The spaciousness of your recordings is striking. You've said you've gotten more minimal as time has gone on. Customarily, a lot of people do the opposite. The more tracks that become available, the more that are filled.
That is true. As a fan and an audience member, I've always loved when I can identify what's going on. I know so little about visual art, but it's a little like when you see a painting and you can tell what it is but there are only seven lines. There's a kind of magic in our relationship to our brain and a piece of art like that. It's almost like a Rorschach test, seeing all of the things that are between the lines. I've always tried to think of music as a kind of parallel. From a musical perspective, you give everything all this oxygen, right? Especially with Billie's voice, I noticed right away when I started to produce music for her – it's like being in a messy room and pushing stuff off the carpet to clear a space. I wanted Billie's voice to have this three-dimensionality in a song – something you could see if you closed your eyes. The only way I could do that was to carve all of this space out, so the less stuff that was I putting in there, the better. Sometimes saying, "Less stuff," is maybe being self-effacing, since there might be 35 different synths and drums. But they're all blended, they're soft, and they've got this 'verby thing going on. But I feel that, as I've gotten more experienced as a producer, I know what thing is going to go the extra mile. It's about being super discerning. I'd get a good kick sound years ago by combining four different kicks. I'd have a kick with a lot of top, a kick with a lot of low, and whatever. As time's gone on, now I'm going to search through until I get a kick drum that hits exactly how I want it to hit, and then I'll let the subs in the bass do the rest of the legwork. So, yeah, I have been "guilty" of doing less and less on the production side. I think we start to notice, as we make music for a longer time – and you've obviously been making records longer than I have – but we start to notice the stuff that dates our records, that are like watermarks. And sometimes those things can be cool. But sometimes those are what I'm trying to avoid. Especially if it's, "Oh, this is the 'hot new' synth sound of 2021." In the moment, that's going to make me feel so good. But six months later, I'll think, "Shoot… I should've used a synth that wasn't so trendy."
Instead, use a vintage synth that used to be trendy. You've said in the past, "The less gear you have, the easier it is to make music."
That sounds like good advice for somebody starting out. Probably me saying that was a defense mechanism for the fact that I had no gear at the time. [laughter] I was just having this conversation with Annie Clark of St. Vincent [Tape Op #134]. She produced the album that she recently put out, All Born Screaming, entirely alone. It's super good. She was asking the other day, "How do you not go down a rabbit hole while you're writing a song if you're also the producer?" I replied, "Well, I know I don't have the one right answer to this, but I do think that the song comes first." An example of a bad use of time to me would be: I start writing a little song – say I have two lines – and then I start doing some production. I start figuring out drums for it, because I get inspired. And then I spend seven hours on a kick drum because I'm haunted by it, I want it to be perfect, and I get the kick drum sounding so good. It sounds perfect on those two lines. Then I go back in, and I write a terrible song. Of course I might write some bad songs. I've written many. But if I can write a bad song before devoting hours of production time into my bad idea, that is smarter. So, I try to think about it from that perspective. I have producer friends who are so much more technically savvy than I am about any gear – old analog synthesizers, analog plug-ins, or whatever. They're so much more technically skilled, and they'll get distracted by something that is so not making the song better. I have spent many hours in studios with producers where they're off on a tangent. I'm saying, "Guys, this chorus is bad." [laughs] This would be a great time to bail on this idea instead of pumping it through $20,000 worth of outboard gear, and saying, "Hear how much it shines?" No, the lyric's still bad, dude. [laughter] I do find it helpful – as an exercise – to be in a room with an acoustic guitar and write as many songs as I can and see how compelling I can make all of them. But the flip side is that when I was first starting to write songs, I had endless inspiration playing an open G-major chord on an acoustic guitar. Once you've written 40 or 50 songs with that big, open G-major, you might start to hear the material you've already written underneath it. It might not inspire as many melodies any longer. Sometimes, as I enter a period of my life where I'm thinking, "Oh, I'm writing the 180th song I've ever written" – or whatever it is – I'll occasionally pick up this weird little synth that I don't know how to play. I'll play a melody or a rhythm that I wouldn't have been inspired by when I was just sitting there at a guitar or piano.
Neil Young has said that he's amassed so many guitars because he knew every time he bought one, he'd get at least one song out of it.
[laughs] Nice! That's cool.
Do you still write the majority of your songs on physical instruments?
Yeah. Probably most songs I've written in my life are on piano, and second to that on guitar. It still keeps yielding. It's such a great collaborative thing if I'm thinking about my relationship, writing with Billie or any other artist. To be there and be reactive – the human, organic quality of that. If Billie starts to slow down, I slow down right with her. If she wants to change keys, I modulate with her. It's a fast and effective way to accompany another person.
Analog and happening in real time, with immediate, unmediated flexibility. You've said that you don't ever Auto-Tune Billie's vocals for the sake of fixing. If it's a little bit off, you don't correct it?
