[kj] (OT) More from Sam Roberts about KJ and working with Youth

[Rheinhold Squeegee]

http://blogs.montrealgazette.com/2014/02/10/sam-roberts-the-complete-conversation/

A fairly interesting read, but I'll include the salient section here for the ADD among us:

Gazette: How much of that had to do with Youth (Lo-Fantasy’s producer, and bassist for Killing Joke)?

Roberts: I think a lot. I think we were ready for 
it, too. It makes us sound like a bunch of teenagers, really (laughs): 
“We were ready for the challenge!” I don’t want to say we’re slow 
learners, but we’ve made a few records, we’ve been in the studio, we 
know what brings the best out of each individual member of the band, and
 then as a collective, how to dredge the best performances out of 
everybody. And I swear, every time we finished making a record, we’d 
say, “OK, next time, guys — next time we’re gonna do this and we’re 
gonna do this.” It’s almost like an immediate reaction to what we’ve 
done. Once you realize that you can’t change what you’ve done, we 
automatically start thinking about the next thing, and how we’re going 
to go about it differently and how we’re going to implement all these 
lessons learned. From the missteps to the things we did right, and 
parlay them into the next album. But then you have somebody like Youth. 
It’s even the way he presents himself: he’s like, “I’m your record 
producer.” He’s there to create a mindset, to create an environment, 
more than he is to nitpick over which notes fit with which notes or 
which frequencies create the best sonic template for a song. He’s there 
to destabilize, disrupt, rebuild a band in a way they’ve never seen 
themselves before. And we didn’t sign on for that knowingly — it just 
became apparent that this is how he works. When he came over from 
England the first time, we were here for a week, in sub-zero Montreal 
temperatures, locked away in our rehearsal space with him. And he would 
just sit there rolling cigarettes and poke holes in everything we’d 
done. I had been working on the record for a year up until that point, 
so obviously my first reaction was to think, “How soon is this guy gonna
 leave?” (Laughs) That was the first day. I was like, “This is not what I
 signed up for at all.” And he’d say stuff like, “Well, the bridge isn’t
 the bridge. The bridge is the chorus. The chorus isn’t even the chorus.
 That’s the pre-chorus.” And you’d have all this British terminology. He
 refused to call a bridge a bridge — it had to be the middle eight. We’d
 say “the bridge,” and he’d say, “No, it’s the middle eight.” So it’s 
all this stuff. But he also had this complete irreverence. He never just
 said, “You know what? You’ve done a great job. Just keep doing what 
you’re doing.” He’s like, “I can’t believe that’s the chorus. That word —
 what’s that word? Shapeshifters? That’s a good word. That’s the chorus.
 That’s what I want to hear. I want to hear ‘Shapeshifters.’ ” How many 
times? “Over and over and over again!” (Laughs) It’s like, take the hook
 and bash people between the eyes with it.

Gazette: Well, that’s total Killing Joke.

Roberts: Exactly! And I’m always precious with the 
hook. It’s like, you just put it here, and then maybe again here. But 
Youth knows how to make music that will resonate, for lack of a better 
word, with everybody, and make them want to dance, make them want to 
sing, even if it’s that one word that gets stuck in your head for the 
rest of the day. He’s not afraid of that. And I have a natural 
reluctance towards including that sort of arrangement or composition. 
I’ll always just put it there one time, so that that one person who’s 
stoned enough will say, “Did you hear that guitar part?” But it only 
happens the one time. That’s always been my approach to hooks. But not 
Youth, man.

Gazette: Well, Youth’s approach sounds more akin to 
your live approach. Not that your live approach sacrifices subtlety 
entirely, but it’s more of a hard-grooving band on stage.

Roberts: Absolutely. And Youth’s just like, “Well, 
let’s harness this and let’s build the songs around these hooks and 
these ideas.” So after a week he’d essentially thrown the whole thing 
out, turned it upside down, but then he left to go on tour with Killing 
Joke again. And so we just took his suggestions, his ideas and we 
started to implement them. And we had two months till he was coming back
 to actually track the record. And yeah, the songs basically underwent a
 transformation in that time, until we could own those ideas, in a way. 
Because before it was just, throw everything into a pot, and the songs 
were popping here and all over the place, and they had no real shape to 
them anymore. So we had to reconfigure them, but with Youth’s vision now
 included in it. And so we were ready to go in the studio, and then he 
came in and he’s like, “I don’t really like that bit.” (Laughs) Are you 
kidding me, man? That’s your idea. “No, that doesn’t work.” That’s one 
beautiful thing about him, one of the many: he didn’t just get off on 
being the one whose idea it was. “No, it’s not very good. Let’s try it 
this way.” So things were constantly changing. There are a million 
different versions of this album out there somewhere, in some digital 
never-neverland, because it was constantly, constantly transforming.

