You got your start in recording in New York. Did you grow up there?
No, I grew up in the Midwest. Minneapolis. After two years of college — I was going to be a dancer — I went to New York City.
So how did you move into recording?
Well, I realized I wasn't going to be a professional dancer — too painful. [laughing] But I fell in love with New York, so I was looking for a way to stay there.
Music was obviously already a big part of your life.
Yeah, and I played the flute also. I always related to music in one way or another. I had a lot of friends who were musicians, I was hanging out with them, and I saw the studio and just loved it.
What studio was that?
Actually the first studio I was ever in was Richard Factor's, who started Eventide. He had a studio in New York for a long time — I don't think it's there any more — and the band I was working with did a demo there. And I just kind of walked in and went, "Wow! I gotta do this."
Did you immediately start looking for a job at a studio?
Well, I had a job at a publishing house, and they were doing... like, math lessons on cassette, little [educational] skits. So I made them teach me how to use all the equipment, and then I'd sneak my friends in at night and record music. Eventually they hired me [to do recording], and I did about another year's worth of voice recording, editing, and mixing sound effects for them. And then I went to Sound Ideas.
How was that studio set up? That was 1973, right?
Yes. It was really interesting because things were just changing over to 16-track at that point. They had an 8-track recorder that they could put 12-track heads on, a 1" machine. And then the first 16- track they got was an Auto-Tec, a dual-capstan machine made by a company called United Recording. They just had one studio, and during the second year that I was there, Geoff Daking built a studio downstairs, below the other one. So I got to help wire the studio, and watch them put the acoustics together.
Was Geoff already building his own gear?
No, but he was the chief engineer and also the maintenance tech. He knew a lot. He really kept that place running. He taught me how to solder, how to trace a signal path through the board, pull a card, find the problems... and he kept that dual-capstan machine going. It was kind of dodgy — sometimes one capstan would get out of alignment with the other, and it would start to kind of eat the tape.
Yikes!
It was really scary. So anyway, he got an Angus board for the downstairs room. The upstairs had a 20-input API board, with eight busses and four aux sends!
What did you learn from Geoff about making records?
He taught me everything. He's a drummer — he started out in the Blues Magoos in the '60s. He taught me how to get drum sounds, and how to tune drums, which is really important. One of the most interesting things to me about being in that situation with Geoff was, he would tune the drums — say a jingle was coming in early in the morning — we'd get a drum sound based on the way the drums sounded when he was playing them, and then the drummer for the session would come in and it would sound completely different. Same set of drums, same tuning. Ding! [she makes the "light bulb on" sound] You know? Pianos sound different with different people playing — everything does — there's so much in the fingers.
How did you meet Laurie Anderson?
I was a fan. And I think the reason I was a fan was because we had friends in common, so they heard her very early on and said, "You have to hear this person." Anyway, her business manager at the time knew that I was an engineer, and passed my name on to Roma Baran, the producer.
How did you approach recording that first album [Big Science]? Were the pieces already fleshed out from her stage show, or was there a lot of experimentation in the studio?
The stage shows at that point didn't have too much of that material in them. She had a lot of material. She has thick piles of notebooks of written material, and she doesn't mind kind of appropriating from one piece to another, so you see different loops, different word fragments and sound fragments kind of migrating until they find a home. Her stage show at that point was deafening! Huge drums and guitars — it was pretty wild. Most of the material on that record is pretty introspective and quiet. She always had the loops and the basic words she was going to start with, and then there was a lot of experimentation to see what was going to fit, and how it was going to fit together. And she was tireless. I'd go home exhausted after twelve hours, and if she wasn't in the studio she'd be pulling out slides or something for another project, or getting out the vacuum and cleaning the place!
Did that record present some special challenges with some of the unusual instruments? Like the tape head violin?
[Laughs] Well, strangely enough, the tape head violin is really easy to record because you just take the direct out. And she just plays it. But one of the interesting things was making the tapes for her. Finding pieces of tape that she thought she wanted to play, and she just popped them in. She had a guy named Bob Bielecki who was — and still is — a recording engineer but also a bit of an electronics designer. And she would work with him on things like taking a little Casio keyboard apart and putting the key contacts onto her body so she could tap on herself and make weird noises. He was the one who mounted the tape head on the violin.
Do you enjoy experimenting with unusual or unnatural sounds?
Oh yeah, totally. I'm always interested in sounds where you can't exactly tell what they are, or where they come from. And also mixing real sounds together with unreal sounds to make something new. I thought for a while that I might want to get into film sound effects, or something like that. But I've found from the movie work I've done that sound to me is much more interesting when it exists on its own. When it's got to be subordinate to an image, that's not as much fun.
It's liberating to work on projects that aren't bound by limitations of style or pop song formats, or corporate "hit" expectations...
I guess I've been kind of lucky in my career, because the totally mainstream hit stuff has, you know, mostly ignored me. [laughs] I've been kind of more associated with more eclectic people, so that there hasn't always been a lot of that commercial pressure. I worked a lot with a guy named John Lissauer who was the producer the first time I worked with Leonard at Sound Ideas. And he was one of those guys... all his projects were always off the wall and all the sounds that he went after were so creative. He had a really liberating approach to sound. Laurie kind of took it to a new place in terms of the things that made the sounds, because the sources that she used were just... as big as the world.
