How did you end up near Nashville?
When I first started coming to Nashville, about 11 or 12 years ago, I fell in love with it because it's so laid back; this embedded balance with work and then having family time and living life. My wife and my kids would make these trips with me, and I would do week-long writing trips. A guy had built a studio out in Gallatin and was selling it; there were some intriguing pictures online. On one of my trips I came and checked it out. I was thinking, "Well, that studio's pretty close to what I would imagine building." I brought my wife out here and we checked out Gallatin. We ended up buying a house before the guy committed to selling the studio. June of 2019 was when the trucks and everything got here and unloaded. I was starting to think I was maybe going to lease a room in Nashville, but the studio worked out.
You'd had a studio at your home in L.A., right?
I did. I had a studio for a number of years that I had built. Then, for the last seven years, before we moved, I was leasing out the front room at Can-Am [Studios], Chris Lord-Alge's place. I took what I had learned from my first studio, as well as the Can-Am space, and built a dream setup at this new studio.
What are the differences between having a space in an existing complex, like Can-Am, and in having your own personal space?
There are advantages to both. There have been times I've gone to work in studios that had different people working in different rooms, and there's this cool energy that can happen. People bump into each other, "Hey, come play on this song," or, "Come check out what we're working on." There are a few places like that in town, such as Sound Emporium and Blackbird. Of course, L.A. has a ton of them. But, for my own purposes, having my own studio and all the gear I've collected over 20-some odd years, I can have gear set up at all times; drum mics, all my guitar amps I want mic'd, and keyboards up. I work a little faster because I know what I can get out of my own gear. I can create an atmosphere. When artists or musicians step into a room, each room creates an atmosphere. I've always enjoyed trying to create an atmosphere that made me feel good, and hopefully made other artists and musicians feel good when they stepped into it.
When we walk into an empty studio as a freelancer, we've got to plug everything in!
Yeah, exactly. "Are all the channels on the console working?" I've had great experiences going to a studio that I'd never worked at before. If there are limitations, I work within those limitations, and that becomes part of the adventure.
True.
It took about three months for the studio to be built. I was making records in a small room at my house on a laptop, while also using a couple of keyboards. I was thinking, "Maybe I should just go the route that everyone else is going!" But I'm grateful that I have the room and have gotten to make a lot of cool records. The Lake Street Dive record was the first record I ever made there, so I learned the room on that record. Fortunately, it worked out!
Did Lake Street Dive come about through the Live From Here broadcasts, working as the Musical Director?
To be honest, I think Live From Here helped me seal the deal. I'd been planning to make a Lake Street Dive record three albums ago. At the time I was doing a bit of A&R for Warner Records, so I became good friends [with them]. I've always been a huge fan of Nonesuch [Records] and everything they represent. I would bug [former label president] Bob Hurwitz, "Hey, can I get a meeting with Lake Street? I'm a huge fan of the band." For whatever reason, the timing wouldn't work out or they'd already committed to a producer. Doing Live From Here, with Rachael [Price] being a frequent guest singer, we got to know each other on a personal level. That show brought it to a point where she felt comfortable with me and could vouch for me. It's a hard thing for a band to commit to a producer. My credits are a bit of a head-scratcher. There are some that maybe make sense for Lake Street Dive, and a lot that don't if you're just looking at credits. I don't know if it was an audition, per se, but it worked out that we went in and cut one song, "Making Do," in October of 2019 at a studio in town called Welcome To 1979.
Yeah, I'm friends with Chris Mara [Tape Op #104].
Yeah. Incredible spot. We went in for three days and tracked one song. The chemistry and the vibe was there. Then it was a matter of figuring out a chunk of time that we could all make the rest of the record. I had a couple of trial writing sessions before they got here. I was also working with an engineer, Lawson White, who I'd never worked with before. Coming from a situation in L.A., where I had only worked with two engineers – Adam Hawkins and Brent Arrowood – since I made the Fiona Apple Extraordinary Machine record in 2005. Brent is the guy who wired and assembled my studio here in Gallatin. He knew every piece of gear that I owned and knew how I liked to work, so it was perfect. He even got the studio integrated with [Audinate] Dante [media networking technology].
You're coming at this more as a musician, composer, and producer. Have you always had engineers to help you out?
