The PT Diaries

FINISHED!!! We’re finally done with the new CD, A LONG WAY FROM TUPELO. Michael and I mastered the record last Monday in Nashville with Ken Love at MasterMix. For me, this is an anxious experience, kinda like taking your wife to the hospital to deliver the baby. For those interested in the process I’ll give you the “Cliff Notes” version:

Michael and I have spent hours & hours editing and pouring over endless variations of how each song could be mixed, and we eventually ended up with versions that seem to work. (Finally, you just con yourself into believing it can’t be any better.) We spend about a day or so assembling the mixes we like in the proper sequence and formats. Also, because there can be surprises in mastering, we went back and duplicated each song with the vocals slightly louder, and then another set with all the vocals slightly lower. Then there’s that nagging feeling that the bass might not be right, so we went back and duplicated another set of mixes with the bass up and down. So we’ve got 12 tunes on the CD — lets count the number of mixes we’ll carry with us: 12 finals, 24 vocal up & down, 24 bass up & down — 60 total mixes. Then, as we’re loading the car at the studio, Michael asks me if I want to carry the computer from the studio in case we need to remix something at the mastering room. Are you kidding me? While a little voice tells me this might be a good idea, I refuse to give in because WE ARE PROFESSIONALS. And, at this point we need to show a bit of back bone; besides, we’ve got 60 mixes of 12 songs in the bag. If that’s not a testament to insecurity I don’t know what is.

So we’re ready to master.

Arriving at the facility at 9:30 we load the finals into the computer. While waiting on this process to end I’m always stuck by something curious and wonderful — the silence in the room is tangible. This space, which cost someone a ton of money just to design (let alone construct), has absolutely no audio reflections-period. Throw in the most exotic stereo you can imagine and a talented mastering engineer, and you’re ready to find out what you’ve accomplished over the last several months. First we edit the front and back of each song and figure out how much time between cuts — no right or wrong here, it’s just a feel thing. Adding fades to the end of a few tunes is pretty easy and we cut about 25 seconds off the vamp of ALL ABOUT PEOPLE. All this runs up to 12:30 or so and we break for lunch. Our agents, Brian Hill and Pete Olsen from Monterey Peninsula Artists, come by and we walk over to South Street Cafe for lunch.

The afternoon will be spent adjusting the volume of each track — adding EQ, compression, and whatever other special sauces Ken has in his bag of tricks. When we have questions about a particular track we’ll make a reference CD and run out to the Explorer and get a “real world” idea of how it sounds. You remember those vocal/bass up/down mixes I mentioned? OK, this is where they come in. For reasons I won’t explain, we go back and load those into the computer and choose the “bass up” version of just the verses for one tune and the vocal down version for the chorus of another. Around 7:00 PM it appears we are done. Ken will spend another 3 hours or so putting all these parts together and he’ll FedEx us a reference CD of today’s work. We’ll circulate copies among ourselves and management. Hopefully everyone in our circle of folks will be as sick of hearing it as we are and they’ll just throw in the towel. Billy Joe Shaver once said to me, “You never finish making a record - you just finally give up.” Amen.

I’ve got a few minutes to hammer this out as we continue to work on the new project. This may be way-more info than you care to know, but as it is all we’ve been doing for the last several weeks it’s kinda on my mind.

This past week (2/4 thru 2/10) we’ve worked on Dr. L’s keys, adding his own special sauce to the tracks. The first thing we look for is the correct “patch” or sound.

In years past we maybe had an acoustic piano, an electric piano, and some kind of organ sitting around a recording studio. The handful of sonic choices available were generally limited by our choice of mics, amps, compressors, and so on. The sounds available to a keyboard player seemed like a reasonably short list. Today, Michael has over 1600 sounds in one keyboard alone. Granted, we don’t need the helicopter sounds and crickets chirping, but the number of pianos alone can take a good 30 minutes to run down.

So why don’t we use the first piano we dial up? Well that takes the fun out of it; just ask Bill Hinds, who goes through endless variations of guitar sounds until we find “the one.” Truth is, we’re listening for all sorts of stuff; how a chord sits in the track, the instrument’s voicing, the harmonics of the part. Ideally, we want the instrument to sit in the track without having to crank the volume too much so it sounds like a natural part of the band.

