First I talked with Julia and Dave:
I heard you rented a cabin to write the new record, ended up going back to the cabin, and then were in Electrical Audio?
Julia Steiner : Yes, this was our first time making a record in what we called a multi-phase approach. A patchwork quilt is another way to think of it, where we were recording in three – really almost four – very distinct environments. A lot of this sprang directly from Chris Walla. He pitched the idea to us where we would start the sessions by going back to this cabin in Wisconsin. We found this cabin up in Wisconsin. We had stumbled upon it when it was time to start working in earnest on the new record and writing together. It's just a regular old vacation rental; anyone can stay there.
Dave Sagan: It's on a large plot of land, so we could fill the room with gear, turn up, and not bother anybody.
JS: Yeah, no neighbors. That's a crucial, crucial aspect of what we were looking for. So, we found this cabin, and it ended up sounding good, which was shocking because it's not a professional recording environment or meant to be recorded in at all. It's just a wooden house.
DS: We sent the demos off to Chris as we were starting to figure out how we wanted to record the album. Chris said, "These sound cool. Would you want to go back there and try to do it for real?" That was step one.
JS: So, we did a week there and then we went back to Chicago.
You did the week of writing and then went back for another week?
JS: Yes. There was some time in between. That writing week was in March of 2024. It was almost a year later that we ended up going back with Chris. We did a week up there and then came back to Chicago and did two weeks at the legendary Electrical Audio, Steve Albini's studio [Tape Op #10, #24, #87]. We had a week in Studio B and then a week in Studio A. Have you been to Electrical?
I have. It was 20 years ago or so and Steve gave me a tour. I remember one large room and I remember the adobe brick and the insane mic collection, but it's a little hazy beyond that.
JS: From everything we've learned, it has stayed remarkably true to itself and very consistent. A big part of that is the spaces and the materials they're built from. None of that has changed. And the differences between Studio A and Studio B are quite noticeable and complementary. We were excited to have a dedicated week in each of those spaces. And then we stitched them together. We integrated both of those rooms, even within single songs sometimes on the record. It was awesome.
Did Chris lug a tape machine out to the cabin then?
DS: No. For the cabin, Chris brought over, two [Universal Audio] Apollo's x8s and a bunch of mics from his collection. He grabbed a bunch of our amps and a couple of our mics. He had these Josephson [C]705s and the [C]715. He really loved those. And a smaller Josephson [C]617 [omni] we used for acoustic guitar.
JS: It was a relatively stripped down setup in the cabin. We were recording digitally, and Chris had two checked suitcases full of gear. Everything else was just our own mishmash of gear that we drove up from Chicago.
He mostly used the preamps in the Apollo? He didn't bring a console or big racks of mic pres in?
DS: Yeah, just the Apollo pres mostly. He brought one of the Great River preamps because he loves that company. They're fucking awesome.
Your record is an endorsement for the Santa Cruz, California, audio community because you've got Josephson and UA, both based in Santa Cruz.
JS: We need to get out there. We’ve never been!
They're all really nice people.
JS: Yeah, I fell in love with those Josephson microphones over the course of making this record. That would be a really cool place to check out sometime in person.
DS: Chicago is like Josephson's second home because Steve really loved them
JS: Yeah, Electrical! They have a great mic collection. Chris was just tracking straight into his laptop, no frills. It was not a professional recording environment at all. But it was so fun because we were able to get cool sounds. And three and a half of the songs on the record are from that space up at the cabin. I think they sound good, to where you wouldn't even be able to notice that they're not from Electrical with the amazing tape machines and console and everything.
DS: When we got into Electrical we did bounce a couple of the songs through the Studer tape machine.
JS: That's true; give them a little layer of saturation.
DS: We were doing live takes on all the songs. We pretty much played a live take of everything in the cabin. Then we were doing live takes of everything at Electrical. Sometimes it turned out we liked the version at the cabin, so we just committed to that.
JS: Yeah, the bulk of the record was recorded to 24-track tape from live takes at Electrical.
Did you mix it from the tapes, or did it get bounced from the tapes into a DAW?
DS: We moved pretty quickly into the DAW once we had a take we were all happy with. Electrical was set up so that whenever we're monitoring, listening back to the take, it's being dumped in real time. It's easy to catalog everything and revisit later without queuing up too much.
JS: Yeah, overdubs were in [Avid] Pro Tools.
DS: We had two reels of tape and we were constantly recycling and recording over our old takes once they were dumped. Tape’s expensive.
Did you mix it at Electrical also? What was the process?
JS: No, we sent it off to Chris Shaw [Tape Op #83] down in Austin [Texas] who mixed the record, with the exception of track one, “Open Up” and track eight, “Just Want You To Know The Truth,” which Chris Walla mixed remotely in Norway. But Chris Shaw did most of the mixing. I haven't seen his space. We haven't even met him or ever spoken with him. He's like the man behind the curtain. But his discography speaks for itself. He's a master. We were really, really excited to get to work with him.
A few days later, we Facetimed with Chris Walla from Norway:
What did you enjoy about the Ratboys project? I heard you were the one suggested they go back to the cabin they made the album demos in?
That's right. When I got the first batch from them, there were a handful of full band demos that they had made in this cabin with everybody just blazing in the room together. Those recordings had such a cool character about them. So, I started asking questions like, "What was that space? Did you like it? Was it inspiring? Would you want to go back there?" The idea was very much that it's rehearsal and pre-production. We're just going to be tightening the screws on everything, but with the idea that we would actually bring a whole multitrack rig and track everything for real. So, that's what we did. And, lo and behold, three and a half songs on the record came out of the cabin, which is very fun.
Cool. And you tracked that straight into the mic pres on a couple of your [Universal Audio] Apollo 8xs?
Yeah, I had two x8Ps and an x4, so it was 20 inputs. I used the UA API Preamp plug-in all across the board, but otherwise there was none of the Unison stuff. I kept it simple. A pretty straight capture.
No outboard mic preamps?
The only outboard mic I brought was my little one-channel Great River [ME-1NV]. That is just such a desert island thing for me.
Yeah, Dan’s [Kennedy] gear is great.
And an [Universal Audio] LA-3A. That was the vocal chain.
After that, you went to Electrical and tracked everything there to tape, right?
That's right. The idea was to get a whole variety of spaces and feels across the record. I think we did that pretty successfully. There are a couple of songs where we start in [Studio] B and then it finishes in [Studio] A. That sort of thing. It was fun.
What is it that attracted you to working with the band in the first place. How did that come about?
I first saw them play when they were on tour with Foxing for a while in 2019, after I had done the Foxing record [Nearer My God]. I guess I saw them play in Seattle and they really spoke to me. They were both serious and also strangely really light. Julia’s stage presence is so fun and so endearing, and the songs reached me, I guess. I don't pursue a lot of bands, but I made a pitch to make that last Ratboys record, 2023's The Window. I'm so happy they went for it. It was so much fun. It's a really fun record.
Below are more photos from the Singin’ To An Empty Chair sessions all taken by Ratboys' drummer Marcus Nuccio on film:
