What lured you into music?
I have a very early memory that bonded me, not just to music, but to recorded music. I couldn't have been more than four, maybe five. I'm 60 now, and I can still feel it. I had one of those little kid plastic record players that played 45s. I already understood that a song could bring about intense emotions, but then I discovered that songs had specific parts that would captivate me like nothing else in my little kid world could do. In all the chaos of my kid life – there was a lot of fighting, drunk adults, and stupid shit going on – I could not only take that needle, put it back to the top, and the song would play back again and would never let me down. But I also realized I could lift the needle, move it to my favorite part, and that part would play back for me, over and over, without fail. It was a consistency that I could count on. I will still put on Wings' Wings Over America, and the transition between "Rock Show" and "Jet" – those eight measures when they switch – is one of the most exhilarating things in the entire world to me. It's not even a big deal, but there's something about that transition. When we're done with this interview, I'm going to go listen to it. It turns me on, it excites the kid in me, and it ignites everything I used to be. I've imbued it with so much power, and that's just one of probably 500 specific moments in songs that can still do that to me. These moments are transcendent.
We met at New Orleans at the third TapeOpCon in 2004. You said one of my favorite things, "I imagine the band on the meter bridge as tiny figures playing the music when I'm mixing."
Yeah, like army guy toys. I've never forgotten that. I still do it, because that way when I turn it down, it doesn't have to sound quiet. I just have to quiet my mind and imagine that I'm mixing little, tiny people that are playing very loud. But if they're only three inches high, they can only be so loud. [laughter]
I love it.
That's part of the way that I exist inside people's songs while I'm doing what I do. I'm inside their moments. They're not my moments; they belong to the song – they don't even belong to the artist. Again, I brought that forward from my childhood. Once I'm in there, I live mostly inside my head. I rarely socialize. I live in my imagination inside other people’s songs. It entertains me, frankly. Otherwise, it's boring in this room for ten hours a day by myself. Not seeing anybody but my husband, who rarely even comes in. I don't like to be interrupted. He knows, no matter what, if I've got my headphones on, do not tap my shoulder! I'll jump out of my chair.
Your recording career began in New Orleans.
I got to New Orleans in 1990, and I lived there until the day before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. I didn't go back after Katrina, because I had an infant and I had lost my house. I had lived in the Bywater, which was high ground and did not flood. But after the baby was born, I moved to Gentilly, which flooded terribly. Everything I owned went under water and stayed there for four weeks. I lost $115,000 that I could never recoup. That doesn't seem like a lot of money to some people, but to me it was because I did not have insurance for my gear. That was the point where a lot of engineers and mixers were starting to build studios at home because Pro Tools existed. I lost a lot. I wasn't up for the whole rebuild with an infant in my arms. Grayson [Capps] had lost his house, too. We were a couple, but we weren't living together at that time, so we decided we would move to Nashville. We lived up there for five years.
Where are you living now?
Fairhope, Alabama, near the Gulf of Mexico. We're in an artist community, and we live in a bubble of artists. The Gulf Coast is its own specific culture, whether it’s New Orleans, Pensacola, Mobile, or Biloxi. Lots of blue and purple, and yes, a good bit of red, but we’re blue. When we moved to Nashville, our son was still a baby. My husband, Grayson, was from Fairhope and his mom was down here. She said, "I want to be your nanny." I’d been paying $23,000 a year in Nashville for nannies. No one wants the cheap nanny! I wanted the good nanny caring for my infant while I was at the studio all day. So, we decided to move back down to the coast.
New Orleans is such a special place, obviously. It must have been hard to leave.
Absolutely, but now we’re just two and a half hours from New Orleans. All my best friends are still there. Amtrak finally opened the Mardi Gras line from Mobile to New Orleans, twice a day, morning and night. I get to hop on the train.
I love taking the train.
I used to go to New Orleans several times a year, but now I go practically every other weekend. If I'm not working, I'm rolling over to New Orleans. New Orleans is still what I consider my soul home. My baby was born there, I met Grayson there, and my career happened there.
How did you end up in New Orleans?
