It's sounding like a record :)
Half-time Update: Sounds Like a Record
Lucas Morton (producer), Brandon Hays (drummer), and myself—Brandon's probably in the middle of a dad joke. Photo by Joseph Bradshaw.
That phrase—"sounds like a record"—has become a familiar refrain over the last few weeks among Evan, Lucas, me, and everyone else who's touched these songs. I find it's often spoken in the control room while we listen back to what we've just recorded, always to denote a moment of magical convergence beyond our control—the point at which "just another take" has also undeniably become the take. Most of the time spent recording is really just fishing around for the good stuff. Usually, while we listen back, our work in progress sounds just about exactly like a work in progress: messy and perhaps a bit confused about what it wants to be. But every once in a while, the puzzle pieces seem to arrange themselves on their own and we witness a micro-moment of brilliance when the song suddenly shines through. And it sounds like a record.
Evan Redwine (tracking & mixing engineer), photo by Joseph Bradshaw
Perhaps my favorite. That's such a Kelsey face :) Photo by Joseph Bradshaw.
We're eleven days in on this project, so I've had lots of time to ponder what exactly it is we're doing, and I'm continually baffled. I hadn't realized the extent to which I'd never done this before. This may make you roll your eyes—"Drew, you've totally done this before, like three or four times, depending on what you mean by this." Well, it turns out that this is a whole different ball game.
What I love most about "this" is the sense of legit contemplation that goes into making an album. That may sound rather fancy, but it's really quite straightforward: any time you listen to a finished album, you're most likely not listening to a singular performance. Far from it. You're listening to the result of countless visits with that song—the musicians may have only paid one visit to the studio, but even within that visit, they played multiple takes of every single song, and each take was another contemplative encounter with the song in question, another chance to hear something new and contribute their own insights from the simple act of listening.
Take that and multiply it tenfold for the producer and engineer (Lucas Morton & Evan Redwine, in this case). They listen and listen and listen, taking in the same old song an untold number of times, in the faith that they will hear something new. Not to over-spiritualize, but this is a prayerful, meditative posture, a discipline of sitting still and noticing what's there already and what wants to be there.
It's not that I truly haven't done that before—obviously, as the songwriter, I've had the most time contemplating these songs out of anyone. Sometimes that comes in handy. And sometimes it blinds me—I'm so familiar with what's already there that my ability to hear what wants to be there has become compromised. But regardless, in the past, I've always embarked on this process of collaborative contemplation in the context of performance, not recording. My favorite memories from the Orchardist days are of the process of arranging. Over the course of a few hours, I'd bring a new song to my friends and bandmates, and within the restrictions of our instruments (guitar, mandolin, violin, bass, and voices), we would fish around for the good stuff. Second to songwriting itself, this is my absolute favorite thing. Sometimes it was grueling and painful, other times it was magic, but every time, we finished arranging with a better understanding of what was being said and how best to say it. Then, when it came time to record, we would just replicate that performance to the best of our ability and for the most part, we were done.
What makes recording this album a whole different ball game is that this arrangement process is far less limited (think: going from bluegrass band to drums, bass, keys, electric guitars, synthesizers, strings, and basically anything within reach) AND instead of taking place over a few hours, it takes place over a few months.
The first five days of tracking were at Forty-One Fifteen with Brandon Hays, Lucas Morton, and Evan Redwine. That's where these photos are from, and it's when we assembled the bones of each song: drums, bass, and acoustic guitar, all tracked at the same time. Here's what that looked like:
Brandon Hays (drums) & Lucas Morton (bass). Photo by Joseph Bradshaw.
It's me! Photo by Joseph Bradshaw.
The rest of the time has been spent at Evan's home studio. We had planned on tracking vocals in the mornings and violin (Camille Faulkner) in the afternoons, but just two days in, I was hit with terrible congestion and allergies, which has ruined all vocal tracking fun ever since! But that just gave us more time for violin:
Me, Camille Faulkner (violin), & Evan Redine (tracking & mixing engineer). Photo by yours truly :)
At this point of the process, we are chipping away at hours and hours of tiny details that gradually take these songs from sounding approximately 92% complete to sounding 110%, overflowing-with-life-and-energy complete. Janie Townsend (another fellow Orchardist bandmate, in addition to Camille), Becca Jordan (whose brand-new album you MUST listen to if you haven't already!!), and Joseph Bradshaw (the one who took these amazing photos!) have all paid their own visits to add their literal voices to these songs. In the first couple weeks of December, Janie will be paying one more visit, as well as my wife, Kelsey, whose harmonies on "Hidden" are going to break your heart into a million pieces—in a good way.
We're on track to have this album fully recorded and edited (finalizing takes, timing and tuning discrepancies smoothed out, arrangement decisions solidified) by the end of the year, and maybe—just maybe—mixing will even be underway before the clock strikes 2022.
But either way, the more time we spend in contemplation with these songs and recordings, the more they "sound like a record."
Thanks for reading this long, perhaps-too-philosophical update. I'll write back again when we're in the thick of mixing.
Wishing you all peaceful, restful holidays and the life-giving hope of Advent. Grateful for you and your incredible support.
-Drew