Hello, and greetings from the road. We're currently driving from Atlanta to Massachusetts - hopefully tonight we'll stop somewhere halfway. I thought I'd take a moment of this quiet and rainy Appalachian drive to write about something we've been up to for the past couple months - recording.
Aside from a brief jaunt through the Caribbean on the Cayamo cruise, we've spent the last two months working basically non-stop on our next CD. For those of you who don't know, we've decided to record this CD ourselves in a home studio (my home), and we've decided to produce it ourselves - a creatively risky, yet very exciting concept. We co-produced our first three studio albums with Bob Harris, an excellent producer and musician in Bridgewater, NJ. Now we all live in Atlanta, so we thought we'd try producing it ourselves.
For those not versed in the terminology of music recording, "producing" means taking songs and arranging them with instruments, voices, and a general vibe. A music producer is much like a movie director in terms of what they actually do in the studio. Some producers take the bare bones of a song - the lyrics, melody, and chords - and add drums, strings, guitar solos, and background vocals with little input from the artist. Others work carefully with the artist to find a way that they both like to build upon the bare bones. Others have intentionally produced recordings with nothing but the bare bones (such as Johnny Cash's
American Recordings, produced by Rick Rubin).
Working with Bob was a happy collaboration - we came into the studio with songs that we'd been playing live, so they were already arranged by us to some extent. Of course, an arrangement that works live doesn't always translate well to a recording. Sometimes it just needed an extra guitar or pedal steel to fill out the sound (like in "Viola" ), and sometimes it needed a full percussion ensemble ( "Fall Stories" ) to bring it to life. In any case, nothing went on the album if we didn't all agree.
For this new album, we've been trying a different approach. Some of the songs have been arranged beforehand, but some haven't even finished being written. Starting the recording process with only the "bare bones" of a song (if even that) allows us a tremendous amount of freedom in deciding how a song will ultimately sound, but it also carries a lot of weight.
Wonderful musicians sometimes make bad producers - there's a tendency to try to pile on more instruments and other sounds until you have the Vienna Boys Choir singing backup over a rhythm section of Brazilian samba and 1970's James Brown drum loops with distorted guitars dueling with Tuvan throat singers. In such an arrangement, most songs are swallowed up, and their emotional energy is lost.
So what have we done? We're trying to take each song on its own and find the arrangement that best supports its musical and emotional core. "Everything's Easy" lived up to its name - we recorded a perfect version in an afternoon, and it seems to only call for a quiet organ in the background. For "Storms Were Mine," we recorded drums, electric guitars, and other instruments - only to come back later and take many of them out because they got in the way of the emotion Doris put into the song, rather than supporting it.
And singing - every song presents a different challenge. For some songs, our voices sound best right next to the microphone at an almost-whispering volume. For others, I have to emote so much, I feel like I'm Dana Carvey in the Saturday Night Live sketch where he's singing about "
choppin' broccoli."
We've learned a lot, and recording has taken longer than we thought. Still, we've never had a chance to make a album like this - taking our time, coming back to songs, trying new ideas. I'm not sure that the final product will be any better than our earlier CDs, but in a lot of ways, it feels better to me. It's tremendously satisfying to take time with each song (an advantage of recording at home is that we don't have to pay extra money to go back and do more work on a song).
Oh, and when will the CD be done? Stay tuned to our
website, and (if you haven't already) sign up on our
mailing list. We'll probably have a definitive date in the next month or so, and we'll let you know as soon as we do.
by MSUE, March 28, 2009
How creatively challenging and rewarding it sounds! Thanks for sharing the insights with us...also, you made me literally LOL twice so I get to use that acronym appropriately! Thanks!