When I was in Los Angeles, I was still on the outside looking in. I had access to studios because I worked at Capitol Records. I could occasionally go into the studios and watch the engineers. I remember watching a dude with the auto-locator between his legs punching in and out, and I was so enthralled by that movement. I thought, "That's what I want to be." I was only 22 years old at the time. I left Capitol Records and moved to London. I was bartending on the Portobello Road when I ran into a famous manager, Tarquin Gotch, whom I’d known from Capitol in L.A. He asked me to manage his office for six months. I said, "I don't want to be a secretary, I want to be an engineer." He said, "I can't help you with that, but I'll pay you £2,000. Plus, you can live in my flat while I’m in America." He might as well have said, "I'll pay you a million dollars." [laughter] Downstairs, in the basement flat of Tarquin’s building, was one of the artists that he managed, Hugh Harris, who has since died. Hugh was signed to Capitol Records and had a little home studio down there. He was English-Jamaican, gorgeous, and smoked lots of spliffs. He became a great friend, and he's the guy who started teaching me to record in that basement flat. He used to always listen to The Neville Brothers' Yellow Moon, which had just come out and was gorgeous. I had never really heard of Daniel Lanois, [who had produced it]. I was certainly aware of Peter Gabriel's So and U2's The Unforgettable Fire that Dan had also produced. Hugh started teaching me on [MOTU] Digital Performer, and also on a TASCAM 1-inch analog machine and a little TASCAM console. Hugh went on tour with Sinead O'Connor, so I went back to Los Angeles, once again feeling lost. I went to a six-month recording class at Los Angeles Recording Workshop. I was learning how to cut tape and how to line up tape machines. "What is a dynamics processor?" They didn't go deep down into the physics of sound. You walked into that school, and they said, "This is a console. This is a console strip. This is a mic preamp." They taught the basics so that you could go out and be a technical assistant. It was more like a craftsman's course or a trade school. They didn't teach you about sonics. They taught you about gear, so that you could understand, like a car mechanic. Back then, you had to work in studios. That was when I met Susan Rogers [Tape Op #117], who was producing a record for Hugh Harris. She looked me in the face and said, "If you want to do this, it's not going to happen for you here in Los Angeles. You need to find some town that doesn't have a big industry, and good luck." She was very kind, but she said, "It's hard. I started out as an MCI tech." All that time I'd been listening to the Yellow Moon record. I love this record and I’d had this romanticized idea of this Southern city on the Gulf with its weepy trees and its voodoo. I remember laying in my bedroom and thinking, "I'll go to New Orleans." I booked a flight; I had $397, and I didn't know anybody. I started cleaning studios. That was my way in.
What places were these?
My very first cleaning job was Ultrasonic Studios, which was on Washington Avenue. Then a place called Southlake [Recording Studios] (which turned into the New Orleans Recording Company), and then Kingsway Studio. Malcolm Burn [Tape Op #35] had seen me at Ultrasonic mopping floors, and asked, "Who's that?" They told him, and he said, "Well, she can come clean at Kingsway." I was a runner, too, but mostly I was a great studio cleaner. Everybody was very nice, and they would let me come in the control room afterwards and sit quietly. I did have enough of a quietness, but also a sense of humor and an incredible enthusiasm for what I wanted to learn. The first time I walked into Kingsway Studio, I thought to myself, “I’m going to work here.” Ultrasonic asked me to deliver a DAT [Digital Audio Tape] to Kingsway at the behest of Malcolm Burn. The Ultrasonic guys were teasing me because of all the rumors about what went on at Daniel Lanois' Kingsway mansion. They were saying, "It's full of demons, and there are probably vampires!” Anne Rice was all the rage, and these people were Canadian so we don't really know what they did. They could be scary. [laughter] We’d all seen the Kingsway crew around town on their motorcycles wearing Prince-style flowy, white shirts and black leather pants. There was this aura about it because it was a closed studio – you couldn't just book it then. It had to be a project of Dan's or something that he had some part in. I brought the DAT down, knocked on the big door, walked through the kitchen, and I heard – reverberating through this entire plaster and tile mansion – Chris Whitley tracking “Phone Call from Leavenworth.” It took my breath away. I can't stress the enormity of what I felt walking through the big, dark halls to the front of the house. It was all open – there were no iso booths. Over in what I would learn was called the "wood room," I could see Chris through the center hall as I walked by, and he was in there stomping his foot playing “Phone Call from Leavenworth.” I rounded the corner into the control room area, which is, again, wide open with all the other mansion’s rooms. I saw their API board, and then those Tannoy Gold [monitors] in Lockwood cabinets. Dan was floating around with Malcolm and Mark [Howard. Tape Op #134]. Different people were sitting in dark corners, playing instruments, smoking cigarettes, and sipping beers or whiskey. I was gobsmacked. It was in that moment that I became determined, come hell or high water, that I would work at Kingsway. I made tons of cables, patchbays, and EDAC connectors. I had taught myself to cut tape, and at that point I was very good at it. Dan noticed my skill early on, so I became the tape op. It was still a job back then, where you sat by the tape machine, put up reels, took down reels, did all the edits, and took notes. For a year, I rarely left the tape machine while the band was working because that was what I did.