Gazette: Maybe that’s what helped every song have 
its own individual character. It’s still an album, not a piecemeal 
collection of tracks, but each song seems to reflect the light in a 
different way.

Roberts: That would be the culmination of a long 
time … (pauses) well, not a long time. A day. But you can do a lot in a 
day when you’re tracking like we were, because you can go, “OK, we’ll 
change this. Play it like this.” And then when we listened to playback …
 Youth listens to playback at about 120 decibels, so you actually have 
no idea. EVERYTHING sounds good at 120 decibels! I mean, once you get 
over the shock — you can feel wind coming off the speakers and we’d be 
dancing, celebrating the victory at the end of each day, but I didn’t 
know what was really in there. What was the mixer going to hear when 
they got down to it? (Laughs) Like, “OK, here’s the vocal take, here’s 
the guitar take” — it was never about that. It was about the whole, the 
effect of the whole. And fortunately, it was all right. (Laughs) 
Fortunately, in the end it was OK, but he really just came in there and 
we created our own world for 12 days. A world where nothing was certain.
 A world where you couldn’t take anything for granted, whether it be 
your abilities or whatever. And it wasn’t a negative thing: it was just 
that you had to be ready to change all the time. And that was a very 
different approach to recording music than I’ve ever been a part of 
before.

Gazette: How hard was it to let … well, especially 
somebody like Youth in, but just in general to let anyone into your 
circle? When I think of tight bands — tight in terms of camaraderie — 
you guys are right up there. So for another artist to come in, other 
than someone like Joseph (Donovan, the Montreal-based producer of 
Chemical City and Love at the End of the World) …

Roberts: Oh yeah, Joe’s in our band, basically. In 
our minds. But I think that’s what we need. It’s funny, because there’s 
always that moment at the end of demoing where we have that conversation
 with ourselves about who’s going to produce this record, and our first 
answer is always, “Let’s just do it ourselves. Because, well, this 
doesn’t sound half bad — we’re almost there. If we just polish it up a 
bit, we should be able to do it.” But then there’s that moment of 
realization that we can’t make those decisions for ourselves. We can’t 
challenge ourselves enough, the way somebody like Youth can, or the way 
(Collider producer) Brian Deck did in his way. We need that outside 
influence, as uncomfortable as it is. And I take your point to heart, 
absolutely: we are a very tight group of people on every level now, and 
it’s hard for somebody to just come in now and be a part of it. A real 
contributing, fully fledged voice in that circle. It’s difficult. But 
not for Youth, because Youth doesn’t give a shit. (Laughs) Youth takes 
over. Youth is the show.

Gazette: So are you destined to work with only very strong-minded alpha personalities as producers?

Roberts: I think in a way, but … (pauses) no, no, 
they have to do it the right way. I think we would balk at egomaniac 
taskmasters. I don’t think we would function like that. Youth has a very
 different way about him.

Gazette: Yeah, and I didn’t mean to imply he’s a steamroller.

Roberts: Oh, he is! (Laughs) He is, but he does it 
in a good way. He’s very much like that. It’s very hard to argue with 
him, because he plays bass in a band with Paul McCartney (the 
electronica duo the Fireman)! Just that fact alone negates so much of 
what you could possibly argue about.

Gazette: Almost more than that, I’m sure you have to
 have a lot of confidence to play with Jaz Coleman in Killing Joke. He’s
 hardly a shrinking violet.

