You started out doing recordings in your bedroom. What gear did you use?
My first introduction to being interested in music was when I was eight years old. MTV and VH1 were huge in our lives. Millennials, right? In the early 2000s, I would watch all these music videos on repeat before school. One of them was “Maps” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and it was so captivating. I remember hearing the intro and thinking, "I want to play guitar." I told my mom, and for my eighth birthday she bought me a nylon-string guitar. I learned Green Day and Blink-182 songs on that guitar. When I was 10, I started playing trumpet. Everyone told me I couldn’t play because it was what the boys did. That started me down a path of doing things just because I wanted to. When I was 12, I remember getting interested in recording. I got all my content off of YouTube at the time. I was watching documentaries on Timbaland and Justin Timberlake, Blink-182, and Tegan and Sara’s [Tape Op #152] The Con, along with Pharrell [Williams] and Chad Hugo studio clips, and a ton of behind-the-scenes footage. Another one I remember is the Feist documentary for The Reminder, showing behind-the-scenes footage of her recording in France with her producers and band. That’s where I learned she sang through a mic into a Twin Reverb. And I’d listen to Death Cab for Cutie [#19] records and think, “How did they make that sound?” When I was 12, I had a Dell laptop. I had a webcam mic attached to an 1/8-inch cable, so it sounded terrible. And I downloaded Audacity – because that’s just what there was at the time – and I started making songs and putting them on MySpace. I made terrible songs and covers. I’d cover “New Slang” by The Shins [#39], and I didn’t even know what a metronome was, so everything was extremely out of time. Then my dad saw how interested I was in recording, and he took me to Guitar Center and bought me Sony Acid [DAW] and an SM58-style USB mic, which also sounded terrible. I did not have great equipment. But I remember thinking, “Oh my god, this is so awesome. I’m recording.” I would play Death Cab for Cutie songs and record over them. That’s how I learned to play along and start coming up with my own ideas.
That's a great way to learn.
Yeah, it was like, "Let’s see what other people are doing," and then try to mimic that exactly. I didn’t know it was a good technique; I was doing it out of pure obsession and curiosity. And it still feels the same.
There’s no end to how much there is to learn. I started out the same way. The first thing I ever recorded was in [Apple] GarageBand, using my laptop’s built-in mic.
When I was first learning, I was pirating a lot, and I was also buying CDs at Barnes & Noble. There was a constant cycle of consuming as much music as I could. I can’t believe how much I was listening back then, but I’m grateful for it, because it's helped so much with inspiration and influences now. I was recording on that weird setup in middle school. When I got to high school, my music teacher, Steve Ernest, became a huge hero of mine. He taught ensemble jazz, was a trumpet player, and also taught [Avid] Pro Tools. He’d catch me in the band room after school recording by myself. I didn’t want to go home; I wanted to stay there, listen, play, and keep working. He even let me take the [Apple] iMacs home over breaks, which probably wasn’t allowed, but it made a huge difference. Eventually, I moved into GarageBand and got a Blue Yeti [microphone]. The first time I heard a condenser mic, it sounded incredible. After that, I started building a small mic collection. I saved up, worked a bunch of shifts, and bought a [Shure] SM57 and a [Focusrite] Scarlett interface. That’s what I used for my first two records, along with some Waves plug-ins. Around this time, I dabbled in different DAWs like [Steinberg's] Cubase and Reason before feeling comfortable in [Apple] Logic Pro X. I briefly used a Yamaha AW16G when I wanted to record outside of a computer for my own demos and for songs with my first band, Summer Peaks. It was a portable 16-channel DAW with a CD burner built in. I learned about menu diving and how to create with limitations. I put my first record [Turn Into] on Bandcamp in 2015, and it started getting some attention. That eventually led to me getting signed. Polyvinyl [Record Co.] released my next record, Everybody Works, in 2017, and that year was huge for me. I remember feeling pretty overwhelmed. It was a lot of attention and a lot of work.
During the pandemic, you stepped away from your own music and started focusing on producing, engineering, and mixing for other artists. What was that experience like? Did you intentionally take a break to work on something different, or did it just happen naturally? Were you feeling burnout at the time?
