So was the recorder was your first instrument?
Yeah, the recorder. I played it at Waldorf School. I still have the recorder. I've used it on almost every record.
Do you have a bunch of recorders now?
Yeah. I have a tenor, alto and soprano — a little tiny one. From recorder you are usually able to transfer to flute or oboe. I think my affinity for woodwinds started when I started playing the oboe. That was my first real band instrument.
Where did you go from the oboe?
Piano. The piano was kind of an accident because my parents bought an upright piano so that my older sister could take lessons. She was taking lessons and then she would come home and practice and I would sit in the kitchen listening to her kind of clumsily struggling through these simplified versions of Bach minuets. When she left I would go to the piano and I would try to play what she had played, just from listening.
Did you learn how to identify chord voicings by ear?
I didn't know theory. I learned visually on the piano. With the piano you see everything laid out, so I was learning through the visuals. But I didn't know or understand what I was doing. I would just go by how it sounded. After a year I was pretty comfortable on the piano.
So you've got the recorder, the oboe and the piano...
How did I get to the guitar? Because songwriting started when I started playing the guitar. Before that if I was writing songs on the piano, they were very ambiguous. They weren't clear, conservative pop songs. There wasn't singing. There were all these flourishes. It was kind of pseudo-classical...but there were pop elements. I was just sort of making stuff up. It wasn't until I learned the guitar that I actually started writing songs. I was writing songs on the piano but never for me. I would write stuff and then a friend who was a singer (it was always a girl) would say, "Oh, that's really pretty. Maybe I could sing over it?" So I was always pairing up with different up-and- coming divas.
Ha! One of which, people should know, was Missy Elliott.
Missy Elliott — she played the viola, too.
At what point did recording come into your life?
It was the exact time that I was learning guitar, the summer before my second year in college. I was nineteen or twenty. My friend was going down to Florida to stay with his mom for the summer, and he couldn't fit everything in his car. So he left one of those Ovation nylon string guitars with the plastic in the back. That same week I went out and bought a Tascam Portastudio [cassette] 4-track. I wanted to write songs and sing. I had been in this college band that I had started with some friends. I was playing the recorder!
Was it the Marzuki band?
Yeah. Shannon [Stephens] was singing and writing the songs. She was playing guitar and we had a cellist. I was playing the recorder because it was all I could do. It was really bad ethnic folk-pop music. I had long hair, wore Birkenstocks and I owned a Hacky Sack — that's where I was coming from. I wanted to learn to play guitar because it seemed like if I was going to get anywhere in this band, I had to play guitar. It was 95 degrees all summer and I would come home after work, sit in my room for five hours, sweat and strum the guitar — strum E major over and over.
And then the first Sufjan record that you made was A Sun Came?
That was mostly done with the 4-track. My last year in college I took a Pro Tools class. So what I was able to do with the 4-track was I would dump into Pro Tools and edit it in Pro Tools. That was my first experience.
That has been a lasting method that is still with you.
I guess I haven't really changed it. The Pro Tools computer was in a studio, so I could go into the studio and use an 8-track version. So I had four [tracks] going in and I had four left over. If the song wasn't finished, I'd record in that studio right into Pro Tools. But most of it was done on the 4-track.
So when you were done with that record, what was the next thing that you did?
I didn't do anything! I graduated from school and I went to New York to writing school. I went to The New School. I wanted to be a writer — I kind of gave up doing music. I was working at Penguin/Putnam [publishers]... as a graphic designer. That's when they had those new, teal green [Mac] G3s. I was an aspiring writer and I had a great job, but I wasn't writing any music. I was on the computer all day. At night I'd be in class, then I would go home and write on the computer. Some of these guys who worked in the tech department at Penguin who were total geeks gave me [Propellerhead's] ReBirth software.
Yeah! ReBirth was one of the first good drum and synthesizer software programs for me too.
In my spare time at work, I started making beats on the computer. That's when I started making the beats that would become the basis of Enjoy Your Rabbit. Lowell [Brams] sent me a [Roland] VS-880EX. I still had my cassette 4-track, but I wasn't really using it. It was such a leap to go from the sound of tape — the cassette — to this weird interface where you were pressing buttons. It was very unnatural and very mechanical. I think that's why I decided to do the record Enjoy Your Rabbit, because I couldn't figure out how to get a warm sound out of the VS-880. So I just decided to make the most mechanical sounding record that I could. I dumped all the beats from ReBirth onto the machine and then started overdubbing oboe and piano. I would put those into the computer and try to make those real instruments sound like digital sounds. I was doing all of it at Penguin. I didn't buy my own computer until I knew I was quitting my job. That was when those old G3s had a 1/8" jack input. I was doing all of my transferring through the 1/8" in jack.