What was it like on sessions with Daniel Lanois then?
Working for Dan was both wonderful and difficult. We had somewhat of a difficult relationship because he was demanding and kind of odd. I'm good friends with Dan now. He knows he's weird. [laughter] He's also a genius. I always took notes on all the takes, practicing for when I'd be a producer and engineer and had to be able to respond. I was also bored over by the tape machine, so I'd listen intensely. Note-taking is so important. I also took the autolocator numbers for parts of the song and handed them to the engineer. One day, out of the blue, Dan called out, "Okay, Trina. What do you think we should do here?" Shocked, I quickly checked my notes then said, "I think take two for the majority of the song, but I think the bridge should come from take three and the solo definitely from take one." He said, "Cut it." I cut it, and the edit worked perfectly. Trial by fire. Dan lit fires – and so did Malcolm and Mark – underneath me. Further down the road, my tenure at Kingsway ended during the Emmylou Harris record [Wrecking Ball], because I had gotten into an argument with Dan. I was on the edge because of wanting to take on independent projects as a burgeoning producer/engineer. He got angry and thought I should be grateful that I was chief engineer anywhere, even if I was relegated to second engineering for most sessions because they'd bring their own staff. He said that if I left, even temporarily, I was done. I quit anyway, and later that day, Emmylou called me herself and said, "Please come back. Neil Young's coming in tomorrow to do vocals. This is your setup. Come back for me. Don't worry about him." Malcolm was on the phone, "You can't just walk out on Lanois! Are you crazy?" Finally, Dan called, still angry, and asked me to come back, which I did. I finished Emmy’s record, but that was my last record on staff at Kingsway.
Even in the best of studios, you can't expect someone to stay in one position forever.
Right. If I’d stayed, I’d forever be the second engineer. It was time for me to become an independent engineer.
Wrecking Ball is one of the best-sounding records I've ever heard.
So beautiful. So special. I still have the reverb setting that was used for most of Emmylou's vocals on that record. It comes from the [Lexicon] PCM70, one of which I have right here. After Emmy's record, I officially went independent. The person that Dan was able to find quickly to replace me was ill-trained, and the room was very peculiar – it had a lot of eccentricities and its share of problems. About a month and a half later, Sheryl Crow rolled in with Bill Bottrell [Tape Op #59]. Sheryl Crow was not on my radar. I may have heard her song "All I Wanna Do" somewhere. Apparently, she and Bill Bottrell had a rather large fight on day one of the session for her second record [Sheryl Crow], and he left. He was also the engineer.
Right, a great engineer.
