This is a cool building.
There's so much extra space that, at some point, I'd like to maybe make the live room the control room. Right now I'm renting out a spot to a yoga studio, but if they ever leave then this will be the control room. This building is pretty wild and big, but when you're in here you don't really realize where you are. Beyond the yoga place is my house.
LC: In the same building?
Yeah. I spend all my time in here, but my house is way bigger. I don't know why I didn't switch it.
LC: Everyone has to have a place to work these days, even if you're working out of other studios a lot. You've got to have some place you can come back to.
Yeah. I've been working at a bunch of other studios, but I always keep ending up back here. It's cheaper for everybody's budget. I kind of like working in here more than most spaces anyway.
LC: You get comfortable and work faster, right?
Plus I know what I'm listening to.
LC: You came from Alberta, Canada? In that area?
Yeah, Bragg Creek. A little outside of Calgary.
LC: Right. I saw that you studied at Banff [Centre for Arts and Creativity]. You had a metal band in high school, right?
Yeah, it was fun. I guess that's how I started, with this metal band.
LC: Were you trying to record that?
Yeah. At first we were just trying to mimic Slayer, or something like that. Then we started listening to Pink Floyd or Radiohead.
LC: Getting more atmospheric?
Yeah. It was like, "Oh, how do we do these kinds of things?" There was no way to figure out how to do it, except maybe we needed some kind of recording device. I convinced my dad to buy me one for Christmas, one of those Roland machines, the VS- 1680. Right after that, I started recording our band. I was already getting into more experimental music. I stopped with all the metal and was listening to other things. I remember hearing a Tom Waits record and was like, "Wow!" The sounds were incredible. I wanted to do something like that. I tried to figure it out. When I was young, my dad had a burger restaurant — he wanted to create a chain, like McDonalds. He sold the business, and they were going to destroy the building so he moved the whole burger restaurant onto our property, and that was my band rehearsal room and studio for the whole time while I was a kid. I was obsessively in that room.
LC: Were you working with friends?
Yeah, my band, and then I started recording local bands a bit. I was in there constantly. When I was right at the end of high school, I started getting these crazy panic attacks. I finished high school and don't know where I was going to end up in life. I couldn't go past certain parts of the city and problems like that. I was really losing it. But for some reason the only thing that would kind of calm me down was peppermint tea and recording. I did that for a year and a half straight.
LC: Were people coming to you commercially at any point back then, or was it mostly friends and as a hobby?
People were coming. Nothing big at all. Local bands would come down and I'd try to do something with them. That's how you learn best, by doing it.
LC: How did you end up studying recording at Banff?
I grew up down the road, but didn't know about it early on. I lived about 45 minutes away from there, in a smaller town. There was a guy who lived in my smaller town who owned an all-analog studio in Calgary. He was teaching me, and he would let my band record there all the time. He was like, "You're a weirdo. There's a place, Banff, and they've always got these artists up there. I think you'd like it." At that point I had just finished high school. He said, "Let me introduce you to this lady who runs it, Theresa Leonard." She had been the President of AES. He called her up and asked if I could come over and meet her. I met with her that day, and we got along great. I still didn't understand if it was a school or what it was. She called me the next day and said somebody dropped out of the next semester that was starting. Did I want to come up, because I was close? I quit everything I was doing in my life, drove up there the next day, and started.
LC: How many years was the program for you there?
It was supposed to be three months, but I was there for four years.
LC: How did that happen?
I was super young, like 17. Everyone else there was way older than me, at least 30. Pretty much everybody who was there had some kind of degree, or had done something in recording and learned a lot. I was in over my head, but I really took to it. They gave me keys to the studios and I had access all night long. I just went crazy. I was staying up all night long, every single night, every single day. I also made my own studio in the bathroom. If I couldn't get into one of the studios, I was in my own. I was piping through all the stairwells, using them as chambers. I was obsessively there. There's a real kind of ski culture in Banff, which I don't relate to in any way at all. I didn't become friends with anybody in the town at all. It was completely different, culturally. Anyone who I made friends with who was there would leave in three months. It could be lonely, but I loved it because it was kind of this solitary confinement for work, and I could do it for that amount of time. They started realizing that this was going to be my education. We have a great relationship. Theresa's like a second mother to me. Because we became friends, she allowed me to continue on so that it would become my education.
LC: Did they put you to work?