Yeah. Before I had an engineer, it was a gradual process of Tascam to Roland – little digital studios – and then getting Pro Tools. Just picking it up as I went along. Then, many moons ago, I came across a Neve BCM10 [console] for sale. I had a BCM10, a Pro Tools rig, an [Akai] MPC3000 [sampler], and a couple of keyboards. I was still doing recording sessions for people [as a bassist], so I'd ask guys like Jim Scott [Tape Op #75] or Matt Wallace [#128] for advice. Everybody always had [Neve] 1073s or [Universal Audio] 1176s, [Teletronix] LA-2A, or whatever. I said, "I'm going to buy one of each of those and figure out what they do and how a compressor works." I've always admired guys like Bill Bottrell [#59] and Eric Valentine [#45, #133], those guys who can play every instrument, write the songs, engineer, produce, and mix the record. I realized that for my brain, I definitely slide more into the musician/arranger/ songwriter type of producer. Especially once I met Adam Hawkins. He was a perfect person to grow with as we started making records together. A lot of my favorite producers also had that "right-hand man" feeling. Quincy [Jones] had Bruce [Swedien, #91] and so on. I did a lot of sessions with T Bone [Burnett, #67], and he always had Mike Piersante engineering. I naturally gravitated towards wanting to have an engineer there to handle as much of the technical end as possible.
There are times when I'm asking, "Please give me a little extra money so I can hire someone to come in and help me set up the drum mics."
Yeah. Once the word gets out that you're a guy who can do all of the above, then the budgets shrink and it's like, "We're not going to pay you double, but we want you to do the same amount of work." There are definitely times where I was at home and I mic'd myself up. As a chuckle I'll give myself engineer credit here and there. But I won't go out of my way to engineer records.
For Lake Street Dive's Obviously, did you do the mixing?
Adam Hawkins did the mixing on that. Like I said, Lawson White was the engineer. We were getting to know one another. I had a certain idea of what I wanted to get sonically, so there were a lot of references. I sent him a Spotify playlist of a bunch of records. When we started working together, there was a lot of, "Could we push this further? How far can we take this?" I like to make sure that the rough mixes are great, to set the bar. It gives the mixer a, "Here's how I'm feeling it." I very rarely will turn in a session to a mixer and say, "This is a mess. Make some sense of it!" I usually have it pretty well thought through, and the rough mix is at a good place. Adam Hawkins did a phenomenal job. There's an unspoken language with him, him having engineered so many records. He's mixed a lot of records for me over the years. I give him the freedom that, if there's something we didn't do that he wants to try, to go for it. The same goes for [Mike] "Spike" Stent. Spike mixes a good amount of my albums for me as well.
This new record is a bit of a shift. Previous records feel more organically performed.
I talked to them about the vision that I had, but they were equally wanting to push the boundaries of what a Lake Street Dive record was. This is their seventh record. When bands get to a certain point, they're super open to doing something they've never done before. We looked for opportunities – where it made sense, based on the songs – where we could push and blur the lines. There were a couple of times I could tell, where they would walk in and it was, "Whoa, can we do this?" But there was never a, "No, I don't want to try that." There was always an acceptance and an openness, "Let's see what happens." Every time we'd wind up with something we were all very excited with, sonically or arrangement-wise.
Were you building up the beats for their songs and helping arrange them?
On some, yeah. They had let me in on the process of song selection pretty early on. They had a bunch of ideas already. Sometimes an artist comes in and goes, "Here are my 15 songs. This is my album, and I know exactly what it should be." With Lake Street they'd say, "We've got five voice memos and GarageBand demos. Maybe you can help us make sense of it?" I love doing that. I love being able to listen to super raw demos. I made a wish list of those demos and what I thought might make a good record. They were into it. From there, I gave them some suggestions to try for arrangements, tempos, or maybe a key change. Then they went into a rehearsal room and played live to have a sense of it with Voice Memo off the iPhone. They came to the studio, and we had the studio set up so that they could all track live. We would occasionally go back and overdub, but for a good amount of it we kept the energy of what was there. There were a couple of times where I would program something for them to play along with; a breakbeat or some percussion. Sometimes that percussion was kept. Sometimes Mike ["McDuck" Olson] would go in and replay it. There's one song on the record called "Anymore." It's a very '70s or '80s production. I had this wacky idea of wanting to borrow from the classic '80s Phil Collins, and Quincy and Michael Jackson's "Human Nature." I was expecting, "All right, Mike. You've gone too far." We ended up with this hybrid of live instruments, but with programming and a [Roland TR-]808 drum machine, and it works. We found a way to make it gel with the other songs. I was psyched that they wanted to blur the lines.
Was it hard to pull together a cohesive album?
Yes and no. One of the things I love about Lake Street is that they've always had this genre-lessness. They can be jazzy, folky, R&B, and rock. I took each song for what it was. There are some pretty disparate moments on the record, if you put them back to back. I'm still a fan of the sequence of an album. They are such great musicians and have such great songs that it does work. Their musicianship envelops any direction they want to go into, and they can pull it off.
