Drummer Alan Evans and his bandmates (Eric Krasno on guitar and Alan's brother Neal Evans on keyboards) have led the funk/jazz trio Soulive through over 10 years of tours, albums and studio sessions. Their latest release, Up Here, is the first on their own Royal Family Records, and the first tracked and mixed at Alan's Playonbrother Studios in Hatfield, Massachusetts. But Playonbrother isn't simply a studio for Soulive. It's also a place where Alan records other releases for their label, as well as producing, recording and mixing for outside projects. Yup, the man is busy.
What's up with your studio, Playonbrother? Is that set up on your property?
Not anymore. [laughter] That's been a studio, but the location has changed a few times over the years. Now I've definitely found a really great spot. I finally have all my gear and everything in one place. For a while I had my studio at home, which is great for me because I play bass, drums, guitar and sing. What happened was a few friends of mine from Boston wanted me to record a couple of albums for them. "Cool, come by." I'm close with them — not a big deal. At the same time I was mixing a lot of albums and FTPing — that kind of deal. The word of mouth starts happening and people are contacting my wife, Kim, because she manages that whole side of things. Everybody who I ended up working with was really cool, but I just felt uncomfortable having people I didn't really know coming to my spot, you know? We have an eight-year- old and a five-year-old. It was hard to schedule things around regular life. I found a new spot and it's just amazing. I'm really psyched.
Is it a barn?
It was a barn. I live in western Massachusetts and I have a buddy who pretty much owns most of the area and he's really into music. My wife knows him really well and she was like, "I'm looking for a space." We meet him, he takes me into this building and oh man. We were walking in thinking, "Yo, this is gonna be incredible." He opens up the door, [makes whoosh noise], the door goes open and it looks like someone has been through with a jackhammer. [laughter] He was like, "So, when do you want to get started on construction?" I'm like, "Dude, that's not exactly what I was thinking of." It just would have been an insane amount of money. On Craigslist I found this one [listing] and the description was so odd. It was like, "Office building/storage area — 2500 square feet." So I emailed. I like to be up front with my intentions. I've done my share of sliding in the back door, then two days later the cops are banging down your door because you're making too much noise.
Oh yeah.
So I write this really long email, tell the person what I'm trying to do. She hits me right back. "I think the place would be perfect for you." We go down there and I walk in. As soon as I put my foot through the door, I'm like, "This is it. It's perfect. She was right." Very high ceilings. I just clapped my hands. It just felt so good — just a big, open area and it has these rooms off to the side. There are two bathrooms and four rooms so I can put guitar amps [in there]. I have my Leslie in one. I have one as a lounge. I have one that is empty now — using it to shoot photos in. In the back of it is the storage area she was talking about, so we have all of Soulive's touring gear back there. Sometimes I just use it as an echo chamber because it's this big, concrete space. You just throw a speaker in there and crank it up just a little bit, [add] some mics and it's just, "Whooo!"
It just adds that real room thing to something.
Exactly. The woman I'm leasing the spot from is just amazing. Back in the '70s people used to hang out in another barn on her property and play music all through the night. Everyone in the area's cool. It was perfect.
On the new record, I hear room sounds on the drums. Is that the natural sound of the room?
That is the room, man.
[laughter] Well, that's a good thing.
Yeah! When I was a kid, my brother and I grew up listening to [my father's] amazing jazz collection. You just have these moments where's it's like an epiphany. I remember listening to a Coltrane album when I was little, looked on the back of it and there were a couple pictures of them walking to the studio from the parking lot and it said, "Walking into Rudy Van Gelder's studio." That was the first time that it really hit me — "Oh, there's somebody who records this music. Who is this Rudy Van Gelder cat?" That's what got me on the whole recording tip right from there.
You couldn't have started at a better place.
Man. That's always been my thing. Obviously we all go through the trials and tribulations and learning process. I'm still learning. But it took me a while to figure out that (at least for me) it's about the room. You can fucking EQ shit for days and do all this kind of stuff, but if the vibe in the room is right, if I can hear the room — ah man. What's that Neil Young album?
Harvest?
