When everything is recorded in the same room, you have to manufacture the stereo balance.” “It’s not a matter of whether anyone is cool with bleed or not, it’s that, when bleed comes into the picture, you have to make it work for you. They wanted to record it entirely live, and since Miner Street is a small room, and Luke was to play piano with the band, we’d have to record all guitars and amps in the room. When it came time to record the second half of the song-the part that is more about the live band-we were saddled with a new challenge. And now that things were comfortably in motion, James added an abstract ambient Casio SK1 track, and a track on the Tack Piano, to balance out the acoustic guitar, an element of Luke’s original concept. Luke’s pass, though simpler, was much more effective. Max started with an ambient organ pass that Luke worried wasn’t living up to that. After such a natural start, the challenge of creating impromptu elements worthy of surrounding those things was big. In the song it’s this respectul experience, this process of carrying a space for the thing that you’re nurturing and putting out into the world.”Īdrianne’s melody, lyrics and performance were all excellent and incredibly compelling on their own. The natural cyclical process of when things decay and go back into the earth. “The song is about the mother.the mother feeding and giving her milk. She played the first 2 verses and choruses and left a long trail of finger picking after where the transition to full-band performance would take over. Both in figure 8 and angled 90 degrees to one another, the top mic, our beloved Neumann U67 was angled toward her voice, and the bottom AKG 414 was angled toward the guitar. So we had to set up Adrianne to sing and play through a pair of the studio’s large diaphragm condensers. The kind folks at Rode Microphones had sent us everything we would need for the day, only… there was a bit of a miscommunication in timing, and they showed up a few hours after we started. It would begin as one and end as the other. It was nonetheless time to make decisions, and ironically, doing both was actually no creative compromise. He agreed with the band that the song Mother had the potential to be performed as either an abstract collage of elements hovering around a solo acoustic guitar and vocal, or as a swirly jamming band. ![]() Those performances (both were recorded with a single ribbon mic) were remarkable and highlighted a wide array of possible approaches. The day began with Luke, Buck, James and Max listening to Adrianne’s impromptu performance of the two song options she had in mind. But I know they’re really open artistically, so we’re all in it together” You don’t want to step on anybodies toes, it’s their music. I didn’t know if I would be able to have presense of mind to help them make it happen. “I had just got back from Europe, and I was like, fried.really tired. But maybe, for the first time in our series’ history, we’d have to make it entirely about them and not us-and we were ok with that. ![]() The anticipation and enthusiasm that come through dreaming with a band and their guests beforehand has always felt directly related to the things we love about the final product. Having produced over 50 episodes and countless albums outside of Weathervane projects, planning has only ever made our recordings better, both creatively and technically. To some degree, it seemed they avoided any planning whatsoever which, as you can imagine, made us a little nervous. Luke and the band agreed that they didn’t want to overplan the song or the session in advance of recording the episode. Their music is the product of terrific musicianship, Lenker’s remarkable songwriting and voice, and a group-wide desire to share and support one another in their collective creative pursuits. Luke suggested Big Thief, a band he’d been touring with in 2015, led by songwriter Adrianne Lenker. So naturally, when we were connected to Luke by Austin Vaughn, drummer for past Shaking Through episodes with Pavo Pavo and Cassandra Jenkins, we were excited to hear what kind of artist Luke would have in mind for Shaking Through, and what his approach would be. To many of us here, 2012’s “A Different Ship,” produced with Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, etc.), is one of the great records, if not one of the “most overlooked” of the decade. Luke Temple has been making music under his own name, and with the incredibly imaginative Here We Go Magic since 2008.
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