OK, we got the piano sound we like…now if we only had the right part. You don’t even want to hear about this. Poor Michael, and everyone else who has to endure the trial and error ‘what if we did this?’ process. It’s like watching paint dry. So the piano is finally done, what about the organ? Ditto the above, all over again.

This week we will be shifting gears a little; guitar slinger Bob Britt will be driving down for a couple of days with a truck load of things with strings on them, amps, and gizmos to help wrap up the overdubs.

Billy, the co-writer/producer
paulthorn.com

…on the new CD project, tentatively titled Long Way From Tupelo (or maybe I’m Still Here, or maybe…). Billy and Dr. Love (Michael) have been working everyday editing tracks and doing keyboard overdubs, bringing Paul in for vocals and backgrounds as tracks shape up…which inspires another edit or instrumental part or two…which would sound way-cool if the background vocals were tweaked a little bit…and now the original guitar track doesn’t quite fit…and so on, and so on, and so on. You get the idea.

A sidenote regarding a truism in modern digital audio production: the digital options available to the creators of music are mind boggling. The intent and feeling of a singer or player can be perfected by nudging a pitch here and correcting a rhythm there, or it can be time-shifted, subverted, and convoluted into something else entirely. What was once a relatively simple process of recording good performances and then mixing a final product has evolved into an overwhelming array of options for the modern artist/producer and a strong temptation to ‘perfect’ or mutate every little breath and string-squeak. So the notion that technology eases the creation of music is a false one; on the contrary, it demands greater talent and craft to discern between creative embellishment and mere trickery. Things can even get a little dicey sometimes. Click here to view a particularly tense moment.

So, on to the embellishment…

I’ve made a couple of trips to West Alabama for guitar overdubs since my last post and I’m very pleased to report that creative embellishment abounds. It always amazes me that it is usually the removal of components that juices an arrangement most of all, and a song called What Have You Done to Lift Somebody Up? is a perfect example. The track is a southern gospel-ish thing along the lines of Mission Temple Fireworks Stand, and on tracking day we counted it off and rocked it pretty hard from the get-go. Bob Britt anchored the track with a great ‘Memphis’-type rhythm guitar and I simply dropped in some horn-ish stabs. When I arrived at the studio for overdubs during the holidays, Billy played me the track and it was completely different! Bob’s guitar and the snare drum had been removed, leaving only bass, kick drum, and my little-bitty guitar to support the first verse, and it was brilliant; it really gave the track someplace to go. By the time it gets to choruses and solos, it has built to what it originally was and the arrangement has much greater impact. It just goes to show that, in music as in all else, witholding the goodies makes the eventual laying out of the goodies much more gooder.

And so we have added a few guitar parts, dropped in a couple of solos, and continue to wrestle with the myriad of decisions presented by the modern recording process. Oh…and Paul has tracked some amazing lead (and background) vocals, as only he can. Those of you who are fans know what I’m talking about. Those of you who aren’t yet, check it out, and we’ll talk to you later. Stay tuned!

Bill, the guitar player
paulthorn.com

While we’ve been off the road, work has continued on the new CD project almost daily.

As you dig into the making of each record you reach a point of saturation (I guess that’s an appropriate term), and after a while you just want to cross the finish line. The “newness” begins to fade and by the end you don’t want to hear these cuts for a long, long time, because you’ve heard them every day for several months. I’m happy to report that we’re not yet done, but this one still sounds “fresh” and we know there’s something special going on here; something cool happens everyday.

Billy, the co-writer/producer
paulthorn.com

I know…we haven’t posted anything about the second session. At this time, I can’t seem to remember anything about the second session. (Getting old is hard.) We’ll have to have a “group-think” and get some details up soon. One thing that I am acutely aware of, however, is how incredibly boring and uneventful recording sessions can be. Aside from a list of songs recorded and a general feeling of either accomplishment or failure, it’s difficult to come up with any events that merit documentation. From time to time a loved one will ask if they can come hang out while we work in the studio. This typically happens only once per loved one. They will invariably stumble squinting into the sunlight after an hour or so, desperate for their lives to resume; they’ve just spent an interminable length of time doing what amounts to watching grass grow in slow motion. So, you have our permission to bail out at any time. Here goes…

We played Huntsville & Birmingham, Alabama on March 2nd & 3rd (much fun, by the way…thanks to all who came out). It was decided that Saturday the 4th would be a good time to drive over to Sulligent and get some work done, so after a sleepy breakfast in Birmingham we trundled two hours west to the studio. We were all pretty groggy after entirely too much fun the previous nights as we hauled a van-load of gear into the studio.