Yeah, that's what they would do as well. Every Monday they would have different projects come in, and they would assign those things to different engineers that were there. It has a big classical program, and 95 percent of the people there were from a classical background. I wasn't, at all. They'd put me on classical things, so I'd learn a lot, but that wasn't totally my interest. I always got the weirder things. There are a lot of artists there who made sound installations and such. I loved doing that. People who weren't even musicians, but wanted music with balloons. I remembered recording a lady who collected rocks for 30 years and wanted to rub them all together. It took days and they all sounded the same!
LC: Well, that's how you find out.
There was a lady with bananas we were making music with.
LC: What do you mean "music with bananas?"
Peeling them and getting the sound, and then creating synth tones. Whenever it was a weird one, they'd just say, "Put Shawn on it."
LC: That's really good experience though.
Yeah. There was this great guy, John Sorenson, who had actually come from L.A. He was one of the elder statesmen of engineers and usually was the one who taught everybody. I really got along great with him, because he was the other kind of rock guy who would show me techniques. He would always be pushing me in that way. But then Theresa would always be the yin to his yang and be like, "Oh no, Shawn needs to learn more about classical," so she'd take me up there.
LC: I think they really want to make sure you don't come out of there with one focus. That's a really important curriculum there.
The other incredible thing that I really don't understand is that there aren't any classes. You don't go to class. You just do sessions. The only classes we ever had were Bob Ludwig [Tape Op #105] would show up, or we'd do a morning with Elliot Scheiner. The best "class" you could have, really.
LC: Yeah, someone with a lot of experience.
Yeah, it was really amazing.
LC: Do you still go back and do programs there now?
Yes. They've been doing this indie rock program there for a while. It used to be just bands from Canada, but now I think it's from America as well. They apply, and it's an amazing two weeks where everyone gets to write in these music cabins in the middle of the mountains. Broken Social Scene are running it now, so they're all up there writing songs with everybody. I'm in the studio the whole time and record whatever they're writing. It's really fun. It's like a vacation for me, even though it's the hardest I work all year.
LC: It's nice to know you can give something back to the place that really informed your career.
Yeah. I feel like I'm taking [from them] when I go there, because I'm still learning. It's fun, because I work with a different band every day.
JB: How long are you there for when you do those?
Two weeks. It's super intense. It's really fun.
LC: Banff Centre seems to be all about throwing you into sessions.
It's crazy. You're recording projects immediately. I think it's unlike any other school I've heard of ever. When you get there, you get an automatic tuition, and then you get a weekly stipend. Then they pay for your food and your housing.
JB: That never will happen in America.
When I left Banff, I had saved money. That's how I moved to L.A. I was debt free.
LC: Was Tony Berg the first person you hooked up with before you came down here?
Yeah. I had actually taken a break from Banff. There was a famous Canadian boy band called The Moffatts. They had moved to my original small town. They were breaking up, so they wanted to do this other thing with the singer [Scott Moffatt]. They started this project, and I was drumming for this band [The Boston Post], which was a really weird experience. It was a really dramatic and wild period where we toured across Canada. I was probably 19, and they still had this huge fan base of young girls we were playing for at all these shows. I was recording that band as well, up in Banff, so those guys were living in my dorm room. At the time, they were still really famous, so it was my first experience on a big project, even though it was not the way a big project would normally come about. It was really crazy. They had been famous in Canada since they were children. It made me better, immediately, because the record they recorded a year before [Submodalities] was produced by Bob Rock. As much as Banff was doing for me, I had to immediately be way better in order to record these guys, because they'd been dealing with top people since they were kids.
LC: A super pro situation.
I had to pretend I was better, right away. The pressure was on. I was doing that in Banff all night long as well. Banff was into it. We'd gone on tour, and then I came back to Banff after that fizzled out. I was there again, and this guy who worked on Lord of the Rings, Mark Willsher [scoring engineer and mixer], was there. I showed him some of the projects I'd done. He said he thought I'd get along really well with a friend of his, Eric Valentine [Tape Op #45]. I really loved that Queens of the Stone Age record [Songs for the Deaf] he'd done. I took a trip down to L.A. and met with Eric. He said, "Oh, if you ever get down to L.A., maybe you can come assist." I was still working at Banff, and IgotitinmyheadthatIwasgoingtoquitandgoto L.A. I'd been there long enough. I got in my dad's old van and drove down to L.A. I had maybe a few thousand dollars saved, so I got a crappy apartment in Hollywood, and then I called up Eric and said, "Hey, I moved! Do you still need an assistant or anything?" He's like, "Oh no. No, I already got one, but let me call somebody." He called me back and said, "There's this guy named Tony. Go to his house tomorrow." I didn't even know his last name. [Berg] I just randomly showed up at Tony's house. Tony brought me to his living room and was asking me questions about music I liked and whatnot. He asked me what I'd done. He said, "I'm starting a project tomorrow with Pete Yorn. I didn't hire an engineer, so can you just come here?" The next day I started that record. I was working with him forever after that.
