I wanted to discuss your most recent project Black Pumas which was just nominated for a Grammy, so congratulations on that. Before we do that let's fill in the gap between the last time we interviewed you years ago for issue #94, when you were doing Grupo Fantasma. What have you been up to in that hole between that time and now?
Last time I spoke to Larry Crane, we had recorded an album with my old band called Grupo Fantasma. We'd recorded a record in a house. We just rented a house and made a makeshift studio. That was really around the time that I started to produce and was barely really kind of learning engineering, more out of necessity. Most of the studios that I was going to weren't getting the sounds that I was hearing in my head. That was early on, me trying to do that. A few years after that I really started to get into producing more, but I was always playing catch-up as an engineer, just to try and get the sounds that I was hearing. I'd say about five or six years ago, I opened up more of a proper studio and started investing in equipment and stuff. Early on it was all pretty lo-fi. I've just been working on records since. I played in a few different bands. I can get into some of the history of other bands and projects that I've been a part of, but in terms of the studio side of it, after that was when I kind of got thrust into producing and subsequently engineering.
In that time, I'm assuming you were doing some writing which led to what became Black Pumas?
Yeah. That was about two or two and a half years ago. I had a little bit of rare downtime. I had done some songs that had done really well. I'd done these instrumental records with a cohort of mine from the UK named Shawn Lee, an awesome producer if you haven't ever checked him out, engineer, producer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist. Just generally one of my heroes. He and I did a couple of albums, these Trans-Atlantic collaborations that we did all via e-mail. He has a studio, so he would send me drum tracks. He's in the UK, and because of the time difference, by the time I'd wake up and get to my studio, I'd have drum tracks sitting in my inbox, sometimes with bass lines. So I'd add songs. Anyway, we made a couple records and had a little bit of success getting songs in TV and film. Financially, I was at a point finally where I could take a little bit of time off and write. In 2017 I started this other record that I was working on for Amazon Music, a compilation more of some Texas Latin and soul. What happened was I sat down to write and record demos for that and I ended up coming up with a bunch of instrumental tracks. I was about three or four of them in, and I realized that this isn't this record, but whatever it is, it's something cool vibe-wise, so I followed that. I made these demos and brought in some musician friends of mine to play them. I recorded this huge batch of soul-influenced, kind of psychedelic-leaning instrumentals. At first, the initial intent was for me to have somebody come help write those songs and sing on them. That led to me meeting Eric Burton from the Black Pumas. At first, he was just helping me out with those songs. But as we started to gain some momentum and have fun working in the studio, we said we should make this an official thing. That was when we started to explore his songs. He's an incredible songwriter, and I feel like that's really when we became the Black Pumas. We already sort of had the production direction. Then when we were able to tap into his catalog, some of his old songs and bring them to life in this format, it all made sense as an album.
Yeah, so with the stuff you'd been writing and the songs he brought to the table, was it just serendipitous in the production style and the idea? Did it translate, or was it something where you took his simple demos and tunes and reworked them to work in the format of a more soul-focused format?
Up until then, he had performed pretty much solely as a solo performer, just him and either an acoustic guitar or an electric guitar. But he had never really performed that much with a band. He hadn't really recorded a lot of his material with a band. I think he may have had one or two songs he cut in the studio with musicians. But honestly his songs just fit like a glove. It was totally serendipitous that we were able to connect. As soon as he started playing songs, it really felt like it was kind of exactly what I was imagining this project would turn into, you know what I mean? His songs really elevated it. As much as I like to write, I'm not a songwriter per se. You couldn't play these songs around a campfire on an acoustic guitar. I'm not a singer. I'm not a lyricist. He really brought that songwriting element to the project. Then again his songs completely fit like a glove with the direction we were already heading production-wise.
How did you guys end up meeting?
