Yours, Mine, and Ours

Oct 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

Considering the ever-increasing fusion of music and technology, you probably wouldn't be surprised to hear that an artist recently released an album containing both stereo mixes to listen to and individual tracks for remixing. What is surprising is that the artist is Duncan Sheik, a singer-songwriter whose folk-influenced pop/rock is not normally associated with remixing.

The new project, entitled White Limousine (Zoe, 2006; see Fig. 1), is Sheik's first release since moving to the Zoe label, an imprint of Rounder Records. It comes with two discs: a CD, labeled Mine, which has the stereo mixes; and a DVD, labeled Yours, which has WAV files of the individual elements of the mixes for each song, as well as Ableton Live session files that open with all the tracks in a given song already set up to mix. The CD was recorded at Allaire Studios in upstate New York, but the preproduction was done at Sheik's personal studio in Manhattan.

Sheik, who was born in New Jersey but raised in South Carolina, burst on the music scene with his 1996 hit single “Barely Breathing,” on his self-titled debut CD on Atlantic Records. That album garnered him a Best Male Vocal Grammy nomination in 1997. He subsequently recorded two more albums for Atlantic and one for Nonesuch before moving over to Zoe.

Besides his CDs, Sheik has branched into other areas of composing in recent years. He has scored two films, including A Home at the End of the World (Killer Films/Warner Classics, 2004), which starred Colin Farrell, as well as a number of theatrical productions. He recently wrote the music for an off-Broadway musical called Spring Awakening, which at press time had opened to strong reviews and was being considered for a move to Broadway.

I had a chance to interview Sheik about White Limousine and various other subjects at his spacious New York loft. The main room is filled with a large collection of guitars and other stringed instruments, and off to the side are the live room and control room that constitute his personal studio.

How would you describe your musical style?

As far as radio is concerned, the format that plays the kind of music that I do is AAA [Adult Album Alternative]. But all of the artists who are in that world — whether it's Aimee Mann or David Gray or Ben Folds or even a band like Elbow — take from the folk music tradition in a big way. A lot of us take from the classical music tradition in terms of orchestration and the use of that instrumentation. Some of us take from the jazz tradition in terms of harmony and the way that we use it in the songs. Obviously, rock 'n' roll is there in a big way, and country too, in a lot of people's cases. A little less so in mine, because my influences are mostly English bands. So what kind of genre would I consider my music? It's kind of the “nongenre” that takes from all of these other ones.

Why did you decide on Ableton Live as a format for the White Limousine remix tracks?

Here's how that situation went down: I was going to make my next record. At the time I didn't know it was going to be White Limousine; I didn't know what it was. But I started writing songs, and I had all the material in [Propellerhead] Reason. When I first got Reason I thought it was like a Game Boy for musicians.

So the material you had was all in MIDI format?

Samples and synths, no audio. I was on tour, and I was making all these little bits and pieces in Reason, just for fun. I took them home and I thought, “This is interesting.” Because I love electronic music, and it's definitely been a major part of the music that influences me, even though you might not know that from listening to my records. It was the first time that I'd gotten into a piece of software where I actually used synthesizers, samplers, and these kinds of things to create the architecture of the song — as opposed to an acoustic guitar or a piano or whatever.

And so my initial conception of the record was that all the arrangements would happen in Reason, and then there'd be one acoustic guitar and one vocal. And I would mix the record normally, but put it out with the Reason files for people to remix with. And they'd have a stem of the vocal and a stem of the acoustic guitar. It's kind of a very simplified version of how it eventually turned out.

But then users would need both Reason and another sequencer.

Exactly. Which poses all kinds of issues and problems, and it becomes less universal in terms of people being able to use it. So then, as I continued to refine the songs and write new songs, and the project evolved, it became more organic and less kind of electronic music based, although it started in that place. But then, I still wanted the concept of the listener being able to manipulate the material in some way, and being able to reimagine it and remix it.

Since the tracks are WAV files, users can import them into [Digidesign] Pro Tools or any sequencer they want. They don't necessarily have to use Live.

I love Ableton, but I think a lot of the work is being done in [Apple] Logic and in [MOTU] Digital Performer, and [Steinberg] Cubase or whatever else people are using.

Do you know of other artists who have released individual tracks along with their records?

Well, here's the backstory. I remember reading Brian Eno's A Year with Swollen Appendices [Faber and Faber, 1996]. It's basically his diary from about 1994. He talks about the idea that in the future, people will release all their records along with the 24-track masters and whatever. And I remember reading that and thinking to myself, “That's a really fantastic idea, and I hope one day the technology will be in a place where we can do that.” And then I think even prior to that, Brian Eno had done a little tiny 4-track version of the Us record [Geffen, 1992]. There was a DVD that came out of the special edition of that record. So that's another precedent. I know Todd Rundgren had done something similar, I'm not sure exactly what it was. And then, most recently, Trent Reznor put out a single in [Apple] GarageBand format.

I think this [White Limousine] is the first time that somebody has taken their entire record and put all the constituent parts of every song along with the record. But, that being said, it's just because the technology is at a place now where that's possible, and there's a program like Ableton Live that makes that fairly doable on a lot of people's laptops and computers, and because Ableton has a demo version of the software that everybody can access.

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