Can you give us a little background on yourself? It's not every day that someone our age happens to be working on a Jane's Addiction record, and working with Bob Ezrin!
I'm from Southern California. I played in high school and all that stuff and when I graduated I knew I wasn't a good enough piano player to really pursue being a professional musician and I ended up going to recording school up here in Los Angeles. I grew up about an hour and a half outside of Los Angeles. I moved to Hollywood about two weeks after graduating high school. My first job was at a studio called Track Record, which I worked at for about four years, and then I lived in London for a year. I didn't do a lot of studio work over there, just because I didn't really have any connections. Then I came back to L.A. and have been independent ever since.
What have you been working on?
The last few are always the ones that seem the most important. Over the last three years it's primarily been 30 Seconds To Mars and Jane's Addiction just because they were such long records. I did another band over the summer called pre)Thing for V2. And this year I've mixed a mellowdrone record, which is supposed to be on ArtistDIRECT but I don't know what's happening with that anymore.
What's your background?
I came from more of an engineering background, obviously. I used to play music but as far as getting work and getting to where I am now, it's more through engineering and having a few successful mixes here and there that led out to me getting more production work. The first real production work was for Deadsy — I produced a few songs for them, which will be out on Dreamworks. Then they asked me to co-produce the 30 Seconds To Mars record with Bob [Ezrin].
How exactly did that happen?
I had done some work with the artist earlier on. Bob got involved and they wanted someone to co-produce the project. So I believe they went through quite a few names before they came back and asked me to do it.
So why were they still looking for a co- producer then?
I think Bob's availability was somewhat limited — he still had a lot of commitments to different ventures and they just needed someone else who could be hands-on all the time. And from that point Bob asked me to come in and do the same type of situation on the Jane's Addiction record. For that record Bob was pretty much there all the time, but not as much as me. We would share ideas and stuff.
So he brought you in for that. How did the band feel about that? Or I gather they were totally completely open to it?
I don't think we really talked about it until we were already in the studio. It wasn't going to financially be a different burden on them and they could see I was doing the work, so all is fair.
And they hadn't made a complete record for over a decade...
It wasn't a type of record where they came in and said, "Here's our songs," and someone could go, "This is the problem with your songs." Because since they were writing in the studio, nothing happened all at once, as far as pinpointing issues that needed to be dealt with. They were always slowly getting dealt with. I engineered the record. I'd say the production values are also things that stemmed over from that side of things — sonic levels and such.
It was quite the setup you had going there — a mix of formats and such.
Yeah, it was Pro Tools and tape. It was much easier to do all the overdubs in the Pro Tools environment. Especially with all the development that happened with the songs, it's much easier to hold onto a track and open up a new one and try a new idea and keep taking different approaches to a song. You know, I'm not a big kind of go-in-and-tune-the-vocals kind of guy. I try to use Pro Tools as more of a recording and archiving type function — editing. It's really great on a creative level but I don't use it as a fix-everything type thing. There's a lot of Pro Tools stuff going on, but it's more on the creative type of song arrangement and just being able to explore different options for the songs.
So how long were you guys at it from beginning to end?
I would say twelve or thirteen months on and off. There'd be a couple months here and there — which is when I made the record for V2. But it was a year-long project.
So was there any burnout at any point?
Up until the last stretch of it, it never really went more than two or three months at a time. Near the end you've really narrowed down exactly what songs you're working on and [laughs] you've been working on a lot of them for a long time but earlier on in the record they were going through new material and it was pretty fresh. And even up until the end, the [first] single, "Just Because", got written when we had already started mixing some of the material. And it got tracked — you know we had already done some mixes when we actually got around to tracking the first single. It wasn't stale from that point. There was always new material coming and you could always go back to recording drums and stuff like that.
I guess the big ordeal in such a major production would be keeping everything logged correctly.
