I wanted to get right into your new album American Stories and hear about the recording process.
I have a studio above my house on the east side of Los Angeles that I've had since the middle of 2019. It's all one room, and I designed it so that the air conditioning comes in from a soffit, so it doesn't make any noise. There's no room tone inside the studio; it's all pretty quiet. I had Jacques Lacroix build some panels: a Helmholtz filter that's behind where you sit, there's a cloud that's above, and other acoustic panels throughout the studio. When I was renovating the space, I did things to limit the amount of sound that could come in from outside. Different kinds of windows you can use in different kinds of doors. There’s a children's hospital near my studio, and sometimes I'll hear a helicopter, but that's pretty much it. What I like about the space is that I can record anything in any part of the studio. I like to have a vocal mic set up and mics on the piano at all times. I have these two RCA KU-3A ribbon mics that are mainstays. I did a lot of this record at my studio, and I also went to Valentine Recording Studios [Tape Op #116] to record drums. What I like about Valentine is that it has an MCI JH-114 multitrack tape system. I will bring my own microphones and some of my outboard gear, like the SPL Transient Designer. Bringing those to Valentine gives the best of both worlds, getting the sound of their room and stereo echo chamber with the multitrack machine. For a lot of songs, it was about using Valentine to get that classic drum sound, but there were cases where the drums that were recorded at my house also found their way into a song. For the song “Back of a Truck,” there's a drum sound in the verse that was recorded at my house and then a drum sound in the chorus that's recorded in Valentine. You could hear where it switches, and I didn't mind that. There was something that was satisfying to me about being able to use these two different drum sounds in one song. The drummer on that was my old engineer, Joey Messina-Doerning – he did study drums, but he's an engineer and a mixer by profession.
Do you usually have an assistant at home if you're working through ideas?
Yeah, I like working with an assistant, but sometimes I will record totally on my own. On this record, I did a lot of vocals with the Electro-Voice RE20 mic; sometimes just me alone holding it in my hands late at night. In some cases, I enjoyed singing with the music playing off the speakers, and then we used some of these new iZotope [RX] stem-splitting technologies to remove everything but the vocal sound.
The first single from American Stories, “Like a Spark,” prominently features the saz [long-neck fretted lute]. Did you have Persian/Middle Eastern instruments on hand next to your [Fender] Strat in the studio when you were writing?
Amir Yaghmai [The Voidz] and I worked closely on the Persian elements of this album. Amir has two sazs; one is an acoustic saz that's very long, and he can bow that in addition to plucking it. Then he also has something that we call the electric saz, which is an instrument that he bought on tour with The Voidz in Istanbul. That's a much smaller size, but it has a unique sound like a Middle Eastern Stratocaster. I used a lot of similar Stratocaster effects on it. It sounds good with chorus, and it sounds great coming through a tube amp. I was treating his electric saz like a Strat. Amir studied Persian music at CalArts and started as a violinist, so he can translate his violin playing to guitar and saz. He can bring microtonal playing to multiple instruments. There were some cases where I would have him double an electric saz with an acoustic saz or have those instruments playing off each other, like in the last song on the record, “The Weight.”
What about Middle Eastern percussion? Your drum sounds are well known. Were you moving outside of your typical sounds for this album?
There are choices that I made about which elements would be inspired by the Middle East and which elements would be American in nature. I was more interested in classic rock as a touchstone for a lot of the drums on the record. My ability to play microtonal music is limited, and that's why I wanted to involve Amir, because, for him, the microtonal stuff is easy. He doesn't just appreciate it as a listener; he can perform those microtonal lines. With time, it'll be something I'll be able to bring to my own playing, but that is a limitation for me. I love the sound of microtonal lines, but I'm not at that point right now. That could change in the next couple of months.
As a producer, was it natural to hear that microtonality? Were there times when you had to reign it in?
If you listen to rock music, one of the defining features is there's modal mixture. You're playing the blues scale in the parallel minor over major chords and the major chord progression. If you listen to The Strokes, the guitar solos are minor and the chords are major. They are taken from the parallel key. What I felt was exciting for me was to take that thing that's so common in rock music and bring it to this rubbing together – marrying the microtonal melodic lines over major chords.
Have you played your album for your family?
Yeah, my mom and dad have had a version of the record since this past summer. I use this app called [untitled], where I can share a work in progress.
I heard you were even bouncing the album sequence off of them for feedback.
As I updated the mixes, my parents could hear the updated bounces and the updated song order.
Being back here in New York, do things pop back into your memory from when you started out producing here?
Well, I did work on this record at Electric Lady. I spent a couple of days there, and I happened to be in Tom Elmhirst's old room. [Tom mixed American Stories.] That was an interesting coincidence, and it was fun to record in New York. I'm in the process of setting up a little studio space here, and I'm looking forward to having that. It's more of a studio with a bed, as opposed to like an apartment with a studio. The truth is, from the era of my college dorm, when I had a Neumann TLM 103 and an Mbox and was recording Ezra [Koenig], Chris [Baio], and Chris [Tomson] with Vampire Weekend – that was the beginning of my career as a producer – until I left New York at the end of 2013, I always had some kind of studio space in New York. When I've been back here and haven't had anywhere that I could record music on a whim, I felt something was missing. I also started renting a piano in 2006, and that piano made it with me all the way across the country. For me, the heart of any studio is an upright piano, a good vocal mic, and a dynamic mic. That's all I need. Even though that's very minimal, to write songs and to begin the journey of production, I find that to be enough. And, of course, a guitar and a bass. I've always had a guitar and a bass kicking around.
I liked your quote on Pensado’s Place talking about HAIM’s Women in Music Pt. III, where you had the realization that all you need is a guitar into a preamp into the Universal Audio Brigade Chorus plug-in. That was a cool and direct way to think about recording guitar.
