I was going to ask if you had ever considered making a solo record, but it sounds as if you're already doing it!
Yeah. I guess I should learn how to talk about it, because it's not like I've been broadcasting it. Although I've mentioned it on occasion for probably ten years. I'm not a compelling singer. I wouldn't want to sit through an album with me singing, so I wouldn't expect anybody else to. [laughter]
I would have expected it to be instrumental.
I would say it's 75 percent instrumental and maybe 25 percent singing. I'm going to sing a couple of tunes. I have a tune Shawn Colvin is singing. I may have a tune that Sarah Jarosz is singing. As you know, it's much harder in the music business to sell records now. So, I thought, "Well, what am I waiting for?" The tsunami of history when the pandemic hit was almost like a sign. A few months into the pandemic, I gave myself over to the process of doing it. It was a lot of work; I had no idea what I could do that wouldn't make me cringe, because I'm my own worst critic. I'm writing, playing, and engineering everything. So, it's a bit of an audio conceptual Tetris nightmare trying to figure out how to make it all work and fit. I'm slowly getting there. For a while it felt overwhelming, but now I see the light at the end of the tunnel.
How do you fight off all those inner critics?
I gotta say, it's been an interesting journey. I have a pretty strong internal critic. I've had to come up with strategies and protocols over the years to both pay attention to him and keep him at bay. My standards are high, and I want it to be compelling music.
How did you get into session playing and studio work?
The first record I produced was Steady On by Shawn Colvin. We made it in 1987 or '88, and it came out in '89. I had moved to Manhattan around 1981. Before that I had been a gigging sideman right outside of Manhattan, but then I moved to Manhattan when rent was cheap. I didn't have any big goal to be a record producer, but I had always written songs. In tandem with me learning how to play the guitar, right from the beginning I wrote songs. The first time I learned three chords, I took those three chords and wrote a song with them.
How was the first record you produced a major label debut album?
Well, that could probably still happen now. It was an incredibly great confluence of events that took place in the latter half of the 1980s. At the same time, I was writing songs and gigging, starting to do some sessions and jingles. I was also maybe a tad ahead of the curve with the home recording thing. I bought every generation of the Tascam and/or TEAC 4-tracks and 8-tracks. I wasn't super cognizant about every aspect of recording, but I was learning how to utilize multitracks and doing everything myself. The short version is I met Shawn Colvin, and we hit it off. In the beginning we were writing songs and thinking about trying to get hits. Then some little epiphany happened; Colvin and I found our voices as songwriters, and we jettisoned any idea of being commercial. I was never going to be happy as a sideman, so I started focusing more on writing and doing these songs on my 4-track. We recorded a bunch of tunes we wrote that ended up on Steady On, and I guess I did a good enough job making the demos.
So, they let you produce the whole album.
Yeah. I had a certain musicality, and I had a certain instinct for arranging. I was always the guy in the band paying attention to what the bass player, the drummer, and the keyboard player were doing. I always had this intuitive grasp that the parts in the machine had to fit together well. I loved music so much, and had listened to it so much, that I was starting to gain an arranger's sensibility. That's what I brought to Steady On, and thankfully it was strong enough to have some impact. It won a Grammy, and all of a sudden I was a "record producer." I didn't know anything about engineering or mixing.
Were you responsible for getting Kevin Killen [Tape Op #67] on board?
Yes. Shawn and I were both fans of So by Peter Gabriel [#63] at the time. Who made that? It was Kevin Killen. We asked him and he said yes. Kevin and I have been good buddies for 30 years. I go back and listen to that record, and I don't love what's going on there. But I can recognize a certain degree of… I dunno, freshness? It found a little niche, probably more among musicians than the general public. Around the same time I was doing that with Shawn, I had a friendship and was writing songs with Jim Lauderdale, who lived in New York as well. More or less the same thing happened with Jim a year later. I had made his demo and somehow it had ended up in Nashville. Rodney Crowell heard it, liked it, and helped Jim get a deal at Warner Bros. Rodney was gracious enough to say, "Let's have Leventhal come down and produce it with me." Then a lot of songs Jim and I wrote got covered. The next thing I did was I played on and arranged Marc Cohn's "Walking in Memphis." I didn't produce it. [Ben Wisch did. -ed.] This all happened in a two and a half or three-year period, maybe less. Then my learning curve began, and I had to actually learn how to be a record producer.
