When did you get this house?
March of 2003. I was moving up from Murfreesboro to Nashville. I was looking for a house that had multiple bedrooms. I wanted to have roommates that would help pay the mortgage, and I was looking for a house that had a recording space or a basement.
There's a lot to be said for a basement space.
I started off recording in garages in Indiana, because we didn't have that many basements. When I was in Murfreesboro I would go to people's practice spaces, which were extra bedrooms or whatever, so I was comfortable with that kind of environment – probably more comfortable with that than I was in a professional studio.
You studied recording at Middle Tennessee State University. What kind of rooms did they have?
The first time I ever spent in a real, professional space was at that school. It was set up more like a commercial studio of the day. They had three rooms back then.
With desks?
Yeah, they had an SSL in Room C, a Neotek in B, and I can't remember what they had in A prior to getting a Studer D950, which was a digital board. It was probably '99 or 2000 when they got that. I think they have an API Legacy in there now, so they probably spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on this digital desk, then sold it for lunch money. They were also teaching us on DASH recorders [Digital Audio Stationary Head, a reel-to-reel, digital audio tape format]. The first Pro Tools class I took was in the summer of 2001, on Pro Tools 3. I think the Digi 001 was introduced around that time, but even for the "home-pro" it was a bit of an investment. They had 2-inch tape machines too, but they taught us on DASH. We would say, "Let's go to the 2-inch, now that we've got our project for school done on DASH." It was like night and day. I haven't used DASH since; I could probably make it sound better now, but I remember being really amazed at the same inputs going into the different recorders, as well as the difference at playback.
What was the tape machine?
A Studer A820 or A827. They had really nice Studers.
You went down to MTSU from Indiana, specifically for the recording program?
I had gone to Purdue University [in Indiana] for a couple of years. When I was a kid, I was really into drawing and writing, so I went to Purdue thinking I was going to do marketing or something, like it was going to be this "creative" thing. But it was more like, "How do you trick people into buying things?" I was also really getting into recording at that time.
What were you using?
A Yamaha MT4X 4-track recorder, and I think by the time I left Purdue I had a Roland VS-880. I had a digital 8-track and a cassette 4-track, and I used them both together quite a bit to make records in the early aughts and late '90s. I was wanting to go to school for recording, but I didn't know what existed except for Full Sail [University]. My dad was doing some research and found Middle Tennessee State. I also had a friend there, Katie Haas [née Krampf]. I met her and her sister [Courtney] at a Weezer show; she went to MTSU and had a radio show. She knew a bunch of people from the radio station [WMTS], so I made a lot of friends that way. It took me a couple of months to get used to the South, but there were all these venues, shows, and bands, which was not like where I came from.
What year are we talking about?
'98. Murfreesboro had already gone through the whole Self and Spongebath Records period, but it was getting ready to move into the next phase with a bunch of other different bands. We had the Red Rose and a hundred venues. It was a really good time. A lot of those bands were people who ended up moving to Nashville. It was the whole DIY scene that really led me to want to do the thing in the basement.
Murfreesboro is very un–Music Row in that way.
I could have just as easily said, "I want to go and work on Music Row," but I didn't have any interest in making coffee for a year so that I could assist and all that. When I interned at Alex the Great [Recording], the vibe was this bohemian, converted house thing. I was able to get in front of the computer, or get on the tape machine, right off. I had to do a bunch of shit work too, but it was never the focus.
Did you get that internship through the program?
Yeah, you had to do an internship to graduate.
Did you luck out, or did you know you wanted to work at Alex?
I had no idea. I didn't spend any time thinking about Nashville studios. My friend, Tony Read, had interned at Alex the semester before me, and he introduced me to Brad Jones and Robin Eaton [co-owners of Alex the Great]. I knew enough people who had worked at other studios, and none of them were really sticking with recording.
Did you learn much in recording school that you still use?
