After Atlantic Records shelved what singer Bettye LaVette had hoped would be her breakthrough album in 1972—an album recorded in soul-music hotbed Muscle Shoals, Ala.—the Detroit native spent more than three decades exiled on the farthest fringes of the music biz, singing for her supper in dives and lounges.

“I gave up every other week,” the 61-year-old artist says today, “but I’ve been fortunate enough to have this one little core of people who have always said, ‘This is gonna work, just hold on.’ When I got to be about 50 or 55, it was like, ‘Hold on to what?’” At that she explodes with rueful laughter.

But she got some unexpected and long-overdue R.E.S.P.E.C.T. in 2005, when she was signed by über-hip L.A. indie label Anti- Records, home to Tom Waits and Merle Haggard. Anti- released LaVette’s Joe Henry-produced album, I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, to universal accolades. “The reviews sounded as if my mother wrote them,” LaVette quips. After that validating experience, shshwhen she came to regard Anti- head Andy Kaulkin as her savior, but she was taken aback when he suggested that she return to Muscle Shoals to record the follow-up backed by scruffy Southern rock band the Drive-By Truckers.

“It was an extreme stretch to me,” LaVette admits. “But Andrew is very persuasive and very smart. I just had to say, like, ‘After all these years, here’s a record company—a young, hip record company—who thinks I rock.’ I just went with that. The Truckers said they were fans of mine, so I was just hoping they’d like me enough to lean my way.”

Meanwhile, at Muscle Shoals’ venerable Fame Studios, the Truckers, whose Patterson Hood was set to co-produce with engineer David Barbe, awaited LaVette’s arrival with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, wondering whether the strong-willed singer would accept them. They were somewhat reassured by the presence in their ranks of a pair of ringers—local heroes Spooner Oldham on Wurlitzer and piano, and Patterson’s father, David Hood, who'd been alternating on bass with the Truckers' Shonna Tucker.

The sparring that would characterize the recording of the aptly named Scene of the Crime began as soon as the players gathered in the main room to go over the arrangements, with LaVette smack in the middle, lording over the process. “We had original versions of the songs to learn before hooking up with Bettye,” Patterson Hood says, “but that all, rightly, went out the window, so we had to completely rework every song from the ground up. If Bettye was there when we tried to do that, she would stop us every few seconds and nitpick it to the point that we couldn’t get anything done. Most of our temperamental times came during these points. It got where we would sneak in the studio and work up songs when she wasn’t there; then we could iron out the kinks in private and she’d come in and everything would go great.”

LaVette soon realized she had an ally in Oldham. “When I sing a gonna defend my position,” LaVette says. “Spooner helped me pull the way that I was going, and he refused to go any other way.”

“Spooner was the link we needed to wed what we do to what Bettye does, and it worked even better than any of us could have imagined,” Hood confirms. “Beyond his playing, his personality and sense of humor really defused some tense moments. Everything just rolls off of Spooner, and that became contagious.”

But Oldham’s calming presence didn’t totally defuse the tension. “Sometimes it would be going great,” says Hood, “and suddenly something would make her mad—usually me—and it was the wrath of Bettye, which almost could have been the name of the album.” That gets a laugh out of him. “She’s been through so much that she has good reason to be naturally suspicious. Add to that, we have our own ways of doing things that didn’t always make sense to her, and I’m sure she thought that Andy had paired her with a bunch of lunatics, but as it progressed, I think she could see that there is actually a method to our madness, and things generally went smoother."

Getting on the Good Foot

Little by little, LaVette bought into the program. “I said to Bradley [Brad Morgan], the drummer, ‘I can’t believe those licks you’re playing are so dead-on,’” she recalls. “And he told me that he’d altered his playing so that he could accommodate the movements I was making while we were all in the room putting the songs together.”

By then, LaVette was digging deep inside the songs, especially the sad ones: Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Talking Old Soldiers,” the George Jones hit “Choices” and Willie Nelson’s “Somebody Pick Up My Pieces.” “I’ve chosen the words because they’re poignant and they mean something to me,” she explains, “and I get swept up in the emotion, especially if it’s being played really well. It wasn’t like I was listening to someone else’s stories that were making me sad; they were true for me. Those are the saddest songs I’ve ever recorded; I don’t want it to be so sad that you can’t listen to it. I just hope the upbeat ones will be up enough to balance it out.”

LaVette needn’t worry. Her finger-wagging cover of Don Henley’s “You Don’t Know Me at All,” the band’s swampy romp through John Hiatt’s “The Last Time” and the Hood/LaVette co-write “Before the Money Came (Battle of Bettye LaVette)” totally smoke. “Watching her perform her vocal takes—and it was a performance—was like watching a great method actor make a film,” says Hood. “She got so worked up and in character, then it just exploded into the microphone. It was awe-inspiring and stunning; I had chills the entire time.”

If LaVette’s 2005 “comeback” album was a delightful surprise, Scene of the Crime is a smoldering revelation displaying an artist nearly a half century into her career who is only now approaching the peak of her considerable powers. “Goodness, I don’t know anybody else my age that this is happening to,” LaVette marvels. "I've got so many quick steps to make, and I really don't know how much time I gotta make 'em in, so I gotta make 'em fast and furious."

(Above [L-R]: Calexico's Volker Zander, Jacob Valenzuela, Joey Burns, John Convertino, Martin Wenk, Paul Niehaus. Photo by Dennis Kleiman.)

Every Calexico album is full of unusual instruments and Garden Ruin is no exception. Behind its acoustic-based songs, listeners will find trumpets, cellos, vibes, banjos and a glockenspiel.

Where do they get all this stuff? Anywhere they can find it cheap. We asked singer/multi-instrumentalist Joey Burns about the band’s five greatest low-budget discoveries.

1. Emerson Answering Machine: “A lot of the songs on our first album were recorded on that machine using the ‘outgoing message’ feature,” says Burns. “That Emerson was the first thing that allowed us to get our sound recorded and play it back.”

