I thought about doing this interview when you were at Jackpot!, but you were immersed in co-producing and playing on Laura's record. Sometimes interviews are so reflective it takes away from the project at hand. I didn't want to chance that!
That's totally true. Plus, if the day goes well – if a lot of emotional energy has gone into the recording that day – I feel weirdly so wiped out; I generally want to go straight to the Airbnb or hotel and just crash.
You've already spent the day making a million little decisions.
It's true. I'm trying to do my best to be a good dad, and I get little tidbits as I'm coming across information about parenting. I read that kids get equally physically tired if they've been running around or if they've been working their brain.
We spend a lot of energy keeping these brains working. That's something we always have to take into account, both in the studio and in creative pursuits. Don't you think?
Absolutely.
What are your views on being asked to produce an artist?
I'm maybe being unnecessarily dualistic here, but if I imagine two poles of producing, one being the producer that walks in and is able to boss the song and the artist around. I don't mean that with a negative connotation. Think of any singular effective leader person, like James Brown, Prince, or Laurie Anderson – any of these people who have intense vision. There's the pull of a producer who walks in and says, "Okay, you came in with this one way, but now we're going to double the tempo. We're going to have horns on the B-section. We're going to make it into this new thing." That's magical and remarkable. A visionary who can see the object in a totally new reflected way, and manifest that.
Right.
The other pole is a producer that allows the artist to feel so self-inhabited that exactly what they want to say comes out into the light in the most real, vulnerable, safe, and true way. Then, all of a sudden, a different kind of magic takes place, where the person feels, "I don't know if I would have said that, had it not felt the way it did in the room today." That's the side, so far in my life, that I've been able to live in. As an analogy, it's like when the forest is dark, quiet, and still enough. And then some of the rarest animals come out into the meadow, if only for a little while. That's what's exciting. Maybe that comes from being quite ostracized as a kid, knowing how to get the rare, hidden self to come forward.
True. In what ways were you ostracized when young?
In my case, I grew up in 1970's small-town Pennsylvania. This was well before the internet, where there wasn't the ability to find a culture of the weird. What we all received was what was on Saturday morning cartoons, evening sitcoms, and Friday night football games. It was very white in the area I was. Unfortunately, between being an immigrant, being Pakistani, and being brown, we have what are given to us as normalized beauty standards. I was well outside of those, in terms of race and culture, but also in terms of the way my body looked, and these kind of unusual deformities. I was on the outside of everything. It was quite grim. But I had the counterbalance of loving parents, so that was lucky.
That's good. I think a lot of us that end up in music feel like outsiders. Sometimes these environ-ments force us inward and make us creative.
Yeah, I totally agree. It's also wild what, thus far to me, has seemed to be the open embrace of musicians in the music community. If I walk into a room and pick up an instrument, and I'm elevating the feel of what's going on, instantly I'll have a connection with the people around me. What race you are, what you look like, what your background is, is instantly totally subterranean. It makes me think about those photos of jazz groups from the '30s, '40s, and '50s that are multi-racial, and how powerful those photos are. The level of racial identification when you walked out the door of your house in those eras was so powerful. Maybe I'm being optimistic, but it feels like it disappears when people are playing music together; the groove is moving everybody, and the sound is moving everybody.
I think you're right. To me that's one of the beautiful aspects about a recording studio. All that matters is what someone is bringing in, and that it is working. The end result of the recording is the only thing that needs to be judged.
That's an interesting point. I never thought about that. If you think about a workplace, and how built into a workplace are a possible set of assumptions of what the person entering in the door is supposed to bring, then the recording studio is one of the most open-ended versions of that. You can walk in, be almost anyone and do almost anything. If it flows with the sound of what we're needing, all of a sudden, you're completely welcome in that space.
Versus a job where it's more the identity of the human coming in and how they function.
Sometimes it's a surprise. We'll bring someone in to do one thing and they end up doing another. I've seen sessions where tensions were high, creativity was low. Then one person walks in and all of a sudden everything opens up.
It's so magic that it's a "vibe." That adorable hippie term is so meaningful in the studio. The tone of what the room feels like, and therefore what takes place. These days, it feels like we're leaning towards "sessions should feel cozy and happy." Yet I read these stories of [Fleetwood Mac's] Rumours being made in the '70s, and those people were so pissed at each other! There was real tension and real ill will in the air, and they still came away with a masterpiece. But it feels like, right now, people are trying to make it as nice as possible in the studio. I wonder about that sometimes. I definitely see Marc Ribot [guitar] artistically come to life when he's pissed at someone, or he feels that there's someone to pull down in a space. It's interesting what brings out different personalities.
What was your backstory? Growing up, did you start studying music when you were young?
I was a little kid, like 2 to 4 years old. Somewhere around that age an intense fire was lit to be a musician and deal with sound. Where did it come from? My parents didn't play. Much later in life, I was contemplating that question, and my partner got me to visit a seer in Iceland who speaks to the dead. That woman's thought was my brother, who was born when I was around two years old and only lived to be around one week old, was a musician. "When he passed, his spirit went right into you."