Scooter [Weintraub], Sheryl's manager, asked [studio manager] Karen [Brady], "Who can we get in here to run this session, just for tonight 'til Sheryl gets her engineer flown out?" Sheryl was going to produce herself; she just needed a temporary engineer who knew the room. Karen called me, and I remember saying, "Oh great, I get to work with another pissed off millionaire rock star. Sounds so fun." I came in, and she was very upset, very scary, very tiny, very pretty, and wildly talented. I just marched up front and started doing what I was trained to do. After going through the fire of Dan, Malcolm, and Mark, there was nothing that this five-foot-two spitfire woman could do or say to me to freak me out. I was a hardened young woman. Tim [Smith, bass], Brian [MacLeod] on drums, and Jeff Trott [guitar] had all flown in to write with her. This was going to be a writing session. But, nonetheless, all this time I was setting up for a session. I had tape rolling way before half the mics were even in place. I spoke to no one, and no one spoke to me. They all sat in a circle in the room right off the open control room as I was booming in mics. The drums were a little bit off in another room. I was getting the kit mic'd while tape was still rolling. I was already on the third roll of multitrack, and this was just the set up. But Sheryl was singing and playing, so I was recording. She was singing into a [Shure SM]57 while I boomed in the [Neumann] U 47. So, we go on like this for a few hours, and then she looked at me at one point and said, "This has become a song, so can you play that last take back off the run DAT?" I replied, "Well, sure, but I can play it off the multitrack because I've been rolling tape." She got angry, or so it appeared to me, and said, "Why are you rolling tape? Nobody told you to roll tape." I said, "Because what else am I supposed to do over here? It's what I do. I roll tape. You play songs. If you don't want to pay for the tape, don't pay for the tape." She glared at me for a minute and then broke into a grin. I played the song back. The song is called “Home,” which is on Sheryl Crow. It fades in because it's part of a 20-minute stretch of writing. It was magical, but it didn't have a bridge, so they went back out and wrote a bridge. "Okay, now let's cut this song for real." They could never beat that writing take, so they cut the bridge, I edited the bridge into the writing track, and there it was. The next day, we cut “Everyday is a Winding Road.” I think the next song we started cutting was “If It Makes You Happy." Her engineer was supposed to be out there by the end of that week, but we had half of Sheryl Crow recorded and it sounded great. I kind of became her engineer after that, and stayed her engineer for a long time, until I wasn't anymore.
I've worked briefly with Jeff before. He really helped the session.
He's so delightful. Everybody was. It's a real treat. This was over a long stretch of time. Everybody in the studio was either on their best behavior or their worst behavior. I wasn't always on my best behavior either. I could get very dark when I felt like I was being taken advantage of. It took me a few years to understand that that very darkness – the music had to pass through me to get through the console, to get to the tape and back – that darkness would color everything. I had to bring only positivity in that seat. If things were untenable, I either had to leave the session or speak my piece and pop the bubble of awkwardness, which I got very good at doing. After all this time, it can be so transformative in the studio. It can be so magical. It can even just be fun and cool. But when it's shitty, it is brutal.
How long was that session there?
About a month in total, and then Sheryl moved the session to Los Angeles. This was the era where instead of having to make [analog] safeties – 24-track to 24-track – [Alesis] ADATs had arrived. The session left and they wanted all the tapes shipped out to Los Angeles. Her engineer was going to pick up where I left off. Again, unknown to Sheryl and Scooter, I had made safeties of not just the master reels but all of the reels, including the outtakes. We had about 20 rolls of tape in total. I had dumped them all to ADAT. It took me one whole day and there were a ton of ADATS, but I had done that of my own accord before I had the reels shipped out. Of course, I made safety copies of the reels that had been consolidated for the master takes. But there were all these outtakes. The sessions started up out in L.A., and for one of the masters, they decided they were going to use an outtake instead. They were working on the outtake reel, and a hole had gotten punched into one of the guitar tracks or something. Scooter called in a panic, and he said, "You need to send all the run DATs. They're going to try to see if they can grab a snippet from the run DAT and somehow fix this." I replied, "I don't see how in the hell that's going to work, but I'll send all the ADAT safeties I made for the outtake reels." He's like, "You did what?" He told Sheryl, and she jumped on the phone, "Oh, Treetop, just get them all and get on the Delta Dash. Can you come tonight?" There used to be a flight from New Orleans to Los Angeles every night that we called the Delta Dash. I got all the ADATs, brought them out there, dumped the ADAT safety onto 24-track, then cut in the whole segment, and the original guitar was returned. I saved the day, and after that I was in. I had done something that nobody had explicitly asked me to do, and I ended up in the engineer’s seat for Sheryl. Little things ended up being crucial in those early days.