A mutual producer-friend of ours. This guy in my neighborhood actually. I had actually put the feelers out around the world literally to a bunch of friends, again my friend Shawn Lee in the UK, I hit up some friends in L.A., and I was asking anybody. People would throw out some names, and I'd look them up, and for lack of a better description, it was just like too much of exact soul music. I didn't want to do any soul revival band. I love that scene and a lot of my friends are part of that. I love that stuff. But I didn't want to do that. I actually was having lunch with a mutual producer-friend of Eric and mine who lives in my neighborhood. He was picking my brain about some stuff, and I remember walking out to the car. We were leaving, saying bye, and I was like, "Hey, by the way, do you know anybody who..." and right away he was like, "Yeah, there's this guy Eric Burton. He's the best singer I've ever worked with. You should call him." So yeah, he connected Eric and I.
Can you tell me a little bit about putting this record together?
Yeah. I have a sound in my head kind of as an engineer. I have my wheelhouse for sure. It's definitely inspired more of my music than previous eras, particularly the late-'60s and early '70s is kind of my favorite era. Not to say that I don't like hip-hop music or any modern music at all. That's just my favorite thing. As a friend of mine put it, "I like the idea." I discovered a lot of older music, soul music in particular, jazz, funk, etcetera, through hip-hop music. I'm from that generation where in the '90s everybody was trying to figure out the samples producers were using. Everything to me is informed by that influence. As a friend of mine put it, you can't pretend that hip-hop didn't happen. I would say that generally my production aesthetic tends toward older eras, '60s and '70s in particular, but I would like it to make my head nod like a Pete Rock or DJ Premier hip-hop production as well. But I got my start producing hip-hop actually when I was in college on drum machines, on an MPC2000. Everything that I do now is still informed by then. But now I'm really into live performance and getting musicians in a room and how we play off of each other. Initially I started demos by myself based off drum loops. I kind of played everything myself. Then I brought in musicians, a crew of about three or four guys. We knocked out about five a day of these instrumentals that I started. They're inspired by the loop-based stuff but all played actually live, so everybody's kind of feeding off of each other and playing off of each other, but we weren't playing with a singer, so Eric wrote on top of those songs. Then when we became Black Pumas was really bringing in Eric's songs. At that point, I felt that to balance out the album, it would be really important to have those songs played live. Nothing was done to a click track or anything like that. Sometimes we even kept his scratch vocals. I wanted it to really balance out the album. The songs I had started felt a little more loop-based, even though it was all played live. There's literally no loops on the record. But we performed it as such, so yeah. It was important that Eric's songs were really pretty much all played live. We'd overdub here and there, fix something here and there and redo vocals here and there, but the performances are pretty live.
One of the things I just love about the record that immediately attracted to it, and sucked me in, is that it has this spirit of these older records without being cliché or cute. It has modernness to it, but it also has some things about it that we all love about those classic soul records. Looking back at some of those classics, what do you think it is, and I'm not talking about specific recording techniques or microphones, but what do you think it is about those records that keep them relevant?
That's a good question. I would say a lot of it is the human element of people playing together live. That's a tangible thing that kind of gets overlooked nowadays. Not that nobody's doing that, but I think that back then, all music was made like that. It was largely made by humans playing in a room together. There's just something about that; the happy accidents. I'm huge on that kind of stuff. I think it makes it to where it's kind of watered-down and perfect. I think some of the imperfect nature of music from that era is what makes it timeless. When you kind of go back and fix everything and don't have that surprise element of people playing ideas off of each other, there's not as much to grasp onto I think, because it's just so absolutely perfect. I feel like I have to keep some limitations in the studio to achieve that and not go back and fix everything digitally. By no means am I any sort of purist, but I usually start with a 1-inch, 8-track machine. We generally start everything there. I like the limitations of that; of not overdoing the tracks and just committing. I don't like to put too many mics on drums and things like that. Then from there we typically bounce to the computer, because I don't have the chops or the budget or time to make a full record on tape. I definitely embrace it. It's 2019, and computers are pretty awesome, and plug-ins have gotten a lot better. I try to find the happy medium of the two and embrace every tool that you have. I don't feel like the tools define the music. You can have the best analog everything, and if your songs suck, they're still going to suck. Some of my favorite engineers have that attitude. "Look man, it's not the mic or the gear or anything." The songs have to be good and the musicians have to be good. There is a certain aesthetic that I think older equipment and particularly having limitations of tape and stuff does bring out.
