Can you give us a little background on yourself? It's not every day that someone our age happens to be working on a Jane's Addiction record, and working with Bob Ezrin!
I'm from Southern California. I played in high school and all that stuff and when I graduated I knew I wasn't a good enough piano player to really pursue being a professional musician and I ended up going to recording school up here in Los Angeles. I grew up about an hour and a half outside of Los Angeles. I moved to Hollywood about two weeks after graduating high school. My first job was at a studio called Track Record, which I worked at for about four years, and then I lived in London for a year. I didn't do a lot of studio work over there, just because I didn't really have any connections. Then I came back to L.A. and have been independent ever since.
What have you been working on?
The last few are always the ones that seem the most important. Over the last three years it's primarily been 30 Seconds To Mars and Jane's Addiction just because they were such long records. I did another band over the summer called pre)Thing for V2. And this year I've mixed a mellowdrone record, which is supposed to be on ArtistDIRECT but I don't know what's happening with that anymore.
What's your background?
I came from more of an engineering background, obviously. I used to play music but as far as getting work and getting to where I am now, it's more through engineering and having a few successful mixes here and there that led out to me getting more production work. The first real production work was for Deadsy — I produced a few songs for them, which will be out on Dreamworks. Then they asked me to co-produce the 30 Seconds To Mars record with Bob [Ezrin].
How exactly did that happen?
I had done some work with the artist earlier on. Bob got involved and they wanted someone to co-produce the project. So I believe they went through quite a few names before they came back and asked me to do it.
So why were they still looking for a co- producer then?
I think Bob's availability was somewhat limited — he still had a lot of commitments to different ventures and they just needed someone else who could be hands-on all the time. And from that point Bob asked me to come in and do the same type of situation on the Jane's Addiction record. For that record Bob was pretty much there all the time, but not as much as me. We would share ideas and stuff.
So he brought you in for that. How did the band feel about that? Or I gather they were totally completely open to it?
I don't think we really talked about it until we were already in the studio. It wasn't going to financially be a different burden on them and they could see I was doing the work, so all is fair.
And they hadn't made a complete record for over a decade...
It wasn't a type of record where they came in and said, "Here's our songs," and someone could go, "This is the problem with your songs." Because since they were writing in the studio, nothing happened all at once, as far as pinpointing issues that needed to be dealt with. They were always slowly getting dealt with. I engineered the record. I'd say the production values are also things that stemmed over from that side of things — sonic levels and such.
It was quite the setup you had going there — a mix of formats and such.
Yeah, it was Pro Tools and tape. It was much easier to do all the overdubs in the Pro Tools environment. Especially with all the development that happened with the songs, it's much easier to hold onto a track and open up a new one and try a new idea and keep taking different approaches to a song. You know, I'm not a big kind of go-in-and-tune-the-vocals kind of guy. I try to use Pro Tools as more of a recording and archiving type function — editing. It's really great on a creative level but I don't use it as a fix-everything type thing. There's a lot of Pro Tools stuff going on, but it's more on the creative type of song arrangement and just being able to explore different options for the songs.
So how long were you guys at it from beginning to end?
I would say twelve or thirteen months on and off. There'd be a couple months here and there — which is when I made the record for V2. But it was a year-long project.
So was there any burnout at any point?
Up until the last stretch of it, it never really went more than two or three months at a time. Near the end you've really narrowed down exactly what songs you're working on and [laughs] you've been working on a lot of them for a long time but earlier on in the record they were going through new material and it was pretty fresh. And even up until the end, the [first] single, "Just Because", got written when we had already started mixing some of the material. And it got tracked — you know we had already done some mixes when we actually got around to tracking the first single. It wasn't stale from that point. There was always new material coming and you could always go back to recording drums and stuff like that.
I guess the big ordeal in such a major production would be keeping everything logged correctly.
Hard drives are so cheap. I wouldn't back up to tape. I would just save hard drives. I would keep a backup hard drive of the most current one I was working on. But other than that I would just keep moving from a new hard drive to a new one. We'd just start a new one from scratch and move all the songs over with only the elements that were being used at that time so I could always go back to an old hard drive and import a track in Pro Tools from an old hard drive...
Nothing gets scrapped.
There was definitely no way I could scrap anything because there were points where people would remember certain points where guitars would get played far earlier and you'd go and grab it and they'd be convinced you had the wrong one until you put on the old rough mixes and played it for them. So if you didn't have it, people would never get past the fact that they had lost something that was really important. Once they actually heard it, the memory of something better than it actually was kind of a syndrome.
And there is the backup issue, like will it be possible to open up a Pro Tools file, let's say, in 50 years.
Yeah, Capitol [the record label] asked me to back up everything, like all the stems and stuff, to all kinds of tape.
And that album was a very guitar-oriented album. Some are saying it's not really a good Jane's Addiction album, but I think it's excellent. I mean, one always has to consider the fact that time is a major factor, new influences and whatnot.
I think Dave [Navarro] and Stephen [Perkins] were teenagers on the first Warner Bros. Record [Nothing's Shocking] and barely in their early twenties for the second one [Ritual De Lo Habitual] and now they've been around for well over a decade in the business and I think even more than the production values, their writing and the sense of what makes a song has obviously grown tremendously. A lot of their earlier stuff was basically jams that were turned into songs with lots of effort and work and there was no real structured direction for them, which they definitely have gotten over. I still think it's a Jane's Addiction record when I listen to it. I was a huge fan growing up.
I think it's the production that can sway people off for a second.
It becomes Jane's Addiction when you get them all together in the same room. Bob and I had done a song with the Porno For Pyros lineup [singer Perry Farrell's other band] right before we did the Jane's record. A week and a half later we started on the Jane's record and it was amazing to me how just switching out the guitar player affected Stephen and Perry [Farrell] so much and I was sitting there going, "Wow! It's Jane's Addiction." They're just people that feed off each other so much. They're always going to sound like that when they play together.
So were there any difficulties besides the regular little things that happen in any project?
Yeah, getting them back to speed of being a band was the hardest thing. Finding what was going to work for them as Jane's Addiction in 2003 instead of 1988 or whatever. The first song we pulled up was an old song that they used to play in their early days, but after that we went through just loads of different songs and directions and avenues but as it went further and especially after they got their new bass player Chris Chaney in the band. They would write in rehearsal and in sound checks and songs would come together much more in a live environment and there'd be less trying to figure out directions of a song. Because there was lots of trial and error in doing so in the studio, and probably some of that big production sound that came out in the record ended up on there [because] we could not have a written song and tried out a few guitar ideas over a drum beat. But later it became much easier to record them because they were more arranged. So I'd say the main obstacle in the earlier stages was figuring out what the band was going to be at this later stage, then just getting them back up to being a band and how they'd work together.
Then that would also equate to the final product having a sort of consistency of that creative energy. So did you have to go back a lot of times and something ended up being simpler than, say, the last couple of songs you worked on?
Yeah, there was a definite conscious effort near the end — especially on Dave's part — of simplifying some stuff. He'd learn when he had to go play songs live that we'd been working on in the studio, if we'd develop the guitar parts out of lots of layering and such and he'd have to find a way to create it live and he'd find new ways to play it — sometimes more interesting [ways]. He'd want to go back and do the parts in a simpler one or two guitar parts, which affects other parts of the production.
