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September Newsletter: The Studio

Added 2023-09-01 13:00:10 +0000 UTC

I write to you from boarding group “C” of a flight from Seattle to LA. A week of vacation with the family, and then a solid month in the studio with the boys. Usually the days leading up to recording time are spent in restless planning, getting backing tracks bounced and practicing parts to a fine point; this happenstance scheduling will be an experiment in whether unplugging and relaxing beforehand will be a viable option for me.

I do not enjoy recording studios. They are sunless, silent places, and the silence is not peaceful; it’s judgmental. Why aren’t you working more? it says during downtime; why doesn’t it sound better? during working hours. I think it was Syd Barrett who once walked into a recording session at a new studio, examined the walls a few minutes, then left on account of the bad vibrations he was encountering. Maybe it was a cautionary tale against drug use, but I’ve been to plenty of studio sessions sober, and those vibrations aren’t any less real.

Of course, it’s the energy you come with that the studio reflects. That’s what they’re built for - they are cocoons that shelter that vulnerable stage of the process where untamed energy gets structured into tangible form. An anxious person (me) walks into a studio and hears nothing but his own anxiety bouncing off the walls. And this is the place where work is supposed to get done, the you-have-an-album-or-you-don’t work, not the apparently effortless work that bleeds out of mindless warmup jams or pleasant contemplation into real song ideas. That is the inspiration - studio time is the perspiration, or at least that’s been my experience. We’re hoping that these coming sessions will combine the two, allow for creative impulse to draw us away from a laundry list of parts. The best way we can prepare is to have material we like, and we do have quite a bit of that, so we’re not in bad standing. Let me be curious, not fearful, to see what gets born this month!