2. California guitar: “A friend bought the guitar for me for a dollar, but when I played it, I noticed a buzz coming from behind the bridge,” says Burns. “I wound up putting a folded dollar bill back there, which deadened the buzz and doubled the value of the guitar.”

3. No-name violin: “I played a gig in Prague as part of Giant Sand where we weren’t allowed to take the money we made out of the country, so I used it to buy a cheap violin,” Burns explains.

4. '60s Italian accordion: “We bought this great old accordion in Boulder, Colo., and have been using it ever since,” Burns says. “Recently, it started falling apart, so our bass player dissected it and gave it new life by using the reeds as a makeshift bass harmonica.”

5. 1950s blonde K1 Upright Bass: “I bought this from a pawn shop in Salt Lake City, then realized I had to make space for it on the bus,” Burns says laughing. “I wound up giving it my bunk. It slept there for the rest of the tour while I was on the couch.”

(To read Paste's in-depth article on Calexico's Burns and Convertino, click here.)

(Above [L-R]: Joey Burns and John Convertino. Photo by Chod McClintock.)

Calexico co-leaders Joey Burns and John Convertino are sipping espresso at an upscale Italian restaurant. The place is attached to the L.A. hotel the band is staying at in the middle of a quick swing up the West Coast to introduce songs from its latest, Garden Ruin. The two bandmates, who’ve known each other since 1990, have a way of alternating comments on any given subject, like a married couple—which, in a way, they are.

“The problem with major labels is that it’s not about music, unfortunately,” says singer/guitarist Burns, explaining why the group he formed in 1995 with drummer Convertino—even with its typically hefty recording budgets—would rather live without the trappings of a big-time record deal.

“The majors are working with so much overhead that they need things that will bring in money right away, rather than allowing an artist time to develop,” adds Convertino.

“Whereas in the old days there was such a thing as A&R and artist development,” says Burns. “Over the years we’ve been doing that ourselves—developing as writers and performers, touring, getting better and more comfortable with singing.”

“So for us, that was the contrast,” Convertino explains. “It felt like, OK, we can start with a cassette and sell them for five bucks, and then the next step is a vinyl—only through a small independent label. And if people are liking the music, then we’re growing with them. That’s what we’re working for.”

With Calexico, record-making is the fulcrum of artistic expression, and the “studio” is any locale where the canvas is painted, whether a state-of-the-art facility or a living room. As an indie band, Burns says, “You have to be creative in dealing with any aspect of the music business. Being more inventive in how you record your music and your sounds inevitably shows how unique you are in the final result.”

These two veterans have experienced the recording process at both extremes. In ’94, while working with Howe Gelb in Giant Sand, they spent weeks in New Orleans’ posh Kingsway Studios cutting big-budget album Glum for Imago Records. But soon after releasing the LP, the label was shut down by parent company BMG, rendering the album dead in the water. A year later Burns and Convertino were in Tucson, capturing songs played on their newly acquired thrift-shop instruments [see sidebar] using an answering machine in the latter’s barrio apartment—their first recordings as Calexico.

“I used to leave drum riffs for my outgoing message,” Convertino explains, “and I thought the drums sounded amazing through the little condenser mic. And then Joey would start playing along, and that was our recording machine.”

Says Burns, “It was the most creative way to put music out there at the time, not thinking we were gonna do a project but just sitting at home, having some coffee.”

‘AN AMERICAN RECORD’
A decade later, Calexico, now a sextet, has grown into a distinctive, formidable entity that—having established itself on the outer fringes of the underground as an arty instrumental unit composing themes for imaginary Westerns—has moved ever closer to the conventions of pop, with no loss to the band’s accumulated indie cred. A previously unstressed reverence for traditional songcraft came sharply into focus on the band’s 2003 breakout album, Feast of Wire, on songs like “Quattro (World Drifts In)” and “Not Even Stevie Nicks.” The group followed those revelations by collaborating on an EP with singer/songwriter Sam Beam (a.k.a. Iron & Wine), as well as cutting a series of cover tunes from sources as diverse as Nick Drake and Tom T. Hall, the crowning touch being a breathtaking rendition of Love’s “Alone Again Or” that made the 1967 classic seem like the very template for Calexico’s sound.

All this set the stage for Garden Ruin, the band’s first album to focus exclusively on songs, bearing distinct echoes of influences like Neil Young, Gram Parsons and Lindsey Buckingham. “Here in the States we’ve just never really seemed to get off the ground as fast as we had over in Europe, and I was wondering why that was,” says Burns, recounting the album’s genesis. “Maybe our music was too eclectic or too diverse. And having toured with Wilco and Iron & Wine, I thought, let’s do an American record for America, and see where America is at.”

To do it right, the partners set another precedent, for the first time working with an outside producer on their own music. They went with onetime Dwight Yoakam bassist JD Foster, whose motivational production approach they’d experienced firsthand while playing on Foster-helmed projects for Richard Buckner and Laura Cantrell. They chose him, says Burns, for “the feel. It’s all about the feel and dynamics. He directs—he gets involved. With JD, you get decisions made and you move on. His line was always, ‘It’s about the process; it’s about how you get there.’ That became my mantra.”

Since 1997, Calexico has been signed to Chicago indie Touch & Go (whose founder, Corey Rusk, is no neophyte, having put out his first seven-inch 25 years ago), and the relationship is basic indeed: 50/50 after expenses and sealed with a handshake. “We’ve done it long enough that they can trust us, and we can trust them,” says Burns. So they upped the ante, not only hiring Foster but laying out for extended studio time at Tucson’s Wavelab (where they tracked and overdubbed), and then headed east to mix at world-class Brooklyn Recording. While Garden Ruin is the most expensive album Calexico has ever made, it cost just a fraction of a typical major-label project.

“We’re smart about how we spend money,” says Burns. “We try to be realistic.”