Harvest. There's the beginning of a tune where the bassist is playing and you can hear the bottom of the snare kind of rumbling with the bass. Damn. They sound like they were on top of each other. That's definitely the turn we made with this album. This is the album that I've been really wanting to make with this band for a long time. The last album — it was called No Place Like Soul — it took us a year or so. It was just one of those albums. It was fun, but it took a long time.
What studios and producers and engineers have you worked with over the years?
When we first signed to Blue Note we did an album at Avatar with Bob Brockman. We were on Blue Note but the [studio's] clock was ticking. I don't think we got as much out of it as we could have knowing what we know now, but whatever. We worked with Bob Power. I learned a lot from that cat. Then our boy Kirk Yano — this dude's a crazy cat, man. He grew up in Cleveland back in the day and he works a lot with [jazz guitarist] Pat Martino. On the other side, he [engineered] a lot of Public Enemy's albums. He's done a shitload of classic hip-hop. He's one of these dudes that will tell you anything and he'll try anything. He's just like, "Alright Al. Fuck it. We'll just put it through this."
He's learned that you don't say, "No." You just try it.
Exactly. On the last album, No Place Like Soul, we cut that at our producer, Stuart Lerman's place — a little room. It was like hanging out in someone's living room. I guess he does a lot of singer-songwriter stuff. We hooked up with him because we were really trying to focus on the songs, lyrically.
Yeah. That's a song record.
Joel Hamilton mixed most of that album. Another crazy cat. Then Tony Maserati mixed a couple of joints on that.
One thing I noticed on the last record is that you were going kind of nuts with drum compression.
That's Joel. It was a lot of fun hanging with him. He's mad scientist, crazy dude. [There] were a couple of tunes I mixed — "Kim", the one that I was singing on, and "One of Those Days". Tony Maserati mixed "Mary" and "Callin'".
Did you have Joel mix those other songs too and just compare them?
Exactly. Joel mixed the whole thing, and Tony had been in the wings wanting to do something with us. Eric met him through doing a Justin Timberlake track...
Adding a guitar or something?
Yeah. He started hanging with Tony and telling him about what we did, and Tony was like, "Man, I would love to mix some music — cats playing instruments." He really hooked us up because he was just so psyched to do it. So yet again, another cool cat.
And there's no wrong or right with mixing. Everyone's got a different approach.
Exactly. That's the truth, man.
That seems like a lot of different recording scenarios.
Definitely. I started gigging out when I was about 11 or 12. My first studio experience was probably when I was about 12 or 13 — one of these deals where we won a battle of the bands, got some free eight hours of studio time at two in the morning. So the [engineer] wasn't really too happy about that. I was kind of interested in it, because at that point I started to get into Jimi Hendrix and the whole Hendrix/Eddie Kramer thing. I had my questions — it was all very new to me. The dude just didn't want to hear from a little kid. So I was like, "Man, I can do this." So I go home. I had a couple of tape decks and [I'd] record drums onto one, just [kept] bouncing back and forth. It sounded like shit by the end. You couldn't hear anything over the hiss. It wasn't until I moved to New York City in the early '90s when I hooked up with this cat Dave Swanson, who was the monitor engineer for Blues Traveler. My band back in the day was running in that circle with the Spin Doctors and Blues Traveler.
Was that Moon Boot Lover?
Yeah, exactly. That's old school man. Dave was a student, I found out years later, of Kirk Yano. We were working at Greene St. Recording and he was the first cat where I had a question about something and he was like, "Come on over." Maybe it was an SSL. "Really, I can touch that?" He's like, "Yeah, go ahead. This is what this does." I was like, "Wow, finally someone who has some credentials is cool." I remember this one Moon Boot Lover album — we were mixing half of a verse, print it to tape — splicing tape. I was learning a lot about the gear and how to fix stuff. A buddy of mine, Michael Birnbaum, has a studio in Woodstock right now — Applehead Recording Studios. He bought and built a new place, so I got in there. For a while he had a Neve, API and a Trident B-range in there. It was just one big mothership. I was like, "Dude, you are out of your mind." It is a great spot. But he's another cat who really just let me do whatever. He was like, "Yeah, come sit down. I'm gonna go have some coffee. Go mix it up. Do whatever."
So you got to do a bit of stuff in there and use that space?
