my mind of how we could do it at different spots, with different engineers for each batch of songs, and then stitch it together. I was talking to a friend about it, and they said, "It sounds like you should just produce it if you have all these ideas about how you want to do it." I thought about it for a couple months. I was mostly worried about being present for the music and also being able to be critical. But at that point we had built so much trust between us that it felt pretty natural. I chose engineers that I could lean on a lot while I was out there playing drums. I wrote a two-page speech, and I gave them a pitch in the lobby of a hotel somewhere on tour. I was saying, "Here's my passion, here's what I would bring to it, and here's my idea of how it should go down." They all said, "Let's do it." We were originally going to do it all over the world in six different locations. But we ended up doing it during early Covid, so it got pared down to the U.S. in four different spots. It was Flying Cloud Recording in upstate New York, run by Sam Owens [Sam Evian]. We did the first session there, and then we did a session in Topanga Canyon, California, at Fivestar Studios, Jonathan Wilson’s [Tape Op #96] place, with Shawn Everett [#115] engineering. We did a session in the Rockies in Colorado at Studio in the Clouds at 11,000 feet with Dom Monks. The last session we did with our friend Scott McMicken [Dr. Dog, #62] in Tucson, Arizona, at his home studio.
You had different people mixing it, also?
Yeah, we tried to mix as we went along. We would record for two or two and a half weeks per place, and then we’d spend two or three days mixing everything. I'd say 50 percent of the mixes were those mixes from the original sessions. Some we remixed after. I ended up remixing some of the songs that other engineers had done, because I was hearing it differently or something on it wasn't quite getting to where I was wanting it. But we were mostly mixing on the fly. Otherwise, it would have been too much. That was built into it. "We have to mix as we go, otherwise we're going to lose our minds at the end when we come back to all this."
It's a consistent record, considering it was recorded all over the place. Is that partially because you were mixing as you went along?
I think so, and part of it is because it happened during peak lockdown. We were together the whole time; we were in our bubble, going from studio to studio. We would do a session, then drive and take a week off. Then we'd do another session, stay in California, take two weeks off, and then all drive together to the next session. We were in this very concise bubble, and it was still pretty early on in Covid times. I don't think we had ever emptied the bag of songs to that extreme. By the end, we had recorded every song Adrianne had and we had tried every idea we had. We pushed ourselves to the edge, in a cool way. That was probably part of the consistency, just that we were together that whole time.
Is there unreleased material from that?
Oh, yeah. I think we did 55 songs and 20 ended up on the record. It was hard to sequence. We actually asked for help from a bunch of our close friends. We gave them the full batch of mixed songs and said, “Hey, can you sequence this down to a double record? What's your ideal sequence?” We listened to a bunch of those to get inspiration. It was an intense, long process to do the sequencing.
In total contrast, your new record, Double Infinity, you did in one studio, Power Station [at BerkleeNYC]. Was that all live?
Yep. We were in the big Studio A room for two thirds of it, and then we moved across the hall for another half. So, it's half in the big room, half in one of the smaller rooms.
That big room is huge.
It's massive, yet the sound is not unruly.
Was that intimidating playing in there, or did it feel like you were able to create a space within it?
It felt good. Because of the nature of the construction – where it's the three rooms within the room, and the glass separating the three rooms – we all set up pretty close to the center. The drums, bass, and (I think) Buck's guitar were out in the big room. Laraaji [Tape Op #141] was playing zither and droning sounds, and Mikel Patrick Avery, Jon Nellen, and the other percussionists were in the other side room. Mikey [Buishas], who played piano and keys, was going back and forth. Adrianne and the singers – June McDoom, Alena Spanger, and Hannah Cohen – were in the third room. It was a big band, so it was nice to have a lot of space. We were separated a little bit, but we still had a close proximity. It’s hard to describe.
This has nothing to do with the recording, but I read that you guys would ride your bicycles to the studio every day.
Totally. In the winter. We were all staying in Brooklyn – I live there now. When we all met in Brooklyn, we were avid bikers. We rekindled that spirit a little bit for the session. It was good. Especially to wind down at night, because we’re always so hyped after a session. It's hard to come down, but an hour bike ride does help!
I once had a job as a bike messenger, and I used to commute about a mile home which was really nice at the end of the day.