Those records sound pretty honest and direct, like what's unusual seems to be coming directly from the performers rather than through a lot of studio processing.
Yeah. Especially since Big Science hardly even has any reverb on it. It's very, very bare.
You've been working with Leonard Cohen since '73, on New Skin for the Old Ceremony. Did you hit it off back then?
Yes.
How did you end up working with him again ten years later?
Through [John] Lissauer. Because I had worked on other projects with Lissauer all along. I was an assistant engineer in '73, and by the time Various Positions came around, in '84, I was the main engineer.
I read that before doing the new record (Ten New Songs) Leonard had spent some time in a Zen Buddhist monastery.
Even in '73, when I first met Leonard, [his teacher] Roshi was coming to almost all the recording sessions. He would sit on the couch, wearing those little sandals and split-toe socks. He was so cute — it was such a good vibe. When Leonard got off the road after the tour for The Future, Roshi at that point was getting to be about 90, so he didn't know whether Roshi was going to be around that much longer. Of course Roshi still is absolutely vibrant — he's fine. But it seemed to Leonard like a good time to hang with him some more.
And he was up there for several years, right?
Did you keep in contact with him the whole time, or was he keeping himself secluded there?
I would hear from him from time to time. You see that red thing in the corner there [indicating a roll- around rack containing a Tascam DA-78HR, a Brent Averill Neve 1272 mic preamp, a Mackie 1202 mixer, and a Stewart HDA-4 headphone amp]? That's like a little portable recording studio, and he had that up there with him, for writing. But he wasn't always really comfortable with manipulating everything, so he sometimes would call with a question, or asking about an upgrade. And there were other little projects we did, like a score for a movie of a friend of his, and another narration thing that he did for the Tibetan Book of the Dead. So there were contacts all along the way.
Are all the instruments on this record, apart from Bob's guitar [Bob Metzger played on "In My Secret Life"], sequenced by Sharon?
Yes, and there was some stuff that Leonard played on his keyboard [a Technics SX-KN6000]. It has a huge library of sounds, with all kinds of different ethnic percussion instruments.
Did you talk about replacing the sequenced tracks with live musicians?
Yeah, we talked about it a lot. And ultimately we fell in love with what we had. Every time we would go to replace something it would be like, "But it's going to change!" [laughing] Especially with Leonard's music, you know how little tiny shifts in the background affect the mood. He's got a kind of specific whole mood that he's trying to create, and some of those real musician performances can sort of take the attention away from what he's doing.
The sequencing sounds very natural.
What Sharon did was perfect. The mood that she created, and the sounds that she used, and the way that it worked with the voice. Replacing things wouldn't make it better — it would make it different. And probably not as good. That's what our experience was.
The programming is simple but detailed, particularly in the subtle drum fills and accents, layers of percussion, and stuff like that. It's meticulous work. Was that done from the beginning, or was it like, "Okay, we're not going to re-record this, so let's make it more detailed"?
You know, the phrase "we're not going to re-record any of this" never really came up. It was more like a track would be there that Leonard would sing to, and then Sharon would put some layers around it, and Leonard would react to that, and then more things would happen. It was just kind of a process of trying to build it into something that was working, and when it was working it was kind of too late to change it.
Were you involved really closely through all of this, or did you kind of sit back and let the two of them exchange their ideas back and forth?
Different songs went different ways. Some songs I had very little involvement in, some songs I had a lot of involvement in. With some songs, it seemed as though you couldn't really tell whether anything was going to work or not unless the mix was really there. And we spent a lot of time working with the different elements, trying to fit them in, so that when we went back to mix, we realized that we had [already] been mixing.
I was going to ask if you sort of mixed the record as you went.
Yeah, but we didn't know it. If we had been mixing all along, I would have insisted on more plug-ins, and not just slapping [Digidesign] D-Verb all over everything and then trying to get it off later. [laughs] Which was a problem in places.
Did you do anything special in recording or treating any of the instruments? It all sounds clean and simple.
You mean in the way of using any special preamps or converters?
Yeah.
We actually mostly went in just using the [Digidesign] 888. Leonard has one of those Brent Averill Neve [1272] mic pres, and his voice sounds good going through that. The most special thing that I can think of that I did was not using very much compression. Which kind of gave his voice a real "right in your face" kind of texture, with all the transients preserved. And I kind of relied on Pro Tools to ride any syllables that needed riding. When you can get that specific, you don't really need to squash things.
Do you do that by just drawing curves with a mouse?
Did you use any kind of control surface?
No. I've done some stuff with control surfaces but I find that even when the control surface is there I tend to be going in there and mousing around anyway, so eventually I just stopped using them altogether. I pretty much just do it with a trackball — I'm a trackball person.
Leonard has a Pro Tools system here (a Mix Plus, running version 5.1 on a Mac G4) but was he still using the DA- 78 to record vocals?
Yeah, and anything that he would play. If he wanted to learn Pro Tools, he would know it in about two seconds. He uses [Adobe] Photoshop and Illustrator, and he's very computer-savvy. But that program is more than he wants to take on, I think. He just wants to think about the songs.