Can you give me an example of how you would set that up with eight tracks for cutting the tracks?
Yeah. For the Pumas record in particular, it was bass, guitar, and keys. When it was Eric's songs we brought in, it was one more guitar, because he's an incredible guitarist as well. Scratch vocal, and then that usually leaves four mics on the drums. Sometimes I just do three and one crazy mic, but typically I do four mics on the drums. I vary that up a little bit. I'm big on the overhead sound. I just like the sound of drums like that. I like that spatial kind of relationship of feeling like the room versus like every drum mic'd up and feeling everything in your face. I feel like that's those modern 4K TVs, those super-HD TVs where everything just looks unnatural because it's so perfect. I like the distance that a room mic gets. I mainly play off the room mic and a drum mic in the heart of the drums, just right on top of the kick drum. Then kick and snare. Sometimes I guess actually on the early tracks there was even a fifth mic, sometimes a bottom snare mic or something random, but typically I average around four mics on the drums. From there it's just bass guitar, keys, and vocals.
An interesting and fun-sounding record, especially in the days where things are often just smashed with compression.
Yeah. My ears get exhausted listening to stuff that's just too heavy-duty like that. There's a time and a place for it, and actually for the next record I'm looking to push thing a little bit, just to vary it up, but I generally like things with a little tiny bit of a lighter touch.
When I listen to Black Pumas and then Grupo Fantasma back-to-back, which I was doing sort of thinking about talking to you, there's such a common tone, and that's your guitar sound. This is a very different trajectory than that band obviously, because it was a big band essentially. It's fun to hear a common theme which is your playing.
Oh, thanks man. Yeah, I did produce two for Grupo. One [Sonidos Gold] we did at Wire Recording, which is a good friend and kind of mentor of ours named Stuart Sullivan. We did that record with almost all-natural reverbs. We tried to use room mics and re-amp things and stuff. Then on the second one, the one I actually engineered [El Existential], we just rented a bunch of gear in a house. We were like, "Oh man, how come this doesn't sound like Stuart's? We don't have the API and the awesome little reverb chamber he has and all that stuff." So it's kind of like this lo-fi, sounds like a living room in a house version of what we're trying to do with what Stuart did. That was like the first thing I'd ever really engineered.
Austin's a very different place than it was 20 years ago to be making music. Can you weigh in on where you think music has gone there? This is happening a lot of places, Austin used to be this cool little town that had and still does have a rich community and history, but it's just tilted toward tech so heavily. What do you think that's done to the scene?
Well, it's made it harder for a lot of musicians to afford living here. I moved here 20 years ago and bought a house 14 years ago. There's no way I could afford now to move here back at that age and buy a house. A lot of people are just posting up outside Austin. There are tons of little towns around here. A lot of friends have moved studios outside of town. To be honest, it's different for sure, because it doesn't revolve around the music like it used to. There's so much going on around here now. But man, there's still a very, very rich musical community. It's very different from L.A. On one hand, we don't have the industry here except for South by Southwest and a couple of festivals that they do in L.A. and New York, so sometimes there's missed opportunities for people, but there's a culture here of people who support live music like literally no other place in the world. I'm not just saying that to blow smoke up Austin's ass. I literally just came from all over the world, and there's literally no other place like it where there's live music every night. And not all of it's good of course, you can make that argument, but man, the level of musicianship here is very high. If you're going to be playing and part of the scene and stuff, generally the aesthetic is very real. There's a level of musicianship and respect and admiration. There are some bands that have made it huge out here, but they don't have the industry like they do in a bunch of cities where there's no shortcuts to being out there in the industry, but it's also one of the only places, well, this is not exactly true, but there is a huge pull of talent here where you can, you know, for a producer like myself who works on a lot of music, I have a huge Rolodex in my iPhone of "if this person's not available," there's eight more amazing musicians I can find. A lot of that informed who played on the record and who's in the band and everything. The talent pool is deep. There's a lot of incredible musicians here.
