What lured you into music?
I have a very early memory that bonded me, not just to music, but to recorded music. I couldn't have been more than four, maybe five. I'm 60 now, and I can still feel it. I had one of those little kid plastic record players that played 45s. I already understood that a song could bring about intense emotions, but then I discovered that songs had specific parts that would captivate me like nothing else in my little kid world could do. In all the chaos of my kid life – there was a lot of fighting, drunk adults, and stupid shit going on – I could not only take that needle, put it back to the top, and the song would play back again and would never let me down. But I also realized I could lift the needle, move it to my favorite part, and that part would play back for me, over and over, without fail. It was a consistency that I could count on. I will still put on Wings' Wings Over America, and the transition between "Rock Show" and "Jet" – those eight measures when they switch – is one of the most exhilarating things in the entire world to me. It's not even a big deal, but there's something about that transition. When we're done with this interview, I'm going to go listen to it. It turns me on, it excites the kid in me, and it ignites everything I used to be. I've imbued it with so much power, and that's just one of probably 500 specific moments in songs that can still do that to me. These moments are transcendent.
We met at New Orleans at the third TapeOpCon in 2004. You said one of my favorite things, "I imagine the band on the meter bridge as tiny figures playing the music when I'm mixing."
Yeah, like army guy toys. I've never forgotten that. I still do it, because that way when I turn it down, it doesn't have to sound quiet. I just have to quiet my mind and imagine that I'm mixing little, tiny people that are playing very loud. But if they're only three inches high, they can only be so loud. [laughter]
I love it.
That's part of the way that I exist inside people's songs while I'm doing what I do. I'm inside their moments. They're not my moments; they belong to the song – they don't even belong to the artist. Again, I brought that forward from my childhood. Once I'm in there, I live mostly inside my head. I rarely socialize. I live in my imagination inside other people’s songs. It entertains me, frankly. Otherwise, it's boring in this room for ten hours a day by myself. Not seeing anybody but my husband, who rarely even comes in. I don't like to be interrupted. He knows, no matter what, if I've got my headphones on, do not tap my shoulder! I'll jump out of my chair.
Your recording career began in New Orleans.
I got to New Orleans in 1990, and I lived there until the day before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. I didn't go back after Katrina, because I had an infant and I had lost my house. I had lived in the Bywater, which was high ground and did not flood. But after the baby was born, I moved to Gentilly, which flooded terribly. Everything I owned went under water and stayed there for four weeks. I lost $115,000 that I could never recoup. That doesn't seem like a lot of money to some people, but to me it was because I did not have insurance for my gear. That was the point where a lot of engineers and mixers were starting to build studios at home because Pro Tools existed. I lost a lot. I wasn't up for the whole rebuild with an infant in my arms. Grayson [Capps] had lost his house, too. We were a couple, but we weren't living together at that time, so we decided we would move to Nashville. We lived up there for five years.
Where are you living now?
Fairhope, Alabama, near the Gulf of Mexico. We're in an artist community, and we live in a bubble of artists. The Gulf Coast is its own specific culture, whether it’s New Orleans, Pensacola, Mobile, or Biloxi. Lots of blue and purple, and yes, a good bit of red, but we’re blue. When we moved to Nashville, our son was still a baby. My husband, Grayson, was from Fairhope and his mom was down here. She said, "I want to be your nanny." I’d been paying $23,000 a year in Nashville for nannies. No one wants the cheap nanny! I wanted the good nanny caring for my infant while I was at the studio all day. So, we decided to move back down to the coast.
New Orleans is such a special place, obviously. It must have been hard to leave.
Absolutely, but now we’re just two and a half hours from New Orleans. All my best friends are still there. Amtrak finally opened the Mardi Gras line from Mobile to New Orleans, twice a day, morning and night. I get to hop on the train.
I love taking the train.
I used to go to New Orleans several times a year, but now I go practically every other weekend. If I'm not working, I'm rolling over to New Orleans. New Orleans is still what I consider my soul home. My baby was born there, I met Grayson there, and my career happened there.
How did you end up in New Orleans?