Of course. It was all fundamental and helpful, especially since up until that point I wouldn't have known anything, except what I'd read in a manual or something. They had the technical side, and the business side, and you had to take both. Like copyright law and all those other things.
So you graduated in 2001 and got the house in Nashville in 2003. In between?
I stayed down there for a couple of years. I was recording and doing other things. In the summers I'd go back up to Evansville [Indiana] and work at a baseball field. I was constantly trying to record bands. My band [Mercator] was recording little things, but we never really did much. I was playing guitar and just kind of doing whatever.
Were you done with Alex the Great?
I continued to do things at Alex in an assistant capacity, whenever they needed me, for about four or five years after that. The day I moved to Nashville, I was sick with a cold. I moved all our stuff in and then had a session at Alex the next morning tracking overdubs and mixing for a week.
What was your personal rig when you got into the house?
I had Pro Tools and a Digi 001. I had a Mackie 1604-VLZ. Those were my preamps and EQs. I had Mackie monitors, some [Shure SM]57s, and an old Radio Shack PZM mic that I really liked. At some point I got an AKG C1000 or C4000 mic, but I mostly used dynamics and the PZM, which was usually a room mic. Sometimes I would put it inside the bass drum. Everything fit on one little portable desk, and I had a little rack that fit underneath that with my 001 and two pres.
Did you start booking sessions and collecting gear as soon as you moved in?
Tony Read played metal and hardcore; we were roommates by then and kind of splitting the gear. He ended up getting a couple of pres and a couple of mics, like some Oktavas. I had some other roommates who played in bands. I was working a day job grading standardized tests. Everybody had day jobs, and we recorded on the weekends. Tony recorded a couple of hard things, as well as the first Justin Townes Earle EP [Yuma], and I recorded the Apollo Up! records.
Were you calling it Battle Tapes?
Yeah, I established Battle Tapes Recording as an LLC in January 2002.
Where did the name come from?
I was talking to a friend; I don't remember what we were talking about but I thought he said, "Something, something, battle tapes," and I thought that was really cool. I don't remember what he really said! I found out after the fact that battle tapes were early underground hip-hop tapes or dis tapes, which I thought was also kind of cool, even though I hadn't done any hip-hop. So that's when it started.
So you were making enough dough grading tests and recording in the basement?
I'll look like an asshole saying it, but there weren't that many people doing rock records in Nashville then that I knew about. I knew Alex the Great would do some. Roger Moutenot [Tape Op #20] was around, but he was doing mostly bigger records or more established bands. Mark Nevers [Tape Op #21] was doing bigger records. I was in my mid-twenties at that point and none of us had that kind of money. Then there was Eli [Lij] Shaw, who worked at Alex the Great, but he didn't have his place [The Toy Box] set up yet, so there really weren't that many places. Joe McMahon was around. Dean Bratcher was recording bands like Ole Mossy Face, and Eric McConnell had done that Loretta Lynn record [Van Lear Rose] with Jack White [Tape Op #82] not too long after I moved up here, but those guys were doing their own thing and I didn't really know them. So I got a whole lot of different bands – people I knew from parties or shows. I was definitely way affordable. I had so much taken care of, based on the fact that I had roommates who could split things, so my overhead was fairly low. I was putting money back into the studio whenever I had it, but it wasn't that much, so I wasn't getting a whole lot of gear.
How long did you stay on the Digi 001?
I was on the 001 for a while. I can't tell you when I switched to a Digi 002, but I had the 002 all the way up until 2013, when I got a [Universal Audio] Apollo. I had gotten an [Apogee] Rosetta 800 for conversion, but the 002 was still my interface. I never had an HD rig or TDM rig. I would either rent them from Blackbird [Tape Op #97] or go to another studio when I needed those, which is what I did for any records that had budgets. Even for things like the Forget Cassettes record [Salt], I would go to Alex the Great or another studio.
You did Salt at Alex?
Yeah, we did Salt at Alex the Great. We were there for two weeks. It was really nice. We used up all that time.