Convertino seizes the moment. “As much as you’d love to have a big bus and the cocaine and the girls and stuff”—he pauses for effect—“you’re not gonna make any money that way.”

“And no one will take you seriously,” says Burns.

(To read about Calexico's favorite musical thrift-store finds, click here.)

Ryan Adams (pictured above) ended 2005 by releasing a dramatic reminder of his gift—the musically sublime, deeply disturbing and stunningly expressive 29. What the most recent album has in common with his first two—the sublime Heartbreaker and the ambitious, if polarizing, Gold—is producer/player Ethan Johns, who’s been able to focus the mercurial artist like no one else.

Johns, son of legendary producer/engineer Glyn Johns, spent his childhood watching his dad make records in the traditional manner, and he manifests his purist methodology on every record he makes, but never more artfully than when he collaborates with Adams, from playing the drums on basic tracks and overdubbing numerous additional parts to making tape edits with a razor (see sidebar).

The producer acknowledges he doesn’t know what motivated Adams to make the sometimes puzzling choices he has between Gold and 29, although the two friends have continued to stay in touch over the years, mostly by e-mail. “Ryan has really specific ideas about the way he wants to approach material,” Johns says, “and that may be why we haven’t worked on some records in the past—because I wasn’t the guy who was gonna give him a satisfactory answer at a key point during the session. I couldn’t have made Rock N Roll if I’d had a gun pointed at me; it was just not my kind of record. I’ve had that side of Ryan presented to me numerous times during the making of other records, and it’s something that I don’t relate to.”

Johns says he was on call to renew their collaboration whenever Adams “had the material, or was willing to write the material, that was gonna get me excited about doing another record. And he showed up one day with a guitar player, J.P. [Bowersock], and we started recording, and two weeks later there it was. It was a great session.”

Cut during the first half of August 2004 (prior to the Cardinals LPs) at Three Crows, Johns’ North Hollywood, Calif., studio, 29 found the collaborators in familiar roles. “The way it works with Ryan, he’ll play you something on the guitar, and we’ll talk about it a little bit,” Johns explains. “Then he stands up in front of the microphones and I sit down behind the drum kit, put the headphones on, press ‘record’ and we just play it. So it’s a very immediate connection, musically; you just have to get to that point of immediate inspiration. That’s probably why I enjoy working with Ryan so much, because we communicate musically with each other really well, and we really listen to each other.”

Johns reckons Adams had two songs—“Night Birds” and “Elizabeth, you were born to play that part”—nailed down when he walked into Three Crows. The rest of the material came into focus during the sessions, but that doesn’t mean he was making stuff up on the spot. “The amount of verse this guy has at his fingertips is astounding, particularly when, at any given moment, 90 percent of it hasn’t been written down,” Johns marvels. “There were anything from kernels of ideas to almost-done stuff that he would pull out and finish off here right before we recorded it. The same with the three records we’d done previously, including the Whiskeytown record [2001’s Pneumonia, which marked the first time they worked together]. Some of my favorite things are the ones that he writes in the middle of a session, very, very quickly. The opening track on Pneumonia is one of those songs, and ‘Damn, Sam’ on Heartbreaker, which I happen to love. There’s some really good stuff on Gold. He’s putting his experiences straight into the material.”

It’s the material—and the discussions it triggers—that has always dictated the sound. “You have to be able to talk about what kind of album you want to make,” Johns says. For this album, Johns felt the songs called for a certain kind of muted mood lighting, so he overdubbed what he calls “effects,” using analog synths and a Memory Man delay unit.

Several songs on 29 were nailed the first time they were played, following a familiar pattern in the partnership; indeed, nine of Gold’s 16 tracks were first takes. “So you’re really listening to the first time a complete run-through of the song has ever been performed,” Johns points out, “which is why I think the performances on that record are so tangible.”

The conversation keeps returning to Gold, and despite the fact that Johns has made 30-some-odd records since, he remains connected to it, protective even. “When Gold came out, it was a four- or five-star record, and then, eight months later, it became very uncool to like it, for whatever reason,” he recalls. “I’ve heard people talk about it like it’s a Pro Tools record, and it’s absurd that you could listen to that record and not get that it was cut live. We cut and mixed 26 songs in six weeks. When you’re working at that kind of pace, you just do it. Time’s up—there it is.

“So that record is just kind of written off. But it’s a perfect portrait of a guy who has arrived at the place he always dreamt about arriving at. But the beauty of it is, he looks around and sees that it’s all movie sets—there’s nothing substantial anywhere. But the thing he dreamed about when he was 12 years old is finally literally sitting in his lap. ‘Goodnight, Hollywood Blvd.,’ ‘Nobody Girl,’ ‘Sylvia Plath,’ ‘La Cienega Just Smiled’—it’s all there.”

Johns views 29 as another career highlight for Adams, but he has no problem with any of the choices Adams has made. “What makes Ryan interesting,” the producer says, “is that he’s not afraid to fail. Most artists today forget that you’ve got to be willing to fail to do good stuff.”

Sidebar: THE RAZOR’S EDGE

The term “capturing the moment” may sound like a cliché, but that’s literally what Johns has done on albums like his three with Adams, the pair from Kings of Leon and Ray LaMontagne’s revelatory Trouble (the subject of the very first Production Notes in issue #7).

There are no computers in Johns’ studio, an open, high-ceilinged space in a funky section of North Hollywood. A custom recording console—retro-hip in flat black and chrome trim—sits imposingly in the middle of the recording area, as if it were another instrument, which in Johns’ mind it is. In this producer’s world, things happen up close and personal, in real time, and they’re documented on two-inch, 16-track tape.

“I’ve tried using Pro Tools,” Johns acknowledges, “but I can’t get a balance with digital noise, and it doesn’t sound good to my ears. For me there’s no reason to use it, because it doesn’t do anything as a tool that tape doesn’t.”

