Michael Penn: Perfect pop maestro

My love of Michael Penn's music so pre-dates my interest in recording that when I was preparing to interview him for Tape Op, I returned to his records — I felt I knew them by heart, to find that I knew only one aspect of them by heart. I knew the songs. Granted, the songs are most important, or as Michael put it to me at one point, "Song is king." Still, with an ear directed towards the recordings themselves, I was astounded at how great all of Michael's albums sound. Now I knew this at a basic level all along — March and Free-For-All in particular have never left my stereo or iPod rotation for very long — but listening from the recording perspective, I discovered an attention to detail that I had not noticed before. The background vocals and guitar parts, for example, were not only memorable melodically, they sounded cool, brilliantly odd. They added so much depth without distracting from the songs — ideas swirled around, but never cluttered up the mixes. I was amazed that I was hearing new things on records I had been listening to almost constantly for 15 years.

Of course, this shouldn't be surprising. During a recent performance on NPR's World Café, Michael agreed that he was but a reluctant performer. He said that making the records is, for him, the best part of the process. His care and craft are certainly apparent on his lateÌ album, Mr. Hollywood Jr., 1947 — yet another record full of brilliant pop songs that he recorded (and mastered) at home.

My first talk with Michael, after a recent performance at Portland's Doug Fir Lounge, led to the discovery that he was a big Tape Op fan.

I later caught up with him for a phone interview.

What's your home studio like?

It's basically just a living room, which is a fairly large room, and in the living room are the drum kit and the piano. That's my main recording room. That's on one side of the house, and then on the other side is a small room that was once a tiny dining room, where I've got my Pro Tools rig and all my gear. I have my amp heads in that room with cables running down to the basement where the cabinets are.

So that's set up all the time?

Mm-hmm. Then I just run a snake into the living room, bring everything back into my patch bay and work in my little cubbyhole.

Are there any treatments in those rooms?

I was prepared to do treatments, but I did a few mixes in there and brought them to various systems and thought it sounded pretty accurate — so I counted my blessings and kept going.

Right. So when you were tracking most of the stuff for Mr. Hollywood Jr., 1947, were you doing that live with the other players?

It was always tracking with guitar and drums when it's a drum song. Basically, I would go with a guitar into a third room that's a little library, and then Danny Frankel would be out in the living room. And Bruce MacFarlane helped me engineer.

So he was, for the most part, just there for just the drum song tracking?

No, he was there for more than that. We kind of engineered it together. Bruce is a very talented engineer and a pleasure to be around. He was extraordinarily helpful.

So you're using almost the whole house, then?

Yeah.

Are you finding many differences in sounds between the rooms?

There's really not much to do in any of the rooms except the living room. The living room is large enough that depending on where you place a mic, you can get different sounds. I was figuring that I was going to have to find a way to make some money to dedicate toward doing drums at a real studio, because I didn't think that I was going to get drum sounds that I liked at the house. But the room had a good sound to it. I experimented with different area mics in different places and depending upon the song, just kind of moved things in and out.

When we talked before, you mentioned using a Beyer ribbon as a supplement on the kick in addition to the standard AKG kick mic. Could you explain that a bit?

Yeah. We stuck the ribbon so that it was sort of facing outwards, so it wasn't going to get all the pressure of the kick drum head hitting it. It doesn't sound like something I would ever use on its own, but it has lots and lots of nice low-end information to help the AKG.

Are there any other mic setups that you keep coming back to?

No, not really. I didn't get too crazy about it. I knew that it was kind of going to be what it was, which is the sound of that room, and I don't have the mic selection that I would have had at a real studio. The only thing that ever really changed was the placement of the room mic, and that was song- dependent. For me the room is really all about snare length, and that has a lot to do with what the tempo of the song is, what the vibe of the song is, and really trying to find the right length of tone. Sometimes that would mean dedicating a room mic somewhere for the snare drum, keying it and gating it off the snare drum, and sometimes that would mean playing around with other options. Either, you know, Altiverb or some other thing sort of combined with a room mic to get the right length of things.

Were you switching up the room mics a lot?