LC: So he trusted you pretty quick?
Yeah. When I was touring with that band [The Boston Post]; we got stuck in some town in Canada for a while and I'd run out of money. I'd seen that there was a job opening at a radio station for a Pro Tools engineer. I went to apply for this job and had this really weird interview. I realized halfway through the interview that he'd screwed up my resume and thought I was interviewing to be the DJ. He was like, "Let's check your voice." I went into the booth and I did this crazy voice. He said, "That sounds fantastic! Start on Friday." So I started this show that went to like 6,000 bowling alleys across North America, as well as all of Canada, the States, and Mexico.
LC: A bowling alley show?
Yeah, it was broadcast to all the bowling alleys. It was going for a while. I started going to these bowling conventions and signing autographs.
LC: Wait a minute! What?
We'd go down to Miami and I'd be at these bowling conventions. They'd have these huge posters of my face as this bowling DJ. When I went back to Banff, he wouldn't let me quit. He made me bring a computer that would send back the information to him and he'd satellite it out. I'd be doing a session, and every five minutes I'd be like, "Hold on!" I'd go in the corner and have to announce a song. Then I'd go back and keep the session going. When I was thinking of going to L.A., I thought, "Oh, I'll make a resume, but I'll be the DJ of my own resume. So I was doing this voice! I brought it to Tony Berg and he was like, "Who the hell is this guy?" Now he loves the CD. He keeps it in a frame and shows it to people when they come. When I came to L.A., the bowling guy still wouldn't let me quit. So even if I didn't get a job, I could be doing this bowling thing. I'd be in my friend's apartment in Hollywood screaming into this mic, and he'd be covering me in blankets so the neighbors wouldn't complain.
LC: That's just surreal. When you started working for Tony, did you get out of that gig?
Well, now I know Tony enough to know that he would have thought it was hilarious if I told him about it and asked if I could do it in the corner. But at the time, I was super nervous. He was a legendary music man. I didn't want to ask him if I could do a bowling show in the corner of his studio, so I had to quit. I told the guy I wasn't going to be on the air in two weeks' time.
LC: Did you feel like all the skills you built up applied when you started doing something like the Pete Yorn record? Were you well-equipped to do a session like that?
Yeah. I still felt like I was a little in over my head. Because of my unique education, and the way I had been brought up, no one was ever showing me the way to do things "properly." Everywhere I went, people were into the approach I was taking, which was a weirdo approach. I thought, when I went into a session like that with a big album, I was just supposed to put headphones nicely in front of the mic and do it the way you're "supposed" to do a recording. I did that and thought, "Well, that's not really what I do." The first day I was recording Pete, I thought, "Let me show them what I like to do." I asked if I could try something. Tony said, "All right, what do you want to do?" He had this chair, and I was dragging it across the floor and made a horn part on the song out of this chair. Tony said, "Fantastic!" Then I realized that Tony was the kind of guy who would also be down with the approach I had always been doing. I was there with him for years. He's still one of my best friends. We've done tons and tons of records together. He taught me so much. He signed Beck, which is so cool. That's the kind of thing that he's into. He heard a song like "Loser," and thought, "This is a huge song!" He was the perfect guy to work with in L.A.
LC: What kind of records, besides Pete Yorn's, did you work on with him initially?
The other record we were working on right around that time was this band, Simon Dawes, which then became Dawes. That's how I met the guitar player in that band, Blake Mills, who I still work with as well. We did the Alabama Shakes record [Sound & Color]. Tony and I did tons of records, like Phantom Planet and Jakob Dylan. We probably did 45 records.
LC: That's a good crash course.
Yeah, it was crazy. I was there every single day, for years and years.
LC: Were you working out of other studios, or out of Tony's primarily?
Mostly out of his place. He's got a great studio in the back of his property. He did this soundtrack for this film for Howard Zinn [The People Speak]. They got all these famous people to play on it, so for a couple of weeks I got to record Bob Dylan, Randy Newman, and more who were on that record. That was really fun.
LC: So now you've won a Grammy [Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, for Sound & Color]?
Yeah! I don't know how that happened.
LC: I thought that was such a cool- sounding record. It's such a departure from the first album.
