While puzzling through the intricacies of home recording (i.e. knowing what to do when you can't hear yourself through the headphones), San Francisco's Beulah managed to concoct two LPs of brittle, rousing pop.
And now, with the help of indie producer John Croslin (Guided By Voices, Spoon), [Tape Op #32] Nashville-based mixer/engineer/producer Roger Moutenot [#20] and Tiny Telephone studio owner John Vanderslice [https://johnvanderslice.com/], they're recording in a real studio, with a real budget. Are they in over their heads yet? We talked with Beulah's Miles Kurosky, Bill Swan and producer John Croslin.
Beulah started out as a bedroom project, singer and main songwriter Miles Kurosky and multi- instrumentalist Bill Swan nestled in Kurosky's apartment working out three-minute pop nuggets — as inspired by the Beatles and power pop architects like Badfinger and the Small Faces as they were by mid-'90s indie folks like Pavement and the Apples in Stereo. Lead Apple Robert Schneider even lent a hand on their early recordings, lending a mixer's hand and luring the group into the lo-fi hipper-than-thou domain of the Elephant 6 Recording Group.
But at the tail end of the '90s, it became clear than Kurosky's sights were set higher than love from a bunch of scruffy horn-rimmers. Signing to the semi-major Capricorn label (home to artists like 311), the group, now grown to 6 members, suddenly had a realistic budget for their records. And in the fading glow of their internationally (though still critically, not fanatically) acclaimed When Your Heartstrings Break LP, the next record looms large. You get the sense talking to them that it has to sound clean enough to break through the glass ceiling of NME and college radio, but still retain enough bite and originality to avoid copping to perceived consumer demand. Beyond that, Kurosky, fresh from a stay in Japan and, from the sounds of it, a bitter break-up with his gal, is determined not to repeat himself.
"I remember we all sat down before I left for Japan, and I said, 'I'm going to leave you tapes. I want everybody's individual voices, I want you just to figure shit out on your own.'" Kurosky explains, sitting tensely (he always seems on the edge of jumping up and either throwing a fit or launching into song) in Tiny Telephone, where the band are finishing mixes for the record. "On the last record more than this one, by far, on the harp strings I came in and said, 'Here's the string line, here's the horn line, here's this, this and this,' and maybe a couple times somebody would come up with a couple lines here and there. But for the most part it was me, and I think a lot of times people felt like, 'Oh, okay. Miles knows what he wants and I won't even bother with it.'"
"On this one I said, because I found myself repeating myself, I said, 'I don't want to do this again, the same string lines and the same horn lines, I want you guys to do it.' And if you listen to what Beagle [Bill Evans] wrote and what Swanney [Bill Swan] wrote, and Pat [Noel], they're so different, they all sort of worked."
The sound of this collaborative recording style becomes apparent when you hear any of the new songs, although they all sound like trademark Beulah — gamboling verses, with instrumental textures ranging from simple indie guitar to horns, that lead into anthemic choruses, melody at the forefront. But let Kurosky explain it: "A couple songs on here go from a Curtis Mayfield sort of soul thing that Swanney wrote, into like a sort of skronky garage guitar thing that Stevie wrote into like a spacey Moog thing that Beagle wrote, and on and on. It's crazy like that and it was intentional. I think this record will be better in that way and won't sound as one-dimensional. It won't sound so Kurosky, it'll sound more Beulah."
Swan stayed true to Kurosky's wishes, as did the rest of the band, cobbling together their parts over tapes sent from Japan. "When he was gone, we all had our own tapes and did it on our own. None of us ever got together to try and figure it out," says Swan. "Five months later we were like, 'Oh hey, nice to see you again.'"
On the LP's last song (the group doesn't have the running order set yet, but they know which songs come first and last — these were two of the six songs I heard in the studio), "The Night Is The Day Turned Inside Out" (alternately titled "Slow"), string sounds created by mellotron and chamberlin analog tape loops highlight a sad, orchestrated tune. But even the song's 5 guitars played at once don't create a mishmash of too many separate tracks, according to Kurosky.
"There are more tracks, but at the same time it doesn't sound like more, because I think we use space a little better in some places. Some things are actually a little more organic I think."
On the album's first song, "A Good Man Is Easy To Kill" — Kurosky's great with titles, but prepare yourself for a hell of a time trying to figure out what they have to do with the song, exactly — low, distorted guitar opens the tune, leading into Jethro Tull-ish flute (that doesn't sound annoying), then straight into their signature "ba-ba-ba" chorus. Toss in the only real strings on the record and it's a sprightly, marvelous opener.
But the path to these final songs was roundabout — it wasn't until all the disparate instrumental pieces were assembled that Kurosky finally put together the vocal harmonies and lyrics. "He's the only guy that I've ever worked with that saves singing and the lyrics till it's almost too late," laughs Swan.
"Which is kind of stupid," interrupts Kurosky, "because you lose your voice. But then again, if we didn't keep stupid, you know, we are stupid, so we're continuing in this manner. If we did things in a logical, smart, proficient way, it just wouldn't be Beulah. So, [engineer] John [Croslin]'s learning it in a different way, and I think he's going to be working in a more stupid manner in the next couple months."
Still, as the group introduces the concept of "Stupid Recording" into Croslin's deep production lexicon, Croslin's been introducing the concept of hands-free recording to the group.
