You went to Berklee College of Music, right?
Yeah, I was self-taught on guitar for about a year or two before I started taking lessons, sight reading, and stuff. Then I did drums. I was mostly self-taught as a kid. I started taking lessons as an adult here and there. I went to Berklee after that. I did a lot of lessons to get ready to audition to go there.
Did you graduate?
I did. I have a music business degree from Berklee, and guitar was the major. But because I was in the music business major program, I only had to get to level four out of eight. If you're in pro music, you have a lot more guitar classes you have to take. I realized, in my first couple days there, that I was not going to be a guitar player. The kids there are unbelievable, so I started hiding in my production.
Is that when you first got into production?
No, I started making beats when I was 14 years old. My dad got me a [Sony] PlayStation game called MTV Music Generator. It was basically an [Apple] GarageBand format, where there were a ton of loops and different genres all in the same key and tempo – you could mix drum loops, bass loops, and sax loops. That was the first time I sequenced stuff, which was different than me playing guitar or anything else I did up to that point. Then I got a demo version of [Image-Line] FruityLoops. I would use [Apple] Logic in the media center of my high school. Once I showed my parents that I was serious about it, I ended up getting a laptop and my own DAW. Then I got an [Akai] MPC as my first tool, and I learned how to use an MPC early on. I then went back to trying to learn FruityLoops and Logic. It was a weird zigzag.
At some point you moved over to Ableton Live?
Yeah. I've been in Ableton for the last decade, but I was in Logic for probably ten years before that. I thought I was going to be a Logic guy forever. When I started making dance music and more electronic music, all the automation and all the techie stuff that went along with those genres was much easier to do in Ableton.
But you're using [Avid] Pro Tools now?
Yeah, I use it with Ableton now. Ableton for MIDI. Ableton to warp. Ableton to get something out fast. But I'm pretty much full-time Pro Tools now.
How old were you when you graduated Berklee?
I was 21. By the time I graduated Berklee, I'd already produced for Kendrick Lamar, Mac Miller, ScHoolboy Q, and a few other signed artists. I wasn't making a ton of money, but I was starting to get my name on the blogs, on SoundCloud, and I was building up a small amount of followers. I was in an electronic duo with a friend, and we had started making stuff that was getting us shows before I graduated. I actually had an apartment in Los Angeles that I got six months before I graduated while I was on my “internship.” By then, I was already living in L.A., playing shows, selling beats online, and trying to get myself ready to get out of school before I was even graduating.
You're one of the people working in music who actually graduated from Berklee.
Yeah! They used to say that if you didn't drop out, you didn't make it! [laughter] I actually know a lot of people from USC, Clive Davis [Institute of Recorded Music] at NYU, or some of these other music programs who are killing it. I'm more peered up with people from these small programs that produced a lot of successful musicians, writers, and producers, whereas at Berklee there's a wide range of majors. I only have a couple of friends who went there at the time I did that are still in my orbit.
You've ended up doing a lot of education online via your YouTube channel and Splice. How did that come about?
I was lucky enough to start getting invited to speak at a few schools before the pandemic happened. I spoke at NYU. I spoke at USC. I've been lucky to have certain videos and things I said online get more traction than I thought they would about my path in the music business and, in general, the music industry and production. Some of those things caught on. I would get asked to talk about how my career worked out at different schools and then the pandemic happened. Organically, we started this huge online community because I started streaming a popular YouTube show at the time that also had a big following. Once I started streaming, a lot of people were looking for a place to go, and also a place to be seen during Covid, especially young producers, writers, and musicians. On this channel, I would host beat battles, give away free stuff, and I would bring on other people and try to get them to talk about their story and how they make stuff. My Discord became the second biggest Discord in all of music. I was the number one music streamer on Twitch the first two years that I started. Content was never something I planned on doing, but it ended up being something that fed back into my opportunities, my music career, and was also helping people indirectly. Somehow, we were teaching people; we were getting people opportunities. There are people out of the beat battles on my Twitch channel that have gotten major publishing deals, major placements, and major collaborations. We love to think that we are part of their rise, or are helping them get their first couple thousand followers. We've seen these people turn it into something. I've never wanted to sign producers. I've never wanted to have any kind of publishing company or anything like that. But we try to help out. We try to be honest, because I'm very gracious for where I'm at. I'm going to share everything I've learned, if I can.
You seem to enjoy collaborating with people.
Big time. It's the whole point, especially as a producer.
Making things by yourself is fun, but making things with other people is more fun.