After setting up and tweaking things a bit, we started work on a song called It Don’t Get Any Better Than This. This is a medium tempo song…the verses are a little dark but the choruses rock pretty hard. Bob Britt came up with a cool guitar approach for the tune and I struggled a bit in finding a part that dovetailed with his…it just takes a little time, some patience, and a lot of communication sometimes. (And an occasional…uh…tantrum.) We “took” it a few times, mulling over merits and potential changes between each take, then decided to break for dinner and reboot our perspective.

Dinner was steak and all-you-can-eat catfish all around (thank you, YoMan Music). We spent much of the time discussing possible loopholes in the “one trip only to the salad bar” policy. I’ll consult the Perpetual Obscurity legal team and get back to you on our findings.

Our bellies finally full, we returned to the studio to hammer away at the track. Actually, that’s not a bad way to look at making a record…it’s very much like taking a big block of noise and chipping away all the unnecessary bits until, hopefully, we’re left with an elegant and meaningful representation. We decided that what we had when we left for dinner was fine, so we began tweaking, augmenting, and massaging what we had recorded. We finally hit the wall and Michael graciously agreed to meet me early Sunday morning to finish my parts, and we adjourned to the Best Western in Amory, MS for a little channel flipping before sleepytime.

We returned Sunday morning…rested and fed…and I finished my contribution to Saturday’s work, adding a solo to boot. We then moved into a song called I’m Gonna Walk Without My Crutches Someday, a simple, up-tempo groove thing. Paul sang it for us and, charts in hand, we went out to the floor and started playing around with it. This one came together relatively quickly after some arrangement debate, with Bob playing a chunky rhythm, me on slide, Jeffrey playing a tight little groove, and Doug playing some seriously funky (do people say that anymore?) bass. As we tweaked and edited our parts Paul remarked that he really liked the track, but it wasn’t anything like what he had imagined. I guess there is more than one way to skin a cat.

The next up was Daddy Can’t Fix It Now, a beautiful, evocative (thanks for the word, Doug) ballad. If you are a Paul Thorn fan, you know exactly the kind of song I mean. We ran through it a few times and entered into a somewhat lively discussion on the approach we should take. Some thought the track should be more defined and “arranged” while others thought it should be spontaneous and intuitive. We compromised by practicing our spontaneity and intuition for a while. Hopefully, both camps are happy now. I think it’s a lovely track, sort of minimalist…Jeffrey rolling a light pulse with brushes on toms, Bob sprinkling some gorgeous Dobro playing throughout, and Michael’s great piano playing holding it all together. For those of you who like Resurrection Day, A Star That Fell Down, and Even Heroes Die, this one will become a new favorite.

And with that, we wrapped it up and called it a weekend. We’ve recorded fourteen so far, including two from previous projects that might be suitable for this one. It looks like we’re going to try for three more at some later date. That’ll give Billy and Paul a nice-sized bunch of songs to choose from. We’ll keep you posted…

Bill, the guitar player
paulthorn.com

Right off the bat a brand new piece of gear crapped out, so Michael left around midnight Thursday night and headed home to pick up a replacement to get us through. A huge storm blew through New Albany, MS around 3 AM and lightning struck near Mike’s house, frying the phones, internet and TV cable just after he arrived. Fortunately, the stuff in his studio survived and we had enough gear to get us going.

