You went to Berklee [College of Music] and then you got a deal with Phil Ramone's [Tape Op #50] N2K [N-Coded Music] label. What would be the best way to encapsulate those years of your life?
Well, I'm often asked, "How did you get into music?" In my case, I can't remember. I was in music school when I was five, and my relationship to music is identical to my relationship with oxygen; I love doing it, I want to continue doing it. But if I didn't love doing it, it wouldn't matter because I'd still have to do it in order to be alive. My "career" really began with Terry Manning and the record deal with Phil Ramone. Looking back, it's all a wonderful experience that taught me an enormous amount. The record deal part of it also taught me what not to do as a label owner. I've been lucky to have had powerful mentors in music; I was able to apprentice under them and learn from them, and, eventually, I'd healthily disagree with them in certain ways so that my music and how I make it would become my own. That's what we're all supposed to do. Today, that chain of master/apprentice has been broken, with people making music much more isolated from each other. I feel lucky that right when my career was starting, I was able to find myself under the wings of Terry Manning and Phil Ramone. I also feel very lucky that, of the people who are in my circle – my friends, my crew, other New York City musicians that I know and love – I'm one of the only ones who got a major label deal and made a record [Anger's Candy in 1997] that I still love. Although Ramone's label had many problems, one of the irresponsible things they did was they allowed me to make exactly the record I wanted, with the person I wanted.
You got to record with Terry Manning when he ran Compass Point Studios?
Yes, it's really all because of Terry. Through a friend of mine, who was acting as my sort of manager, Terry got a hold of some early recordings that I'd made and – unbeknownst to me – he really liked them. Even more unbeknownst to me, he got on a plane from Nassau, Bahamas – where Compass Point was – and flew to Miami, sat in Chris Blackwell's office, and refused to leave until he would meet with him, saying "You're going to sign this guy, and I'm going to produce the record." The same manager/friend went to Phil Ramone, pitched me to him, and, when he heard that Blackwell was sniffing around, he made me an offer. Phil was always lovely; a great music maker, and a great musical mind. He treated me with love and respect. Not the greatest label owner, he'd be the first to say it, but a beautiful man. In our first meeting, like a young and impetuous person, I said, "The two things I want are: I want to know that I'm going to be with this label for my entire career. And I want Terry Manning to produce the record with me." I'd already met Terry, and we'd fallen in "musical" love by that time. Phil said, "Well, you're out of problems. So, are you going to sign?" I did, and he signed me to a seven-album deal having heard only six songs of mine. As a label owner now myself, I have to tell you this was terribly irresponsible, but it worked out! [laughter] Terry and I ended up making the record together. Lenny Kravitz sings a duet on it with me. Terry is still one of my dearest friends. And Terry, and his imprint Lucky Seven Records, are now signed to my label, ECR. It's truly full circle, all these years later.
Anger's Candy sounds great. Thanks to Terry, it has such a timeless sound.
He does have a timeless fingerprint, indeed. I think the reason is something fundamental that he taught me: He taught me to make decisions in the studio. What I learned from Terry, more than anything, is to make decisions. Have a vision, make decisions, and stand by them. Print the effect. Choose a microphone and then stick with it. Which I do to this day. One of the first things I do on a record that I'm going to produce – either for myself or for all the artists that I work with – is I storyboard the record as if it's a film. We'll do a microphone test, and we'll pick one. "Is this a [Neumann] U 47 record? Is this an AKG C12 record? What works on this vocal?" Then I'll try to use that microphone as much as possible for everything on that record, from the acoustic guitar to the far room mic on drums. He taught me to make decisions and to stand by them, thereby trusting one's vision and one's instincts. That's one of the reasons that his work stands the test of time, because he was coming at it from a timeless standpoint as opposed to something more ephemeral. I wonder if you agree with this, but in music – even with professionals, and certainly with laypeople – I think people are fundamentally unsure of what a producer really does.
Oh, certainly!
I think laypeople instantly understand what a film director does, but not what a record producer does. A record producer is to music exactly what a film director is in cinema, and a recording engineer is a cinematographer. The songwriter is the screenwriter. The recording artist is the actor. Inherently, we understand what those roles are in film. But even high-level music professionals don't really understand what a producer is. And Terry is a film director. There are some producers out there that revel in not having a fingerprint, and that's completely valid. I am not one of those guys. I'm one of those producers that wants to have a fingerprint, and does have one. Those were my instincts early on in my career, but he validated it.
We see a lot less commitment with recording now because of the ability to have unlimited tracks. Records are put together piecemeal, as opposed to meeting at the studio every day for four weeks.
I'm someone who'd rather hear a record that was recorded on a Tascam Porta One that has intention than a record that was recorded in an enormo-studio that has none. I believe that there's a profound difference between recording and tracking. Recording is recording sound. Which, frankly, anybody can do. Tracking is the recording of sound with intention, and specifically the intention that the sound you're recording is going to be living next to other sounds that you're recording. Tracking, to me, is like stacking bricks, whereas recording is just piling stones. That intention is critical when you're trying to follow through on a vision for a record. When you're trying to follow through on rendering some art that could move people or even raise people's heart rates.
There are pieces of music that will just devastate me still.