When I was in Los Angeles, I was still on the outside looking in. I had access to studios because I worked at Capitol Records. I could occasionally go into the studios and watch the engineers. I remember watching a dude with the auto-locator between his legs punching in and out, and I was so enthralled by that movement. I thought, "That's what I want to be." I was only 22 years old at the time. I left Capitol Records and moved to London. I was bartending on the Portobello Road when I ran into a famous manager, Tarquin Gotch, whom I’d known from Capitol in L.A. He asked me to manage his office for six months. I said, "I don't want to be a secretary, I want to be an engineer." He said, "I can't help you with that, but I'll pay you £2,000. Plus, you can live in my flat while I’m in America." He might as well have said, "I'll pay you a million dollars." [laughter] Downstairs, in the basement flat of Tarquin’s building, was one of the artists that he managed, Hugh Harris, who has since died. Hugh was signed to Capitol Records and had a little home studio down there. He was English-Jamaican, gorgeous, and smoked lots of spliffs. He became a great friend, and he's the guy who started teaching me to record in that basement flat. He used to always listen to The Neville Brothers' Yellow Moon, which had just come out and was gorgeous. I had never really heard of Daniel Lanois, [who had produced it]. I was certainly aware of Peter Gabriel's So and U2's The Unforgettable Fire that Dan had also produced. Hugh started teaching me on [MOTU] Digital Performer, and also on a TASCAM 1-inch analog machine and a little TASCAM console. Hugh went on tour with Sinead O'Connor, so I went back to Los Angeles, once again feeling lost. I went to a six-month recording class at Los Angeles Recording Workshop. I was learning how to cut tape and how to line up tape machines. "What is a dynamics processor?" They didn't go deep down into the physics of sound. You walked into that school, and they said, "This is a console. This is a console strip. This is a mic preamp." They taught the basics so that you could go out and be a technical assistant. It was more like a craftsman's course or a trade school. They didn't teach you about sonics. They taught you about gear, so that you could understand, like a car mechanic. Back then, you had to work in studios. That was when I met Susan Rogers [Tape Op #117], who was producing a record for Hugh Harris. She looked me in the face and said, "If you want to do this, it's not going to happen for you here in Los Angeles. You need to find some town that doesn't have a big industry, and good luck." She was very kind, but she said, "It's hard. I started out as an MCI tech." All that time I'd been listening to the Yellow Moon record. I love this record and I’d had this romanticized idea of this Southern city on the Gulf with its weepy trees and its voodoo. I remember laying in my bedroom and thinking, "I'll go to New Orleans." I booked a flight; I had $397, and I didn't know anybody. I started cleaning studios. That was my way in.
What places were these?
My very first cleaning job was Ultrasonic Studios, which was on Washington Avenue. Then a place called Southlake [Recording Studios] (which turned into the New Orleans Recording Company), and then Kingsway Studio. Malcolm Burn [Tape Op #35] had seen me at Ultrasonic mopping floors, and asked, "Who's that?" They told him, and he said, "Well, she can come clean at Kingsway." I was a runner, too, but mostly I was a great studio cleaner. Everybody was very nice, and they would let me come in the control room afterwards and sit quietly. I did have enough of a quietness, but also a sense of humor and an incredible enthusiasm for what I wanted to learn. The first time I walked into Kingsway Studio, I thought to myself, “I’m going to work here.” Ultrasonic asked me to deliver a DAT [Digital Audio Tape] to Kingsway at the behest of Malcolm Burn. The Ultrasonic guys were teasing me because of all the rumors about what went on at Daniel Lanois' Kingsway mansion. They were saying, "It's full of demons, and there are probably vampires!” Anne Rice was all the rage, and these people were Canadian so we don't really know what they did. They could be scary. [laughter] We’d all seen the Kingsway crew around town on their motorcycles wearing Prince-style flowy, white shirts and black leather pants. There was this aura about it because it was a closed studio – you couldn't just book it then. It had to be a project of Dan's or something that he had some part in. I brought the DAT down, knocked on the big door, walked through the kitchen, and I heard – reverberating through this entire plaster and tile mansion – Chris Whitley tracking “Phone Call from Leavenworth.” It took my breath away. I can't stress the enormity of what I felt walking through the big, dark halls to the front of the house. It was all open – there were no iso booths. Over in what I would learn was called the "wood room," I could see Chris through the center hall as I walked by, and he was in there stomping his foot playing “Phone Call from Leavenworth.” I rounded the corner into the control room area, which is, again, wide open with all the other mansion’s rooms. I saw their API board, and then those Tannoy Gold [monitors] in Lockwood cabinets. Dan was floating around with Malcolm and Mark [Howard. Tape Op #134]. Different people were sitting in dark corners, playing instruments, smoking cigarettes, and sipping beers or whiskey. I was gobsmacked. It was in that moment that I became determined, come hell or high water, that I would work at Kingsway. I made tons of cables, patchbays, and EDAC connectors. I had taught myself to cut tape, and at that point I was very good at it. Dan noticed my skill early on, so I became the tape op. It was still a job back then, where you sat by the tape machine, put up reels, took down reels, did all the edits, and took notes. For a year, I rarely left the tape machine while the band was working because that was what I did.