"I think we've been a lot less stressed on this record than we've ever been before," explains Kurosky, "mainly because if something goes wrong we just assume that somebody else will fix it. Whereas before, we ran around like fucking chickens with our heads cut off because we didn't know how to fix it. We were just scared that we could never finish anything. This time around we're like, 'Screw it.' We have twice the machine for reasons unknown to any of us. I think we wish we could spend another six months in here really and just keep fiddling around. Maybe we don't really, but maybe we do, I don't know."
"It's comfortable," asserts Swan.
"It is comfortable," says Kurosky. "Look, we have a couch for Christ's sake."
The Making of Beulah's "When Your Heartstrings Break" by Michael Brannan
Tell me about the gear used to record When Your Heartstrings Break.
BS: We basically used a 16-track Tascam 1/2" MSR-16 and we uhh... you're gonna laugh at this, we used a Fostex model 450 16-channel board I bought for two hundred bucks.
I won't laugh at that.
BS: Somebody out there will.
Maybe somebody who knows what they're doing will!
BS: Yeah. And then we used a DBX 166 compressor, and we used that a lot. Vocals... pretty much everything. The best mics that we used were a CAD E100, it's a condenser mic, and an AudioTechnica 4033. And then we used Shure SM57s & 58s. We recorded most everything with the 4033, most of the exotic instruments w/ the 4033 & the CAD E100. The tape was Quantegy 456.
Did you use any mic preamps?
BS: Nope, directly into the Fostex. Well, I guess we used the compressor as a sort of preamp.
Tell me about your recording process.
BS: Everybody in the band just played thru the board — thru headphones, live — and then we just recorded the drums just using a headphone mix. We recorded the drums live with us playing our instruments, but just thru the headphone mix everybody had of each other, that's how we started it. Then we added the bass and just took it from there, added whatever we felt sounded good.
Were those ideas fairly fully formed before you started? Or did you keep, as you went on, just adding parts and saying, "How about this?" or, "How about that?"
BS: Well, about half-and-half. Some of the songs on the record we had already played full live versions here and there, but we changed them up once we started recording.
MK: The others were just done as recordings. We learned them real quick, had Steve [St. Cin] play drums and then just started adding stuff. As far as the adding stuff, you can pretty much see the evolution of them by the notes that I wrote on the back of each tracking sheet. Each sheet I wrote... I'd come in, because I'd be thinking about it all day. It says, "Try this," "Try this," "Try this." Not all of it worked. Usually one or two things worked. It'd say, "Put acoustic guitar on bridge", "put fuzz on verse", "add horns to chorus", or whatever.
That was part of the little parenthetical question I had here — were there things that you tried that didn't make it on the record?
MK: Yeah, there are lots. I would think about the crazy things and would try to get people in to play weird instruments just because I thought it would be fun. But there were a lot of times that I might've said, "Oh, this would be good," but it just didn't work out. It probably works 50/50. A lot of times I'd come in and say, "Oh, I heard this in my head." Then when I actually heard it in reality, not the reality in my head...
It sounded better in your head?
MK: Yeah, it sounded much better in my head — I have a different tuning. [laughs]
Is there something you can think of that would be the most unorthodox thing that you've tried?
MK: Oh yeah, there's so many things. First of all, we have a really dry room, our practice room. It's just carpet, it's a crappy little room. It has no good sounds whatsoever. So we've done things like stick our heads in bass drums to sing or play stuff.
BS: We're desperately looking for reverb that's natural.
MK: Yeah, so we'd stick our heads in things... we've taken the drums directly from the board, like you're listening to 'em on headphones, then stuck the headphones somewhere and mic'd the headphones. So we could get a different drum sound. Give them some sort of weird, coney, old time drum sound, kind of tinny.
What song would have any of those drums?
MK: "Matter vs. Space". We took four headphones, stuck 'em in the bass drum and then mic'd the bass drum and ran it back in.
BS: Then we just muted out the real drums for that part.
MK: Or the way we got sitar sounds on "Matter Vs. Space" were actually guitars that we'd just bend like crazy and tried to make these weird sounds to make it sound sort of sitar-y.
BS: We compressed that really hard too, so if anybody talked while we were recording it would have been just blowing out everybody's headphones.
The sitar sound on that song is guitar?
MK: Yeah. Those took about four hours.
BS: We just mic'd electric guitars, with no amplification, or if there is amplification we put the amp way in the corner of the room and pointed it the other way.
After the record was finished, you had it mastered. Did you notice a difference from what you heard in the final mixes that you did and the mastered version?
MK: No. I mean, the mastering, when we went to mix with Robert [Schneider], he pretty much compensated for the fact that... He didn't want to put too much in the hands, or have so much work for the mastering people. So it was pretty close to being mastered as it was. It was just the EQs. So there wasn't really much done at mastering, very little. He just twisted some knobs and did his thing to make it radio friendly or whatever — listener friendly. I went down once to master with Steve [La Follette, bass] and Pat [Noel, keyboards] and then it wasn't good enough so I went back down on my own.
Where did you go?
MK: Los Angeles, Newbury Park. This place called John Golden Mastering.
I've heard that name.
MK: Yeah, he does a lot of Sub Pop and Merge stuff. All sorts of other little indie bands. I went and hung out with him another day just to make it a little better, cuz there were a few things that needed to be done.