So would you put two tracks in at a time and line them up?
I actually still do that because my VS-880 only has two outputs.
When you're doing drums, are you just sending in a drum mix? Or do you do overheads, kick and snare and then line those up?
If I'm having a drummer do the drum parts — not me — then usually there are four or five mics and I line them up. Why don't they have something where you can just transfer everything?!
Well, they do now!
Yeah. Which is why I'm getting rid of that thing! I'm going to get a new thing.
When that one breaks I bet you'll buy a new one on eBay!
[sighing] I get teased so much! I actually have two of those at my house. I almost bought a third one!
I could probably show you a trick to get more than two outputs at a time. It probably has a monitor output and it probably has an effects send...
You're telling me this seven years later! I could have been done with these records so much faster!
There's a lot of distortion on that record (Enjoy Your Rabbit). Most of the elements are pretty crunchy.
It's a lot of using internal effects on the VS-880 or in Pro Tools — slowing things down, speeding things up, reversing it and using whatever plug-ins were free. Just making it sound like something it wasn't.
After Enjoy Your Rabbit, is that when you did Liz Janes' record Done Gone Fire?
Michael Kaufmann introduced me to her. She came into town and had her guitar and some songs. I had two mics — two SM57s. One was on her guitar and one was on her voice. The whole record was recorded with two SM57s. The drums on that record are always two mics.
Recorded with an SM57? I think that her voice on that record sounds so amazing!
She was about five inches from the microphone and we didn't use a pop filter. So when she would hit it — PFT! — I would have to go into Pro Tools and quickly drop the thing. I did that all manually. Once in a while you can still hear a punch. I didn't know about pop filters. I didn't know you weren't supposed to use SM57s for your voice. I do it all the time, but everyone's telling me, "No, it's for the snare drum..."
Tell 'em to take a hike.
We recorded as much as we could that day and then she came by again a couple of weeks later and we did another round of just her and the guitar. She wasn't living in New York. Then I spent a couple weeks overdubbing. I did the drums afterward — and her tempos go all over the place. There's a song where she actually adds a beat in the measure for no reason. It took me forever to figure that out. I pretty much limited myself to 8-tracks after she had done her part.
Was that the first project you'd done with someone else?
You mean Liz's album? Yeah. I got to know her through that project. We only did everything once. We just recorded the songs. The only song we recorded twice was "Jerusalem", and that was because the first time we recorded it, I was so into it that I was shaking a shaker in the corner of the room and I was saying, "Yes! Awesome!" To save tracks I was going to add the shaker while she was playing, but then I listened back to it and it was totally out of tempo and it was the loudest thing.
What you have to do is go back and overdub another shaker, but perfectly out of phase. Cancels out the sound of the 1st one....
Would that get rid of it? See, I don't know about this stuff. This is where you come in.
No, you can't do that. I'm just kidding.
Okay. I don't know!
It's a recording joke.
I don't know about these jokes. That's funny. The way I recorded Liz is how I did A Sun Came. I did the guitar and piano first and then drums later.
Then later you have this big epiphany — "Wait! You do the drums first and then the guitars — it sounds way tighter!"
Which I didn't start doing until Illinois. Michigan is all guitar and piano first.
But the stuff on Michigan doesn't feel herky-jerky at all. Did you use a click track on it at all for your guitars and pianos?
Yeah. The VS-880 has a built-in click track. I didn't use the click track for Enjoy Your Rabbit because it was all digital drums. But most of Michigan is click tracked.
How long was there between finishing Done Gone Fire and starting Michigan?
I feel like they were kind of simultaneous. I didn't really start working on Michigan until I was done with graduate school, or around the same time. Michigan wasn't a concept album from the start. I didn't think, "I'm writing songs about Michigan." It was just stuff that I had been assembling kind of randomly with no thought behind any of it. The only difference between Michigan and Enjoy Your Rabbit is that Michigan was all live, acoustic instruments.
And you tracked it all on your VS-880?
Yeah. I think a lot of it had nothing to do with my recording, because I never recorded in the studio. I hardly even recorded at home, honestly, because it was so loud at home. I would bring this upstate or to Massachusetts where my brother lived. He worked at a Quaker school there. They had a room with a piano and his apartment was quiet. I would record up there sometimes on the weekends.
Everyone talks about how you play thirty-two thousand instruments on that record!
Which isn't true at all. There's piano, guitar and woodwinds. And I play the drums of course, but I'm not very good at it. I can't even say that I really play the drums. I was just overdubbing it all. This is how it would work — I would figure out that there was this kind of instrument available, so I would take my 8- track over to where it was. At my brother's school there was a vibraphone that was there for a while, so I went up there and did the vibraphone.
