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.
Before I was making any money doing recordings, I was delivering pizza on a bike in New York for two years. I did a lot of biking. I love it.
You mentioned earlier that you're building a new studio for the band with a 3M tape machine?
It's in the works. We've got some gear. We made the album [Dance of Love] for [the late] Tucker Zimmerman there. We got the gear, made the Tucker Zimmerman record, worked out some of the kinks, and learned a lot about what we had. We've got an MCI board, the JH-400 series, a 3M tape machine, and a couple of 2-tracks: An Ampex and an ATR. It's a fully analog studio. Maybe in the future we'll have a little digital rig in there to be able to perform ideas quickly, but Big Thief mostly tries to record to tape. Since we mostly track all together and Adrianne sings all at once, it makes sense as a workflow. It feels natural and it sounds really good, so we try and do as many pure tape sessions as we can. It's exciting! We want it to be where we basically have no outboard gear; just the board, the tape machine, and some mics. We want to keep it pretty simple so we don't end up having to fix stuff all the time. We're going to have to do that anyway, with the 3M deck. It's still fun to go to another studio, but we’re excited to have our own permanent spot to make records that we can continually come back to.
Adrianne cuts most of her vocals live, with the music?
Yeah, which is interesting as a drummer, as well as a producer and engineer. That's the constant technical puzzle of every session: The vocal sound, with whatever's going on around it, and getting a spill sound in the vocal mic that sounds good. I've definitely learned a lot about good spill over the years through Dom Monks, who's engineered a bunch of Big Thief records, along with Philip Weinrobe [Tape Op #167] and Sarlo. We do a lot of moving drums around to find where the drum bleed sounds good in the vocal mic. Like, "Oh, that's a beautiful room sound." Often, it's being closer to Adrianne, which was counterintuitive to me at first. Sometimes we have to get closer, so that most of the drum sound is just coming down her vocal mic and then just a few instruments are coming off the close mics. But it's the best to track all together. We know whether we have something or not relatively quickly when the singer's cutting their vocal live. We can add a couple of little things, and if it's not happening, we know to not bark up the wrong tree and just try it again another day or try a different approach. Versus when you're not tracking live, then you're building up this production, you put a vocal down, and something's off and you're trying to reverse engineer it and you're confused. I've done a lot of that as well!
Do you use a lot of ribbon mics and use the null of the figure eight?
Yeah, definitely some of that. I do love ribbon mics. We've done all sorts of different things. When you're using that much spill, you get crafty. It's also very room to room, and studio to studio; the same trick doesn't really work twice. We'll be in a carpeted room, and some configuration will work that sounds amazing. I'll try that in another studio and it's totally off. It requires a lot of intentional and engaged set up time, which is nice because once you have something that sounds good and feels good to play in, you can just take off and not worry about it so much. It always takes us two or three days to find the exact place where the line of sight and sound works. We'll often have little vocal monitors. I'll be getting a little vocal or a little bit of Adrianne's guitar through a speaker, in the room. I'd say maybe half the time we use headphones, and half the time we don't. I've also learned to play quieter. That helps a lot too.
Your solo records, which – in contrast to Big Thief – bounce between experimental, electronic, noisy, and ambient. What's your process on those records?
As far as process goes, it changes from solo record to solo record. But most of those are the combination of ongoing musical experiments and more conceptual things that I’m exploring in life. With Performing Belief, it started as a study for myself in observing, reconnecting, and searching for my own feel. I did these small, personal performances when I found myself moved by the greater living world – whenever I was outside and connecting with the land, I would find sounds and improvise. Rubbing rocks, splashing water, and lots of dancing. I did this for years and I had this pile of recordings that eventually went through this big transformation and translation into a sort of club grammar. To present the essence of those performances I felt it needed to be manipulated and unified with the computer and logic of dance music, which of course is also a deep love and fascination of mine. I had to unify the process of gathering those performances with the process of me sitting on my laptop, tinkering and making shit to be legible to me as something that felt important enough to share. Of course, there are other ideas lurking in there but that gives a process sense. I’m always working on music, often not knowing how or what it will fit into, if anything. We all do a lot of music making outside of Big Thief, and we are bringing in ideas and processes we’ve learned into the fold while simultaneously also giving each other space to explore pathways outside of the band. It all eventually feeds into the other, on the micro scale of the band and on the grandest scale. I don’t see any of this creation and exploration as separate, really.
You're working all in Ableton Live?
Yep. It was mostly made in Ableton with some outboard gear. I use a lot of Audio to MIDI, via Ableton and plug-ins. With that I can sync my rhythms to my machines and they can become one. I also use a lot of MIDI-controlled prepared piano on the record, a massive acoustic synthesizer I can sync with the feels.
Plus, a lot of found sounds and field recordings?
It all stems from the performance field recording and the search for inspiring sounds outside. Then playing with those sounds and trying to feel out the way they want to be sounded. What is the essence of our interaction? What is it asking for? It’s layers and layers of performance, once it’s translated into the track. When I am playing a bush, or a pile of rocks, or anything – they all have some intrinsic rhythmic qualities and essences that present themselves to be explored. The way they bounce back – their weight in my hand, etc. – it all greatly affects what I am called to play. The same goes for the way they sound.
When you say that you’re syncing up drum machines, is that soft synths in Ableton or are you using external hardware?
