Listen to the Music:
Producer Mitchell Froom lets the songs do the talking.

Nov 17, 2006 7:21 PM, By Michael Molenda

           

So what happens if a track just isn't coming together?
If we're in the studio and something is not working, we completely tear the song apart. We don't bother with subtly changing it around the edges. If a song is lying flat, there's some real fundamental problem that must be solved, so we just start over.

Do you find that certain situations never fail to sabotage a recording session?
The worst thing that can happen — the absolutely worst thing — is for people to get fearful. Good music cannot develop without a basic feeling of confidence. Now, I'm not talking about arrogance, I'm just talking about an artist having the confidence to trust in his or her instincts and stay open minded if the music starts heading into radically different directions.

Also, there's no way I'll get involved in a project if an A&R person wants to be in the studio every day pitching ideas or if a label executive wants to change this and that. These are warning signs that the project is going to be grief and that the compromises I'll be forced to make will be the ugliest kind — compromises that are not based on the good of the music.

When outsiders impose themselves on a project, they fail to understand that a certain aesthetic emerges as the artist-producer-engineer relationship develops. Someone from the outside can't just come in and start changing everything. I'll listen to whatever anyone has to say, but if they enter the field, they must he prepared to be put down if they don't make sense. After all, between Tchad, myself, and the artist, there are already plenty of opinions.

This may he coming out of left field, but I've noticed that your records tend to be pretty organic. You seem to use effects rather sparingly.
Tchad is really responsible for the amount and type of effects we use, but I will say that we tend to prefer records that may seem uncomfortably dry to some people to those where you can hear a bunch of reverbs clattering against each other. Using a lot of effects can bury the music and the personality of the artist, whereas a drier sound spectrum, with wide stereo panning, can make an intimate song almost confrontational.

Speaking of which, one thing I've admired about you is that the artist's personality always seems to be at the forefront of your productions.
The main part of the job is to stay absolutely out of the way when you're not needed. If you can't make the decision to leave a good thing alone, you've no business being a producer. In fact, one reason I'm not very proud to be a member of the "producer club" is that a lot of producers just can't stay out of the way. Many decisions are made purely for personal ego gratification rather than for what is musically appropriate.

On the debut record by Cibo Matto, for example, I literally did almost nothing. I had never experienced a project so complete that the band needed me so little. It was hard to stay out of the way, but it was the right thing to do. Actually, my main motivation for working on the record was making sure it didn't get ruined. The group is composed of one woman with a sampler and another woman who sings, and they put together these amazing loops at home. There are intentionally a lot of rough edges to the way the loops fit together, and if the wrong people were involved in the project, they might have tried to soften things up a bit — although I don't think the band would have tolerated it.

Another project that required limited involvement was the Latin Playboys record, which I love. The band brought in these home-studio tapes that were recorded on an out-of-alignment 4-track cassette deck. However, the arrangements, the musical ideas, and the performances were amazing. Making the record consisted of bouncing the [cassette] rhythm tracks to a 24-track deck in a pro studio and letting the group figure out how to sing something over them. My job in that situation was to hear these home tapes and say, "We shouldn't try to redo these tracks; they're great."

As you've just used two home-bred projects as examples, I'd love to hear your take on the personal-studio boom.
Well, it certainly helps the people who are good and does nothing for the people who aren't. One bad aspect of home studios is that records have become totally devalued because so many people can put out an album now. There are something like 300 records a week that get released, and a lot of stuff gets thrown out into the public before it really should be. Conversely, in the 1930s and 1940s, very few people actually recorded. Musicians would have to struggle in the clubs and be able to present themselves very powerfully before they could even think about recording. Today, you can do so much with mirrors and samplers that anybody can put out anything. And it's so fashionable now to leave things rough. You know, it's cool to have tracks that just fall apart at the end, or tracks that are extremely distorted, or whatever. But people tend to forget that for a track to he cool, it still has to be good.

Obviously, giving everyone access to powerful tools doesn't mean everyone will make powerful music.
That's for sure! I often think about why records used to be better than they are now. They had a lot more spirit, and they tended to sound more unique. I think the key was that there wasn't much money to be made back in those days. People would just go off and make their own records, and they had to work very quickly. There was no standard that anything had to live up to, so the records ended up having, well, personality.

Also, when I was growing up, the rock section of our music store was one bin filled with maybe twenty albums. If I liked a record, I listened to it every single day for a year. It just seems that music meant so much more to people back then. Most music today, however, seems to he experienced functionally. It's something to exercise to, or to provide background for cleaning the house, or to liven up your commute.

But I still naively make records thinking somebody may listen to it more than once — that there's a kid sitting in a room somewhere who really digs music and will listen to a record intently from start to finish. I can't help myself. That's the place I come from.