Pushing the Right Buttons

Jul 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Paul Tingen

Bill Botrell uses technology and psychology to produce award-winning music.

If you want an indicator of Bill Bottrell's skills as a producer, start by looking at the list of heavyweight artists he's produced: Rosanne Cash, Sheryl Crow, Thomas Dolby, Michael Jackson, Shelby Lynne, Madonna, Tom Petty, and the Traveling Wilburys, to name a few. Then there are his numerous Grammy nominations, his Grammy win (1994's Record of the Year for Sheryl Crow's Tuesday Night Music Club), and multiple millions in record sales.

But the ultimate proof of Bottrell's skills can be gleaned by listening to the albums he's engineered, produced, and in many cases also played on and cowritten material for. He has a knack for creating records that combine the refinement of a modern studio-recorded CD with a profound sense of rock 'n' roll vibrancy.

Tuesday Night Music Club is a relatively early example of Bottrell's gift. For more-recent demonstrations, listen to Rosanne Cash's Black Cadillac or Van Hunt's On the Jungle Floor, or check out the songs that are uploaded on Annie Stela's MySpace page (www.myspace.com/anniestela). Or, if you want to hear the ultimate triumph of feel over faultlessness — and get a sense of Bottrell's amazing songwriting, singing, and performing talents — listen to his DIY, lay-them-down-in-two-hours demos, a rotating selection of which can be found on his MySpace page (www.myspace.com/billbottrell).

Atmospherics

How is Bottrell able to marry sonic sophistication with such a strong sense of spontaneity? Part of the answer lies in his grasp of people skills. He doesn't simply turn on the red light and expect artists to perform at their peak. He believes in managing the psychological aspects of a session. That starts with providing a comfortable working environment, but it involves a lot more.

“The main thing that I do as a producer, for better or for worse,” Bottrell says, “is to orchestrate emotions in a room toward something. I have always tried to begin with an interplay between musicians. I may put a little 808 beat down for the tempo and have the singer sing and play piano or guitar and have a couple of musicians play along. That would always form the basis from which I build the record. And to get a good performance, you need to set a mood — a vibe — and this has to do with the people and the environment, the room they're in.

“I carefully regulate who is in the room. I don't mean [that I] eliminate people — it can be a matter of consciously bringing people in to add to the vibe. I use musicians who can hang in a room and contribute to the energy, whose egos don't shut down the energies. I don't pick musicians for what they play, but for who they are and their ability to bring something to the room. Then I follow the energy of the group, wherever that leads. Group dynamics, the psychology of small groups of people, is a fascinating subject to me — the arcs of synergy, how that ebbs and flows. And the producer has to be integrator of all these energies, making sure they get focused in one direction.

“I don't overly plan things. I like it loose, and I like it somewhat chaotic. I like to find every distraction that I can, short of taking people's minds off the music. Musicians have comfort zones and way too often play their most comfortable thing, as opposed to what's needed and what supports the energy of the whole [see Web Clip 1]. Getting them out of that is the whole challenge, and I may do things like put a thick book on the snare or throw things at the guitarist while he's doing a solo. The aim is to distract. The brain is pretty strong and people's thoughts are many, and distraction creates better performances.”

Strong Opinions

Before talking more about production, Bottrell discusses the state of the music business and music technology. “Recorded music has had its glory days, and it is on the wane now,” he says. “The first indicator occurred during the '90s, the era of CD reissues, when I noticed that anything we put out had to compete with a rich library of 100 years of great recordings. This made it very difficult to create something that you felt would stand the test of time. Myself and others continued making records like the ones we had made in analog — full of nuance, fire, energy, and sometimes cacophony. But we found that on digital they sounded terrible. Only when producers and artists came up with ways of shifting focus, of saying things with minimal dynamics and arrangements, like in hip-hop, did things progress. The fact is that music morphs to fit the medium. And digital breeds Disney-fication.”

In other words, the capabilities of digital workstations and sequencers to manipulate performance characteristics such as pitch and timing are taking the soul out of music. “We have lost something — the real value of music, the story, the humanity,” he says.

“Music has become wallpaper. Everywhere you go there's a speaker playing pop songs, and people have become accustomed to pop music playing as a constant soundtrack to their lives. Pop music takes up 90 percent of the space in the media, leaving the dusty corners for the rest of us. Recorded music has become merely part of a franchise. It's Beyoncé who matters, not the record she makes. In addition, we have to look beyond the idea of recording and selling music, because music will be free. You can't control the copyrights, and you can't keep track of digital duplication.”

Biting the Hand

Bottrell's diatribe seems to predict the end of the music industry as we know it, and when this is put to him, he responds, “Let's hope so!” In his view, what he calls “mediated music” will become purely a calling card for live performance — something he welcomes because he feels that “playing live is what musicians do.” The producer's words symbolize the love/hate relationship he has with the mainstream music machine. While on one hand Bottrell welcomes what he sees as the music industry's impending demise, on the other he has helped supply it with many of its biggest hits.

This ambivalence is nothing new — Bottrell has at various other stages in his career bitten the hand that fed him, and twice he dropped out entirely. Growing up in Los Angeles, the teenage Bottrell played in rock bands and in 1970 bought a Teac 4-track tape recorder. He developed his engineering skills through various jobs at commercial studios in the L.A. area. He went freelance in the early '80s, and by the end of the decade, Michael Jackson and Madonna had sought him out because of his unique combination of technical and musical skills.

Despite his success, Bottrell felt empty and dissatisfied, and he dropped out in 1990. He built a studio in Pasadena called Toad Hall, and vowed to work only with what he called “marginalized artists.” The problem with his plan was that some of those marginalized artists became famous through his Midas touch, one of them being Sheryl Crow. Bottrell nevertheless became known as the enfant terrible of the American music industry.

By 1996 he retreated to the Northern California town of Albion, where he spent time with his family and vowed to work and perform only locally. When he received a demo of Shelby Lynne in 1998, however, Bottrell couldn't resist his instincts. Using his Toad Hall equipment, he built a new studio, called it William's Place, and recorded, produced, and cowrote Lynne's I Am Shelby Lynne, which earned her a Grammy and Bottrell another Grammy nomination.

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