As far as your home recordings went, would you say that their success is in some way a result of your friendship with the producer Brian McTernan (Converge, Thrice, Texas Is the Reason, Cave In, Circa Survive)?
Of course. Brian and I played together in several bands. We’ve been best friends since we were like 11. We played in a band together around here [in Washington, DC] called Ashes for a while, I played drums and he played guitar. Then when we moved up to Boston we did a band called Miltown which was really short lived, I think it lasted only a year and a half, but we were both playing guitar in that. So yeah, we’re just bros. He’s my 3 a.m. phone call when I’m freakin’ out and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
So what was the learning process like for you?
I don’t know. It’s weird because the production thing came naturally, like working with songs and stuff, engineering is a whole different art form that I’m still trying to get my head around. I learned a lot from Kolderie, that dude is a freakin’ master. I would say it’s an ongoing thing for me. The thing that I try not to lose sight of is that at the end of the day, it’s the song that matters. So, if I’m having trouble with engineering, I try not to let it cloud what I am really there to do, and I think that’s been the lucky thing. There’s some stuff that I did in the early days where maybe the drums didn’t sound perfect, or maybe the vocal harmonies were off, or I used the wrong microphone, but the song was great and it got the band a deal and now I’m doing their full-length, or something like that. I just try to always remember that, at the end of the day, it’s about the music, not the technical aspect.
What goes into producing a record and doing it well for you?
Blood, sweat and tears. A lot of hard work and making the bands do a lot of hard work. It’s typically a pretty long day at my place and it’s all work intensive. It’s basically a whole series of decisions that we make along the way that lead us to, hopefully, a great end product, but there’s a lot of second-guessing, like the changing of a melody or trying a different lyric. I think that as long as you’re conscious of everything the whole time – paying attention and listening, and making sure it sounds the way you want it to sound – I think you’re good. A lot of stuff gets fleshed out in pre-production, which is about a week of every record for me, where it’s sort of set up band practice style and we’re going through the songs and changing arrangements, and changing melodies, and changing keys, and changing drum parts and sort of just making the songs work. And then, of course, every band is completely different from one another so you have to step outside yourself too and make sure you’re doing the right thing for the band. None of my records sound the same because I’m always like, this wouldn’t sound good on Panic[! At The Disco], but it would sound great on Cute Is What We Aim For, or whatever.