Although his best-case outcome is a complete performance, Johns says he does a lot of editing. “People talk about Pro Tools as being the best editor,” he says, “but because I don’t like to alter musicians’ performances, I don’t have a use for that side of the tool. But if we hit something with Ryan, for instance, and it’s the first run-through, and somebody doesn’t make the bridge, or Ryan wants to change the lyric, or we just happen to get a particularly great outro on one take, then I’ll cut that into the multitrack with a razorblade and cut the takes together. Tape helps me get the sound I want to get. It’s like having another member of the band, almost, or another engineer. And digital doesn’t allow me to do that, so I don’t use it.”

(Above [L-R]: Andy Cabic, Devendra Banhart, Noah Georgeson, Thom Monahan. Photo by Autumn Dewilde.)

More than any of his contemporaries in what has become an extended musical family, freakfolk avatar Devendra Banhart has fomented a rebellion against Pro Tooled and packaged popular music—he’s a Moses in reverse, leading his disciples back into the wilderness. But Banhart is hardly a Luddite, and what many of his fans don’t realize is that the rustic nature of his recordings has been more a matter of severe limitations than any philosophical stance.

So when he began work on Cripple Crow—his fourth full-length album and first for a full-fledged record label (XL)—Banhart for the first time was afforded an opportunity to fashion an album with a full set of resources, including a sizable budget and an actual recording studio, as well as his choice of producer and players. Naturally, he utilized these resources his own way.

The Production Team

“We had the opportunity to work with some bigwig dudes, and it seemed so ridiculous and pointless,” says Banhart. Instead, he tapped two friends, Noah Georgeson (Joanna Newsom) and Andy Cabic (leader of S.F.-based acoustic group Vetiver). This brain trust had enough brains to know they still lacked a crucial component—a bona fide studio expert to guide them through their first big-time project. Without hesitation, Banhart rang up Thom Monahan, bassist and producer of the Pernice Brothers, who’d gotten to know all three while producing Vetiver’s debut album and EP (he also recently produced the band’s full-length follow-up). Monahan enthusiastically accepted the co-producer role. “It was like working with family,” he says. Banhart agrees. “Thom has the most endless source of energy of anyone I’ve ever met. We love Thom.”

Monahan felt right at home in this crowd. “I’m not this super-top-down producer,” he says. “I’m in a production role most of the time, but I co-produce with people—that’s what I do. Joe Pernice’s brother said that I’m like a player/coach, and that was the coolest thing that anybody could ever say.”

The Facility

The whole crew, including a sizable revolving cast of players, convened in March at hallowed Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, N.Y., to help their bro make a record. “I don’t really care about the equipment,” Banhart points out. “I care about the stored vibrations of a space. Bearsville was just what we needed, because it’s all pure wood, and wood stores energy—it was just a straight-up, aged-energy battery. It was the perfect studio for this record.”

Bearsville, says Monahan, “was technically incredible because I had tons of ribbon mics to choose from, great preamps, everything. It was totally straight-up, old-school, classic recording, straight to tape. I just didn’t want it to sound like some up-to-date, state-of-the-art, modern record.”

The Sessions

“Making a record is like cooking,” Banhart offers. “The ?rst record I ever made, I was cooking but with very shitty utensils and very shitty ingredients—like a matchstick, the corner of a piece of paper, some peanut butter from the ’80s, a broken lighter, a couple of pieces of hair, etc. And on Rejoicing in the Hands and Nino Rojo, it was just a recipe book. On this record, we tried to get cooking, but it’s still not a full meal. I hope to someday make something that feels like an entire meal.”

There’s an old adage that too many cooks spoil the broth, but according to Monahan, the members of the four-man production team interacted effectively during their month at Bearsville—they did, after all, manage to complete 40 tracks (with 22 making the album). “It was a very fluid kind of thing,” Thom explains. “Everybody was engaged in making decisions. My job was making sure that we were getting the right tones and going in the right direction. Noah was awesome to work with, and Andy is just a totally amazing person.”

The sessions proceeded at a careening pace. “I didn’t know what was gonna happen from one moment to the next,” Monahan admits. “We’d go in a million different directions. One day I had 14 mics up just for percussion because there was so much stuff going on that I had to be able to respond to it in an instant. It was like, boom, do it, go to the next take—it was kung-fu action all the time. You totally had to not think about it, just get it done. That record was only possible because people nailed their parts. You’d run it down for them, they’d rehearse it, you’d roll tape and they would peg it.

“It was as ideal a situation as you could possibly imagine,” the producer marvels. “You were there with your best friends, making a record with somebody who’s firing on all cylinders all day long. Devendra was f—ing incredible. He would go out and do a vocal take or a guitar overdub, and he would be completely throwing himself into it. He’s not psychotically running around and screaming into a microphone all day; he’s trying to make music in a way that he feels is true to himself and is the best that he can do.”

The Result

There was obviously a lot of love in the room; Banhart’s dad even cooked dinner every night for the entire entourage. And out of all that love came tangible results. Cripple Crow is the most developed work of Banhart’s short career, yet it sounds utterly homemade. And in “Long Haired Child”—with its infectious groove, beguiling vocal and a lyric that’s at once insightful and hilarious—Banhart and his cohorts have fashioned what actually sounds like a radio hit, inadvertent as that may have been.

“For me, this record had a glow about it,” say the 38-year-old Monahan. “I really consider myself lucky to have been there. If I get to do this as a career, I’ll get hired by people I don’t know, and at some point I’ll be doing something I’m not as engaged in. But for that moment, I couldn’t have been more down with what was going on.”

In a sense, Brian Setzer’s 23-song Rockabilly Riot: Vol. 1: A Tribute to Sun Records was a piece of cake—the album was mastered a mere three weeks after the first day of recording, which went down at the Castle, a converted house in Franklin, Tenn., just south of Nashville. This record was not fussed over. “It’s rockabilly, man,” says Setzer. “It’s supposed to be raw, and it’s more about feel.”