Just doing a little bit more than someone else might do. Like taking tracking notes earlier.
Right. The whole thing is a series of organizational skills that are handled creatively. Editing is nothing but a high-end organizational skill, but you still have to use a creative musical umbrella over it. You have to be creative, but what you really need to be is organized. That's what I think is the defining thing. My masters are organized, my sessions are organized, my stems are organized, my delivery is organized, and everything is organized. Even years later, I can still bring back a session and give you the stems you need. I archive everything I work on.
As far as your productions, one of the records that I was checking out was the Mountain Goats' Jenny from Thebes, that you tracked, produced, and mixed.
That's one of the more recent productions I've done. I produce pretty rarely now because I get enough mix gigs. Production's a lot of work.
I imagine that would be an enticing one, because John Darnielle's such an interesting songwriter.
He is fascinating. The band was wonderful.
Was it Jon Wurster on drums?
Yes. He's a genius. And Mattybonez [Matt Douglas, bass]. John Darnielle is also a published author; his brain is so sharp. These things were extremely intimidating for me. I have done a lot of producing over the years and interacted with artists on so many levels, but he is quite possibly the smartest one out there. He was very dominant in the control room right off the bat, and I basically said, "Look, you've got to trust me. I know you want all of your vocals to be live, but let me show you what I can do with a comp. I want you to go out there and sing this song. I want you to sing it seven times. You sing it however you want, I'm not going to coach you through it. Then I'm going to go to my room and I'm going to comp it." I brought my laptop so I could comp vocals in my hotel room. I took it back to the hotel and I did the intensive comping work that I do, which takes me hours. I came back with a finished vocal for him, and it blew his mind. By day three we had landed in a place where the trust was established, then whole thing just got so fun. I loved making that record. We were at Leon Russell's studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Right, The Church Studio.
Yeah, that place is killer. It's this big church. Great isolation booths but a tiny control room. That was a bit uncomfortable for me – there's no couch for the musicians to hang out in the control room. They had a beautiful Neve [8068] board that I had worked on before at Long View Farm [Studios] in Massachusetts. I've got pictures of myself at this Neve board, with Billy Conway from Morphine, who passed several years ago – he was wonderful. The Church had the most expensive and best mic stands I've ever seen in my life. The room sounded phenomenal and all the gear worked beautifully. I loved working there.
Did you mix that back at your place?
I did.
I can usually find something in most music that I'm going to attach to and go, "Oh, cool. I like that." But when I really don't, and if it looks like the process is going to start getting really intricate in a way that I don't think is going to be productive, I don't want to be involved.
If I can't hear room for improvement from a rough mix, and they're songs I don't like, then I can't imagine why I'd mix it. While I always need income, I do turn a lot of stuff down, which leaves me time to do interviews with you, work on my book, play with my horses, and then go to Detroit and hang out with my kid. I need to finish mixing American Aquarium, which is awesome. I love that band. Then there'll be some tracks from Turnpike Troubadour. I should be mixing right now, but I’m thrilled to be talking to you!
I was out with some engineers having a beer. Looking at an email on my phone, I said, "Fuck, look at these mix notes!" My pal said, "Don't look at it on your phone. It always looks bigger than when you open it on your laptop."
Yep. It's true. You start to panic, but then it often turns out to be easy. Here's one I thought was going to be terrible, because I thought this mix was done. "There's been talk of this being the last song on the record, and I wish I'd thought of that before we tracked it. But I'd be curious what techniques could be used…" – I'm already starting to sweat – "…to sustain that last chord from the band, as well as the last little dribbles from the horn jam. I feel like milking another few seconds of sound would be more grandiose." And then I'm relaxed, because I know they just want me to pull the fade out more! Not a problem. I don't have to vari-speed the track or do anything crazy. Can do.
