BEFORE & AFTER

Paper Lake wanted to make a contemporary LP with lo-fi, psych, and electronic elements to contrast their classic folk-rock songwriting style. Among their more obscure demos, we found this sketch for “Jaybird.” Despite the languid mood, I heard potential in the song’s melodies and lead riff for a higher-energy single that the album was missing. If a retro sound had been our goal, I might have pursued this demo’s production approach, drawing inspiration from the likes of Skip Spence’s Oar and Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man.

Instead, I felt there was a way to combine an Elliott Smith vocal style with robotic drums and keyboards to push the piece in a plaintively histrionic pop direction. I wrote extra verses to fill in compositional gaps and presented this arrangement and production concept featuring my vocals. The artist embraced the approach. We refined the lyrics, and I trimmed my arrangement to make the track more engaging. 

Intentionally murky and expansive, our final production brings distressed gothic and psych-pop textures to this neo-Western romantic melodrama and captures the narrator’s myopic and recursive mindset. I pivoted to acoustic drums and analog synthesizers for continuity with the album’s organic aesthetic. “Jaybird”’s studio journey illustrates both the plasticity of production strategy and how concept can motivate choices at all levels of a performance and recording.

Laura Martin asked if I wanted to hear her new song while I was visiting her home in Los Angeles. I was hooked within a few bars of the demo, but when she hit the drop at 2:24, I insisted she let me produce it. Laura sent me her three scratch tracks: the original take, which included embedded lead vocals and guitar, and two vocal overdubs, one for doubling and another for harmonies and ad libs. In the second half, I copied and pasted her overdubs in uniquely stacked sequences for an organice sense of a wider choral ensemble. Although Laura hadn’t recorded her demo with the intent to release, I built my production around her takes as if she had come into the studio and tracked her source material to tape with no click.

In contrast to the transformation required for Paper Lake’s “Jaybird,” Laura’s song only needed its intent and structure to be expressed in a complete production. Rather than correct imperfections in her timing, I let my drums and bass follow the natural lurch of Laura’s rhythm for a tastefully human, live-recorded energy often absent in modern recordings. To keep consistent with the roomy, open feel of her takes, I included room mics when tracking most of the instruments that I added, and I captured the drums with a Glyn Johns mic array. “The War Goes On” exemplifies how a songwriters’ composition, use of their rhythm instrument, and demo recordings can convey essential clues about space and impact in a final production.

Dru Cutler hired me to represent his creative interests while recording at Cove City Sound Studios in Long Island for his LP Bring Closer The Distance. His band delivered the performances, I attended rehearsals and helped develop the material prior to tracking, and I provided session oversight at the studio. “Brain Place” stood out as a single. This stripped-down development demo features some of the original lyrics. Early in our process, I convinced Dru to change the chorus refrain from “I’ll float away” to “just float away,”empowering the listener with permission rather than annoucing the narrator’s withdrawal. That adjustment pivoted the tone of the song, and the artist’s mindset for the whole project, away from a solipsistic posture to one of generosity—a crutial difference for a singer/songwriter looking to connect.

Our album was tracked through Cove City’s Neve 8068, a legendary console that provides ample warmth and rich tonal character. To mix the record, Dru hired an engineer whose process was to mix through his own vintage Neve console, and who tended toward raw, grungier mixes. I felt this was a mistake. “Vibe” can come from many aspects of the recording process—the sound source, the mics, the front end, the substrate, etc. But once a desired tone has been captured, it’s often better to mix and master with a delicate, transparent touch to avoid “vibe redunancy.” Our recordings also had a number of hard-won nuances that I felt were lost in a more traditional rock & roll mixing style. In my opinion, the mix of Bring Closer The Distance took the record past an optimal balance of tone and detail into crudeness.

Dru and I agreed that a remix of “Brain Place” was needed to honor our production for the release of its video. My focus with the remix was on restraint and clarity, and I chose a mastering engineer whose work I knew to embody those objectives.

Mona is an artist whose sound depends on her collaborators. Her phenomal ear and voice rely on a producer to provide form and structure. With its sequenced jazz elements, live trombone, and bits of electronic keyboards and drums, her demo for “Tension” provided no clear direction or narrative. Its one compositional change seemed to suggest a verse, but struck me more as a surreal bridge. Brainstorming sessions with Mona about the song’s motivating circumstances yielded notes from which I drafted verse lyrics that she effortlessly improvised into melodies. The funky track that emerged felt like a poignant and sensual early ’90s R&B ballad.

For our production, I recycled Mona’s trombone recordings, leaned into the electronic weirdness for her bridge, composed a second bridge that elborated the story and captured a melancholy suggested but not fully explored by the other parts of the song, and otherwise focused on the groove. Mona composes and records largely through improvisation, often keeping first takes. Her gift to me and our collaboration was the optimal vocal producing scenario, in which profound talent and honed skill adapt egolessly to technical process and creative direction.