How do you write a song?
I don't.
But you have...
Sure, but I don't try to write songs. A song starts to percolate. It might start with an impression or a feeling, or I might even hear it playing in my mind in different settings. I often hear music in dreams. At times, I've been able to take melodies from dreams and find a way to put them into a song.
You can't just sit down at an instrument and write a song?
It happens occasionally, but it's rare. I'm often coming at it from more of a passive place. If I sit down with an instrument and I'm not feeling like I have something that I'm trying to express, then usually nothing happens. I need to start with something, a section or a fragment, and that fragment needs to have something compelling about it.
Do you write your songs in sections?
Most of the time, yes. Songs are like puzzles. I might only have part of the puzzle solved, so I keep coming back to the part that's working and I try to find another part that fits with that. I might have a good chorus, but no verse. I have to attempt to solve a musical puzzle, and I'm not always successful at that. I probably have more unfinished fragments sitting around than finished ones. It's important to understand that, while you're writing, it's not all going to work. The section that you were initially inspired by has to be followed by a section that feels equally meaningful.
You're focusing on the emotional aspects of the song more than the structural aspects?
Well, I focus on both, but you can't just drop anything into a song, because it generally won't work. That's one of the hardest parts about songwriting. It's similar to filmmaking or storytelling. You have to find a beginning, a middle, and an end. It all has to work together on an emotional level. A song might work on a structural level, but if you get hung up on making the parts hang together technically, and there's no emotional center, then it's usually not very captivating. That's where forgettable or bad songs come from. If you look at magic as an analogy, there are different techniques that people use to do illusions, and some are more convincing than others. Songwriting is like a form of magic. It's an illusion. It's about using a technique to craft an illusion that makes someone feel something. Sure, it has to work structurally, but it also needs to be more than the sum of its parts. Otherwise, what do you take away from it after you've heard it? What's the point?
When did you first start recording your songs?
As a teenager, I would record onto this stereo cassette deck and then I learned to multitrack with two cassette decks. I would play one deck back while recording onto the second. I didn't go into a real recording studio until I was 21. I was friends with someone who owned a studio, and they let me come in and do some demos. Going into a real studio was so exciting for me. It started an obsession.
Was Plush's "Found A Little Baby" seven-inch your first proper studio recording?
Yeah, I recorded five or six songs, but I only released that single from the sessions. I actually had more songs that I could have recorded to make it all into a full-length album, but the studio was so expensive.
Plush's first album, More You Becomes You, came out in 1998 but it sounds like it's from outer space compared to everything that was going on at that time.
I didn't personally relate to a lot of what was happening with mainstream music in the 1990s, but I also felt that there was something exciting in the air. People were excited. I would listen to this proto-alternative radio station, and I was wondering where all of these bands were coming from. Occasionally one would have something about it that I liked or that I felt I could relate to. For the most part, though, I was not musically in step with how that whole period was defining itself. I don't think More You Becomes You was reactionary. I was making music the way that I had wanted to make it for a long time; since I was a kid.
More You Becomes You was recorded on a 4-track?
I bought a little gear when it was cheap to buy gear that no one wanted. I bought an Ampex 440 1/2-inch, 4-track [tape deck]. This was in the era of SSL consoles and 24-track Studer A827 machines that could record backwards. I was into the limitations of the machine; but, more than that, it sounded beautiful. Bob Weston [Tape Op #18, #86] and Conrad Strauss were helping me record it all. We would roll the Ampex around to different places and record on location. Somewhere I have this photo of Conrad and me working on More You at CRC [Chicago Recording Company]. We brought the Ampex 4-track in and connected it to the 72 channel SSL. The house engineers were really confused. They started to get agitated with me. The lifters for the tape heads weren't working, and one engineer had to use a pencil to lift the tape off of the heads while it was shuttling. He was groaning and muttering. The Ampex 440 sounded huge though coming back through the mains in the control room. You could hear so much power in the low end, and so much sparkle on top.
Your second album, Plush's Fed [2002], had a legendarily long multi-year gestation. There are stories of Fed involving piles of tape reels, songs being reworked for months, and financial ruin. Is it painful for you to talk about that period?
I'm very proud of Fed, but there were so many things about making it that were problematic. I'm not saying that I didn't get some help, but after a certain point I was climbing uphill. I mortgaged my future to finish it. It was an intense and relentless process. Emotionally, it broke me. With Fed, people always focus on how much money was spent or what went wrong, but I was trying to push against my own limits. I was trying to take the music as far as it could go. A lot of what came out in the press about Fed after it was released were about budgets and [aspects] that have nothing to do with art. I was trying to do something that took a lot, creatively and financially. Part of going further, sometimes, is about going outside of yourself. Fed is unique. It's not for everybody, and I'm happy about that.
You worked with Steve Albini [Tape Op #87, #10] on Fed?
Steve Albini had been a friend to me when I was making More You Becomes You. He lent me a bunch of very high-end microphones casually placed into a cardboard box. I was waiting for Steve to open Electrical Audio; I was bugging him and asking him if it was ready yet. So, when he opened Electrical Audio I was one of the first to book it. Steve was doing a thing back then where if you bought a day, it was a day. Well, towards the end of making Fed, I was needing to turn a day into two days. So instead of working 12 hours a day I would work for 24 hours a day and I would stay up the whole time. I could stay awake, but a lot of the engineers couldn't. I started doing shifts, bringing in different engineers over a 24-hour period. I was burning people out.
I noticed that Steve now has something on his website defining how many hours a studio "day" is.
That might have something to do with me.
The legend is that you replaced the original drummer on Fed?
On some of the tracks, yes, but not on all of them.
You don't feel bad about that?
What's to feel bad about? People replace guitars, people replace vocals, what is sacrosanct about replacing the rhythm section? If it's not working, it has to be replaced.
But when you replace performances, people get hurt. How do you deal with that?
I'm not out to step on people. I care. But sometimes it has to be done. The more direct you can be, the better, and I haven't always been on top of it. There were some tracks on Fed where it was the rhythm section being one thing on the 4-track. But we built up these complex arrangements with full string sections, and now what's happening with the drums is not working with the arrangements that are sitting on top of them. We've spent all of this money and time. What do you do? You might have to do some structural adjustments. You're going down into the foundation and having to pull a part of the building out, readjust it and put it back in there. We weren't using sync'd reels on Fed. But it was more than a 24 channel record. We were moving between machines. We would cut the band tracks on the Ampex 4-track or an 8-track, 1-inch. We'd mix those down and assemble a compiled version onto a 16-track machine. Some songs went up to 24 tracks. "Whose Blues" started on 4-track and migrated to 24-track.
Most of Fed is at least a couple of generations down?
Yes. We would go yet another generation down and move everything over to the 24-track, because we weren't using SMPTE [time code]. We were doing tape-to-tape transfers
