Audio Technology, February 4, 2014

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Univ. Woroni Australian Women's Weekly Black+White BMA Magazine The Bulletin Countdown Crowd DB Magazine Drum Media EON Extra Follow Me Gentlemen Inpress Juice Juke Melbourne Beat Men's Style Australia Mint Magazine The Music On The Street Rage Reverb Magazine RAM Reader's Digest Revolver Rhythms Rip It Up Roadrunner Rolling Stone Semper Street Fever Sydney Star Observer Time Off UNSW Tharunka Who Online publications AU Review Australian Stage Music Feeds Scenestr Tone Deaf — WISE UP, GET BACK TO THE ROOTS Steven Mandel managed to make a practise room at 30 Rock sound like a million dollar studio. It just so happened to house Elvis Costello, ?uestlove and The Roots at the time. Paul Tingen These are dark days for lovers of hi-fi audio; over-compressed and over-bright productions are only on the increase. But occasionally, through the pumped-up digital grey, you get an album that caresses the ears, rather than assaults them. Two recent pop albums up for consideration are Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories and Elvis Costello & The Roots’ Wise Up Ghost and Other Songs. Random Access Memories became instantly celebrated for its audiophile approach; helped by a million US dollar recording budget and pre-release mini-movies describing the lengths the French duo went to ensure the album wore analogue 1970s aesthetics on its sleeve. It was an open invitation to return to the expensive, laborious, big studio approach of the pre-digital Golden Age of record production. Topped off with resurrected disco-era icons. Wise Up Ghost and Other Songs, meanwhile, sounds almost as good, with a non-fatiguing natural spaciousness to the sound and arrangements; a gentle, silken high end; a huge yet tight low end; and impressive dynamic range. Its admirable sonic qualities hint at similar working methods and budgets to the Daft Punk epic It turns out, however, that nothing could be further from the truth. The man in the know is Wise Up Ghost’s engineer and mixer, Steven Mandel, who proudly proclaims that he “grew up as an analogue person who loved tape”. Despite his love affair, he explains, Wise Up Ghost was “made without a budget, before a record deal was in place, in a rehearsal room, and entirely in the box, in Pro Tools at 24-bit/48k. It’s not something I’m trying to promote, but I guess the record does have a warm sound, and a sense of expansiveness. “ As Mandel relates the full story of the album’s gestation, it gradually becomes clear that circumstances conspired to create something unusual, including the fact that it was made without a budget, and bizarrely, recorded and mixed for the most part in a tiny dressing room-cum-rehearsal space. It could nonetheless have turned out a mess, and this is the story of how, and why, it didn’t. CROSSOVER PATHS When news broke of the Wise Up Ghost collaboration there was widespread concern that Costello, a British singer-songwriter emerging from the 1970s New Wave movement, was jumping on the latest bandwagon, and that the world was going to witness a Costello-gone-hip hop car crash. In this day and age of extensive genre crossovers, the eyebrow-raising is surprising. Especially given Costello’s long reputation for eclectic collaborations, including with classical music acts like The Brodsky Quartet, all the way to Burt Bacharach, and Paul McCartney. And this could be one of his best. Costello’s intense, hoarse vocals fit seamlessly with The Root’s relaxed but deep muscular grooves. If anything, both Costello and The Roots sound revitalised, demonstrating a connection that usually takes decades to foster. Though, in truth, it did take a couple of years. The collaboration originated when the two parties met at Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. The Roots, led by drummer Ahmir ‘?uestlove’ Thompson, have been the Jimmy Fallon show house band since the beginning of 2009, and later that year backed Costello on a version of his song High Fidelity, chosen by Mandel. Another year went by, and Costello was back on the show to promote his album National Ransom, playing an album track with the Roots and Guitarist John McLaughlin. The stirring combination of wordy song and ballsy funk grooves was an indication of things to come. And it just kept happening. Next up, Mandel recorded Costello and The Roots playing the Squeeze song Someone Else’s Heart, for a Squeeze tribute album. Everyone was vibed on the result, and the ideas first emerged of Costello and The Roots doing an album together. Costello visited the Fallon show yet again in February 2012 to play some Springsteen songs, with The Roots backing him once more. By then, the collaboration was merely a matter of timing. The first steps involved a typical 21st century long-distance approach, with Costello cooking up ideas at his home studio in Vancouver, called Hookery-Crookery West, and uploading them so ?uestlove and Mandel could create their own takes in New York and fling them back Costello’s way. Once the songs were fleshed out, a batch of recording sessions followed in New York, Vancouver and Philadelphia. “It was an untraditional way of making a record,” remarks Mandel. “Because there was no record deal, there also was no deadline. So we were doing this at our leisure, when we were inspired. We would send things to and fro, and then haphazardly recorded the album in three cities. Three songs ended up being recorded live in the studio: The Puppet Has Cut His Strings, If I Could Believe and Sugar Won’t Work, mainly with Ahmir, Elvis, bassist Pino Palladino and keyboardist Ray Angry, but the other songs were mostly recorded one musician at a time. “In general, we were