You've been Nick Lowe's producer/engineer for all of his albums since 1994's The Impossible Bird.
He was a huge inspiration for me. He was the guy who convinced me that records could be made live in the studio, that it wasn't too scary and that all you needed was somebody who was confident enough on the mic to take control of the situation and believe. Nick's attitude is always, "I know how this song goes. Just play along and it will all be fine." He's got confidence himself that what he's got is really good, and the whole thing goes forward like that. He invests confidence in the people around him.
That's probably infectious.
It's totally infectious. He's also very pragmatic. He usually sets out a four or five-day period of recording, and he's maybe got three to five songs to cut. We might miss one of those — it really doesn't matter because of the amount of time he saves not having to overdub a vocal and all that stuff down the line. He can afford to miss on a couple of songs over the course of an album and have to come back and re-cut them. We've done that, but it's very unusual for his songs not to be got in the end. He'll do three or four of those sessions and that will be it. He really wanted to make records where you started with his vocal and then figured it out. When I met him I was pretty frustrated by the way the records I was making at the time were sounding. I never listened to them when I went home.
But you do now?
I do now, and I get really excited when I hear them — if I can feel what I felt when the red light was on and it was, "My God, I hope this is being recorded!" I can still hear that moment in them — especially Nick's records. I never tire of listening to them, nor does he.
His 2007 album, At My Age, just sounds fantastic. Were most of the vocals live on that?