In other ways, though, Rockabilly Riot was the most intensive undertaking of the veteran artist’s career, even more intricate than his five big-band albums with the Brian Setzer Orchestra. Although Setzer’s association with rockabilly goes all the way back to his beginnings with the Stray Cats, and even though he’s covered songs associated with the arcane idiom over the years, until he decided to revisit the trailblazing work turned out by of Memphis’ Sun Records, Setzer had never closely examined the nuances of the original records. So he threw himself into his “homework,” as he calls it, going through every rockabilly track that came out of Sam Phillips’ label between 1954 and ’57, as well as digging through the Sun vaults in search of undiscovered treasures.

Further, once he’d selected the 23 songs for the record, Setzer, along with his longtime drummer Bernie Dresel and slap-bass specialist Mark Winchester (who played on 2001’s Ignition) scrutinized every detail of the half-century-old recordings, making discoveries along the way.

For example, “Those drum parts really complemented the vocals, adding a lot of excitement to them, and that’s something drummers don’t do now,” Setzer explains. “Like, modern drummers would never play into the next verse, but these guys did—it was wild. Bernie was pretty amazed at what they were doing on those records, ’cause they were inventing their own new style. We almost had to unlearn a lot of stuff.”

For Setzer, the biggest realization was that he was missing an integral piece of the puzzle. “They always had a piano as well as a guitar,” he points out, “and of all the neo-rockabilly bands who came along in the ’80s—I can’t think of one that had a piano. I guess it’s because they were trying to copy the Stray Cats. So I needed to find a good piano player, and this cat, Kevin McKendree, fell into my lap. He sent us a tape; I listened to it and said, ‘This is the guy. Where does he live?’ It turns out he lives four houses away from the Castle. Mark told me, ‘I love playing rockabilly; I’m not talkin’ the honky-tonk or the boogie-woogie.’ He knew where to leave the holes.”

Tennessee-bred reverb

Originally, Setzer wanted to cut the record in Memphis, for obvious reasons, but that idea turned out to be unrealistic. “Sun isn’t really a studio anymore,” he points out. “It’s more like a museum, with guided tours. Also, if we needed particular old microphones and guitar amps, Nashville would be a lot easier to find stuff. But I wanted to get as close as possible—I wanted to get the vibe.”

When he got to the Castle, Setzer was delighted to discover that it was a tracking room with a view—a rarity in professional recording studios. “It was so good to look out over the rolling landscape while we worked,” he says. “It definitely made a difference. I don’t think I could’ve made this record in L.A.” The studio had another benefit, as well: “We got it for a whole week for what it would’ve cost to book one day in L.A. Plus the people were very friendly.”

As they were setting up, co-producer David Darling noticed an old cistern in the backyard. When he checked it out and discovered it was dry, Darling wasted no time running a cord out of the control room window and mic-ing it up. Voila—a real, live echo chamber. They made good use of that cistern during the sessions, adjusting the amount of reverb from track to track in order to bring some variety to the strict conventions of the idiom.

Leave the Pro Tools in the Shed

Setzer was committed to honoring the formal requirements in his guitar performances. “I wanted to let my own playing come through, just kinda keep it more basic, to-the-bone rock ’n’ roll,” he says. “But some of those original riffs were so good that I had to play them. You can’t just give it an entirely new part—the whole idea is to play it like that.”

Naturally, the quartet played live—and in close proximity—on the basic tracks, with Setzer heightening the vibe through his body language. Later, he overdubbed the vocals and acoustic guitar. The band averaged three or four tracks a day during the week and a half of recording, listening to the original record and brainstorming, playing the song themselves three or four times and then rolling tape. You didn’t expect this record to be made on Pro Tools, did you? “The only times we didn’t nail a take, it was always my fault; it was never the band’s,” Setzer says, laughing. “I mean, they nailed it.”

In creating a scrupulously retro recording like this one, “You want to capture all those human elements that were on those records in the ’50s, but you wanna dust it off a little,” Setzer explains. “So we made it just a little more hi-? in the mixing technique. With what I was trying to achieve, we didn’t really need to add anything to it. I wanted to keep it what it was: 23 songs that most people have never heard, and you get it all on one record. That was the idea. I hope some guy who’s 18 will go, ‘Huh,’ and buy it. ’Cause it’s worth it.”

The primitive purity of the sessions made a deep impression on Setzer, who puts the Rockabilly Riot project right up there with the Stray Cats in London and his first recording with the big band in his bag of studio memories. “It was just classic: great songs and great players, right on the border of country and rock ’n’ roll,” he says. “As you can tell, I’m really excited about it.”

Svenska Grammaphon Studion—the room where The Soundtrack of Our Lives recorded its new Origin Vol. 1 and its similarly scintillating predecessor, Behind the Music—sits next door to a dive bar in the Swedish port city of Gothenburg. The place is in such a seedy neighborhood that the musicians frequently have to step over prone bodies on their way in and out of the facility. It’s just part of the local color for these guys. TSOOL bass player Kalle Gustafsson Jerneholm, who owns the studio, started carting in gear four years ago and had the room cherried-out just in time for the Origin sessions.

The degree of intricacy that distinguishes Origin wouldn’t have been possible had the band been on the clock. Having a room of their own allowed for the endless tinkering with sound and arrangement the tracks required. “It’s just basically playing in the studio, trying to figure out the best possible version,” TSOOL founder/frontman/lyricist Ebbot Lundberg explains about the refining process. “For us, it’s all about the sounds. We’ll say, ‘We wanna use the sounds of the guitars the way Captain Sensible [of The Damned] did in Machine Gun Etiquette—that specific sound they do on “Plan 9 Channel 7.”’ So we’ll listen to that track and try to come up with that sound. Or maybe the Pretty Things—‘I want that vocal sound.’ And now we have the equipment to get these sounds—that’s the great thing. We don’t have to look for it anymore, and that’s a luxury in itself.”