Yeah, that would always change. A lot of times it was a [Neumann] U47. A lot of times it was a U67. Sometimes it was a [Studer] D19. Sometimes it was an American D22. Sometimes it was an American D44. You know, whatever sounded interesting.

And you said you have a pair of Schoeps, too?

Yeah, I have a pair of Schoeps that I use for the overheads. Snare was usually a 57. I don't have a lot of options. And then toms are usually Sennheiser 441s, and that's pretty much it.

Does the studio play much of a role in your writing?

I usually don't even start to record until I can actually sit down with a guitar or the piano and play the song top to bottom except, obviously, for things like "The Transistor" or just little tone poem things that are all about texture and some kind of sonic environment. That's a whole different thing. But in terms of the songs, I don't usually start unless I've played them at Largo a couple of times. But the studio plays a big part in arranging for me.

We also talked about your Pro Tools 24 setup and how you like the stability of that system. You would, however, like to get something so you could mix out of the box because you hear a difference there. What difference do you hear?

The difference that I hear is really just the width of the canvas that you're mixing on, and it just seems that there's a little bit more... a little bit wider stereo field and a little bit more clarity of sound placements within the stereo field when you mix out of [the box]. And I'm not sure why that is. There's something, I guess, about frequencies combining in the analog realm... Maybe I'm nuts and there is no difference. But I don't even know for sure if subbing out to eight stereo pairs is going to achieve what I want, because maybe it's a function of actually everything taken individually — but I want to at least try that. I mean, I'm always trying to find ways to expand that. I was privy to some early tests of QSound. The unfortunate part about QSound is that when it was first introduced, they were out of their fucking minds. They wanted to like, charge points on an album. But they actually let me use it for free, and I used it on the album Free-For-All a little bit. And there's a couple of little moments where if your speakers are set up right, you'll hear something coming from behind you, giving some three- dimensionality to the stereo field. It's always something that has really intrigued me, which is why I would eventually love to get my hands on a 5.1 system just to play around with it. Since people are actually buying those things for their home theaters, there's at least a moderately in-place environment for that. I just don't know how good the quality is of what most people have. In the interim, I've tried to find things that achieve a little bit of it — like on my album MP4 (Days Since A Lost Time Accident), Husky Hoskulds, who engineered it, had this old expander box, so we would have the normal stereo canvas, which would be however wide, but then every once in a while there would be some sound that we would place extreme left or extreme right. That interests me — to sort of play around with that kind of thing.

Do you remember, on Free-For-All, what parts you used QSound on?

You know, I don't remember what they are. I just remember being aware... I was aware of two things. One, that they were nuts to charge points for this, because it was the kind of thing where you had to have a stereo set up exactly right at home. It had to be laid out very specifically. If you did that, it was impressive as hell. But who's going to do that? And number two, it was the kind of thing I just knew was going to be abused. The kind of thing that people are doing with 5.1 now, where they're using it as a fucking space age effect box and sending sounds soaring over your head or something, as opposed to trying to create some kind of subtle environment with it — which is something that could be really interesting.

I really love the electric guitar parts on all your records. They're so well- placed and fit each song really well. I was wondering if you've used a similar rig across all your records, or if you kind of mix that up each time.

I would like to mix it up more — I just don't have that many amps. I bounce between the following amps usually — it's either a fairly new Fender Pro Junior, a vintage [Vox] AC30, a Matchless 30 watt or an Ampeg V2. Then occasionally, I'll use a Danelectro Silvertone that has a crazy reverb in it.

When you mic those, are you sticking pretty much with the traditional approaches or are you moving stuff around a lot?

I usually move stuff around a lot, but the limitations of this particular record usually made it so that I required the isolation of the basement, and there was already a cabinet down there. So I would run either the V2 head or the Matchless head through the cabinet and just mic it up with a 57.

In addition to the guitar parts, you also have consistently interesting back- ground vocals. The parts are creative and they're recorded in really cool ways. I was wondering if that's something you are conscious of going for when you're recording?