What was it like on sessions with Daniel Lanois then?
Working for Dan was both wonderful and difficult. We had somewhat of a difficult relationship because he was demanding and kind of odd. I'm good friends with Dan now. He knows he's weird. [laughter] He's also a genius. I always took notes on all the takes, practicing for when I'd be a producer and engineer and had to be able to respond. I was also bored over by the tape machine, so I'd listen intensely. Note-taking is so important. I also took the autolocator numbers for parts of the song and handed them to the engineer. One day, out of the blue, Dan called out, "Okay, Trina. What do you think we should do here?" Shocked, I quickly checked my notes then said, "I think take two for the majority of the song, but I think the bridge should come from take three and the solo definitely from take one." He said, "Cut it." I cut it, and the edit worked perfectly. Trial by fire. Dan lit fires – and so did Malcolm and Mark – underneath me. Further down the road, my tenure at Kingsway ended during the Emmylou Harris record [Wrecking Ball], because I had gotten into an argument with Dan. I was on the edge because of wanting to take on independent projects as a burgeoning producer/engineer. He got angry and thought I should be grateful that I was chief engineer anywhere, even if I was relegated to second engineering for most sessions because they'd bring their own staff. He said that if I left, even temporarily, I was done. I quit anyway, and later that day, Emmylou called me herself and said, "Please come back. Neil Young's coming in tomorrow to do vocals. This is your setup. Come back for me. Don't worry about him." Malcolm was on the phone, "You can't just walk out on Lanois! Are you crazy?" Finally, Dan called, still angry, and asked me to come back, which I did. I finished Emmy’s record, but that was my last record on staff at Kingsway.
Even in the best of studios, you can't expect someone to stay in one position forever.
Right. If I’d stayed, I’d forever be the second engineer. It was time for me to become an independent engineer.
Wrecking Ball is one of the best-sounding records I've ever heard.
So beautiful. So special. I still have the reverb setting that was used for most of Emmylou's vocals on that record. It comes from the [Lexicon] PCM70, one of which I have right here. After Emmy's record, I officially went independent. The person that Dan was able to find quickly to replace me was ill-trained, and the room was very peculiar – it had a lot of eccentricities and its share of problems. About a month and a half later, Sheryl Crow rolled in with Bill Bottrell [Tape Op #59]. Sheryl Crow was not on my radar. I may have heard her song "All I Wanna Do" somewhere. Apparently, she and Bill Bottrell had a rather large fight on day one of the session for her second record [Sheryl Crow], and he left. He was also the engineer.
Right, a great engineer.
Scooter [Weintraub], Sheryl's manager, asked [studio manager] Karen [Brady], "Who can we get in here to run this session, just for tonight 'til Sheryl gets her engineer flown out?" Sheryl was going to produce herself; she just needed a temporary engineer who knew the room. Karen called me, and I remember saying, "Oh great, I get to work with another pissed off millionaire rock star. Sounds so fun." I came in, and she was very upset, very scary, very tiny, very pretty, and wildly talented. I just marched up front and started doing what I was trained to do. After going through the fire of Dan, Malcolm, and Mark, there was nothing that this five-foot-two spitfire woman could do or say to me to freak me out. I was a hardened young woman. Tim [Smith, bass], Brian [MacLeod] on drums, and Jeff Trott [guitar] had all flown in to write with her. This was going to be a writing session. But, nonetheless, all this time I was setting up for a session. I had tape rolling way before half the mics were even in place. I spoke to no one, and no one spoke to me. They all sat in a circle in the room right off the open control room as I was booming in mics. The drums were a little bit off in another room. I was getting the kit mic'd while tape was still rolling. I was already on the third roll of multitrack, and this was just the set up. But Sheryl was singing and playing, so I was recording. She was singing into a [Shure SM]57 while I boomed in the [Neumann] U 47. So, we go on like this for a few hours, and then she looked at me at one point and said, "This has become a song, so can you play that last take back off the run DAT?" I replied, "Well, sure, but I can play it off the multitrack because I've been rolling tape." She got angry, or so it appeared to me, and said, "Why are you rolling tape? Nobody told you to roll tape." I said, "Because what else am I supposed to do over here? It's what I do. I roll tape. You play songs. If you don't want to pay for the tape, don't pay for the tape." She glared at me for a minute and then broke into a grin. I played the song back. The song is called “Home,” which is on Sheryl Crow. It fades in because it's part of a 20-minute stretch of writing. It was magical, but it didn't have a bridge, so they went back out and wrote a bridge. "Okay, now let's cut this song for real." They could never beat that writing take, so they cut the bridge, I edited the bridge into the writing track, and there it was. The next day, we cut “Everyday is a Winding Road.” I think the next song we started cutting was “If It Makes You Happy." Her engineer was supposed to be out there by the end of that week, but we had half of Sheryl Crow recorded and it sounded great. I kind of became her engineer after that, and stayed her engineer for a long time, until I wasn't anymore.