It’s both. I used a lot of the Behringer RD-9, the [Roland TR-]909 copy. Having MIDI running from Ableton to the RD-9 tuning drums. The Audio to MIDI is so precise, the transient of the drum machine and the transient of whatever you're playing – the piece of wood or the bits on the water – they sync up and combine in interesting, uncanny ways. I was doing some syncing in the computer with my own samples, and then a lot of RD-9 to bring in that context of sound too. The dryness of a 909 sound shares something with the dryness of a Zoom recording.
You've also done production and collaborations with other artists, like the Westerman record [An Inbuilt Fault]. It reminds me a little bit of the later Talk Talk albums. What was your role in that?
Will Westerman was familiar with me for records I'd done with Mega Bog, another great band that I've worked with a lot. He was looking for a producer for a new project and was wanting to try some new ideas. We met a couple times on the road, and then we had some chats to discuss ideas. I've produced a fair amount for other people, but it was mostly for artists in my more immediate community. Will was one of the first people where I didn't know this person and he was asking me to produce a record. We had a lot of chats because I was curious about his vision for what he was wanting to do, and how he imagined doing it. Less about sound and more about process. How did he want to do it? What were the songs calling for? What’s the record communicating? I’m of the production mindset that the process itself should be free, wild, creative, safe, and outside of the critical mind as much as possible. Because we are dealing with recordings, there will always be plenty of opportunities to sit back and be critical, as well as to listen and judge and shape. As much as possible, I want the atmosphere of making the music to not be too infected with judgement. Beyond setting up that sort of environment, I see my main role as a producer is to be a "get shit done" helpful person – which looks different for every session. Some people need a lot of hand holding in dealing with logistics, and some people have specific sonic things they are trying to achieve but don’t quite know how to get there. With Westerman, it all just aligned and we were coming from the same creative space. The demos he was showing me were amazing.
Did you record it all as well?
It was mostly engineered by Philip Weinrobe. We did most of it in L.A. I was playing drums and we had a couple other musicians coming through. Luke Temple played on it a little bit. This amazing trombone player, Robin Eubanks, played on it, and lots of others. We had an initial tracking session at a studio in L.A. called Tropico Beauty – a great studio – and came away with the bones. We spent another three weeks with just me and Will, adding and subtracting. Cutting some songs here and there, experimenting a lot, and focusing on some of the more nitty gritty arrangement textural details of it. Marta Salogni [Tape Op #153] mixed the record and also did some additional overdubbing and production with Will during the mix. She’s amazing.
I love the drum sound on that. It feels different than a lot of drums I've heard you play.
Before we made the record, I bought three new kick drums and a few orphaned toms and snares. I remember thinking, "What would a professional drummer do?" They would have a bunch of cool drums, right? I can nerd out, and I love and appreciate gear, but most times I just don’t care about it. I didn’t own a drum set for the first few years of Big Thief. Someone loaned me the Premier I still play today, and eventually I bought it from them. Knowing the kind of open beautiful drum sound we were going for, it was a good excuse to try some new drums. We were both hearing this lush, full spectrum, dry-but-orchestral drum sound. The drums and the acoustic guitar we wanted to be open, full, organic, alive, and big. Those were the grounded elements for everything to sit on. Credit to Phillip and Marta for achieving that.
You're doing a lot of session drumming too. Aaron Dessner [Tape Op #141, #133] seems to haul you into his crew quite a bit.
Totally. I find session work to be a grounding practice, because it's one of the most egoless roles in a project. With Big Thief, or with my own productions, I’m often in a deep struggle trying to steer the sound to what’s in my head. Or, I’m trying to discover this thing that’s on the edge of what I can consciously imagine. I can end up being critical during the editing and mixing. Sometimes it’s not, but sometimes it is. It’s very hard to make records. Whereas with session work, I think of myself as a tool or a smaller part of the whole. I’m listening to the artist and producer, and I’m trying to make them light up. I’m not tripping on ego stuff – I’m throwing my best efforts and ideas out there and trusting they’ll take what fits, as well as what they connect with. It's not my problem to worry if it's "good" or not. Which is a deep lesson I’ve taken with me. Even when you’re producing, or you are the artist, it’s still really valuable to be able to access that space where good and bad don’t exist. Where you’re just trying stuff and trying to get the room hyped.
You probably learn new things every session.
Oh, totally. I mean that's one of the things I miss about working at a studio. When other engineers come in, there are all these little tricks that are just weird habits or things that people naturally find out over time. It’s the same with session work. You see how engineers and other artists work.
I feel like drummers make good producers. We were talking about not having an ego, and I feel like the drummer, as opposed to the lead singer or the lead guitarist, they have the role of building the foundation. It's easier to transition into the role of producer.
There's definitely something to that. Good drummers are focused on if the whole thing is working, and they have a lot of power to shape it. Especially with most of the drumming I do. None of it is technically so challenging that I'm having to think really hard about how to play the parts. I tend to gravitate toward parts that feel good, loose, and natural in my body so I can have fun, perform, and be more in the song and the moment. When you are in that space and not tripping on your own playing, that’s maybe where the "producer" perspective is taking hold. I can feel when the whole thing is happening or not, and because I’m a part of the foundation. I can make subtle tweaks that have ripples.