Yeah. Soulive actually cut something in his old spot in Woodstock. When Mike moved we cut the album Next there. His new spot is great. Mike cut Meshell Ndegeocello's album Comfort Woman there and then Bob [Power] mixed it.
So that led you to work with Bob then?
Exactly. We worked on some stuff with him. The funny thing is, and this has happened to me a few times — I always thought Bob was a brother. [laughter] You listen to A Tribe Called Quest and they're like, "Bob, turn me up." Then D'Angelo — you hear the guitar and I'm like, "Word." I think we finally met Bob at a restaurant in New York. I walked in and he was like, "Hey, I'm Bob," and I was like, "Are you serious?" [laughter] "Okay cool. Right on man."
I guess you wouldn't know, given his reputation and the back catalog.
Yeah. But that's the other funny thing. I don't know, you might know more about this than I do. But in my experience I haven't really met too many black engineers. It's very rare.
Or women.
Exactly.
It's obviously a "white dude" field, and that's kind of disturbing.
You go into these studios and you look around — I used to do my research and I'd see the prices of stuff and I was like, "I kind of see why. This shit's expensive man." [laughter]
It's hard to afford putting a studio together, for anyone.
For me though — I never let that get in my way. You have to work with what you've got. That really taught me a lot, because when you have only a few microphones and a 4- track, you've just got to make it happen. I record a lot of bands — you get cats in who are on their way, but they're not the greatest musicians. The tunes are cool, but I don't want to take cats who are alright and make them sound like Genesis or whatever. I like to make cats feel comfortable with what they're doing and make them sound the best they can. The thing that really helped me was getting bands in who could really play. Some of it is about where you record and the gear and this and that, but Toussaint, for instance — the cat who sang on the No Place Like Soul album — that brother can sing. I cut one of those tunes because we were at the studio, at our producer Stuart's spot. We were cutting most of his vocals on a [Neumann] U47 or something. He had a nice chain going. But he was blowing this mic up. This dude was the loudest singer I've ever heard in my life. So we did some vocals for one of the tunes at my house here. I was like, "Man, I'm not gonna have this cat blow up my stuff." So I pulled out my Audix OM6, put it up there. There is no way you're gonna find that vocal on the album compared to anything else. I was like, "Man, you can take a dope ass singer, put him on a [Shure SM] 57 with a good tune and it's not gonna matter. You put a wack singer on a U87 and it's gonna sound wack. I don't care."
Someone said, "The better your recording equipment, the more you can hear the flaws." That's the charm of the 4-track.
Exactly. It's funny that you say that. Neal and I have an older brother who's an audiophile. He has McIntosh gear — 1000-watt mono blocks. You go listen to music on that system? Whew. So what was really depressing was when I'd be really psyched on something I recorded and I'd take it over there. That's when you really hear what you're doing. He's not an engineer, but he would suggest things to me and it was really cool. Now when I send him stuff he's like, "Man!" He can't stop talking about it. So I'm like, "Cool." That's a good feeling. You listen to old recordings at his spot and you really hear how good... again, going back to the room. You listen to Count Basie, Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald — you're just like, "Man."
Top-notch players, great room, great recording.
So coming back to this new album, it was an interesting process because we really didn't plan on recording an album at all. Eric, our guitarist, hadn't even been to my studio. Neal came up to record some horns for his solo album. But I was like, "Yo man, come up and just hang out." So we come in, Eric had this tune and we just kind of laid into it — no click track, which we've done a lot of. That's a whole other thing. On a lot of albums I would record drums up here. Everything was to a click track so we could send files around and all that kind of shit. Ugh. Just a vibe killer, you know?
You're obviously a decent drummer — you're gonna swing a little more without it.
I've learned to play around the click. I was horrified of click, but now I can do it. I don't even think twice about it. But I still prefer not to. With this album, I hit record. Old school — you get a few takes, you get a good one, cool. Then we start building on it. So what I would do — I had the Leslie and Neal's clavinet in a room and then the guitar amps were [in one], so we were all in cans, but we were all in the room together. The horns were there in the room with us.
Oh, cool.
We were just cuttin', and as soon as we got some basics down I would go over to the control area and we'd start doing overdubs. A lot of the tunes and all of the horn stuff we were just doing on the spot. I'd get over to the control area and I'd start putting the mix together, because I knew what I wanted the recordings to sound like in my head. I could hear it. I would get over there and start getting the balance together while these dudes are doing the horn overdubs and whatever. At the end of the overdubs the tune was mixed. Done. In the can. We'd move on to the next tune.