This is true. But I do Auto-Tune my own voice a lot. Oh, well! [laughs] But, yeah, Billie has such great pitch, and she does all this cool glissando, ornamento. Auto-Tune doesn't rock with that super easily. Also, I find it is much harder to judge when it's your own voice. I just finished For Cryin' Out Loud!, and there's Auto-Tune on some of the songs, but then there's not on other parts. But I was listening to one verse, and I was so tormented by being pitchy on this one note. Then I thought I was pitchy on this other note. Until, "Oh, my god, this is all driving me crazy." I got up and finished my work for the day. But later I was listening to some Beatles' songs, and I realized, "This vocal is so pitchy, but the song has made me cry every time I've ever heard it. It probably doesn't matter if it's perfect." That's the twofold thing with Billie – she's an amazing singer and has amazing pitch. If there are moments where it's not exactly on the cent, that's probably great. Some of the music that I'm the most disturbed by is the most quantized, tuned, and cut up. There's, obviously, this whole side of electronica and cool club music that is synthetic; that's sick, dirty, and awesome. But I find that what I'm least moved by is some pop artist singing over drums and keys where everything is quantized. That's the music that bums me out. I'm not usually bummed out by an emotional vocal performance that gets a little pitchy. That usually delights me!
I've heard that you even use real handclaps.
[laughs] Yeah, so true, dude! I'm trying to think of what I use that is not real. I have a piano in my studio, and it sounds great for most piano parts. But there are times where I want a really harsh piano, and I don't have the acoustic one for it. The piano in my studio is the one that's been on [Billie's] "What Was I Made For?" and other songs. There are songs where I need a jangly piano, and those are fake. But yeah, I like a part that's "less good" because I was the one who played it. I play all of the shakers and tambourines, and sometimes my tambourine playing is pretty bad. But it's cooler to me to have a whacky tambourine than an amazing loop that I pulled from some library.
You incorporate what could be called Foley in a lot of your recordings. This is interesting, given your background working in film as an actor when you were growing up. You've even used recordings of your sister having her teeth drilled at the dentist. Was that a handheld Tascam DR-05 [portable digital recorder]?
Yeah, the origin of recording those sorts of sounds was on the Tascam. To be honest, I found the Tascam prohibitive enough that, over the years, I've graduated to just an iPhone. An iPhone has stereo microphones, but it doesn't record in stereo when you're using the Voice Memos app. So, all you have to do is take a video of it and then strip the audio off, because the iPhone records the audio for video in stereo. That's my hack for getting sounds on an iPhone. But, yeah, sometimes I've gone to look for a specific sound because I think it's so incredible. I want a specialized microphone to be picking that up, which the DR-05 is really more appropriate for. Oftentimes, I'm just looking for something textural – something that is interplaying with five other elements. It doesn't need to be "the best" recording ever of somebody knocking on a door.
You often send songs to the mixing engineers, pre-compressed and pre-panned. Are the reverbs printed and everything pre-mixed?
Yeah. We used Jon Castelli [Tape Op #136] to mix Billie's last album [Hit Me Hard and Soft] and my recent solo album. Rob Kinelski did all of the records before that. They're both great, super-talented mixers. I'm an avid YouTube wormhole person. I watch all those Mix With the Masters, as well as any self-uploaded tutorial video. Anything to always keep learning. I don't want to ever discount work that I know Rob and Jon both have added; they've made creative choices, and done cool reverb throws that are on the more inventive side of mixing. Maybe what I feel I desperately need is the balance and the math of it. My relationship to listening to music – the profile of my ears – is I want too much bass and not enough treble; that's the way that listening to a song all day sounds good to me. I listen really loud, and it's high bass, low treble. I often rely on a mixer to amend that, and to even it out for other environments. I always say, "The rough mix I did for my car is the one I want to listen to." Oftentimes, the mix that's done by a great mixer is jarring for me in my environment. But then, as we've been lucky enough to experience, if you heard a Billie song in an elevator or in a hotel lobby and it was like my mix, there would be a disaster. [laughter] But Jon's mix is more balanced and sounds great, whether it's right after a Bon Jovi song or right before a Sabrina Carpenter track. That, to me, is one of the values of mixing. I think a lot of that's been dumped on mastering, but there's more of that balancing work that should be done in the mix rather than the master.
I read about how on the song "8" from Billie's debut album [When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?] that the kick is off-center. And they wanted to place it center, but then you wanted it panned back off-center again.
That sounds like me. [laughs] But I do think that the drums on that song are really cool. Part of the thing that's cool about that song was it was vari-speeded. We shifted it up a couple of semitones, and we took everything with it. We took the drums, the subs, and warped it all. That was a fun, fun way to do it. But in some ways, I've tried as of late to dive back into the real mixing side of it. When I have somebody like Jon or Rob doing a mix, it's a little "fix it in post." To be honest, sometimes that's a real luxury for me. If my job is to produce a lot of songs in a year, doing a great mix of a song – especially for somebody like me who's not a professional mixer – is going to take many hours. If it's the difference between many hours spent mixing a song or sending it to a person I trust a lot – and I get to work on a new song – there are pros and cons to both. But in the last couple of months, I have been trying to hone in on my personal mixing skills, just for the appreciation of it. I'll hear a great mix by another band, and I'll think, "This is a great, knocking mix, and I want to get me some of that!" But the whole fun of being a producer is, "How'd you get that sound?" I've been dealing with it a lot this album cycle with our music director for Billie's tour. He'll send me a text, "What's the synth for the transition from the first half of 'Bittersuite' to the last half of 'Bittersuite,' so that I can have the synth guy play it." I'm thinking, "Oh, dude! You can't. It's a crazy little toy that I ran through an aux cord and then ran through a plug-in. Then I distorted it and reversed it. It's not playable – it's all fucked-up and crazy." I'm not doing all of that for the sake of being complicated, but it does bring me satisfaction and pride that I'm not saying, "Press #2 on the thing. It's a plug-in."
You've done a lot of recording with just one mic, yes?
