AG: We recorded this album down at Kingsway Studio in New Orleans. It was done as nights of live performances, we had an audience of about thirty people in there. The last four tracks are just live room mics. The first two are near where the band and Utah are, and the last two are in the back of the room on the other side of the audience. They picked up all kinds of crazy shit, whispering and rustling. Unbelievably, there was a dog at the studio and during the performances he wandered into the audience and his tags were rattling.
AD: And at one point he just sat down in front of Utah and started chomping on this bone.
AG: The dog is definitely on the record. We actually set up a small PA in the room, that was being mixed at the back of the room, it was a very strange setup.
Was that for monitors for the players? Or did you use headphones?
AG: The PA was for the audience. Nobody was on headphones, except the drummer, cause he was way in the back. Most stuff was happening pretty quietly and everyone could pretty much hear each other. Utah sat and told stories, Julie (Wolf) on keyboards, Jason (Mercer) on bass. The trumpet that you hear is Dave Pirner from Soul Asylum, who happened to be there, and he's taken up playing the trumpet. We said, "Come play on this track!" and it's this really warpy crazy trumpet. So off to one side of the house you've got the control room, which is very open. The whole concept is that there is no control room, there's no glass, you don't have that kind of separation. Off the control room there's another big room with a piano, and there's another room off that, and that makes up one half of the house. The house is symmetrical, and on the other half of the house is the big live room.
Has Kingsway been a studio for a long time?
AG: No, Daniel Lanois [#37] set it up, around '89. He came to New Orleans to do this Bob Dylan record, rented a house, set up a bunch of gear, really liked New Orleans, and then found this house, which was vacant at the time. So he bought it and basically installed a studio. But it's still very open. Until very recently, there was just a hundred foot snake that came off the back of the board and wherever you wanted to record you just ran the snake. Now they have, in a few different places, some remote boxes. That compressor there, the TubeTech, is a key piece of gear. Utah's voice is going through that. And pretty much any of the vocals that have been on the last three Ani records have gone through it. It's real transparent, it just adds a presence to it. We've been using the FMR Really Nice Compressor (RNC) too, they're actually made in Austin. Mark (Hallman, the head engineer and owner of Congress House) got one as a demo and I bought it off him. They're amazing, I use it a lot on drums, run it on the overheads. I pretty much don't use it in the "Super Nice" mode, because it's so transparent, it freaks me out. I was suspicious of it at first. I used to use that Valley People compressor (the Dynamite) that's sitting next to the RNC, it does the same kind of radical pumping, but it's really noisy. Now I've changed over. [The track Ani is mixing ends.] We're actually mixing this new Utah record in order, it's a very strange way to mix.
AD: Why is it strange? Just cause we've never done it before! Of all the records I've done with lots of crossfading and stuff, to figure out first how it's all supposed to flow...you know, Living In Clip, it was like, oh well, I guess this should be the order. And then it was, well, this song stops dead, and this one starts like this.
AG: No, mixing in order totally makes sense. Your instincts, which I really like for mixing, you do all the starts and the fadeouts. Most people don't do that, they leave it for mastering. All that junk, applause at the end, or count-ins and stuff.
You're using automation with this board?
AG: Yeah, it's not flying faders though, it's VCA controlled. Automation saved our lives. We do four copies of each mix, two at 48 and two at 44.
AD: We have to do 48 and 44, because you never know what's going to happen in mastering, and you can't do them at the same time.
AG: And since there's two machines here, we might as well do two of each. We just had our first major DAT fuckup in a long time. I think it was for "Providence," we had an unplayable DAT.
AD: Oh, yes, the DAT machines at Kingsway were doing a little dropping out, bink, bink.
AG: They're new as well, they're two [Panasonic] 3800's and the drum hours are really low. I don't know what is wrong with those machines.
Bad day at the factory.
AD: Yeah. And Kingsway has some crazy monitors. I feel like I have a blanket over my head at the board there. They have huge, what are they called? Like custom Tannoys.
AG: It's a fifteen [inch speaker] with a concentric tweeter mounted on the cone, two of them, so there are four in all.
AD: But basically there's no high end and there's no low end. These huge, muddy, low-middy speakers are in this room with a ceiling fifteen feet high, and a tile floor.
AG: There are curtains behind the board, but if you close them off it's very small in there. There's also these huge foam blocks that you can make walls out of. I did that, I closed it off while we were tracking.
AD: It's amazing to me, that Dan's whole thing is very low-mid oriented, very warm, except that that's all you can hear there!
AG: I know, what do his records sound like on those speakers? It must be insane. And when we're getting sounds in that control room, my instinct is I want to dip 200 [Hz] on everything.
AD: You're trying to clear up the bass and you do things you shouldn't be doing just cause you're listening through water.