Roberts: Yeah, and Youth’s the kid in Killing Joke. 
He’s the young one. He gets what our drummer gets, that unfortunate 
role. But to us, he’s been on tour with Joy Division and he’s made 
albums with the Verve, and he’s regaling us with these stories of all 
the bands that we grew up listening to, and still listen to, and admire,
 and he was there. He was in the thick of it. And he’s very, very humble
 about the whole thing. He’s not an egomaniac. But he’s incredibly 
strong-willed when it comes to expecting out of you as a musician what 
at this point you ought to expect. You’re making a real record. He’s 
like, “I’m a record producer. We’re making a real record here.” And you 
had to be prepared to take your lumps along the way. Things like, 
“That’s cabaret, man. That’s lame!” What does that mean? What does it 
mean to say “that’s cabaret” about a guitar solo or whatever? I don’t 
know, but I don’t like it. It doesn’t make me feel good. So I guess I’ll
 try it differently this time!

Gazette: Was there anything he pushed you guys to do that you felt just went too far, that you had to scale back?

Roberts: I think that thing about the hook. I think 
that that, for me, was the big tension. And then there was this other 
phenomenon: “the jams,” as he called them, where at the end of a long 
day, when we were all pretty much tapped out of anything musical, he 
would make us jam: basically, taking a chord progression and just 
playing it, letting it eventually develop into a song. And you can tell 
which songs — there are two that made it onto our record. If you listen 
to them now, knowing that, the chords don’t ever change — it’s just the 
dynamic that changes and it’s the same all the way through. And that’s 
because those are actual recordings of us jamming for about half an 
hour, cut up to give them some shape. They had no lyrics, there was no 
melody — it was all just spontaneous, live off the floor, free-flowing 
playing. And then when I went to Spain, to Youth’s studio, afterwards, 
he kept on me: “You gotta work on the jams, man!” I don’t want to work 
on the jams — I want to work on the other 12, 13 songs that are actually
 going to be on this record, and we need to finish them in a week. We 
don’t have much time, we’ve got to get everything ready to send off for 
the mix. “Yeah, I really think you should work on the jams.” (Laughs) 
That was one of the points that he would grind me on, and he would 
never, ever let up. And eventually I said, “You know what? If it’s gonna
 get you off my back about these goddamn jams …” and I would sit and I 
would write in the morning. I would write the words and I would write a 
melody, and we would track it right there. And two of the songs made it 
on the record. They bumped off these other songs that had undergone a 
year’s worth of work, a year’s worth of deliberation, but they just had 
this power that was born out of that moment.

Gazette: Is Golden Hour one of them?

Roberts: Golden Hour is one of them. Good call.

Gazette: My favourite one on the album.

Roberts: (Smacks the table) It’s one of my favourite
 songs on the record too! And I put a lot more work into a lot of other 
songs. That one I wrote staring out over the hillside in Spain from my 
hobbit-hole window — because he designed the studio around Hobbiton, 
Lord of the Rings. He actually did, from sketches. Yeah. There are 
sketches all over the place. I lived in a hobbit hole. It’s not even a 
joke. And I would sit there in my hobbit hole and I wrote Golden Hour 
and another song, which, again, if you listen to it the chords don’t 
change.

Gazette: Which one?

Roberts: The Hands of Love.

Gazette: Ha. Another one of my favourites on there.

Roberts: And that’s Youth! I would never have done that on my own, but he pulled that out of us.

Gazette: We were talking before about the importance
 of rhythm to this album, and the songs head off in a lot of directions.
 How hard was it for Josh and James especially to embrace where this was
 going?

Roberts: Josh loves it, because we get to focus on 
the drums — although I keep threatening to replace him with a drum 
machine: “They’re getting really good these days. They sound really 
good.” James … (pauses) James has this very unique style, so if I write a
 bass line on a demo, he’ll always come back with a counterproposal. And
 Youth is a bass player. So this was either going to be James’s worst 
nightmare or a dream opportunity, really. And it just so happens that 
James and Youth have very, very similar styles of playing. Not to get 
too specific, but they both play with a pick, and they both like really 
digging in. They’re not light bass players. And so Youth really brought 
out the best in James. And he worked very closely with Josh, because 
Youth’s first priority, once the song is a song, is always the drums and
 the bass. And keyboards also. He dragged … no, not dragged — he pulled 
great performances out of everybody in the band. And that is ultimately 
the most important thing that a producer brings to the equation: how to 
pull the best out of everybody. And he really did it, and I think that 
that’s why the record turned out the way that it did.

 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://four.pairlist.net/pipermail/gathering/attachments/20140211/823e3495/attachment.htm