That's interesting.
They share all the same prerequisite classes, up until about the second or third year. Then summers [home] from college I interned at West Side Recording Studio in Houston, where I grew up. I was learning Pro Tools by recording my friends. When I was in college, I started a band called Via Audio. We toured a little bit and got a record deal with SideCho Records. We got noticed by a couple different producers, one being Chris Walla [Tape Op #19, #111] from Death Cab for Cutie, and Jim Eno from Spoon [#27]. They were both saying, "Make a record with me." We ended up going to Austin, and we were one of the first bands to make a record at Jim's new studio, Public Hi-Fi. Have you been there before?
I was there back when it was in the garage.
Oh, wow.
I went back right after they were opening the new space, to say hi to Jim and Britt [Daniel]. It was like, "Oh, this is different!"
Yeah, he really did it right. It was so great. I got to learn a lot from watching Jim operate. That was also sort of around the time I met Elizabeth Ziman, and we started Elizabeth & the Catapult. Eventually I left Via Audio to pursue the Catapult full time. We were playing all the Lower East Side venues; The Living Room, Pianos, and Rockwood Music Hall. We got the attention of Blue Note and Verve Records. This was right around the time when there were lots of female songwriter artists who were emerging, like Norah Jones, The Bird and the Bee, and Ingrid Michaelson. We ended up signing to Verve. Elizabeth and I were in a relationship at the time, and we were in a band together for two records. The first one [Taller Children] we did with Mike Mogis [Tape Op #51] in Omaha. I started producing the record before we got signed, but passed the production duties to Mike once we began working with him. At Mike's studio, we ended up getting to this place with the record where he was starting to mix, but we were running out of time and we still had things we wanted to record. He was like, 'Go in the B-room.' I got to learn on his '70s API console, futz around, and work with all this cool, old gear that I hadn't really had much experience with. I've made a bunch of records there since.
He's a bit of a gear hound, I hear.
He is, for sure. We released that record when I was touring with the Catapult. Elizabeth and my's relationship sort of faded as a couple, but we tried to stay a band for one more album [The Other Side of Zero]. We ended up making that record with Tony Berg [Tape Op #121]. I met Tony, and Shawn [Everett, #115], who was his engineer at the time. It was another experience where I got to learn so much from two brilliant guys. I'd never seen someone engineer in Pro Tools as fast as Shawn. It was quite a sight to behold. Tony's a real teacher; he loves to foster talent. Through all those experiences I realized that in any band I've been in, even though I have the ability to record and make arrangement choices, if there is an opportunity to work with someone else, I will always take it. I get to have a master class and take home all these new methods of working, and then implement them in my own projects. It's so fascinating to learn how other people operate and do things, whether it's on a technical or psychological level. It's so much more about the relationship you develop than it is necessarily about 'what you know.'
Coaching someone's performance, or catching, "Hey, that drum part's kind of weird. Do you want to rearrange that?" That's what makes great records.
Yeah. Lucius just did a little bit of recording with Richard Swift [Tape Op #120].
I thought he said you guys were coming down when I interviewed him.
Yeah. We talked about Bob Dylan records, where you can hear the popping of the mic, like the "P" plosive. No one thinks about that when you're listening to those records.
Yeah. What does that matter, really? When did you meet Holly [Laessig] and Jess [Wolfe] and join Lucius?
I met Jess in college, but didn't get to know each other until a few years later. After college, Elizabeth & the Catapult were playing a show in New York at City Winery and Lucius were opening. Jess and I reacquainted at the show, and a few months later we started dating. A few months into our relationship, Jess asked if I would help her and Holly explore trying to give Lucius a more aggressive sound. The two of them had already put out a record [Songs From The Bromley House] that was more adult alternative.
A little straighter than now?
Yeah. Jess wanted to make something they could dance on stage to. It became this exploratory thing with the girls and me, where I would show them an instrument, or play a part, and be like, "You mean something like this?" They'd say, "Yes, yes," or, "No, no." It was a lot of me jumping around on different instruments, coaching them a little bit, and then them coaching me on what they were trying to do. I guess I have this thing of being in bands, but as a producer. It's like I'm an MD in the studio or something. I also brought in Pete Lalish [guitar, formerly also of Elizabeth & the Catapult] for a session. They loved Pete, and we all got along well. We finished this album that was mostly the two of them and me, which became the first incarnation of the Wildewoman album. We brought it to Shawn Everett to mix. I introduced the girls to Tony Berg, and he let us use his space and work mostly with Shawn. Tony was around for some of it too. After the record was done, and Shawn had mixed it, we were getting the band together. Pete ended up being a part of it, and Andrew Burri [guitar] was in, playing some shows. It was like, "Maybe we should re-track a couple of things and make this a real band record." We re-cut a third of the record, and then Shawn mixed it again. That ended up being what was the "real" debut record of Lucius, even though the girls had released another record before that. They wanted it to feel like it was a rebirth, because they're just such different records. That turned into two years of touring.