Yeah. One of the reasons I produced – and didn't take my own songwriting and stuff further when I was younger – was because I'm a white kid from Connecticut who has always worked in, and been interested in, black music and things that I'm not particularly authentic to. Things that I love and am interested in because they're probably so far from what I know. When I work in music, it's always trying to be the biggest helper I can be. I'm never trying to tell people how to do their thing. I'm always trying to be around someone who I think is this unbelievable talent and just foster it and be helpful. That's how I ended up doing engineering on top of playing instruments, on top of making beats, on top of introducing people to directors and getting them new managers and doing a million other things that aren't just production or beat-making. It was because I wanted to be useful for people that were talented and sometimes didn't need my help in the area I wanted to help in. My career has always been about collaboration and about how can I get next to the things that I can't believe I'm in the room with. That's when I dig the deepest and make my best stuff within it.
I have to imagine that comes back to you. There's a certain karma of helping people out that feeds back in a positive way.
Yeah, definitely. It's in all the chatter and different people being evangelists for things in my career because they might have learned something, or seen something helpful, or won something free in the chat that I was hosting or whatever. Those people go and they spread love for your brand. I sold merch for a lot of years. I had a brand called Don't Over Think Shit. [D.O.T.S.] It was also the sign on my YouTube show; everybody rapped in front of this neon sign. D.O.T.S was something that people supported in an unbelievable way. At Berklee, as a music business student and as a producer, I was taught that you might get your points on a record. You might even end up playing in a band or playing some shows, but there wasn't this path carved out for selling your drum sounds, or your merchandise, or streaming, or content, or these other types of income when I came out of school. I wanted to be a producer, and my managers are my best friends – they're smart and they helped brand me and put me in these different areas. They let me just talk my shit and tell my story and bring my friends on with their other artists. When the content and all that stuff started feeding back into it, there was a lot of good karma that came from it. The more honest I was on there, the more opportunities I had. I used to be scared to be on camera. I thought it was lame. I thought I would look like a vlogger or something and I wanted to be taken seriously as a musician. Then some of the funny content I made got the attention of the artists I dreamed of working with! I took everything too seriously, but the more I was myself, the more artists reached out. Definitely, we try to help out as much as we can because of how much support we've had. For me to be able to sell my own merchandise as a producer – and my own concert tickets and all these kinds of things – it's very rare and I don't take it lightly. So, I better give back, you know?
You say we a lot. Who is we?
My best friend, Mike [Michael Power], is my manager. Dylan [Johnson], who you met, is my day-to-day manager. My other best friend, Jon [Tanners], is my other manager, and these are very close relationships. All the years where I ran a lot of content and merchandise, all those things, my friend, Dom [Glover], was the creative director. My friend, Aris [Chatman], filmed and edited everything. My friend, Drew [Pulig] did all the animations, as well as all the tech packs for the merch. We had a group of a bunch of our friends who were all putting work into my producer career, much in the same way most artists have creative direction and get linked with directors and business managers. Sometimes producers might have their manager and their lawyer, but I was afforded people who took me seriously even before I was financially viable enough to pay all of these people. They let me pay them a couple hundred here, a couple hundred there. But it came to a point where I would produce a full project for an artist and then say, "I've got this idea for the creative. This guy can film it and we've been taping all the beats along the way. Then you can come be on our show on YouTube. Our last episode we got a hundred thousand views in a couple of days." I was moving like an artist moves, because I had that help and that was something that my team masterminded. I was sitting there, thinking, "How can I make better songs? How can I keep working with this artist, or get this artist to come to the studio?" I never considered all these things. People see my brand, and all these things I've done, and they think it's me masterminding that, but I'm only thinking about the music. My team is smart with how they position me and the things we've built together. So, it's always a “we” thing.
Two artists you've worked with, IDLES and Geese, both have unique, unconventional vocalists. Is that something that attracts you to an artist?
I guess so. Those were both first time, first listen, instantaneous fan people for me. Cameron [Winter, Geese] and Joe [Talbot] of IDLES; the second I heard them, it became this fever panic of, "How can I help them? Can I even help them? Maybe I just want to hang with them." They are people I would see and think, "Oh my god. Nothing's as interesting to me as this is." I've felt that way about both of those bands, at different points in my life; just blinders, immediately. I'd hear a song and realize I don't care about working on anything else. Yeah, Joe is one in a fucking trillion, and so is Cameron. Joe's an elder statesman, at this point. He's selling out shows and they've become one of the biggest live acts in the world. For Cameron, what a year for him! He's seeing it all for the first time, in this new way. They're both so different in my mind that I wouldn't even consider grouping them as a certain kind of frontman, or a certain kind of vocalist. To me, it's apples and oranges, but I guess I am attracted to authenticity.