Oh yeah. I'm pretty bold in carving out stuff. I'm not shy with filtering stuff. And background vocals, to me, they don't have to sound like hi-fi vocals. They can fit into a mix like an instrument. They can fit into a mix like a horn part or a guitar part or whatever. That's one of the reasons why sometimes I'll use an old RCA ribbon mic, because that's almost like putting it through a band filter. It already just puts it in a place other than where the lead vocal is. It's different if it's a part that's like a two-part or a harmony part to the lead vocal. But if it's a background part, that can serve as color just like an instrument can.

That sort of leads to another thing I notice across all your records. There is a lot going on in your arrangements, but they're never cluttered — just full of really cool ideas that come in without ever detracting from the song. Do you have any hints on how to carve out those spaces and make sure that sounds aren't stepping all over the song?

You know, a lot of it with me is instinct, and there are a lot of things I wind up doing fairly consistently — but I always have to re-remember them. It's almost like once I get my hands on the mix I find I'm doing something that I've done before to achieve a certain result — and I never remember them between records. I just always go, "Why don't I fucking write this down so I don't have to search to find this idea again?" And I never do. And that would be, for me, something helpful to read in a magazine. Write it down. Write the idea down. Because I spend too much time rediscovering some of these things. I can tell you one thing that I do a lot is find and commit to a place within the stereo mix for a sound, and then assign a reverb to it that is right for the mix. But the reverb is mono panned in exactly the same place as that sound. So, you basically have a sound with a room behind it. But it's in a defined place within the stereo field. I think of mixes like a grid. In fact, when I did my first album, I gave Bob Clearmountain these diagrams that I had drawn, where it was basically a perspective stage of left and right and then front and back. And the further something was back meant the wetter it was, and then it would indicate whether the wetness was stereo room or mono room behind it.

How did he react to those diagrams?

He loved it, I think. I did them on my Mac SE in HyperCard. Remember HyperCard? God, I loved HyperCard. Bill Atkinson designed a program that taught you everything about computers without letting you know that that's what it was doing. Anyway, I made little icons representing each instrument, placed them on a 3D grid and then printed them out. Maybe he was just bemused, but he seemed really into it. While I don't know Bob well, I find him to be a very, very nice guy, so it's entirely possible that he was humoring me.

Was that an unusual level of detail for him to receive?

I don't know. I never asked him that. All I remember is me constantly saying, "Dryer," and Bob going, "Really?" and me going, "Yes... please. Look at the grid. Up near the front... this is bone dry," and Bob going, "Really?"

Cool. On your various records, you've worked in such a wide array of conditions and with so many different people. I was wondering if we could just run through the records and discuss the varying conditions in which each was recorded. On March, you have big name session drummers like Jim Keltner on one song, and drum machine stuff on the next. How did that all come about?

I had done very, very complete demos for March. I got signed off of 4-track demos that I had done at home. And because of my limitations at the time, in an apartment, I couldn't have a drummer in to do the demos — and I hated drum machines. So what I spent hours and hours and hours on an early version of Performer with a little sampler with drum sounds that I had made in it, and just kind of created the drum tracks. So I was able to give it some life, as opposed to the static-ness of a drum machine. I would really move the samples around in tiny increments to try and push a little bit before the chorus, lay back in the verses and not have any beat occur in exactly the same place. It's the kind of thing that now, I'm sure somebody has an algorithm that you can just do with the push of a button, but at the time I had to actually go in and, by hand, move every single beat constantly. And it gave it admittedly an odd feel, but a feel. So some of those things I had grown very, very fond of and didn't want to replace, particularly "No Myth". So we just pulled [the beats] from the demo versions and put them in. And then when it came to actually fleshing out some of the other songs that either were demoed in a more rudimentary fashion, or were hold-over songs from the Doll Congress days [a band Michael played in in the mid-'80s] like "Big House", we would bring in drummers. And, you know, the top of my list was Jim Keltner.

And you had some of the same crew back for Free-For-All?

Yeah, a lot of the same people.

Did that result in more of a band-like collaboration on the arrangements?

I usually have pretty full ideas when it comes to arrangements. But Patrick Warren would take my melodic ideas and embellish them beautifully — and Tony [Berg] made important contributions as well. For example, Tony was unhappy with the original guitar solo I had done on the demo for "No Myth". It was kind of based around the melody of the song — very old school — and he pushed me to do something else. I am very glad he did. Tony has a very sophisticated musical mind and he would suggest alternate chords and inversions.