You're a huge Beatles freak?
Yep!
Was George Martin a huge influence on your style of production and bringing that sophistication to roots music?
Yeah, I guess. I never thought of it specifically as George Martin, which is interesting. I love Beatles records, so whatever was going into those records was what I loved. We could spend the rest of our conversation talking about The Beatles. For me, and apparently for a lot of other people, they're magical. Why it worked, how it worked; people will still be talking about it, I suspect, a century from now. They were magic and it was such a powerful imprint that I had to jettison using it a long time ago. I've avoided using Beatles-y things for a while now. I don't know how familiar you are with what I'm doing, but I've really veered away from it.
I have noticed.
Yeah. I made a record [Whole New You] with Shawn Colvin after the album [A Few Small Repairs] with "Sunny Came Home." It was a fun Beatles, Brian Wilson, Burt Bacharach thing.
It's my favorite album you produced.
A lot of people say that! It's so funny. I can't listen to it. It's weird. There are a lot of reasons that record ended up the way it did. Shawn had writer's block. I had all these tracks, and I didn't have committed vocals or committed lyrics. I had too much time on my hands in the studio to dick around with all these kinds of ideas. You name it and the kitchen sink is in there. Every influence I had up to that point is on the record. Horns, sleigh bells, and backwards guitars; it's all in there. I think my songwriting had a Beatles influence at that point, but I made a point of trying to veer away from it. In the last ten years, I'd be hard-pressed to find a real Beatles influence. I did a record with Sarah Jarosz recently [World on the Ground], and she pulled me back to it, inadvertently.
What do you draw influence from, production-wise, now?
Well, dare I say I try not to? I just try to be me. I try to make everything simpler and have everything mean more. The goal is to do the least amount I can, and to make it sound as big and deep and interesting as I can by not doing a lot. Whenever I do anything – working on my record, writing songs with somebody, by myself, preproduction, recording, and sessions guys in or not – I do my best to turn my analytical, intellectual, conscious creative brain off for the first hour or so. I try to respond quickly, viscerally, and immediately to the moment and the music in an attempt to try to get what I'd call real feeling in it, as opposed to some idea of what a record's supposed to sound like.
In Shawn's memoir [Diamond in the Rough], she talks about how a lot of the songs you produced for her started as instrumental ideas that later she would write lyrics and melody on top of. Is that right?
Yeah. I've collaborated with a lot of people now, and I've approached it from every conceivable way you can think of. There isn't a way to write a song that I haven't done or tried. With Shawn, it's tended to be – for the most part – that I write music, give it to her, and she goes off and writes lyrics to it.
Do you put all the little melodic lines and hooks in there beforehand?
Generally. It's all intuitive. Sometimes I'll have a very specific melody. Sometimes I think, "This will be better if I don't define it and let her find her way through it." It depends. I've tried – to some degree of success – to reverse it with Shawn. I usually have her give me lyrics and let me write the music. With Rosanne [Cash] that's what I do 95 percent of the time.
Does Rosanne already have a melody with the lyrics?
Sometimes. But it's mostly me writing the melody, looking at a sheet of paper, like Elton [John] does with Bernie Taupin. I love that. That forces me out of my box, in a way. If you're writing music to somebody's lyrics, you can't just go back to your own patterns. You have to make it work. I like that challenge. I did a record [This is Where I Live] with William Bell a few years ago, and I wrote a good portion of lyrics on that.
I was going to ask how you got hooked up with that record. He hadn't done an album for a decade.
It had been a long time. I got hooked up with William at Stax [Records] through Joe McEwen, who had A&R-ed [Shawn Colvin's] Steady On. He used to be an A&R guy at Columbia [Records]. I was glad he thought of me. R&B and soul music is really more of who I am versus a folk singer/songwriter or Americana. When I first started playing guitar in the New York area, the coin of the realm was knowing how to play R&B and soul music. If you didn't, you didn't work, because that's what all club bands did. I have a deep love of classic soul from the '60s to the early-to-mid '70s. I was thrilled to do it.
Did they let you do your thing with him?
They did, though they initially sent me a bunch of songs I didn't love. I went ahead and wrote better songs.
On your own, or with William?