building things up piece by piece and working with a cut and past montage-type approach to producing. It was somewhat new for Elvis, but for Ahmir and I, it’s second nature. Maybe we were trying to prove a point by throwing paint on a wall and then removing things. Elvis called it collage. You have these splatters of paint on the canvas, and pick and choose which you find the most interesting in a long process of arranging and editing, muting and un-muting, and decision-making. Even friends of mine who know a lot about how records are made don’t realise how the people who make them listen to it. The lead single Walk Us Uptown is 202 seconds long and we carefully considered what happens in each an every moment. I mean, 202 seconds is a short time, but when you are creating something, it’s much longer. “We are shooting for the space, air and feel of the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album from 1970. We intended to make the songs very sparse, with just drums, bass, piano, guitar and vocals. A lot of the greatest stuff happens in the silence. Having said that, we ultimately ended up filling more space than we intended, because it’s a constant battle to try to keep things sparse, and yet do the songs justice. If we felt a song needed horns, we’d add them but tried to keep them as sparse as possible.” NO LOSS FOR WORDS Mandel not only engineered the album, but also co-produced and co-wrote it, with Costello and ?uestlove. And in manning the DAW, Mandel played a crucial role in the creation of the album’s apparent analogue aesthetic. Mandel’s own analogue roots can be credited to the 1970s and ‘80s music he listened to as a kid - with a particular interest in Elvis Costello - and to his time as an intern at Electric Lady Studios in New York, where he began working in 1996. Fate met him quickly, because in 1998, when Mandel had graduated to assistant engineer, neo-soul singer D’Angelo came to record his second album Voodoo at Electric Lady. ?uestlove was one of the producers, Mandel and he hit it off, and not long after the D’Angelo sessions Mandel found himself in Philadelphia as The Roots’ main engineer. He has since worked almost exclusively with The Roots, and also engineers and mixes many of ?uestlove’s productions. He’s led a charmed life, but this particular collaboration was perhaps Mandel’s most fateful coincidence. Unlike many of his studio colleagues, Mandel wasn’t a closet musician, but instead, he recalls: “The thing that got me into music and then engineering was lyric writing. I’m not a drummer or a guitar player, but a lyricist, and Elvis was a big influence on my lyric writing. From there I started looking into how to record. So in the first part of my life I’d been listening to Elvis’ music, and the second part has been working with ?uestlove and The Roots, so I guess I was qualified to work on this collaboration! I was in a unique situation in that I know Elvis’ back catalogue inside out, and am intimately familiar with the way The Roots and ?uestlove work. The challenge was to turn the idea of them working together into a true collaboration, rather than The Roots just being Elvis’ backing band or him singing over beats. For me it was obviously a lot of fun to meet Elvis. If he’d asked me to engineer an album for him I probably would have been too intimidated to even attempt it, but I somehow knew how to make the combination of him and The Roots work. If I had contributed to the making of some kind of failed Elvis Costello record, I would have never forgiven myself.” THE PATCHWORKER Mandel was the unsung hero at the centre of the entire process, and he worked endless hours piecing different elements together, constructing and deconstructing the tracks, suggesting and working on arrangements and getting the sonics right, in a process that mirrored the manner in which The Roots and he had been working for many years. In addition, Mandel put his encyclopaedic knowledge of Costello’s previous work to good use. He ended up with a co-writing credit on 13 of the 15 songs on the deluxe version of the album. For Mandel, as a Costello fan, this was a dream come true. “Elvis wrote all the lyrics for the album,” explained Mandel. “And Ahmir and Elvis co-wrote the music, and I provided the initial ideas for some of the songs. For example, Wise Up Ghost is based on a loop of Elvis’s song Can You Be True from his album North (2003). Similarly, the song Tripwire is based on a loop of the intro of the song Satellite from Spike (1989), which I had processed to the point where even Elvis didn’t recognise where it had come from. Many of the loops that provided the start-off point for the songs were based on samples taken from when Elvis played with The Roots on the Fallon show. They played six songs from that. Everybody has been focussing on Elvis re-using some of his lyrics but it’s also really interesting where the music for these songs really came from. “The making of this album was incredibly collaborative. As an engineer you can suggest things without saying anything, just by selecting what you play to people, or editing or processing things, and people will react to that. And, of course, you spend many hours on your own with the session, working on the sounds and changing things around and so on. After having recorded or been given many ideas and parts of songs, I was left by myself for much of the time to make many of the writing and editing decisions and trying to make everything work.” UP TOP AT 30 ROCK Remaining text and scanner-error corrections to come... Audio Technology, No. 8, February 4, 2014 Paul Tingen interviews Steven Mandel about recording Wise Up Ghost. Images Cover and page scans.

External links

• Audiotechnology.com.au
• issuu.com