I've worked briefly with Jeff before. He really helped the session.
He's so delightful. Everybody was. It's a real treat. This was over a long stretch of time. Everybody in the studio was either on their best behavior or their worst behavior. I wasn't always on my best behavior either. I could get very dark when I felt like I was being taken advantage of. It took me a few years to understand that that very darkness – the music had to pass through me to get through the console, to get to the tape and back – that darkness would color everything. I had to bring only positivity in that seat. If things were untenable, I either had to leave the session or speak my piece and pop the bubble of awkwardness, which I got very good at doing. After all this time, it can be so transformative in the studio. It can be so magical. It can even just be fun and cool. But when it's shitty, it is brutal.
How long was that session there?
About a month in total, and then Sheryl moved the session to Los Angeles. This was the era where instead of having to make [analog] safeties – 24-track to 24-track – [Alesis] ADATs had arrived. The session left and they wanted all the tapes shipped out to Los Angeles. Her engineer was going to pick up where I left off. Again, unknown to Sheryl and Scooter, I had made safeties of not just the master reels but all of the reels, including the outtakes. We had about 20 rolls of tape in total. I had dumped them all to ADAT. It took me one whole day and there were a ton of ADATS, but I had done that of my own accord before I had the reels shipped out. Of course, I made safety copies of the reels that had been consolidated for the master takes. But there were all these outtakes. The sessions started up out in L.A., and for one of the masters, they decided they were going to use an outtake instead. They were working on the outtake reel, and a hole had gotten punched into one of the guitar tracks or something. Scooter called in a panic, and he said, "You need to send all the run DATs. They're going to try to see if they can grab a snippet from the run DAT and somehow fix this." I replied, "I don't see how in the hell that's going to work, but I'll send all the ADAT safeties I made for the outtake reels." He's like, "You did what?" He told Sheryl, and she jumped on the phone, "Oh, Treetop, just get them all and get on the Delta Dash. Can you come tonight?" There used to be a flight from New Orleans to Los Angeles every night that we called the Delta Dash. I got all the ADATs, brought them out there, dumped the ADAT safety onto 24-track, then cut in the whole segment, and the original guitar was returned. I saved the day, and after that I was in. I had done something that nobody had explicitly asked me to do, and I ended up in the engineer’s seat for Sheryl. Little things ended up being crucial in those early days.
Just doing a little bit more than someone else might do. Like taking tracking notes earlier.
Right. The whole thing is a series of organizational skills that are handled creatively. Editing is nothing but a high-end organizational skill, but you still have to use a creative musical umbrella over it. You have to be creative, but what you really need to be is organized. That's what I think is the defining thing. My masters are organized, my sessions are organized, my stems are organized, my delivery is organized, and everything is organized. Even years later, I can still bring back a session and give you the stems you need. I archive everything I work on.
As far as your productions, one of the records that I was checking out was the Mountain Goats' Jenny from Thebes, that you tracked, produced, and mixed.
That's one of the more recent productions I've done. I produce pretty rarely now because I get enough mix gigs. Production's a lot of work.
I imagine that would be an enticing one, because John Darnielle's such an interesting songwriter.
He is fascinating. The band was wonderful.
Was it Jon Wurster on drums?
Yes. He's a genius. And Mattybonez [Matt Douglas, bass]. John Darnielle is also a published author; his brain is so sharp. These things were extremely intimidating for me. I have done a lot of producing over the years and interacted with artists on so many levels, but he is quite possibly the smartest one out there. He was very dominant in the control room right off the bat, and I basically said, "Look, you've got to trust me. I know you want all of your vocals to be live, but let me show you what I can do with a comp. I want you to go out there and sing this song. I want you to sing it seven times. You sing it however you want, I'm not going to coach you through it. Then I'm going to go to my room and I'm going to comp it." I brought my laptop so I could comp vocals in my hotel room. I took it back to the hotel and I did the intensive comping work that I do, which takes me hours. I came back with a finished vocal for him, and it blew his mind. By day three we had landed in a place where the trust was established, then whole thing just got so fun. I loved making that record. We were at Leon Russell's studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
