Take us back to the genesis of this project.
Medich: Well, this has a long, sordid history. It started in about 2000 with Jim Hirsch, who was Old Town's executive director at the time — he put forth the idea. Then he left and it kind of languished and I tried to start it up again another time somewhere between 2000 and 2005 with another producer, and it didn't work. But in 2005 we were recording a children's album, Wiggleworms Love You, at another studio and we kind of got on a roll. Kerry Sheehan, who is the Director of Education, said, "Maybe we should do this, and you should meet John Abbey." I had never met John — and he had worked here for years.
Abbey: I started in 2002 teaching bass and guitar. Bass is my primary instrument but I've been playing guitar long enough to do that.
So you two meet, hit it off and decide to get started on this project in May of 2005. What was it like at the start?
A: At its original inception, it was like, "Let's do ten or twelve songs. Sort of a best of the songbook." Very simple, like a play-along thing, and we pegged it as two months. So I started getting some Old Town faculty in to record — and it was actually just going to be faculty at first. They loved the vibe... if you can call this room "having a vibe."
Bob, were you ever concerned that John was gonna walk to this space and say, "You want me to record here?"
M: No, no. I knew there was no space in the main building [which houses Old Town's offices, performance hall and most of its classrooms]. That wasn't going to work. But I knew this room was here next door, so we walked over here and I think we both were like, "Okay." And I had our building super change the locks — which pissed off the rest of the staff to no end because they were using this room as a classroom before. I got into a little trouble with the powers that be because we started off without a budget, too. I figured we were on a roll with the Wiggleworms record and I said, "Let's do it." And then Bloodshot Records got involved and it just snowballed.
A: The musicians loved the whole process here and so I guess there was a little bit of a buzz that started to happen. Then a friend of mine was managing Danny Barnes from the Bad Livers, and he was in town doing a show. I'm a big Bad Livers fan. I met them, we talked, we played a little bit and I just I said, "Hey I'm working on this project for Old Town. We're doing these songs — it should be interesting." Danny was the first outside person we got. I remember coming to Bob and saying, "Is it okay if people who aren't faculty contribute a track to this?" He asked who and I said, "Danny Barnes." He said, "By all means." So all of a sudden, that started to pick up the momentum. We got Barnes, Jon Langford, Robbie Fulks and Dan Zanes — I played bass with Dan Zanes for a long time.
We're in the control room right now, and it looks like it was either a very small instruction room or a storage room. There's a chalkboard and a drop ceiling with standard acoustic tiles ...
M: It was an office for a soccer club.
So how do you take a very typical, carpeted, acoustically neutral space and turn it into something that's conducive to creating this great music? A: This became the control room, for lack of a better term. It took me a couple times. I shifted stuff around trying to get a feel for the room. I'd monitor ridiculously low! I tried to bring as little of the room as possible into what I was hearing.
Were control room reflections a big problem while mixing and cutting?
A: Reflections here are ridiculous and the bass response, if I'm sitting close, it's like, "Alright gotta turn the bass up." Then I'd walk out to get a drink of water and by the time I hit the door the whole track would just be swimming in bass. It took me a while to get used to this room, knowing that I really couldn't treat it. It was temporary — but for two years, it was like, "Well, we're going to be wrapping it up pretty soon." So I just got used to monitoring fairly low and if I took a mix out I'd listen to it at home, on a computer or in a car — all these various things to see what I liked about it and where things sat. Then I could come back and make the adjustments. I got used to working with the room. By the time this finished, apart from aesthetics, balance-wise I was able to nail things pretty quickly. Out in the live room, I just close-mic'd. There are a couple of tracks where drums were cut live, guitars... basically everything. But a lot of things don't have drums so that removes the loudness element. If I was tracking guitars and vocals, I'd set people up in a semi-circle so they could see each other. I'd dedicate instrument and vocal mics for whoever was playing and singing, but it was all close-mic'd. Every session was probably an hour and a half or two hours.
One extreme is to mic every drum, every instrument, every singer — and the other is having one or two mics like in the old days, where you get a balance by asking people or instruments to move closer or further back. How did you do it?
A: It was somewhere in between. If I didn't want drums to sound that close I'd put a mic three feet in front of the kick, at waist level, and then another one equidistant above the snare. Bleed was a big factor — good and bad. Primarily good because it would force me to obsess a little less at times. Guitars bled into the vocal mics, vocals bled into the guitar mics — not obnoxiously, but if I was trying to do something with the guitar and all the sudden I picked that frequency where I'm hearing pops from the vocal in the guitar mic, it didn't sit well with the lead vocal. Some mixes are mixed to mask that. Surprisingly I used yoga mats to wall off the drums. I mean, anything that was around: Mexican blankets, four-by-four throw rugs...
It seems like you wanted to get urgency in these tracks, too. How did you approach that?
A: I wanted performances. If time and scheduling allowed I'd get one artist, one featured artist — the primary person singing — and then two or three people accompanying. If that didn't work, then I'd get that artist singing and playing — and if it stood on its own, then great, but if I felt like I wanted more then I'd bring more people in. We always worked with the best take. Out of a hundred songs, maybe there are four that have the bridge from take two and then everything else from take three. But primarily it's one take. I might grab a vocal or a line that was brilliant in a bad take and fly that in.
I notice the lack of iso booths here, and how the cutting room lends itself to getting all the musicians together in a circle. That must've had an impact on the recording.
A: Right, absolutely. And there were no headphones. Maybe 20 or 25 percent of all these sessions people would want headphones. But for the most part, it's like they're playing as if they were rehearsing.
