So proud of our friend Tom Healy, who has been announced as one of three finalists for Best Producer in the New Zealand Music Awards for his work on Brightly Painted One. Tom recorded us in a small room-within-a-room hed recently built inside the network of corridors and passageways known as The Lab Recording Studio. With an air of fresh paint and chipboard, it was unnervingly still in there. We decorated the room with a big painting of a camel in the desert, the stained-glass pyramid lamp from our Vermont Street flat, silk scarves and big cushions, bed spreads and books, trinkets, and a makeshift dividing wall between Alex’s drum kit and Cass’s bass corner. Tom was set up 30 metres away in his little studio room, where he ran long cables between us under the floorboards. After a long weekend of setting up, we started work on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of February, recording the first song of the album, Me at the Museum, You in the Wintergardens with Cass & I together, and Alex adding the drums the next day. It was finished quickly and we moved on. Over the following two weeks, we tracked most of the album in that room-within-a-room, as well as a couple of long days in the big studio assisted by Ollie Harmer. Each morning we arrived in the full-blown summer heat, before heading down the stone steps clad in dusty red carpet, the indescribable aroma of boys arising, the temperature dropping as you sank lower underground, into the fluorescent bulb haven of pastel-clashing walls tacked with posters of the pretty ladies we came to know so well. It took another five months of deliberations, decisions, bringing in friends, adding things and taking them away again, listening sessions, mixing, and re-recording before we came to the final song on the album, White Sheet Lightning, laid down much the same as the first song. Tom added various jangles of electric guitar & atmosphere to the album, small percussive/noise elements you pick up on repeated listens. He played all the tracks through a bunch of amplifiers in the passageways of The Lab, recording that ambience and adding it to the final tracks. Then in July, we finally took all the mixes to York Street studio, where we funnelled all the tracks through the big beautiful Neve desk, and tested for hours the sounds of different compressors to glue it all together. Tom is a great producer because he gets music, first and foremost, in a really broad and awesome way. He listens and seeks out what you are after, as well as being a technical whizz. He worked tirelessly on our album, and I for one know there were many nights he was holed away there, working on the mixes on his own. Thank you Tom - we salute you!
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 01:54:56 +0000
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