I also print mix revision notes out a lot of times. If they're sitting in front of me on the console, so I'll just check them off.
Yeah. I go right down that list. If it's on my phone, I can't check it off, and then I don't know where I am.
How do you approach mixing these days?
I still behave in the analog mindset, so if I get a track that has 28 backing vocals, I'll bounce them down through my APIs or whatever into nice, neat little stereo sets and print them back into Pro Tools. My original API 550 EQ is from a console. It is the love of my life, and all my vocals go through it. I love my plug-ins, but I love my analog gear. If I can't have that working, I just don't want to do this. It's not fun if I can't click knobs. I've got the source tracks if I need them, so I bounce it all down so that I'm looking at maybe 20 tracks on my screen. Not just bussed to an aux track. I use all of that analog mindset to make the bounce. I'm pretending I'm actually on tape and I'm not going to have those source tracks anymore, even though I secretly can change it if I want. The bounce I made is the bounce I've got to work with, so I'm very conscientious and creative about making sure that that bounce is vibrant and beautiful. All leveling and all the moves I want made, I incorporate into the bounce. I'm alone in here. It used to be that the record got mixed right after it got cut, or while it was getting cut. The engineer was acting out the mix, but the producer was at the board, or at least in the room, telling you what to do. Now I just get the files. I do whatever I think serves the song, because I know how to produce as well as engineer a mix. I know how to produce and engineer a record. I know how to produce and engineer a mix, and when the producer's not there I have to be the producer on the mix. I turn in the mix and they're happy, because I'm using my production skills. But I don't insist on a producer credit for the mix, of course, I just want to get paid.
I do a lot of remote mixing also, and there are times where that boundary's absolutely blurred. Everything is a production decision.
Producers used to mix their records. Andy Wallace [Tape Op #25] and Brendan O'Brien may have had an engineer at the console, but they themselves were the mixers. I'm just naming two of hundreds, and these are the people that taught me. Tchad Blake [#16, #133], too. These days, the producer is not standing behind me, so I largely make those production decisions. Don't forget your mixer, people! Or your engineer. Mixing is the highest form of production, without a question of a doubt, in my opinion. If I open a track that somebody has sent me to mix and I start to recognize that for me to deliver what they hoped for – which is why they hired me – I need to let them know right now, "Your tracks are nowhere near what they need to be and what you'll be getting from me is production work and a mix. I’m not concerned about the credit, but it’s going to raise the price.”
Yeah, you have to say this.
Speaking of all of this stuff, I have to say right here and now: There's nothing in the world that feels better than leaning on a console. Especially if you're a little bit sad or lonely, or if the world seems too scary, which it obviously does now. You can just rest your elbows on a console. Nothing can bring me that kind of comfort, except for maybe a horse. I don't know what I'd do without consoles or horses. I work off my horses’ board by feeding 22 horses lunch, three times a week. It's rowdy out there!
You've had a cool career.
I've done fine. I stay busy. I work hard all of the time, and I give it my best. And if there's a glass ceiling, I could say something poetic like, "I can still see the sky just fine." I'm not sure I need to be above that.
I think the recording world is changing quite a bit.
Oh, definitely. In the '80s and '90s, people were asking me, "Why are there so few women?" I didn’t know then, but when I consider it now, I’d say that this is an industry that had no women in it because most industries were devoid of women. There's about a 20- to 30-year ramp up from when a previously unrepresented cohort, like women, start entering a field, to when they gain proficiency, numbers, and a certain amount of recognition. Women didn't start entering this field until the '70s and '80s. More entered in the ‘90s. So, back then, we needed another 20 years to pass. Just like other highly technical fields, women weren’t necessarily being held back, it's just that there were not a lot of women entering the field. Now there are a ton of women engineers doing amazing stuff. It's hard for men. It's hard for women. It's hard for everybody. It's competitive.
You can work for a couple of years if you're really pushing on it, but you've got to figure out how to stay in it.