AG: You just learn, it's going to sound big and muddy, and you get used to it. But if you put up the foam wall, close the curtains, and monitor real loud, it gets better. That's what I've been doing. It's so funny, it's like the Ani way: whatever is available to be used, she has this way of maximizing it. For this record, we were going to record to sixteen tracks, but we decided because ADAT's are so weird and because it's a live performance thing, we got a spare. And then suddenly, it's all on twenty- four. It's like, where did that spare ADAT go?
AD: But the last record, Up Up Up Up Up Up, was on sixteen tracks, and that seemed fine for that record.
AG: The Little Plastic Castle record, we did sixteen tracks of ADAT as beds, did all the transfers to two inch, overdubbed on two inch, mixed on two inch. And that was the idea, we went into Up Up... doing that.
AD: But then we started saying, why are we bouncing to analog?
AG: Well also we never got beyond sixteen tracks. So we ended up keeping it on sixteen, mixing on sixteen. I don't know, you could go on about that for a long time too, about working on eight tracks, working on sixteen, working on forty-eight. There's something about working on sixteen tracks.
AD: Well, I think for the Utah project, if I could speak for the engineers, because they were live performances, to have different instruments on their own tracks [made it easier]. Cause when you're comping stuff...and it's all happening one song after the other without any like, wait, OK, is this line working.
AG: No, and I can't imagine that there's any mix on there that's more than sixteen or eighteen tracks.
Who were the players on this album?
AD: Me on guitar, Jason Mercer on bass, Julie Wolf on keyboards, Wurlitzer, and Darren, who's my new drummer. This was his first gig! We went deep right away. But he did so wonderfully. Cause it's a crazy gig for the players, it's like, OK, we have to play with this guy who is very arrhythmic, and you can't freak him out but you've gotta groove hard. The whole collaboration was heavy, and we were just making it up as we went along. And Utah likes the doghouse bass, as he calls it, he doesn't like electric, so Jason played his upright the whole album.
Did Utah play any guitar?
AD: Yeah, there are some things where he was leading and we set music to his playing. Let's play you some mixes...
That moment where the drums drop out [on "Shoot Or Stab Them"], was that done live or was that a dub thing?
AD: That was in the mix. Yeah, we were supposed to do three nights of performances, but we had to cancel the third night which is unfortunate because it wasn't until the second night that things really started to come together. So let's see, what else is there....
AG: There's that crazy "Bread and Roses" thing that you did with Mark the other night.
AD: You know I don't really like that [mix], it doesn't have the vibe of the rough mix.
AG: Is it cause you don't like the bass?
AD: Hmm, yeah, I don't know. And also his voice...it's too loud. It was really teeny and squanky before. Yeah, so this is a story that Julie was playing piano to and then it went into this song, where the performances we did of were just not happening. It was a bunch of people trying to follow Utah, kind of careening along. So then I sent Darren in as an overdub to just groove on the drums and try and smooth over the rhythmic pushing and pulling of the song. And he laid down this great groove. So when the song starts we sucked Utah into this teeny little box of an EQ. And now in this mix I overdubbed a bass which now I'm not sure I like.
Did you take anything on this project and pull it into samplers and do a total remix?
AG: No, "Shoot Them and Stab Them" is pretty much the only non-literal one, he had just spoken that stuff and we laid that over the music. But really it's pretty far away from the other approach. OK, this track is "I Will Not Obey."
That's a really deep, warm guitar on there.
AD: That's my baritone guitar.
AG: And also going through the dbx 120 subharmonic box. That thing's amazing.
Do you run the 120 live?
AG: We used to a lot. Before there was a bass player. AD: Yeah, now I gotta move over. I kind of miss those days when I just toured with Andy, and people thought there were taped bass tracks or something.
Ani and Andrew continue mixing, later working on an grooved out version of the labor movement classic "The Internationale."
AG: We're running a 40ms digital delay here on the guitar amp for some stereo imaging. Pan the original to one side and the delayed signal to the other. It stops becoming a pinpoint signal and spreads out. You just have to watch it when you collapse to mono, with the phase cancellation. You can do that with an amp, take a 57 in front of an amp, and if it's an open-backed amp, put a mic in back of it, so that when the speaker throws forward on the one mic, it's throwing back on the other mic. It sounds big if you pan one hard left and the other hard right, but collapse it down and it's gone. This Roland Reverb box (the SRV330) is totally amazing, it's one of the best sounding and usable reverbs. Real simple, it's got around four hundred presets in it, not a lot of weird stuff, just reverbs. Lots of really short verbs. We use it a lot.
AD: It has that 250 plate thing. Our friend's studio in Hamilton has an actual EMT plate reverb, with the big levers. It's so excellent, you can make it so transparent, it takes away the sound of a microphone and it sounds like you're there. And this Roland box has a 250 plate emulator.