Friday: Spent most of the day spiffing up the studio. Laid a bunch of cables, wired the mics, headphones, and all that jazz. Went to Piggly Wiggly and bought copious amounts of Starbucks, assorted drinks, and snacks. The snacks include: Ritz Crackers, Wheat Thins, 2 cans of assorted nuts, granola bars, breakfast bars, Crispy Nutter Butter cookies, and (most importantly) two cans of Easy Cheese. I bet Mike a quarter the Easy Cheese will last less than 30 minutes after the first can is opened. By early evening we were done and grabbed some dinner. Doug, Jeffrey, and Bob Britt left Nashville around 6, so there was plenty of time waiting on them to arrive. Mike took a nap on the couch and I noodled around in the control room. The van pulled up around 11 and we unloaded a ton of drums, guitars, amps, and began setting everything up. (There will be photos on the site in the near future for all the gear heads.) Finished up around 1:30 AM and everybody turned in, shooting for a noon start time on Saturday.

The guys in the van stayed over in Amory, MS and on the way back to Sulligent on Saturday, Jeffrey pulled into Downey’s Grocery in Greenwood Springs. This is near Splunge if you care to check the map. I had mentioned that they made an amazing cheeseburger and he decided to do his own research. After completing the field study they drove on in to town and we met at Mr. Genes for the main course from the buffet. Jeffrey remarked after his third trip through the line that it really was an amazing cheeseburger.

The studio is a block away so Bob & I walked and met the others as they drifted in. Paul arrived with his daughter Kit and a friend of hers to hang out with us for the afternoon. Everybody headed into the control room to listen to the demo of the first tune. We decided to cut All About People, a “Stonesey” sort of tune with a great big chorus. Here is the drill: the guys all get a pen and pad and begin scribbling numbers down as the demo plays. This will be their chart. At the end everyone compares notes, we talk about the key, what kind of guitar sounds, tempo, and so on. Now on to more important matters: fresh coffee before we begin.

Finally, everyone heads into the studio. Jeffrey’s drums are set up in the storage room in the back where we keep the merchandise we carry on the road. We converted it to a drum room by throwing down some carpet scraps and stapling a bunch of blankets we bought at Wal Mart to the wall . If you can imagine Jeffrey all by himself in this small room behind his kit, surrounded by a bunch of very nice microphones and children’s blankets with imprints of lions, giraffes, elephants, next to the blanket that’s an indian motif, next to the Van Gogh ‘Starry Night’ blanket, and so on. Very surreal.

Out in the studio it’s pretty loud with Bill & Bob set up next to one another facing Doug who’s across the room with Paul. As always, everyone wants to hear something different in their phones so we spend a considerable amount of time working through that. We’re rolling by early afternoon and beginning to get comfortable with the tune. Cut a couple of takes, come in and listen, change guitars, or parts, cut it again, and listen some more. It goes on until we think we have a rhythm track to work with over in the afternoon. Bill goes back and adds a slide to the chorus and a really cool part to the bridge. Bob overdubs a mandolin he’s running through his amp. This feels like a good one and everyone is smiling.

Note: It’s around 4:45 PM, the Easy Cheese lasted just under 40 minutes, and I owe Mike a quarter. Its hard to make it last when some of us are bypassing the cracker and squirting it directly into their mouth.

My brother drops by the studio to say hello. He’s a physician in Montgomery and is visiting our parents over the weekend. We chit chat about the kids’ current events while the guys consume more drinks and snacks. At some point in our conversation he says, “Are yall about done?” I remarked that we’re done with the first song and will break for dinner shortly. Hes a great guy but clueless about all of this and can’t understand why we havent finished the whole CD - after all, we’ve been recording all day and there are only 10 or 12 songs. He and I have a big laugh over this as I explain the process.

Some tunes are a bit more elusive than others. The next one we choose was Between the Two of Us, and it would prove hard to corner. We try lots of different incarnations and finally throw in the towel to break for dinner.

So it’s off to the Mexican restaurant (through the alley and around the corner) for fajitas, enchiladas, and burritos. The atmosphere inside the studio will remind you of the primate house at the zoo for the remainder of the evening.

Back to work around 8:30. We pull out Starvin’ for Your Kisses as the 3rd cut. Bob is playing lap steel and Bill is the icing on the cake. This one will take us up to midnight, but comes right on around; a lazy shuffle that’s worth waiting for. Coronas and Sam Adams all around, day one is done.

Day two: Its Mr. Genes breakfast buffet. At Mr. Genes you can pickup your Sunday breakfast from the drive-thru on your way to church. Or, if youre a backslider you come in and eat with rest of the sinners, which is what we did. Eggs, bacon, sausage, fried baloney, grits, pancakes, biscuits, coffee & OJ. I wont go into the details of everything Jeffrey ate this morning, but I remember thinking Mr. Gene may not be in business much longer if we keep hitting him at the all you can eat buffet.