Yeah. I don't know; I wasn't really thinking much about that. I don't think anyone was. Brittany Howard [vocals, guitar] spearheaded that change. There were songs she wrote, and that's what they were. She's such a creative person. She's never going to rest on one thing. She could go in any direction. She just has a unique, interesting, wild voice. I don't think she was even thinking about doing something like her first record. Whatever she thinks is cool is what she wanted to do, which is also reflected in who she hired to do the record with her. Blake was a big name, as far as guitar players, but as far as production, he hadn't done a record of that size. The fact that she heard the music he had done, thought he was so cool, and wanted to work with him, that speaks to what she's into as well.
LC: Did Blake rope you in for the project?
Yeah. We'd worked together tons. We'd done so many albums together. He probably played guitar on 39 of the 40 records I did with Tony. We'd become great friends. I had done his solo record, Break Mirrors, which Brittany had somehow heard. She liked that record, and I had done that, so that's how I ended up on Sound & Color.
LC: Were you guys dividing some of the work up, as far as production?
Blake and I? I guess we've been working together for so long that we have our own roles that we play, as far as how we work. We fall into that pattern. It's a great working relationship, because I fill in the technical areas when he's got his attention on some other part. It's a really fun relationship to have. It's like we're two different clouds that fill in each others' spots.
LC: You were given a lot of free rein to really work and morph the tracks and the band.
Oh, yeah; completely. Total free rein to experiment. It's cool, because she was just down with anything that sounds cool. So many people will think there are certain things you have to do the professional way, like, "Now we're going to mix it and make it punchier!" She doesn't care about that, at all. She'll listen to rough mix one and say, "I like that." Whatever is cool is what's going to happen. We would be experimenting and trying anything. It was this perfect scenario where everyone was into doing it a unique way. Remarkably the label, their management, them [the band], Blake, me — we all were down with this. There're so many times you work on things and, at some point along the line, it gets compromised. For this record it seems like that never happened. It seemed like we were all on a train and there was an endpoint, and we all were in it together the entire time.
LC: Were there discussions where any band members felt marginalized by the process?
No, I don't think anyone felt marginalized. I guess I'd be speaking for them, but not that I'm aware of. I think maybe there was a little bit of nervousness, like, "Maybe this is too much of a departure for some people." Not that they didn't like it, but there were concerns. I was blown away the whole time. I couldn't believe we were getting away with it. We handed in the album and it was mastered. I was like, "Really? We're done?"
LC: Nobody said, "Can you fix this for radio? C'mon."
Yeah, I thought at some point someone would say, "Super mixer here is now going to do this thing."
JB: You mixed it all too?
Yeah. I felt like I was renegade mixing or something the whole time. I sent in mixes and my teeth would be chattering. Somehow I just kept getting away with everything.
LC: Were you and Blake conferring on ways to approach the mixes?
Yeah. When we were tracking, we had a pretty specific idea of what it was going to sound like. The mixes weren't a wild departure from what we were doing in the room. I'm pretty much mixing the whole time I'm recording. It's hard for me to actually work without it almost sounding like a done album. A lot of times I'm tracking with mastering compressors on my master bus the whole time. I'm constantly A/B-ing between other records. I want it to sound like another record the entire time I'm working on it. That's just how my brain works. By the time I left that studio, I wouldn't have been bummed if those were the mixes that had been on the record.
JB: Did any of the early rough mixes survive and end up on the record?
Yeah, there are probably about two mixes on the record that are almost what we left the studio with.
LC: Where were you tracking the initial sessions at?
We were at Sound Emporium in Nashville. We did it in chunks; work two weeks, take a break, two weeks, take a break.
LC: Then you had a month at Ocean Way [now United Recording, Tape Op #106], right? Holy shit.
Yeah. I thought, "This album could be done, but here's a month of studio time. This is the best record I've ever worked on!" I could experiment for a month. They had all this great gear. I was doing the mixes in-the-box, for the most part, while we were at Sound Emporium, so I wanted to do a real console mix after that. I was trying to use all their analog gear to do the mix.
LC: Replace the plug-ins?
Yeah. I would be doing all these weird experiments to figure out how to get all these mixes to be exactly like what I had in-the-box, which was kind of fun. With Waves Q-Clone [plug-in] you can visually measure EQ. If I had a Pultec plug-in on, I could see what the Pultec plug-in had done EQ-wise on the Q-Clone. If they had a [hardware] Pultec at Ocean Way, I couldn't just do the same setting I had in the plug-in because it would be a different sound. But I could move the settings visually so it would match almost perfectly with what my plug-in had done. I was using the analog gear, but it was exact settings, or as close as I could get it.
LC: Wow. You probably ended up learning quite a bit about what the differences are.