I hate to be a snob, but maybe Tape Op is the place to be a snob. [laughs] When I say, “a guitar,” it's usually a Fender from the ’60s, and when I say, “preamp,” I mean a tube preamp by Astral Toneworx. It has a way to drive the signal, a treble knob, a bass knob, and then a way to limit the output of the signal. And I do have to say that probably adds to the color of the dry signal I'm feeding to the plug-in. I actually do own an original BOSS CE-1 [chorus] pedal from the ’70s, but it's interesting because there is also a special magic to the UAD plug-in.
I like this philosophy you have about not believing in “demos,” but rather constructing a song in real time as you go.
Partly what's behind that philosophy is that when I record music, I usually do it in Pro Tools. The Pro Tools session can evolve – it can change keys; it can change tempo – but it's some continuation of that same session that we began with. For that reason, the idea of a demo is odd to me because I've been using Pro Tools since I was 18. Before that, I used an 8-track BOSS BR-8, and it recorded onto Iomega Zip drive, and even before that I had a Yamaha MD4 4-track MiniDisc recorder. If I made something on those and then imported those tracks into Pro Tools, then maybe that could be considered a demo. There's a demo phase, and then there's a production phase. But because I use Pro Tools as the basis for recording from moment one, it's hard for me to think of something separate in the process of production.
I know you’re not big on close mic’ing drums on the snare and hi-hat. I don’t know if you even mic them? I also appreciate this concept of not knowing or caring whether the drums are “real.”
Sometimes I do mic the snare and hi-hats. Because I use these two KU-3A mics and the SPL Transient Designer outboard piece on the way in, I like to make decisions about what the hi-hat and snare sound like through those stereo mics and the SPL rack unit. If I want a tight drum sound or a big open snare sound, I want to achieve it as we're going in. The records that I love, the sound of the drums is something that wasn't decided later on. I think a lot of people use 12 or 15 mics because they want to be able to decide later what the drums should sound like. It's my philosophy that you can always re-record the drums if you need to, in a pinch. For drums that I record at my house, I'll often run them through either my Ampex ATR-102 or Nakamichi tape machines. That Nakamichi gives a much grittier, dirtier sound, with a natural amount of wow and flutter. The ATR-102 is a cleaner and more pristine recreation, depending on when it's been last serviced. [laughs] A few months pass, and all of a sudden the ATR-102 is starting to sound like the Nakamichi!
Yeah, it's fluttering. Do you feel that going to L.A. was the turning point of “I was a band guy and now I'm a songwriter/producer”? Did it happen with the move?
It's funny. I never thought of myself as a band guy because I went to Columbia [University] and studied composition. I saw myself on the path to being a composer. I had always felt that production and recording were possibly my version of being a composer, but at some point in college it became very clear to me that the album format was the most exciting and highest version of composition. I know not everyone would think that, and I recently saw one of my favorite pieces of symphonic music: the first movement of Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 6.” I think that's one of the greatest pieces of music ever written. But something happened for me, where I felt like what I wanted to contribute artistically was producing albums. The first Vampire Weekend album was the first album that I produced, and it was the beginning of me harnessing what I'd learned studying composition at Columbia and applying it to my love of recorded sound. Being a member of the band didn't figure into my identity, but I realized that wasn't true for a lot of people looking in from the outside. I'm proud of those first three Vampire Weekend records, and I'm happy that we were able to make them together. But whether I was a songwriter, composer, producer, or inside or outside of the band wasn't hypercritical to me at all. And when I make full albums with artists, which is most of what I do as a producer, I think it does blur the line between what it means to be a member of a band. It's like I’m temporarily engaged in a partnership. I find that very satisfying, in the same way that other people find being a member of a band for a long period of time can be very satisfying. Coming together through a record scratches that itch for me. When I moved to Los Angeles, I did think about how there was this new ecosystem available to me of writing and producing pop music. In some ways I've surprised myself, but it also confirms what I thought all along, because my relationship to that ecosystem has remained very much my own. And that could change. I could find myself producing pop records, and I occasionally do make music that lives in that world, but I'm coming to it from a different angle. I'm proud to say that the music I've made is music that I stand behind, with all the people that I've collaborated with. I guess to me those collaborative projects all figure into what I consider… art making.
I was going to say artistry.
I would say art making. “Artistry” sounds a little highfalutin. [laughs]
One song that you’ve done in the pop format that had an impact on me, because my kid listened to it constantly, is “Bags” by Clairo. I love that somewhat indescribable lead sound. It’s like the first time I heard those Chamberlin flutes on Vampire Weekend’s “A-Punk.” You have this knack for finding sounds that are outside the realm of what’s normal. Is that something you seek out as a producer?
After I graduated from college back in 2006, one of my first jobs was working for film composer Craig Wedren [Yellowjackets, School of Rock, etc.]. At the same time that I was working for him, I was producing the first Vampire Weekend album, and he gave me a bunch of sounds, including those flutes. He also had these harpsichord collections and the Chamberlin cello – all of those sounds went into the Vampire Weekend record. It was the beginning of me seeing how film music could be integrated into songs, and that has continued throughout my career. It's funny, as I say this, I realized there's a song on my new album, “Hardy,” that samples a film scored by George Delerue. On the third Vampire Weekend album [Modern Vampires of the City], prior to getting into the thick of making it, I was working on a film project with my brother [Zal Batmanglij], and I collected all these choir sounds that I thought would be great for the score. That project didn't materialize, but all of a sudden I had all these choir sounds that I had extensively been learning how to use, and I put them into the Vampire Weekend album. I think the sound of Modern Vampires of the City is very much influenced by this film project that never materialized.