Did you work off of demos for that record too, or..

Yeah, I had a few demos, but it was mostly fleshed out at Tony Berg's studio.

Free-For-All is one of my all time favorite records. Any good stories from that one?

It was an interesting experience for me for a number of reasons. One is that it was the record that started this notion that I'm a perfectionist who takes forever to make a record, because it was, whatever, two-and- a-half years between March and Free-For-All. But the reality wasn't that. It was that it was the first time that I had ever had a label giving me tour support and sticking me out on the road to work a record. I was away from home for a long, long time and couldn't, for the life of me, write on the road. So it wasn't until I got done with everything for March that I could begin to write Free-For-All. So when I had a batch of songs, it was a very new process for me, because my experience previous to this was being able to demo and flesh stuff out first, and then go into a studio and deal with them. So it was a learning experience. We went back to Zeitgeist for most of it, which was Tony's place in his backyard — a nice API console and a little room and stuff — and we just started to record the songs based just on the more rudimentary demos that I had done.

So had you written the songs in a pretty concise amount of time?

Well, it depends on what you mean by concise. I wouldn't call myself speedy. I would say in the year before we started. It usually takes me about a year to write enough songs that I'm happy with to make an album.

And then on Resigned things switched up a bit.

Resigned was another big learning experience, because Tony is very much a perfectionist, and whatever perfectionist tendencies I have were sort of multiplied by Tony's. I remember Tony spending hours and hours cutting Jim's drums on "Now We're Even" to get them perfect. And I was just amazed at how dedicated he was to this task. It was an early digital recording, the Sony multitrack digital reel-to-reel, and so he was doing it digitally from one machine to another. It was that kind of thing, where we were both indulging those kinds of notions, and it was a lot of fun. But then Brendan [O'Brien, who produced Resigned] is a completely opposite animal. Brendan is incredibly spontaneous. Because Tony was closer to my tendencies at the time, it was for me, a bigger learning experience to work with Brendan Suddenly I realized that what is more important than the perfect sound is spontaneity and capturing a moment, and that is what Brendan is just unbelievably good at. Brendan has this symbiotic relationship with Nick DiDia, his engineer. It's close to mind reading what goes on between those two, because they've worked together for so long. I'd be in the main room at Southern Tracks coming up with a guitar part and Brendan would suddenly come on the thing going, "Oh, that's great. We should do that." He'll tell Nick, "Put up a mic," and Nick will go, "What?" and Brendan will go, "I don't care, whatever's close. Now." It's like now. And it was like, "Oh, you mean, you don't have to really worry about that shit? Really? I mean this guy's a hotshot and he's doing that?" So it was like, "Wow." It was very liberating. Now admittedly, this was Southern Tracks, where any mic you might pick up is going to be a great mic-and it's a room that is tuned extremely well, so the sound that you're mic'ing in the main room is going to sound pretty close to what's out there in the control room, because the guy that owns that place, Mike Clark, is kind of a fanatic on phase and making sure everything is just so. That's where the perfectionist tendencies went at that place. It's kind of Mike Clark's thing. But Brendan's approach is just great.

Did that spontaneity contribute to Resigned sounding more like a straight rock record?

Well, I think that had a lot to do with it. I think the fact that I didn't want to make another album with drum machines, and I told him that, and that I wanted it to sound like a band in a room — so that's how we tracked everything, with Dan McCarroll and me and Brendan on bass. So yeah, it was a different vibe from the first ones and was a blast.

Then on MP4, you started to do a little tracking at home?

Yeah I started to do a little bit on the first few songs because I had gotten my first Pro Tools rig and hadn't really done much with it. I started to demo some of it at home and then went in fairly quickly to actually do it.

So, pretty different experiences all across the board. After all that and then doing the new record at home, do you have a preference?

Well, the most fun I've had are Resigned and this one. MP4 was difficult because things had blown up at Sony already. I'm sure people are sick of hearing stories about the big bad majors, and my story is not unique. There are people with far worse experiences than I had.

