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?