You can't do that without intention. I think that "creativity" is vastly overrated and "artistry" is vastly underrated. Creativity is cool. It's about exploring and it's about allowing yourself to make mistakes. But artistry is about knowing when a mistake is beautiful, when a mistake has merit, is virtuous, and knowing when to keep it. Artistry and expertise are not getting the day in court that I wish they were, at this particular moment in history. They're being assailed, are they not? Expertise is critical and artistry is critical. So, when the CEOs of various "friendly" tech-overlord corporations talk about embracing creativity, I know that they don't know what they're talking about. Musicians aren't really after creativity. Such as I've experienced it, they're after artistry. The records I love, regardless of the decade they were made in, are in possession of artistry, and artistry comes from intent.
Absolutely.
I'm convinced that if you're in music because you're interested in serving the art of music, then you're going to have a great life. You're one of those gals or guys who can't get away from it. It's oxygen, right? But if you're here to serve yourself, you're cooked. You're making music for likes and follows. If you're making music to try to get a big record deal or you want to play at Glastonbury, I think you're in trouble from the get-go. All my heroes, whether they're producers, artists, drummers, or whoever, they can't stop being themselves for five consecutive seconds. They can't get away from making music, because where would they go?
I remember asking a young artist once, "What do you want this recording to achieve for you?" She said, "I don't know. Maybe make some money." She couldn't give me one answer of what she wanted the record to feel or sound like, or what she wanted to express.
I love that you're asking those questions. Any time I start making a record I get out a stack of blank index cards and a Sharpie, I start talking to the artist I'm working with, and we start talking about what this record is about. "What is it going to sound like? What are we hoping for?" I start writing things down on these index cards and throwing them on the floor and it becomes a storyboard for what we're doing. We may not know where we're going until we pull back and start looking at these ideas on the index cards. During the sessions, I put them back out on the floor so that we stay on track. It can be 20 or 30 cards. I just made a record [Between Lightning and Thunder] with Miles East – who's been my long-time drummer – and he's stepped out to make a beautiful singer-songwriter record. His record is somewhere between Beck's Sea Change and Paul McCartney's RAM. We had to talk about, "How are we going to do that?" Then we started bringing in elements; sometimes they're technical and sometimes they're just emotions or colors. I'm at a point now, luckily, where I don't have to work with anybody I don't want to. Usually, the first couple of conversations get people straight, as far as what the purpose of the record we're trying to make is, which, in the simplest terms, is to make something great.
A lot of times people approach it in a paint-by-numbers way. Sometimes I'll go in a studio and people will have a huge piece of butcher paper up with all the song titles, and they're checking off basic tracking and overdubs.
I can't get away from the cinema thing. Alfred Hitchcock famously storyboarded every film and every shot. There were no surprises on the set. So, I work horizontally. What does that mean? It means that we're going to talk about the drum sounds for a long time, then we're going to figure out how to render those drum sounds, and then we're going to cut them. Then we're going to do the same thing for bass, guitars, keyboards, percussion, and vocals. Again, this is tracking instead of recording. In that sense it is what you're talking about, but I do it a little bit differently. I'm not doing it song by song. I would never say, "Let's cut three songs and we'll come back and do another three." It's very important to me to make albums that sound like records. And the way to do that, in my opinion, is to think horizontally. That's why I'll pick a central microphone for the whole record. In terms of the piecemeal thing that you mentioned, I think that as we all increasingly work in the box, one of the real traps that people fall into all the time is the amount that's available to them. One of the index cards that's on the floor in pre-production all the time is, "What's the console that we're using?" Even if we're working in the box. I'm making a record with Chris Barron from Spin Doctors, and it was very important to me, based on coalescing that vision, that we were going to use [Universal Audio] 610B preamps for tracking that record. I don't understand people who use one preamp for the kick drum and another preamp for the bass guitar. It's like they never worked on a console. I want my records tracked on a console. Miles East's record, that's like a '70s record. So, that's Neve 1073 preamps all the way. If you do that in the box, those choices begin to stack up and they read so that you're making an album that sounds like a record. I'm fortunate to have come of age as a musician and as a studio person working on the hardware versions of [Pultec] EQP-1A EQs, 610Bs, and API 2500 compressors, so while I'm working with plug-in versions, I know what I'm expecting. I use those tools not anachronistically; I use them as one would expect, and then they actually work better for me, especially in mastering.
I totally agree that there can be a consistency, but I do pick certain mic preamps for different elements when tracking!
When we were all working on tape, one of the challenges was trying to get definition and clarity. Everything was bound together because it was all going to be on the same piece of tape. In the digital world, it's the opposite. Everything is so disparate that I'm always looking to bind sounds together, so they feel like we're entering a world. I'm not just choosing something; I'm rejecting all the other choices on purpose so that the record sounds like something. I like records that sound elegant, and elegance, more than anything, is refusal. It's not gaudy. Another one of my mentors, Phil Nicolo of the Butcher Brothers, has taught me so much about music, but the most important thing is that it's not the plane that gets you there; it's the pilot. The most important piece of gear I have is right between my ears, and in my chest, and in how I feel. That's the most critical thing. Also, when people ask me how I made a record or how I'm doing something specific in the studio, I always try to tell them, because there are no "secrets" in music. You could make a record in every single way that I make records and I could make a record in every single way you make records, Larry, and it would still never come out the same.
They'll be totally different, for sure.