“We tried to capture all eras of recording: old Neve desks, ’60s keyboards, whatever we can find,” Jerneholm says of the impressive array of equipment he’s gathered. “I’m not really a collector; you just don’t want to be limited sound-wise when you do an album. … So our studio has become a kind of center for Scandinavian acts.” Among the bands recording at SGS in recent months were former Smiths members Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce, Silverbullit (known as Citizen Bird in the U.S.) and The Hives.

“It’s like a museum when you walk into the studio,” Lundberg marvels. “We have a mic from the Second World War that belonged to [Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph] Goebbels. Kalle even bought the mixing table Deep Purple used for ‘Smoke on the Water’—the one they’re singin’ about in the song.” He chuckles at the thought.

Lundberg admits, almost apologetically, that digital technology has entered the world of TSOOL. “Pro Tools is getting better and better,” he says. “It’s easier if you want to cut something out—you don’t have to splice the tape anymore. So it goes back and forth, really. We run it through Pro Tools, but when we do the actual mix, we mix it down on two-track again.”

The band co-produced the album with Johan Forsman, but the six members are so experienced at recording that they all take turns manning the console. “It’s my studio,” says Jerneholm, “so I’m most responsible, along with Johan. We know how to do it ourselves, but it’s kind of weird to produce your own album entirely, because you lose a lot of energy arguing with all your bandmates.”

Most of the tracks start with drums, which are recorded to two-inch tape in the traditional manner. From there, the process depends on the needs of the particular song. “Sometimes we nail a song instantly, and sometimes it takes months to get the right overdubs,” Jerneholm explains. “Our songs are very much layered with small details that you might not notice instantly. That’s kind of the trademark for our recordings, I think—that you can actually listen to them over and over again and keep picking up new details.”

TSOOL is so good at its aural kleptomania that only a handful of passages on Origin are obvious in their, well, origins—like the manic drumming and the Pete Townshend-esque windmill chords that kick the raging “Transcendental Suicide” into gear “Baba O’Riley” style, or the turbo-charged jangle of “Borderline,” which sounds like some newly unearthed outtake from The Notorious Byrd Brothers. In Soundtrack’s world, every reference point has equal legitimacy, and they tackle each with enthusiasm.

“We like to spice it up,” Lundberg acknowledges. “It’s like a production trick … you add something that you always thought was really cool if used in the right way. It’s the attitude; it’s the whole spirit of those bands. That’s something that I miss—like a true expression in everything. You can find bands [that have it], but it’s kind of hard nowadays.”

“We’re a classic band in a way, just doing normal stuff,” Jerneholm adds. “But people think that’s weird these days, for some reason.”

When I ask Jerneholm about the apparent delight the band takes in pilfering from the past, he says, “We’re not ashamed of that—quite the opposite. It’s a good feeling that people can actually recognize small parts. If you can blend it right to make it your own, then you’re on the right track. That’s always been true of rock music: taking one tradition and twisting it around somehow. It’s really hard to do something entirely new; that only happens with a few bands a century, like Kraftwerk or whatever. But those kinds of changes usually occur with technical developments. We go in all different directions—we can use ancient instruments or new ones, we don’t care. It’s just interesting to combine all different types of sounds. We’re not snobbish about it—whatever feels good.”

Explaining why Origin is Soundtrack’s strongest album yet, Lundberg says, “We didn’t know each other in the beginning. We weren’t really a band; we were just an idea. You couldn’t hear that on record, but now it’s simpler, in a strange way. It’s not so complicated anymore. We kind of grew into this stronger band. With this band now, it’s kind of like putting a coin in a jukebox.”

Ben Lee has impeccable timing. A few months ago, the Australian artist called his producer friend Brad Wood with some news. “He told me he had a bunch of new songs and wanted to make an album,” Wood recalls, “but he said, ‘I can’t work in a studio—it makes my stomach just drop.’ I said, ‘Hey, what a coincidence.’” As it happened, the producer was just then finishing construction on a home studio in the garage behind his house, wiring it to the adjacent guesthouse where he’d installed his recording equipment. Lee had no record deal and no budget, but Wood was itching to try out his new setup, and who better to serve as his guinea pig than Lee, four of whose albums he’d produced, starting in 1995 with Frail Girl by Lee’s high school band, Noise Addict, when the precocious artist was 15.

After showing up on the radar as producer of Liz Phair’s 1993 indie-rock classic, Exile in Guyville, the Chicago native deftly mixed art and commerce on projects with Lee, Veruca Salt, Tortoise and Smashing Pumpkins. Five years ago he left the Windy City for Valley Village, an upscale section of North Hollywood ten minutes from a slew of high-end recording facilities. Wood chose the neighborhood in large part for its convenience; it wasn’t until 2004 that he realized how much more convenient—and affordable—it would be to make records in his own backyard.

Sitting in front of his Mac with the ubiquitous Pro Tools software visible on the monitor, the affable, low-key Wood opens a folder containing his notes on Lee’s now-completed album, Awake Is the New Sleep (New West). “Every project has its own folder,” he explains. “I like having a sonic blueprint before I start, just to minimize the waste.” During preproduction, while Lee played the new material on acoustic, Wood spontaneously jotted down arrangement ideas. His notes are full of the sort of shorthand that’s second nature to record producers and rock critics: “Talking Heads-like rhythm section,” “Harvest-like verses,” “Spiritualized second half,” “Sly & Robbie reggae beat,” etc. “Billy Corgan hated that,” says Wood, with obvious amusement. “He’d say, ‘No referencing.’” A few sheets have larger, less-sure-handed printing. “That’s my seven-year-old, Olivia,” he explains. “She wanted to help Daddy with his work.”

As Lee played him the new songs, Wood became increasingly excited. “Knowing him, but also being a fan, this is the record I’d always hoped that he would grow into making,” he says of Awake Is the New Sleep. “It was one of those rare instances where I knew going in that it was gonna completely be great. And then the only concern was just to not screw it up. I felt the same way about Ben’s record as I did about Exile in Guyville.”