Were you even envisioning that that could happen with this band?
I don't know what I envisioned, but I had never really been in a band that went beyond a start-up level. I feel like I really love building things from the ground up. I take something where someone says, "I don't really know what I want this to be," and help them figure that out. Now the girls know much more of what they want. We go into the studio, and they have their songs and a really strong vision.
Lucius is definitely a really unique band.
On one hand, I like being a little bit in the background. The amount of responsibility that goes with being a front person: having all that attention, talking to all those people, and saying all the same things in interview, after interview' It seems nauseating to me. I got to experience a little bit of it with my solo record, and that was part of the impetus of me wanting to do it. I never would have thought that any of this would get to this point. I still pinch myself thinking about it. Now that Jess and Holly are on the road with Roger Waters, it's out of this world.
There must be a lot more attention folding back on Lucius because of his tour.
I think they knew that going into it. They sing lead on some songs. It's been a year now, and then there's another eight months of commitment that they're involved in.
I've never seen backing singers that are a presence on the stage in the way that they are. When they get to 'Great Gig in the Sky,' people are crying.
I've seen the show now seven times. I can look around at the audience, instead of looking at the show, and I can think, "There're 12,000 people here who all now know who Jess and Holly are." That's totally insane.
After all that touring for Wildewoman, Lucius did a second record [Good Grief] with Bob Ezrin [Tape Op #31], Shawn Everett, and you working on it. How did Bob Ezrin come around?
Bob was a recommendation from Tony Berg. We were talking to Tony, and asking him who he thought might be a good person to collaborate with Shawn, because Shawn is a sonic painter. He's grown a lot since making our record, but Shawn thinks texturally; that's his strong suit. We wanted to get someone involved who was more of a "song" person; someone who thought in a more zoomed-out perspective. The girls and I met with Bob, and had a really great meeting. At the time that it all ended up coming to fruition, his dad had gotten really sick, so he wasn't really around that much. It mostly ended up being just Shawn. I think we were in the studio with Bob for only a handful of days. We ended up gelling with Shawn. We had this box, called the Marnie Box. Before we would start recording any song, everyone would write down a couple of other [artists'] songs that they felt, in some way, could inspire something in the particular one we were working on. We would anonymously put them in the box. Shawn would pull out a song and play it on his phone. No one would know at first whose song it was, but we were all guessing whose song choice it was. We would just start talking, "What is this song making you feel, or think about? What do you like about, or not like about, the song?" Shawn would listen and chime in, but mostly he'd just listen to us discuss it and things that we would hear. We'd have this huge whiteboard with random thoughts and ideas on it, everything from dolphin calls, to wood instruments, to loud sirens, to "make it rock." It'd be super out there. Then we'd reference the board as we recorded the song. Sure enough, as soon as we'd be done with the song it'd be like, "Yep, everything is there." It was great; I loved that so much.
Where did you work at?
For Shawn's sessions, we did it all in his space in L.A., Subtle McNugget. The way that Lucius works is that the girls write the songs, and then they give them to Pete and I. It used to be Pete, Andy, and I, but now it's just Pete and I. We take their GarageBand demos, tear them apart, and put them back together. We'll record parts. Maybe if we feel like, "Oh, this is a cool harmony that doesn't quite match the melody," we'll try and switch a note, which they don't always love. But occasionally it works. Then we present it to them, and they either love the ideas or they don't. Then we have these "demos on steroids." I'm recording in a hi-fi fashion. What's great is that we go into the studio and we have the "girl's demo," we have the "boy's demo," and, at any point, we can pull from any of those sources. Good Grief ended up being a compound of some of the parts the girls recorded, some of the things we recorded, and also from Shawn's studio. The music that we demoed was at this rehearsal space called Bedrock.LA. We reserved the room for about a month, and it was so noisy from all the rehearsal rooms surrounding us. In some of the recording rooms you could hear the rumbling of someone playing "Enter Sandman" leaking through the walls.
That can be dangerous.