When you did [the live album] Living In Clip, that was all to one ADAT?
AG: Is that true?
AD: Yeah. Three people in the band, one ADAT. AG: Oh yeah, it was one. We're now carrying two.
AD: But it's worse than it used to be, cause nobody is monitoring the recording process. Back in the days of one ADAT and no compression, it was less things to fuck up I guess. It was kick, drum overheads, guitar, vocal, vocal, bass. Everything generally went to tape at really low levels, so everything was low and noisy until that one big hit where it would go crack!
AG: Then too, you had three guitars but they were all plugged into one [input], so the guitar could just go straight to tape. Now, you've got all these different guitars and they all have to get grouped.
AD: And Julie [Wolf], who plays organ and Wurlitzer and clav and accordion...
AG: And those all have to get grouped to two tracks, maybe...
AD: And now, we have two ADAT's, we were just mixing some stuff from them, half the instruments it's like, oh well, that didn't go to tape. Cause nobody's watching them. He just patches them all in and mixes the show and meanwhile.
AG: And Julie's melodica has a little mic in it, which we leave up and on, and suddenly it's all over everything. I just had a big conversation with Klondike, which is our sound company, talking about revamping the ADAT setup. Every night, for Steve, there's all these cables where it's like, OK, this plugs into aux one, and this goes to group out three, and this one goes straight to tape, and apparently it takes him half an hour to set the thing up, and sometimes he gets it right and obviously sometimes he mispatches things. So we're talking about creating a little interface box. Building an Elco, so all that stuff just lives in the back on the board, and we can just plug a snake in. And that'll also provide an opportunity to revamp how the whole thing's working.
So are you continually taping shows?
AD: Yeah, you know what happened? So, we carried an ADAT around for a year, pieced together a live album, and then I was like, OK, no need to keep taping shows, we made a record. That was the whole reason to get the ADAT, baby's first ADAT. And then what
happened is that Chuck Plotkin, who is like Springsteen's pseudo- manager / producer / buddy... He did Dan Bern's first album, right?
AD: Yeah, hence, because Dan was on the road with me and so Chuck was with us for a little while. And Chuck was talking to Scot [Fisher] my manager one night, like, "Son, this is what you need to know." AG: He was blown away by you and started saying, "Oh my god, I've never seen a performer this vital since Bruce."
AD: And so he says to Scot, "Document! There's very little footage of Bruce from his heyday," and there's very little this or that and Scot's like, "Oh, OK." So then after the live album came out, Scot's like, "What, it just gets loaded on the truck, it's just one more box, you just turn it on. Tapes are cheap." He insists. But it's just gotten so fucked up, it's two useless ADAT's per night of line hum.
Did you record Up Up Up Up Up Up [Ani's previous solo album] here at Congress House?
AD: No, we recorded it all at Kingsway too, and mixed it here.
What was the recording process for Up Up...?
AD: It was pretty much live. We went down to Kingsway. I had been down there for Jazz Fest and fell in love with the place. So then I decided the thing to do would be to go down there, not bring our mics or amps or anything, just our instruments, and use what was at the house, really try to utilize the house. Which was a bad idea when it came to amps. You realize that the room full of amps there were left behind by Dan for a reason! But it's incredible, because the house has fourteen bathrooms, for starters. So you're talking fourteen tiled room verbs. We just started walking around the house listening to rooms. Each song was different.
AG: We just kept moving around. It was like, OK, drums sound really good underneath the stairs and we'll use a certain tiled area for this...
AD: Apparently, according to Ethan, a lot of bands just go in and they set up in the main room and they just stay there.
AG: That's why they put those snake boxes there, because it was like all the time they were recording there, and it was a drag to have to pull that snake out to the same place all the time. The control room as well. The weird thing is that it's always been where it's been, but in theory, everything can move.
AD: Cause that was Dan's thing. "It's not a studio, it's just a house," and there's some gear in there but nothing is hardwired. Everything has to be floatable.
AG: So you could just literally take a rack and unplug it and move it, if you wanted to.
AD: But the thing is, you don't want to move the whole fucking board and the tape machines — nobody's ever moved it! But it can't be installed. Which makes for some...
AG: It makes for some fucked up wiring! I mean, I know everything that's a problem on this record is my fault, but there was really funky [wiring]... the patch bay leads to really strange places. Instead of just putting in a patch and having it go to a preamp, it actually goes to a weird little snake box where the preamp is temporarily plugged in. There's so many connections in that studio it's scary. Around the back of those racks, there's all these weird snakes, so that anything could go in and out, nothing is hardwired to anything.
Did you get a lot of noise problems?
AD: There's a lot of radio hum....
AG: RF on things. And crackly things. The board is a 1970 API console and it's in good shape, but it's from 1970.