Along with Wood, Lee’s handpicked team included two other old friends and musical colleagues: American guitarist McGowan Southworth and Aussie keyboardist Lara Meyerratken, both of them remarkably inventive musicians. Indeed, the haunting sounds that Meyerratken was able to coax from her Roland synthesizer—which Wood then ran through effect boxes and his own collection of analog synths, including a rare original Putney—make as deep and lasting an impression as Lee’s lyrics and vocals, to the point where the settings are inseparable from the songs. “She’s the secret weapon, as far as I’m concerned,” the producer raves. “She’s super-cool.” Wood played bass and drums on a few tracks, while Lee brought in some L.A. friends—including actor and ex-Phantom Planet drummer Jason Schwartzman and Rilo Kiley singer Jenny Lewis—for the rest of the parts.

At a time when the world seems especially grim—a perception that’s being reflected in much of today’s more serious popular music—Awake Is the New Sleep is suffused with optimism and a sense of infinite possibility. “These songs came quickly,” Lee writes in an open letter about the record. “I just tried to get out of their way …. The music is inviting me on strange adventures. It’s asking me to dance. It wants to tell me all about how lucky I am to be at the feet of this awesome mystery called life.” But if Lee’s mission is essentially spiritual, neither has he skimped on the ear candy—this album is loaded with hooks.

Several of them are shoehorned into “Catch My Disease,” a catchy little sing-along with the constant refrain, “And that’s the way I like it.” The arrangement juxtaposes a stomping beat appropriated from Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” rapturous strumming inspired by Cornershop’s “Brimful of Asha” and a plinking toy piano for an effect that’s the aural equivalent of being tickled—and that’s just the verses. This is the kind of song people know by heart after hearing it once. “My seven-year-old got it easily,” Wood says about Olivia’s reaction. “It follows up a massive hook with an even more massive hook. The first time I heard him play it, I thought, ‘This is one of those songs that only comes along every so often.’ I said, ‘Hey, look, Ben, let’s just make this everything it’s supposed to be; let’s just have fun with it. We’ve gotta make it even more hooked-out.’ So that’s where the foot-stomping and the toy piano came in. It’s about as stupid a conceit as you can come up with.” Maybe so, but this kind of stupid requires smarts.

Since completing Lee’s album, Wood has continued to make records in his cozy backyard facility, leading to nearly constant foot traffic as musicians enter through the gate at the side of the main house and tramp back to the studio. And that, he says, is the one drawback to working at home: “As you can see, it’s been hell on the lawn.”

Throughout the first half of the ’90s, Matthew Sweet was perhaps the preeminent purveyor of left-of-center pop, generating a rabid fan base and racking up a pair of gold records with 1991’s Girlfriend and 1995’s 100% Fun. A decade later, in a radically altered musical climate, Sweet has no record deal and likes it that way. In late 2003, Kimi Ga Suki* Raifu, an album he’d made specifically for Japan—and the first LP he’d produced, engineered and mixed himself—came out in extremely limited quantities through the Coalition of Independent Music Stores and sold 3,500 copies. Ironically, it was the first time in Sweet’s career that he’d made any money off record sales, but such is the nature of the mainstream music business, wherein the only artists who recoup are those who sell in the millions.

Encouraged by the CIMS experience, Sweet is putting out Kimi Ga Suki* Raifu and its similarly created follow-up, Living Things, in September on Superdeformed/RCAM, the label he formed with his longtime manager, Atlanta-based Russell Carter; these will be his first albums of new material since 1999’s In Reverse. “Living Things is step two in my homemade vision,” Sweet says. “I’m just gonna release it, and I don’t expect people to rave about it, or to sell tons of it, or for anyone to play it on the radio. I don’t expect any of those things.”

But Sweet may get more than he bargained for. The two albums recall Girlfriend and the 1993 cult classic Altered Beast in their fusion of smart, heartfelt, irony-free songs and inspired, spur-of-the-moment performances. Both feature his longtime cohorts Ric Menck (drums) and Greg Leisz (guitars). Kimi marks a reunion with Television’s Richard Lloyd, who was once Sweet’s primary guitarist (along with the late Robert Quine), while the largely acoustic Living Things features the legendary Van Dyke Parks, Brian Wilson’s co-author on the storied Smile album.

The records will be nationally distributed through Redline, and if their combined sales do one tenth of the total of In Reverse, his lowest-selling album, Sweet will be able to live on the revenue for a year or two. Given the present reality of the business, it’s understandable why so many onetime major label artists are contemplating self-employment.

It isn’t just the potential bottom-line that Sweet finds alluring about his new DIY approach, it’s the creative liberation that goes along with it. On a summer afternoon at his gear- and art-filled house in the hills above Hollywood, which now doubles as his studio of choice, he speaks with unbridled enthusiasm. What follows is a continuous passage prompted by a seemingly routine question about how he used Pro Tools in the recording of Kimi and Living Things. During the monologue, which flows naturally from digital methodology to reinventing himself as an artist, I’m unable to get a word in edgewise—but there are times when the best thing an interviewer can do is just zip it and keep checking to make sure the tape recorder is working properly.

“It’s all done in Pro Tools,” Sweet begins. “The variability of it makes it possible for me to do free-form things, because I can take raw stuff and there’s nothing I can’t correct. If I need to make something work or take a section and use it in two places or whatever, the editing is really comprehensive. In Pro Tools, I can select a little piece and cut it out in one second, and then a drum take that might’ve been thrown out becomes a keeper. I also use it to tune things. What’s great is I can play some crazy slide part that’s really inspired but gets out of tune in one spot and I can tune that section so it isn’t horrible—or I’ll just leave it if it doesn’t bug me. So Pro Tools really affords a level of tweaking, but it’s all little things that I tweak; I don’t make it the grid. That makes stuff really boring and mechanical.

