Early Days
I was in bands doing the indie rock thing, playing guitar and shit, as well as producing in the Raleigh/Chapel Hill [North Carolina] area. I was born in Raleigh. I had a studio in downtown Raleigh called Flying Tiger Sound. It's not a studio anymore; it's shut down, but the room's still there. It's a cool-sounding room. That's where I met the Megafaun band, and a lot of the Merge Records people, around 2008. I started producing a lot, doing rap music, like Petey Pablo, to Merge Records' indie rock with guitar and drums. I ended up working with Megafaun – the band Justin [Vernon] left to form Bon Iver. They b rought me to Wisconsin to make records, and I ended up going back and forth a lot, eventually moving to the Midwest. I was there for seven years.
April Base (Justin Vernon's studio in Eau Claire, Wisconsin)
Me and Justin actually lived together for a couple years when we made his album, 22, A Million. Me and him making fucked-up sounds together. There are two rooms; a Studio A, and then he built a Studio B, which is this state-of-the-art room. It has a [SSL] Duality and big ADAM [Audio] soffit mount [studio monitor] mains. It has a giant window that looks over the woods. Pretty amazing. It was a vet clinic, originally. And the live room was an indoor pool. The floor is built on a pool. It's covered up with gymnasium hardwood floors. It's a cool sound. It doesn't sound perfect, but I dig it. I use a lot of room mics to capture it and make it unique to its environment. After living at April Base, I eventually moved to Minneapolis. I ended up buying a recording studio in northeast Minneapolis and operating that the past year. I'm renting it to some artists I work with now, to hunker down and write their albums there. Hopefully they'll take care of it. The last Bon Iver album, we mixed four of the songs in that studio two weeks before I moved to L.A.
Bon Iver's 22, A Million
That's us [BJ and Justin], trying to find sounds that we've never heard before and putting them together. Songs would develop out of that. It's a backwards-ass way of writing music, but I still do it now. I remember the first day it started: When I moved from North Carolina to the Midwest, I brought my guitars and this Fostex 1/2-inch, 16-track tape machine that I got in Greensboro, North Carolina. The first session we started for that album was on that tape machine. That machine is all over the album. It's clipped out with tape saturation. The first song we did was the second song on that album ["10 d E A T h b R E a s T", which is super blown-out. Justin was doing the kick, testing out the tape machine; meanwhile I cranked the input and it started making this weird pattern. We ended up using that tape machine a lot, sending tracks to it and clipping it out, and getting different rhythms. Then it would move into [Avid] Pro Tools. I'll use [Apple] Logic or [Ableton] Live if other producers need it, but I usually start in Pro Tools. It always ends in Pro Tools [for me], so I might as well start where it ends up. It was about two years from the beginning, off and on. It wasn't a constant, every day thing. I tried not to force him to do anything until the end, when we needed to get vocals and lyrics done. Then it was like, "Let's do this!" We went to Lisbon [Portugal] for a month or two, and wrote out there. I was doing other projects as well, while doing that album. When we went to Lisbon, it was a smaller, portable rig, but we also brought ATC [monitors], AMS reverbs, and preamps. But a lot of it was done at April Base, in the B Room. We started most of it there. We would have our friends come over and jam in the live room, and then I would chop it up and try to make it into a song that was interesting. Of what we recorded, 93 percent never got used. I'll go back to my hard drive from 2015 and 2014, and there are folders of crazy jams that I'll pull out. "Oh, wow. I forgot about this." Last week I found something from one of those drives and started making a track with another artist. I think the process came out of the leisure of Justin being able to do it with his own resources and his own success, and then me committing to being Justin's partner in that. I'm always devoting myself to find shit that's fresh to me, like new sounds. We both have that chemistry, and the timing worked out.
Bon Iver's i,i
The first song that I wrote for this with Justin was "Hey, Ma." That was the first thing we'd done since 22, A Million. It sat around for a year or two. I was a little less part of the beginning of the album. I guess it was a similar process [as 22, A Million]. There was material from 22, A Million that I'd bring in. There's a song called "Faith," and I said, "You've got to put this on the album. It definitely fits." Justin had shut down his studio for renovations, so they ended up going to Sonic Ranch [Tape Op #94] and tracking the band with more live, organic elements on top of it. For a few songs, they brought back to me to finish. I was producing and engineering, but also co-writing and playing parts. We also did live performances before the album came out, when we were still writing and figuring out how to translate them. I would play a sequencer and drum machine and we did a few shows.
Low's Double Negative
We did some of that at Justin's. I ended up finishing it in my bedroom in Minneapolis. That was a lot of back and forth, where they'd come in and demo songs, and then I would do production on it and give it back to them. They'd re-sing to my new groove that I came up with. It was a lot of breaking songs down and building back up until it was right. It's always a dialogue with the artist going back and forth. I'm proud of that record.
Kanye + Francis and The Lights + Multitasking
I was doing [Kanye West's] Yeezus with Justin when we met Kanye. It was pretty amazing, actually. That influenced me; how fucking loud these guys are. He's got his engineer, Mike Dean, [Tape Op #122] I definitely look up to him. Francis [Farewell Starlite] is an artist who was struggling in New York. I met him, brought him out to Wisconsin, and he lived there for a year or two. At the same time as I made 22, A Million, Francis was living out there and we made records. Francis is a super-talented songwriter. He came out to April Base, became friends with Kanye, and started doing production with Kanye on his latest work. Francis is a good friend of mine now. I'm never working on just one thing. I'll often do four different projects in a day. I'll do busy work on two different projects in the morning, and at night I might have a session with a songwriter if I need to finish something. In the morning I comp vocals, make mix decisions, sign off on masters, or put parts into a new session. In the evening I do a lot more of the creative work; tracking and shit like that.
"the Most" Mark Ronson, featuring Miley Cyrus
I never even met her! I was mixing an album at Electric Lady Studios, and Mark Ronson was in the room next door. He said, "I like these sounds. I've got this Miley track. I wonder if you could do it?" I said, "Sure, why not? That sounds like fun." A week later, he sent me the parts; I did production on it and sent it back. That's the track you hear. It was as easy, quick, and simple as that. I enjoyed it. I like working with Mark; he's cool and a nice guy. I did a track with this artist called Yebba [Abbey Smith], her last single, which was cool. But yeah, there's not too much of a story to the Miley track beyond that!
The Japanese House