AD: So every now and then channel one disappears. And you don't notice that the kick drum hasn't been there for a couple takes, or something. And you just have to get into the bleed. Make it bleed! The album was very much about performances, playing together.
AG: The other aspect of that record was that it actually took place over a long [time]. Most of those songs were also recorded in June, and a lot of those were recorded in February, by you solo.
AD: Yeah, so this is my big theory: Because I'm instant gratification slut, I just play it once, OK, fucked up the lyrics a little bit, whatever. I just can't perfect things, I just can't deal with doing things over and over. So, you know, you make quick recordings and live to regret most of them. So I thought, OK, make quick recordings, since I can't stand to take too much time on things, and do that in different places, different times of the year. I had this bunch of songs, and we recorded most of them here first. I thought, compare and save the recordings. It was cool, because you learn a little from the first times, but then we ended up just taking most of the Kingsway recordings. It just had a whole vibe.
AG: It definitely flavored the record in a big way.
AD: Yeah, mad Kingsway flavor.
AG: It's a great place to work. There are certain kinds of music and certain kinds of records that you just would not be able to make there. To try and work against that studio would be a real drag, to try and have lots of isolation. The whole place just lends itself to working in a certain way, so that's how you end up working when you go there.
How much time did you spend down there?
AD: A week and a half. The band was there for five days, and we were there for another three. So I guess that's just a week. But fuck.
AG: There's all these stories of people spending a month in the studio or two months. I don't know. The new Rufus Wainwright album... two years in the studio!
AD: Wow. So that's what you can do in two years! It's so complex, there's so much going on. Alright then, if anyone's going to take two years, you might as well have a million strings and stuff. I just don't have the attention span.
I think with any project, you get to a point where you just start to lose momentum.
AG: Yeah, like after the first eight months. [laughs] The way we did this one was very cool, because we were breaking it up, you did demo versions in February, out on tour, back in June, out on tour again, back to Kingsway. So it was kind of like spending a year or six months to make a record but not in the studio [the whole time].
Was that the first time you had done a demo-like process?
AD: Yeah, totally. Usually it's like, write the songs, play them live, drive around, do gigs, drink beer, and go in the studio for a week and make a record. I think it was making the live record that made me realize that the songs sound much more like themselves onstage. The songs that turned up on the live record probably sound totally different from the way they were recorded in the studio. But the studio was just a fluke! It was what that song sounded like at that moment in that studio, depending on... But the songs onstage are more indigenous, that's where they live, you know? And then getting the ADAT's into the studio then got it more like live. With two inch tape it's like, ok, rolling, go go go, and then it's do we keep it, do we do another, ah! Now because the tape is so cheap we can just keep rolling, keep all the takes. It's less pressured. But I have a very love/hate relationship with ADAT's. We get error messages all the time. They're fucking VCR's. One of the great things about the Kingsway setup is that Ethan the engineer there got these little sixteen channel Mackie mixers for headphone mixes so everybody's got a little rolling cart. We're all like invalids with our IV, rolling it around.
AG: And then [in the control room] there's a patch section with sixteen little inputs to send them to all the mixers, split from the tape outs basically.
AD: All the musicians can change everything in their headphones whenever. So the engineers at the board spend no time, like you were saying, after every take, "Can I get less organ?"
AG: "But you're sharing a headphone mix with Julie and she needs that organ." So this setup was just ridiculously easy.
AD: It is much more like a live recording in that you're not dealing with the needs of the musicians all the time.
AG: And with everyone in the same room, it's just making sure the preamps are connected properly and it's all going to tape.
AD: But Kingsway is up for sale now. It's been having a really precarious life the whole last year. Since we started going there, you never know, any moment a truck could show up and take all the gear away cause Dan has been wanting to get rid of it. This Utah record was supposed to be officially the last session.
When you did the previous Utah album (The Past Didn't Go Anywhere), what kind of sampling setup did you use? Or did his voice just get flown to tape?
D: H3000! Eventide H3000 SE. It's all about that box, that whole record. You can get it with a stereo sampler upgrade, so you can do sixteen seconds or something like that. Everything went through that box. All the drum loops Sixteen seconds? That's like old school hip hop production.
AG: And it wasn't MIDI'ed up to anything, it was just triggered.
AD: That album's sound is very much the capabilities of that machine. If you set up a loop, then press record [on the tape deck], and record five minutes of a drum loop, and then you want to set up some other kind of loop, eventually, in five minutes, they'll be out of sync with each other. But there's a triggering function, so I would set up a trigger for each track.
So you used a click as a trigger?
AD: Yeah, basically, or I'd record one instrument and that would trigger all the other loops.
AG: Or the kick from the beginning of a loop, you can use that as a trigger.
AD: But mostly it was just sampled drums and then I played everything else. It's a little Luddite.