One percent of people reach the golden ring where they get to make a lot of money and they're doing magnificently well. But the rest of us make our middle-class livings and make very cool records for bands who are also making their awesome middle-class livings. Everybody's surviving, their kids are going to school, their house notes get paid, we're making records, and we don't ask more from it than that.
There's too much fear involved in all the decisions from the people that are above you as the mixer.
Oh yeah.
"Is that industry standard?"
Yeah, I can't deal with any of it.
"It's not as loud as such and such…"
Yeah, the minute that starts, I tend to bow out. I need to enjoy the hours I spend in the studio. I don’t want to work in a pressure cooker anymore. After forty years in this business, much of it spent working under-the-gun, so to speak, my hours are really all I have left and they’re sacred to me. I won’t allow them to be squandered trying to please people who only want to sound like someone else’s hit record. Making records hasn’t made me rich and it never will. I’ve always known that. I want my books to make me rich! I want to sell a book one day and then make money on my own terms, with my own words based on my own shit. If there's any chance that I'm going to make some big money at this point in my life, then it's going to have to be from the books. There are thousands, maybe tens-of-thousands, of people producing, recording and mixing records now. When we were coming up, there were not tens-of-thousands; there were a couple thousand in the trade for real. I remember going through Mix Magazine, looking at the listings in the back. In 1987, there were 587 working engineers listed in Mix Magazine. Even if that meant it was double that amount…
…still not that many people.
And in the 1987 issue of Mix Magazine there were three women. I had to research that because I put it in my second novel. My heroine was the person reading the listings in Mix Magazine. I'm more interested in being a novelist now than I am in being an engineer. I have written two full-length novels. I have an agent. My first book is on submission. I don't know if it'll ever sell. The market in literature is as devastating as it is in music, but I love writing. I love writing fiction. My novel's called Bury Me Alive in Your Sugar. That’s a working title the agent recommended. I might rename it Medvedika. It’s set in New Orleans in 1995, back in the tape days, but at the dawn of the digital age. It's a love story and a thriller, but the whole backdrop had to be studios because that's all I know. I delve into my heroine's relationship with the gear and how she anthropomorphizes the gear. Like the little breeze that the capstan motors create. The Mighty Neve and Big Studer are her best friends.
Did you study English?
I never went to college, but I realized, back in 2018, that I’d been creating internal narratives while working on other people's songs for my entire career. I live in my mind. While I'm working for hours and hours inside a song, I create characters and narratives. A lot of it is just fantasy: Love, murder, and crime. I'm an avid reader. I read books non-stop and always have. So, one day in 2018, I got out my laptop, and I wrote four pages of dialogue. I just started writing down one of the narratives that had been running in my mind for about a year and it turned into a book. It consumed me. The way that my brain had been trained all these years for hyperfocus – how to balance a bridge, how to balance a verse, how to transition into a chorus, how to make those moving parts work, how to simplify the equation until it functions in its simplest form; those were the same skills I needed to craft a paragraph and to transition from one scene into another. I used the same energy, and apparently it worked because I wrote a book good enough to have a very prominent agency sign me. It was rough; I had to rewrite the whole thing and it still has not sold. But they told me, "It may never sell, but we've never heard a voice like yours before." They have not dropped me, and I've submitted another book even though the first one didn't sell yet. They apparently believe in me.
Make sure to have your movie options ready for the books!
Yes. That would all go through the agent. If there is a movie option, they can do whatever the hell they want. [laughter] I wouldn't care. But I'll keep writing and see where it goes.
We immerse ourselves as recording people, and we have to draw on everything else around us to do that well. I studied making films and doing storyboards. I always see the songs I'm mixing or producing as cinematic.
It's the same exact thing: Instead of a storyboard, I'm writing the screenplay.
When I read, see movies or TV shows, or anything involving a fictionalized recording studio, it's always portrayed so wrong.
You have to really understand how to lean on a console. I can explain how it feels for my heroine to lean her butt on the console bumper and view the room. You learn how to lean on a console. It's not something you naturally know how to do, but once you know, you know.