Wow!
That's the answer that I'm sitting with at the moment. So, I had no road in front of me. I was in elementary school, and I asked to be in the marching band. I started on the bass drum. I had an elementary school drum teacher who said, "Tap your left foot to all the quarter notes for every rhythm you're reading." That was magical, because he was saying to internalize a sense of a pulse and do everything against it, but to also feel all that in your body. Kiss was a band I was listening heavily to as a middle-schooler. That foray they did into making a movie [Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park] where they're in an amusement theme park and people are facing them? I have a deep memory of watching it as a kid.
Same here!
When I was 15, I'd collected a bunch of cassette tapes, mostly of pop music that's on the radio, like The Human League and Madonna. The band that I was in took the bus from Pennsylvania to New Orleans [Louisiana] to play. In the process, I lost all my cassette tapes. I went to a record store and said, "Where should I start?" They got me a Dave Brubeck record and Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. By that random turn of events, jazz entered the picture. Then, around 16, I found music that had a deep thread of melancholy, because that resonated with how my life felt. That was Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" and U2's Joshua Tree. Years later, I can put on anything from Joshua Tree, feel the 16-year-old who doesn't know how to play music, but then also simultaneously feel current Shahzad appreciating the amazing textures of the Brian Eno [Tape Op #85] and Daniel Lanois [#37, #127] choices on that record.
How did your musicianship improve?
I was totally self-taught for a long time. I was trying to learn how to play, up in my attic with a drum set, trying to learn drum parts from Joshua Tree. One thing that's very surprising is, when I was 15, in English class they asked us to make up an essay and submit it to the local Danville, Pennsylvania, newspaper. I wrote an essay about having a recording studio. It's a little something like this: "You're at the bottom of the stairs. You walk slowly up the stairs, and you feel like you're entering a cozy space, like a tent or the warmth of your own bed. You open the door, and it's your workspace as a musician." I was describing a recording studio. I wrote that when I was 15, and then I eventually made a studio when I was 44.
That's amazing! Did you study jazz somewhere after high school?
There was moment I tried to. I was 18 at a music school in New York. They had a summer program. Somehow, I'd convinced my parents let me be in New York for a month or two and do this. I was in this little classroom, and this totally disheveled teacher comes stumbling in, hungover, in a football jersey with dark sunglasses, and then he asks everybody, "Okay, if you've got a five horn horn section, how are you going to voice the top tenor?" Everybody's hand shoots up and they say, "E-flat down to D-flat." I looked around and felt like I was in an alien landscape, because I had none of this information. I thought, "Oh, my god, I don't belong here." I walked out of the class, and I left four days later.
Wow. What path did you pursue then?
I went to college. I was initially studying political science, international relations, and a little bit of pre-med. But I was very quietly signing up for a music theory class, or a music ensemble class. As soon as I did that, I got voraciously excited about it. I would buy books about theory. I bought a small-scale electric bass. Then I moved to [Phoenix] Arizona, ostensibly to start a little pop-rock band with friends from college. What was lucky is I went to Stinkweeds Records, and I also found this place, Modified Arts, that was suggesting we should just improvise and see what sounds we'd make. I found the experimental improvising music scene, and I found weird records at this record store that were saying, "Music can be anything." That was a big starting point for me. Later, when I moved to New York, I found people that were a good connection for me to play with. They weren't purely about shredding, reading [music] really well, or working on a Broadway score. They were more about, "What are you feeling right now, and what sounds can we make that relate to that?" Connect with the other person and move the whole thing upwards. As I started doing that more and more, while simultaneously learning theory, to a basic degree, I could also bring it into the songwriter world playing with that enthusiasm and spontaneity. Now, there were at least two worlds that I could functionally exist in, whether it was on bass, drums, or guitar.
Do you think it was having to find your own path, and becoming more of a listener and participant than a studier?
Definitely. I got lucky, looking back on it. I've had friends who have gone through a real serious schooling path, and what hits them at some point is, "How do I develop my own voice?" I was finding music entirely on my own.
I asked Kendra Lynn, Jackpot!'s manager who engineered your sessions here, for some questions about you, and she said you had studied music in many different countries. Where have you been?
When I was in college, I had a close friend who decided to get a PhD in Balinese music, and he found himself going to Bali. One year he said, "You should come down there with me!" All of a sudden, I was in Bali going to these small villages. It was really following different friends who were on their way somewhere, and I would tag along. Similarly, I went to Morocco. I was moved by the sound of the Gnawa music and the gimbri. We imagine when you stay with one thing, then you understand that thing. But what if by touching many horizontal aspects, you begin to understand its nature also? How does rhythm work in the context of Moroccan Gnawa music, and then try to understand rhythm in the context of a Balinese gamelan, you might start to understand rhythm well, just as you would if you had stayed with one thing for a long time.
What led to recording studios for you?