That's a great record.
It was really cool for them to have enough money to say, "Let's go to a studio." Most bands recorded in the basement, but whenever bands had budgets I always liked getting out.
Did you mix there?
No. We didn't even finish tracking completely. On the day before our last day in the studio, we had a hard drive crash on us, so the next day and a half were spent trying to recover that. Then, once we had it all secure, I think we did a couple more overdubs at my place and we mixed it here. I think I had rented something from Blackbird, like maybe a Chandler Mini Mixer for summing. So we had a couple things that were nicer than my standard rig at the time.
What year was that?
It was 2006. We had done the Be Your Own Pet demos at Alex in 2005, then we did the [eponymous] record at Treasure Isle Studio. I'm reconstructing this based on looking at pictures from the sessions not long ago, and I saw pictures of Nathan [Vasquez] from Be Your Own Pet running around with Humphrey, Beth's dog.
Beth Cameron's [of Forget Cassettes] dog?
Yeah. At the time, Salt was a bigger record for me, even though I had done the Be Your Own Pet records. That was out on a bigger label [XL Recordings]. I was just the engineer on that. Records like the Forget Cassettes record were more my productions.
Who produced Be Your Own Pet?
Steve McDonald of Redd Kross. He's great.
Who asked you to do Be Your Own Pet?
Essentially the band did. They were doing demos at Alex the Great, but whenever Brad got things that he wasn't interested in, or the money wasn't good enough, he would say, "Hey Jeremy, you want to engineer this? It's some kids." I said, "Sure." We did the demos, they got signed to XL based on some of those, and then they said, "You wanna make a record?"
That opened a lot of doors for you, right?
To some extent. It opened the door to what mid-aught label money was like. It was interesting to see a label really throw money at something, because I haven't seen it like that since. It opened the door to saying, "Wow, there's some money in this! This is great!" Followed up with, "Wow, I've never made as much money on a record as I made on that!" I think it opened more doors for me down the line, maybe five years after the fact. That's fine, because I remember thinking, "I hope my whole thing isn't going to be trashy garage music." I was doing plenty of projects like that, and I still do plenty like that, but it wasn't the thing that turned me on. It was more, "This is fun, and I can make it sound cool."
You do it really well.
That's the thing. That was a peak example of what I was going for when I started – blown-out, in-the-red recordings. Be Your Own Pet is a more unchained version. Forget Cassettes is a more thought-out version, where shit jumps out of the speakers at you. I imagined them in actual spaces, other than the recording environment. It was like a rocking cave that wasn't too reverby.
It's been ten years since Be Your Own Pet, but you still get a lot of teenage bands coming in to record.
I love working with young bands. Somebody will say, "Hey, I listened to Be Your Own Pet a lot when I was starting to play guitar. Now I have a band and I want to record with you because you did those things." When I went to Brussels [Belgium], it was based on the fact that Lucy Lucy! and the label [62TV] liked the Turbo Fruits records.
What was the studio in Brussels?
It was called Swimming House because it was right next door to Brussels's oldest public pool, which was this awesome amazing thing.
How long were you there?
Six weeks. I spent a lot of time finessing and editing, so I brought it back here to finish things off because I ran out of time. But it was cool. I definitely enjoy working with younger people and helping them sort it out, because that's where I came from. Some of the best records I've ever heard were made by people in their early 20s. Your inhibitions are low; you're just making this interesting music that you're just now figuring out. Pet Sounds, Talking Book, Innervisions, Highway 61 Revisited, and Rubber Soul were made by young people. Not that old people can't make great music; I just think older people end up with that scope of textures and experience that lend to a broader picture, but it never has the energy and excitement it has when you're young. If a band is young and plays well, it's easy to make them sound cool. You put up some microphones, press record, and make sure they're comfortable. You're not dealing with the fact that their back hurts and their bills are due.
So are the musicians contacting you cold?