Let's talk about a couple of the tunes on the record. I picked a few that are standout favorites for me. If you're up for it, I would love to just dig into them a little bit. The first tune on the record is one of those tunes, "Black Moon Rising". Can you give me a little bit of the back story on that one?
Yeah. The instrumental for that was written, that was on the solar eclipse of 2017. I don't remember the day, but do you remember that in 2017 you weren't supposed to look at the sun or whatever? Of course I walked out without those glasses. Everybody had those glasses. I had to go run an errand, and of course I looked up straight at the sun, and man, it just sent me into this daze for the day where I had to come home and Google if you could go blind from that. But it was kind of psychedelic. I just came home and walked into my studio. I was kind of scared at first that I had maybe damaged my eyes, because everything looked crazy, but I immediately just sat down and made a demo for "Black Moon Rising". It must have taken me half an hour. That was the first song Eric and I recorded I believe, if not the second. But yeah, I feel like that one established the mood right away for what we were doing. That to me is a big one. That's why we opened the record with it. That one just sets the tone of what we were trying to do. That's a hip-hop influenced kind of soul-leaning song. I always put weird titles on the demos so that I don't forget what they are, so I called it "Solar Eclipse". I sent it to Eric with that and he ran with that theme and made it "Black Moon Rising".
How about "Colors"?
Yeah, that's an old song of Eric's that he has always performed acoustic. It may have been the first one I saw when I looked him up on YouTube. He's never really played that with a band much. But he wrote that one years ago on his uncle's rooftop. I heard it and was like, "Man, this song is special." A hit per se, as they say. So yeah, by that point in the album I really felt like it would be important to capture that one live. We were already starting to play live as a band. I felt like really that would balance that out. You know, there were two directions to go with that one. Either try to make it a pop, super-catchy kind of loop-based production or go live. I opted to go as live as possible. I think most of that song, if I remember correctly, a lot of that is maybe his original vocal on the track that he cut live. So I left it kind of just with the band.
Yeah, lovely. How about "Know You Better"?
"Know You Better" was from the original batch of instrumentals I had as well. That was another one where the drums were a big part of what influenced how we all played and how the song was written. That was JJ Johnson, an incredible drummer here in Austin who played on that. It's based off of one of my other kind of favorite drum patterns. I played it for him one time, turned it off, and he said all right. So he started playing that. I really liked this era of The Temptations where they were kind of doing that psychedelic soul thing. Norman Whitfield was the producer. He was really influenced by that when making this record, and I think that this one nods to some of that.
How do you separate the roles, those roles between producer, engineer, band member, and maintain some objectivity?
Yeah, as of now, I kind of see it all as one in the same. In terms of the guitar parts, it's just so specific to what I want. If there's anything where I know what I want, it's the guitar parts. At some point as a producer, you think well, you can just be the producer and not the guitar player. But I'm so particular about that. I'm so particular about everything with this. I've worked on other projects where I've learned to let go and just be the artist and finally work with other producers. I've learned so much doing that, just showing up and playing guitar, but this one is so particular with everything that I'm feeling that I feel like I have to be at the helm on those things.
What's next? Are you guys planning on making another Black Pumas record, or are you working on other things?
We're touring pretty much non-stop for a while, but we're still writing. We actually have a few demos and unreleased songs. We're constantly trading ideas, but I'm home for a week, just enough time to make sure my life doesn't fall apart. It's hard to commit to studio time, but we're itching to get back. As much as Eric loves performing live and being on stage, he also really likes to write songs, so I know that we're both itching to get back. Of course as an engineer, it's hard for me to hear the last record without hearing things I could do better as an engineer, you know? From one record to the next I hear it and it's like oh man, I could totally do that better. Better this and better that. I'm itching to get back because I'm hearing that sound in my head as well. As a producer, this is just the perfect situation for what I like to do. You have a singer and songwriter like Eric and the band that we have now. The band that played on the record is different from the live band, but it's a producer's dream to have all of these tools at your disposal and start kind of putting it all together.