It sounds like a whole different process than the previous record.
Oh yeah. That's the thing. I don't work with tape anymore for the obvious reasons that people stop working with tape — money, upkeep or whatever. You can have 150 tracks and you can do this and that — I try to be like, "Let's do this as if we were working with tape. Don't try to do any crazy editing. Let's get a good take." At the end of it we were so psyched. We did two three-day sessions. After the first three-day session we had like half of it done, and we had some gigs. We made CDs and we listened to it — it was on repeat the whole trip and it's been a while since we've been able to do that. For one, when you're working on one album for a year, you've heard it so many times and you've scrapped it so many times and you've rewritten it. By the time it was done I did not want to hear it. I was over it.
You're ready to move on.
Yeah. Whereas with this we're actually getting up to rehearse a couple of days at my studio before the tour because we have to learn the tunes. That's one disadvantage of doing it like that, though. We don't know them because you're just writing them on the spot and laying it down and then going, "Cool. Tune's done." Then you move on to the next thing you're gonna do.
You're gonna be excited about it on the road.
The thing is with us, the tunes are really going to develop and go other places, and we'll probably end up recording towards the end of the tour, so we'll have some live versions of it which are gonna be — whew, you know.
Yeah. They'll develop and they'll have some other twists and turns to them, different solos and what have you. That'll be cool.
Exactly. That's one thing were psyched about — having our own label now. We're already talking about going into the studio again. I've been so crazy busy just working on the Royal Family stuff. Eric came in to the studio a few weeks ago and recorded like three albums in four days or some shit. I've been mixing my ass off. The other night I was in the studio. I was like, "Man, I've got to work on my own stuff." I was like, "Hey babe, I'm going down to the studio. I'll be back in a little while." I think I was down there until 3 in the morning and of course up at 7 with the kids. I'm working on some solo stuff where I'm literally just playing and singing everything. Then I have my band, the Playonbrother Band, which has been going for a few years, and that's just craziness.
That's more guitar-oriented stuff?
Yeah. It's cool. It's a good time, man. The funny thing is when we started Soulive 10 years ago, the whole purpose of it — one of the things is obviously to play some music, but man, I didn't want to get involved with labels. I've always been the type of person where I like to be in control. I just always wanted to put out our own music. The early Soulive stuff had that organ trio type of thing. I was working on the album cover and I made it kind of Blue Note-ish looking. "It would be funny if we got signed to Blue Note." Sure enough a few weeks later Verve and Blue Note are like flying us all over into New York and this and that and I'm like, "What the hell?" So all of my like, "Man, fuck the labels!" stuff and then Blue Note comes at you and you're like, "Well, I'll make one exception." [laughter] It's Blue Note.
No kidding. There's such a wonderful history in that label.
And Bruce Lundvall, the president, you walk in his office and there's photos of him with everybody. He's the nicest guy, loved the music. "Alright, alright. I won't be so revolutionary right now. I'll chill out." We also did the Concord/Stax thing — they had some bread, but we never lost connection with our people. It feels really good now that we can just do whatever we want — it's a great feeling. Over the years we've gotten the connections and the relationships with people. It didn't take us any time to get a distribution deal for Royal Family. We're really fortunate — I never lose sight of that. Now we're really psyched that we can really feel comfortable about the music that we're making, because I know for a fact that when we feel good about what we're doing, it translates. People hear and feel that and they react to it and it's a snowball effect. The one thing I always believe is that the average listener doesn't care what label you're on. They care about what they're listening to. Is it good? Do they dig it? That's all that matters.
It's really true.
I'm really grateful for having been on Blue Note and Concord/Stax and what it's helped us to do, but it's a different time now. I'm just so excited. I've been waiting for this for a long time.
With this sort of direct connection with the fans through the label's website, are you looking at doing things like putting up MP3s of oddball tracks?
Oh yeah. Kraz (our guitar player) sent me this thing to mix. It was "Mellow Mood", this thing they cut at his studio down in Brooklyn. It is tight. Eric was saying, "It doesn't fit on any albums that I'm planning on doing." We just have so much music between all of us. That's definitely the plan.
