Flexibility in changing arrangements
Nathan :: Well, let me tell you a quick story. I had a friend who did Iron Man (Triathlons), and he never trained for them. This confused me to no end. I asked him, “How can you do these unbelievably brutal endurance events when I don’t see you ever train for them?” He said “I only have one applicable skill, and that’s being uncomfortable for long periods of time.” It’s like being okay with being uncomfortable for long periods of time.
CRT :: Wow!
Nathan :: Once he told me that, I think that I told myself “I might have my new life mantra.”
CRT :: That’s great.
Nathan :: Yeah, that’s a lot of how I approach my musical practice.
CRT :: That’s very wise, and that’s very brilliant. From that and what I was saying earlier from what you said, I’m like, “I think for a year, I’ve been a little too comfortable with what I’ve been doing in 2020.” I mean, there have been moments where you know, I’ve been reworking stuff like five, six, seven versions of songs, but I can say that 2021 is the year that I step out of my comfort zone a little bit more musically.
Now let’s talk about the execution of (recording) it. Did you have people record on their own setups, then you brought it in and worked it over into your system? How did that happen? When you’ve got people all over the world basically, right?
Nathan :: Yeah. Well, let’s see. It was all over the US and Germany. It was kind of a spread. This project started before but ended in the COVID-19 pandemic. The closest contributing artist to me is 15 miles away. I did rely on everyone recording themselves. Luckily, we had places like Black Bear Studios in New York. Everyone else uses their own studios at home. One contributor had no real home studio setup, so we focused on what they have to work with in terms of microphones in their space? “Let’s make it weird. Stand your stairwell, like at the top of the stairwell and sing that way. Sing right on top of the thing laying on your couch. Let’s just try all variations, and see if a distant perspective works or a close perspective works. Don’t worry about it being correct. Worry about if is it going to convey the emotion I’ve asked you to convey? The technique of it doesn’t matter.”
CRT :: That’s fascinating to me, because like I said, I am a megalomaniac. I guess I would think preconceptions are obviously bullshit, but I would think like, “Wow, you know, Nathan is this amazing master in engineer. He took my music and made it really even more powerful. He does that with other people’s stuff.” And I would think that you would be so particular about how people were recording that unless you were as familiar with the studio as you are in the back of your own hand, you just left the recording up to them but it would give me hives! Unless I were to say to myself in the beginning, “Okay, you have to relinquish control of XYZ in order for this to happen.” I’m very impressed that you could do that with this vision of yours. Now furthermore, I was just curious if you did you write down notations? Did you give people scores or sheet music? Did you just say, “look, I want you to sound like someone’s trying to pull a giraffe through a kitchen sink drain?” Which, by the way, sounds amazing.
Nathan :: I wish I thought of that one. [BOTH LAUGH] That would have fucking helped. I think it’s a combination of being vulnerable and flexible. The vulnerable part is what you were saying earlier. The vulnerable part is leveling with people as to where you’re at, what you need, and what you can give somebody. I can help somebody else. I can give you MIDI files. I can give you audio files, just you do it by ear. I can put this stuff out in Sibelius as sheet music, and come to find out every single artist I worked with was completely different. Some wanted to just hear it and work theoretically or Suzuki style. Some really needed the written notes.
The flexibility side comes into knowing at what inflection point you need to stop your work and inject someone else’s voice into it, so that you are working flex to accommodate what they give you. Certainly, if someone does something that just wasn’t appropriate for the motion, I’d give it back and ask for a revision. But if someone gave me something that had slightly different aspects that I didn’t expect, that is why we make music together. Those are opportunities. I need to be flexible in changing arrangements or mixes to accommodate an appropriate voice aimed at the same emotional outcome to make it better.
CRT :: That’s brilliant. That’s kind of like how I would like to think that I would work in that you can’t bring in somebody like Robert Fripp and say, “I want you to play like Luther Perkins.” It’s like you’re bringing somebody in because you know that they’re going to do things in a certain style. On the other hand, you have an idea in mind. You want to give him a rough framework to work from.
Nathan :: Right. I mentioned the flexibility and vulnerability, but the third thing that we didn’t really talked about is just simple, old-fashioned trust. I reached out to every single person on this project not knowing if they would say yes and then certainly not knowing if they’d be comfortable where I was going to ask to push them. I was 1,000% rewarded for putting that trust in them that they would understand what I would ask for. They put the trust in me that I would be honest with them, validate whether or not what they gave me worked, and I would be respectful in giving them feedback. It’s vulnerability, flexibility, and trust. To be honest, that’s the foundation with any relationship we ever have.