You mentioned that you'd tried to master Mr. Hollywood Jr. with respect for the dynamics that you already had in the mixes. What did you use?

I actually mastered in Pro Tools. I brought the 24 bit stereo files into Pro Tools and used one of the Waves finalizing programs and maybe a little bit of multiband compression. But nothing severe, and nothing that squashed the dynamics to the point that the songs had no ebb and flow. The album, when listened to as a whole, "Room 712" sort of shocks you, because that's what it's supposed to do, and the album has to have headroom for that to be able to occur.

And you said that you've gotten some complaints from retail as a result?

Not complaints so much as questions like, "How come we have to turn this up when we put it on the in-store play?" And I have to explain to them, "Well, you see most CDs these days..." etc., etc.

You'd also talked about the idea that if somebody was going to get into mastering, one thing to consider would be mastering specifically for MP3?

Yeah, specifically for AAC or MP3. I mean, I think that makes sense. And if I had the time and the sort of communication with Apple, whether they were interested enough, I would have offered two versions of the album on iTunes. I would have offered an album version, which would be mastered just like the CD, and then I would have offered separate individual tracks that would have been volume-adjusted, so that when people make mix playlists, tracks from my album don't suddenly drop in level from other songs. I would still do it judiciously and make sure that the songs internally had dynamics, but I wouldn't have worried about the overall dynamics and ebb and flow of the album as an album. But that was what was more important to me, so that's what I did first, what's out there as a CD.

Do you feel like there's anything else specific to MP3 or AAC that needs accounting for?

I actually think MP3s can sound really good. You know, as somebody that spent a lot of time making cassettes, these are much, much better, and I think there are a lot of people who would never have to choose anything but an MP3 or AAC. The only thing that I would consider, in terms of the mastering, is what most people who are listening to MP3s are listening on — ear buds or computer speakers or headphones. The home hi-fi almost needs a different mastering approach than what people tend to listen to music on more now.

Have you brought back much from your soundtrack or production work that you think has really informed your music?

A lot of what I've done on soundtracks has informed stuff. In fact, "The Television Set Waltz" actually makes a little appearance in Melvin Goes To Dinner [a film by Bob Odenkirk that Michael scored]. But yeah, it's just more learning for me. The more work I do the more I learn. It all helps on every level.

How would you describe your production style when you're producing other artists? What do you try to bring to the table?

I think I have the ability to get inside the songs, to find the emotional core. I don't think I have a production style as such. I just try to let the song dictate the approach.

Of your work as a producer, what are you most happy with?

Well, I am very proud of Mr. Hollywood Jr., 1947, but in terms of producing other people I would say "Wise Up" for Aimee [Mann], Wallflowers' "Witness" and Liz Phair's "What You Can't Have" [from the shelved album] are three of my favorites.

Are there any records or artists that you aspire towards? Most write ups of you or your music just make the obvious Beatles comment.

I am very complimented by the Beatle comparison. I think I am definitely in a tradition of songwriting that is melodic, acoustic based, folk-rock-pop-whatever. But there are a lot of people who make music that is much more "Beatles-y" than me. I mean, lyrically I am a million miles away from that and musically and sonically, it's quite different to my ear. So I assume that what they mean is I make music based in that tradition, but it's really good. The Beatles influence stretches through so much of the stuff that I grew up on. Everything from Big Star to Cheap Trick to Squeeze and Costello. What those guys did, in the brief period that they were around, was come up with these basic patents that everyone's been building stuff onto for a long time. And I'm not interested in just repeating that. But there's so much other stuff for me. Dylan, obviously. Roy Harper, Peter Blegvad, Brian Eno. As far as aspiring, I don't really aspire toward any records or artists, but I do aspire to generate feelings that I respond to. Does that make sense?

Totally. Speaking of generating feelings that people respond to, lots of Tape Op folks are fans of your engineer cameo in Boogie Nights.

Oh, cool.

Any insights into that performance?

Well, I named the character Nick after Nick DiDia. And there were a couple of outtakes(that I don't think show up anywhere) where Wahlberg says something to me — I forget what — but it's something where I finally blow up in frustration.