“The cool thing about Living Things in particular is that it was done with no pressure to be normal or acceptable to anybody. Not that I ever tried to make something that way, but there was no pressure at all from outside. So I think of it as an arty record that I would never try to push as something that should have songs on the radio or anything like that. It was purely an expression of my feelings in making music and what I went through at the time. I was excited about making Living Things and the musicality of it; I think the musicians picked up on that and played in really loose, free kind of ways. There’s just something about raw. “And so it stands now for me as a really artistic effort,” he continues, “but it stands more for how I want to approach doing work in the future. Any work I do, I want it to be more from an artistic standpoint. I just think the way the music business got really made us feel terrible about music and made me think the wrong way about it. The more I get away from the music business, the more I can see that I can still make music as vibrantly as I ever could—and not only that, I feel free of the shackles of pressure from the world. Now, whether I’ll be able to live over time and sell enough of my little records on my own to make it work, I don’t know. But I’m a lot less ready to do things the old way.” At that, he finally takes a breath.

Sweet’s varied interests extend to Japanese anime, B-movies and big-eyed art—he’s nearing the completion of a book on the latter—and lately he’s beginning to see parallels between his new direction and the attitudes of artists in other mediums. “I learn about other kinds of artists—painters, ceramicists, just different things I’m interested in—and like, they just do their thing and it gets put out into the world, and whatever happens, happens. The more I can think of my thing that way, the better. If I deem something to be good enough to put out into the world, I just want to be able to do it, come what may.”

Glen Phillips hit bottom in 2002. Five years after the breakup of his band, Toad the Wet Sprocket, he’d finally come out of a prolonged depression to record his first solo album, the highly organic Abulum, with producer Ethan Johns, only to see his label, Gold Circle, go under. Without a record deal, he stayed out on the road — away from his wife and three kids in Santa Barbara—for months at a time in order to pay the bills. But Phillips kept writing, determined to make a proper follow-up, even if he had to pay for it himself. He went to Austin and recorded an album’s worth of material with producer/musician David Garza, who was himself quite familiar with recording on a shoestring. But unhappy with the results, Phillips scrapped the whole thing and pondered Plan B.

Enter John “Strawberry” Fields, a Type-A up-and-comer who had recently relocated from Minneapolis to Los Angeles at the urging of his friend and colleague Jack Joseph Puig, moving into a house in Hollywood with a guest cottage out back — the perfect spot for his Pro Tools studio. Fields had done a radio remix of a song from Abulum, and his name had been on Phillips’ original short list of producer candidates, but the producer was then in the midst of projects with Switchfoot and Mandy Moore and had to decline. But then Fields had an opening in his schedule. He agreed to produce the record in return for a stipend up front, with the understanding that he’d be paid an additional fee when and if the artist secured a record deal. His only stipulation was that he would choose the players. “When you work with new musicians, there’s a little more tip-toeing going on in terms of how you move the session forward,” Fields explains.

Phillips wanted to make the modern equivalent of albums that had captivated him while he was growing up—intricate, highly produced classics like XTC’s English Settlement and Peter Gabriel’s So. Knowing exactly what to do—there’s not an indecisive bone in his body—Fields threw himself into the job in characteristically dynamic fashion. The producer summoned his homeboys—bassist Jim Anton (Johnny Lang), guitarist Michael Chavez (John Mayer) and drummer Pete Thomas (Elvis Costello)—and haggled a “secret rate” on the big room at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. There the basic tracks would be cut live, with vocals and overdubs handled later in Fields’ home studio. “There were a lot of favors and low-cut deals,” he says. “It was a for-the-love-of-music thing.”

With Fields on keyboards, Windham Hill-vet Steven Miller engineering and Jon Brion bringing his mad skills to the final session, the studio band blazed through 17 songs in five days, bang-bang-bang. Back in the guest cottage, producer and client endlessly manipulated the sounds, and they kept tweaking even after Phillips went back home, sending redone parts back and forth as IM attachments.

“Everything is about forward movement with John,” Phillips marvels. “He has no technological theories—he just keeps going. He uses the technology to free him so that he can make the kind of record in a couple of months that would’ve taken a year to make in 1980.”

“I don’t have rules,” Fields says of his fiercely pragmatic approach to record making. “Whatever gets the job done, that’s what I’ll do.” “I sit here in front of the computer and I just massage the songs into what I think sounds good, and that to me is essentially what is competitive for the radio in terms of sonics. I also have a style of track improvement; I just start going at it, and if I don’t like that sound I’ll do somethin’ else. That’s different from spending nine hours on a guitar sound and then going, ‘OK, think blue and purple. Now play the part. Do we have enough incense? Let’s get some food in here.’ I’m not that kind of producer. [I’m] way more like, let’s just do it now.”

Months after the sessions, Phillips called from Santa Barbara with good news: He’d been signed by Lost Highway. But the label wanted six more tracks—recuts on two potential singles, and four new songs. Thanks to Fields’ foresight—he’d put Phillips together with two of his pals, Dan Wilson (Semisonic, Trip Shakespeare) and Danny Wilde (The Rembrandts) for co-writing sessions—the artist had some strong new material for the second round. Lost Highway A&R exec Kim Buie is presently poring over the completed tracks, which now number 25, to nail down the dozen or so that will be on the album, which is slated for release in February 2005. An EP is under discussion as well.

“The project came out great,” says Fields. “It’s all over the map; there’s a lot of super-dark, eclectic stuff and a lot of poppy stuff that I would associate with the old Toad sound. I was actually going, ‘Glen, people wanna hear that guy. We have plenty of these dark, brooding songs; I wanna hear that voice that people respond to.”

Fields motions to the gleaming Mac G5 that awaits his next command. “I have a lot of ways to fix stuff now, enabling the first-take performance to be the final performance. Glen was so down with it I was surprised, considering the last album he made. I think it turned out to be a good match of live and Pro Tools.”

Phillips wasn’t the only one who was down with it—the label and management were delighted as well—and the producer now has himself another satisfied customer. “I’d always wondered whether you could combine an amount of complexity of production with so much spontaneity and happiness,” says Phillips, “and it turns out you can.”