Having an outlet for that?
Exactly because Neal — that dude's just crazy. He's been doing the score for The Black List on HBO. He's constantly been writing stuff, so some things make the cut and some don't. He has a ton of stuff. He wants to do the same thing, just put things up there. MP3s are cool, but I really want to find a way to give people a choice if they are going to download something.
On the Touch and Go website you can download records as 24-bit/WAV files or get an MP3. You can get higher quality than a CD if you want it.
Yeah, right? For a while we were looking into the USB key thing, but man those things are expensive.
It's probably good timing with having the studio space up and running. You can do projects in there with no or lower overhead.
Yeah, that's the thing man. It's funny because most of the cats live down in New York, and you know how it is in New York. All the larger studios have closed or are about to close, so cats have gotten used to the little project studios, little closets, and they walk into this spot and they're like, "Wow. Man what time do we have to get out of here?" "We're out in the woods! Don't worry about it. Let's roll. Let's have fun." [laughter] Kim gets the emails — "Where's the studio? We could do it here in New York." I'm like, "Just trust me." It's less expensive for me to charge people here. They have to come up and [get] hotels or whatever, but it's still not that expensive. Aside from all that, I just say, "Do whatever you want to do. But the vibe — you're just gonna really dig it." There's just something really special about the country feel to me. I just feel relaxed. I try and tell people when they come in — "When you're here making an album, just do good work. There's time for all the business later." At my studio I don't even have Internet. People come in with their laptops and I'm like, "Sorry man. You can go to the Starbucks in town a few miles away."
You're trying to capture a place and time.
Exactly. I set up my studio primarily for me. I can sit down at the drums, I have a remote and I can just go click and start cutting. Pretty much everything is all mic'ed up and ready to roll. You can go swap out different amps. The piano is always ready to roll. If someone has an idea, it's like, "You wanna lay that down?" The thing I like to do before a band comes in is have them send me demos or live versions of tunes. I go in there a few days in advance and try and get it set up. I start to get some sounds together. Obviously things change when the cats come in, because they hear some stuff, but I'm pretty far ahead once they get there. "Let's start cutting."
What are you recording to? Are you using Pro Tools?
No. I am not. We don't even have enough time for that discussion. I had an HD rig, but I don't have it anymore. Back in the Moon Boot Lover days I had some friends in this band ¿Como Zoo? out of Poughkeepsie. One of the guitarists was Joe [Buchalter] who was like, "Man, I'm tired of this shit — gigging, driving all over the place." I was trying to record at Applehead, my boy's spot in Woodstock. I had sessions set up with a live, hip-hop thing that my brother and I were [recording] and it fell through. So I called up Joe and he was like, "Come to Poughkeepsie. I have a room." He starts explaining to me, "Man, I'm gonna make some hardware and software." This is like '95, '96. I didn't even know what the hell he was talking about. I don't know if you're familiar with Metric Halo.
I just realized who you were talking about.
Exactly. So he shows me. They built the room because the first thing that they made was SpectraFoo. He was trying to explain to me what it was going to do. "Man if it isn't tape, I don't know what you're talking about." So once we got Soulive started, he calls me up. "Hey Al, it's been a long time! I started up the company." He was like, "I'd really like to send you what I'm talking about." I think he sent me one [Mobile I/O] 2882. I have three of them now expanded with the 2d cards. Joe and [his brother] B.J. hooked me up. I still have the same boxes I've had since 2000. All I did was update some DSP. They had the foresight a while ago when they were making it. "At some point we're going to figure out how to improve on it."
Well, that's so different than some of the other companies, where you've just got to throw it all away and it's worth nothing after five years or something.
Exactly. It sounds really good, man. It definitely helps when you've got some good gear. It makes it a little bit easier.
It's tempting to look at stuff you don't have and think, "Hey these could be some good tools."
Exactly. Back in the day I would just sit there at my Mackie with my ADAT and I'd just be EQing shit. I couldn't get it to sound right. I finally realized that it didn't sound right going in. If I want that snare drum sound, I tune my snare drum and I get it to sound the way I want it to sound. r
playonbrother.com, www.royalfamilyrecords.com