CRT :: This is very true. That’s how you do everything to build relationships with people or anyone.
Nathan :: As dark as this album is emotionally, when you listen to it I cannot overstate the amount of joy there was in making it.
CRT :: No doubt.
Nathan :: Hearing someone interpret something, and giving it back to you 10 times better than you could ever imagine it being. There was this constant upwelling of joy throughout the entire creation of the album that I hope is rendering somehow in the craft of it, even if the emotion that people take away from it is slightly dark intensity.
CRT :: I think it comes through definitely from listening that there’s a clear theme or concept around it. It’s obvious through the execution in each track that you’ve got—I’m thinking in my head I see the roots of a tree, and a lot of different things weaving together to create this one powerful object or model. But each track is woven together meticulously from a variety of different musicians and different people with obviously one central overriding vision which is yours. It’s obvious that the degree of work that is put into it is amazing, but it’s not, what’s the word? It’s not pretentious.
Nathan :: Well, my shoulders dropped two inches when you said that! I think a lot of the joy also came out of the fact that every track on the album was an experiment. I used improvised instruments. I stretched things out in time by a factor of eight or 16. I put a microphone underneath my floorboards to record drums. There were no recording or performance techniques that were off the table. I think that’s why it was so joyous to make. It felt like every single track offered multiple lanes for experimentation. It was just a matter of what fit that moment in the narrative.
CRT :: Yeah. That’s not an easy thing to let happen. I mean, you deserve credit for this, for being smart enough to let yourself get out of the way and let other people do this thing. Your guitarist sent you 19 tracks of feedback. It’s really kind of brilliant to be able to be like, “Okay, even though this is an album by me I’m still gonna give people the space to do their thing and bring their work to my table.” It reminds me for of Verner Herzog’s directions for the soundtrack to Grizzly Man. He assembled a lot of different really interesting musicians led by Jim O’Rourke. It’s been a while so maybe I’m making this up, but he didn’t even give them specific directions necessarily, he’s like, “I just want you all to get together and play, and just make something and we’ll use it as a soundtrack.” Whoever was leading was like, “Don’t you want to give us some?” “No, just make something. Do it.” They’re like, “Okay!” They basically just did these improvs. It’s just sort of like anything goes, and Herzog loved it. Of course, it’s Herzog. He had the wisdom to get out of the way of it, whereas Phil Spector would be like, “I’m going to hold a gun to your head till you play it this way!”
Nathan :: No, I totally agree. I have learned through my past as a creative director, that my style is definitely provide direction and see what happens. That’s how I try to run any creative project I do. With my primary visual designer Corey Holmes who works on most of my albums, to musicians I work with.
CRT :: Did they do artwork for this? Which is brilliant, by the way.
Nathan :: Corey did, yes.
CRT :: Yep. That’s great.
Nathan :: He’s worked with me for at least five or six albums now.
CRT :: Wow, that’s cool.
Nathan :: We’re a pretty tight team. He’s a musician. I actually produced and mastered his last album. That is actually how I wind up collaborating with a lot of people. It’s that I’m a mastering engineer. I have a service I can offer. On this album most people wind up getting paid but a few said, “Oh, I’ll just do this in exchange for you mastering my next album whenever that is.” That’s totally equitable. For me, the barter system in the music industry has been an incredibly powerful tool.
CRT :: It’s like what you said before, it’s trust and the relationships. It’s both trusting that somebody else is going to do the art. They’re going to give you what you kind of want, but also being trusting that they’re going to give you their thing. You’re not asking Pavarotti to sit in with John Cougar Mellencamp, which is a fascinating concept. Not just forgetting the fact that Pavarotti is dead. “Minor glitch, we can work around it, can fix it in post.” [BOTH LAUGH] But seriously that’s brilliant, and that working relationship with Corey. That’s fantastic.
Now I just want to ask you, as a mastering engineer, I know what your answer is probably going to be but what’s it like to hand something, your baby, this incredible project involving musicians from all over the globe? What’s it like to hand that off to somebody else to master? Did you pick your mastering engineer based on work that you knew? Oh, also to the musicians? How did you pick them? Was it just people you were familiar with and you’ve worked with?
Nathan :: I’ll answer like the general question of how would I pick the team. When it comes to the musicians involved, I hand picked people whose musical voices I thought would be appropriate. I’m just incredibly lucky that 100% of the people that I asked wound up saying yes. And were really open to me giving them anything from very specific to incredibly vague direction. They rolled with it like champs and just doing an incredible job. When it came to mastering, this is the second album I’ve had mastered by Stephan Mathieu. Who’s in Germany.
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