Mike passed on breakfast and stayed behind at the studio to edit tracks, and he has the roughs from the previous day up for everyone to hear. I brought him a sausage and biscuit to go with his morning Coke. More coffee as everyone comes into the control room to listen. A couple of passes and everything still stands up to the post-mortem, so we move on.

Sometime over the past year, we were traveling somewhere and flipping through the iPod when we stumbled across an old demo of a song called Whisky is Good for the Heart. In spite of a cheesy sounding demo, the lyric and melody felt pretty good. We decided to keep this one in stack of tunes to look at. It’s a gospel feeling track that might have turned into a country song if we had allowed it. Bob plays lap steel, Bill is on his Strat, and Mike fills the gaps with these big “we’re in church now” chords and lines. Just the right tune to cut on a Sunday morning in Alabama. We’re done with this one by early afternoon.

Lucky Seven Ranch is a tune that’s been waiting for the right project to surface on. Uptempo, dark, and edgy, Jeffrey sets the pace with a straight-eight tom riff and the guitars follow with atmospheric parts while Doug holds down the bottom. We’ll run through this one several times and when Doug & Jeffrey are happy, Bill & Bob will nail all the guitar stuff, and just like that we’ve got a great track.

The guys have about a four hour drive home so we decide to call it a day and load the van while Mike makes everyone ref CDs to listen to. This thing is off to a good start. More to follow…

Billy, the co-writer/producer
paulthorn.com

Well, let’s see…we cut 5 great songs.. averaging 5 to 8(!) takes per tune (just to pick to best)…. about 10 gigabytes of data… 2 cases of beer.. lots of Mexican food.. and biscuits. lots of biscuits… anyone who wants specifics on the dull stuff (what mic pre-amps with what mics, on what instrument..) let me know… I’ll run the song titles by the proper authorities and post ‘em….

Dr. Love, the keyboard player/engineer
paulthorn.com

It is high time we started another record! It’s been two years(!!) since the last release (the DVD release sapped a lot of time from the lives of our Herculean production crew) and it feels great to be getting ready to hunker down in the studio again. We’ll convene, as we always do, at Billy Maddox’s recording facility down in Alabama.

The usual suspects will be there: the band (Michael Graham, Bill Hinds, Doug Kahan, and Jeffrey Perkins) plus Bob Britt on guitar. Bob is an amazing and sought-after guitar player who is currently working with John Fogerty, and he brings a wealth of talent, tone, ability, and ideas to the table.

I love working with other guitar players (especially great ones) and feel very fortunate to have another opportunity to work with Bob. It’s nice to have contrast and diversity…things can feel a little one-dimensional without some other guitar ideas flying around. Bob’s ideas are always good ones, and he executes them flawlessly.

Billy Maddox will be behind the console, as always, barking orders and making sure we are all sufficiently humiliated in order to submit completely to his megalomaniacal will. Please, if you have a shred of decency in your heart, I’m begging you to stay tuned to this board for cries of help and rescue. (It might be a good idea to start training an extraction team now.)

Okay, okay…the last paragraph was a joke. He’s a great guy. He signs our checks! (Well, that’s what he makes us call them when we spend the t-shirt vouchers he pays us with.)

Okay…that was a joke, too. There is no band without Billy. If you think of the band as a bunch of three-year-olds with wet, saggy breeches and chocolate smeared all over their faces (and that would be giving us the benefit of the doubt), Billy is the harried school-marm frantically screaming and waving a ruler in front of the class. He and Paul create extraordinary songs (we are awfully fortunate to get songs so good they pretty much play themselves), he is the arrangement and sonic “traffic-cop” (not an easy job), he creates an environment that’s fun and relaxed, and he does it all with a lot of grace. So consider this a thank you to Paul and Billy both. I am a lucky man indeed.

So here ends the first post of the Eighth Album Blog. Stay tuned for more ramblings from me, and I’m sure the rest of the peanut gallery will post (rebut?) as they are able.

Looking forward…

Bill, the guitar player
paulthorn.com