They have their own very unique, characteristic style. With many rock bands, the vocals can be pretty cookie-cutter.
I like freaks. I like weirdos. I'm not interested in someone who comes in here in their running shoes after they went to Equinox [Sports Club] and then they do their ginger shot at 3 p.m. I want people who are living their art, and it shouldn't be this thing where it's easy for them to make it. Everybody I work with, they put everything they have into it. Both those guys, when you hear their music and it feels so singular, it's because it's taken them a long time to get to the point where they've become themselves in their songwriting. Cameron's just finding it at a young age.
There's a lot of music that feels fairly derivative, and seems like it is just hitting certain standards and marks, but both those artists are very unique.
Cam from Geese, the first day we ever met in person, said, "It's easy to be a good band right now, because no one's trying."
We have the tools now to make safe music fairly easily, but it's become homogenous and boring a lot of the time. It seems harder to make great music.
That's why education and helping people out is something that will always be important to me. There is a bit of magic that's being lost when you hear something and three weeks later it's on some YouTube show and they're breaking down how they did it. Instead of creating this lore and myth in your head about what was happening in the studio – or how they did it, or what they used, or whatever – once you know it's this kick drum from this website, this Serum [synth] patch, and this mic through this preamp, and you can do it yourself. It doesn't feel the same when you listen to those records. It's a weird point in my career, where I want to help and I want to share. But I also don't want the records I work on to be piecemealed out and every magic moment on them gets explained, because I want the magic trick to still work.
I heard somewhere that you pursued doing the Geese record.
They had another producer and the studio booked already.
Really? You talked them out of it?
There was no option for me. [laughter] I was doing the record. That's it.
You've also done two records with IDLES.
Yeah, I did Crawler myself. And then I did Tangk with Nigel Godrich. That one got three Grammy noms, and Crawler got two.
How was working at Real World Studios with IDLES?
It was a few years ago. When I think of it now, it's how I think of my high school; you see it as an adult, and it looks so small. Real World has the biggest control room in the world, but when I went there, they said, "We're going to track 20 mics of drums straight to a Studer tape machine," and that was day one. I was thinking, "Oh, I'm out of my depth." I'd never done a band like that, and I'd never done a band at that scale and at such a competent studio. They have the best kids from the Oxford recording program as the interns. The most base-level person at Real World is a top-of-the-line engineer and usually a musician, as well as a whole bunch of other things. When I went to Real World, it was a very intimidating thing. Also, the week I got there I found out my dad had cancer for the first time. Then we made this record that's one of the most important things to me ever. That studio is an old water mill in the middle of nowhere in the U.K. and I got there in the middle of a world pandemic, while my dad got cancer, to make this thing with this band. It was in a super volatile place. Real World, to me, has this scary, holy feeling. Everything about it adds to what I think about the control room. There's a 96-channel board in there, us standing in the middle of it, and the band saying, "Kenny, how are you going to make our drums sound better than Geoff Barrow was going to?" All these storied rock producers that worked with IDLES had worked there, and I was sitting there looking at this board with the pond in front, with all the geese in it, just thinking, "What am I going to do?" But I couldn't have learned more. There was an engineer there named Oli. There were actually two engineers (Oli Middleton and Oli Jacobs) named Oli, and there was a tech on site as well who was unbelievable. The way I'm running my studio now, I'm using the same headphone amp, with the touchscreen live mix system in the control room. I built a tech shop here where we fix the gear. The second the capsule is broken, the second the tape machine stops working, we fix it onsite. There were so many things I picked up from Real World that I had in the back of my mind when I built this studio and had my own space. There's a certain efficiency here I haven't seen anywhere else. At Real World, the level of what they're able to do, even with only a few people there, it's pretty staggering; like when you go to the top A list studios in Los Angeles, New York, or in London. There's something about it being in the countryside and how much work Peter Gabriel put into it. It’s one of the most impressive and capable places you could ever go.
After you did Crawler, you did Tangk with Nigel Godrich. Did you do that at your studio here?
No, we did that at La Fabrique in the south of France. I've been to that studio a few times now with Nigel and the band. We did Tangk there, that was my first time going there. Nigel had done Radiohead's last record [A Moon Shaped Pool] there, from what I understand, and they use it for the Mix With the Masters classes. I'd seen it on videos, but going there was pretty unbelievable.
You've worked with Nigel on a couple different projects now?
