Continued from “It is 5 am and you are listening…to Bad Apples.”
When we entered the studio at DB Plus, it was as if we had never left the first time. Though it had been nearly two years since we had been there last, the time in between seemed so inconsequential, it felt like it hadn’t happened. Like the déjà vu of a recurring dream, my consciousness slipped away and I let the atmosphere of the room guide my thoughts through an ephemeral montage of “how did I get here?” - complete with a soundtrack of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.”
This session started off on a much better note than the Home session. It is intimidating to be in the same room as a man who has seen and done the things that Gene Paul has. As musical nobodies, we were obviously thrilled to be able to work with him on our first album. However, we almost let our reticence get the best of us as Gene started to work on “Acid Reflux” first simply because he always goes in alphabetical order. Those of you who are familiar with the tune know that it is the disparate song on Home, an album full of disparity. An instrumental jam totaling nearly six minutes, “Acid Reflux” in no way captures the sound or intentions of Bad Apples as a whole - it was one of the original Apples tunes, done in one take (and since, never successfully replicated) before we knew we were a band, and which we decided to put on the album for posterity and nostalgia’s sake.
Needless to say, Gene was visibly fuming while listening to this tune, thinking he had to master an album full of such nonsense. I finally mustered up the courage to say something.
“Uh, you might not want to start with this one.” Thankfully, the next track alphabetically was “Danny Movefastly,” our pop (soon-to-be) mega-hit.
“This more your style?” Gene asked, the red evaporating from his face as it returned to its normal pale hue.
“Yeah!” we chirped. And all was well from then on.
“This your first album?” Gene asked after the last song was done.
“Yeah!”
“You boys done good.”
The Today Begins at Night session was a much more comfortable experience from the start. Gene definitely remembered us, which was compliment enough. But instead of us being in awe of his presence, we were able to be more interactive with him. He gave us some advice in terms of recording and mixing. Like, a lot of ball breakingly intense advice. So much that he kept giving us a disclaimer. “Don’t get me wrong, this sounds fucking good. I’m just telling you how to make it even fucking better.” Gene curses a lot. It’s charming every time.
One of his points was that we should make the mixes sound more modern. This is a fair point. We drench ourselves in the sounds of the seventies, which is not a bad thing. But Gene wanted a modern sound so that “some asshole with his iPod” could appreciate it without having to actually listen to it. We A/B’d our album with a Maroon 5 demo Gene had worked on. Now, don’t get me wrong, I definitely dig Songs About Jane, but the demo of “Harder to Breathe” just sounded so flat. Everything was mixed almost too evenly, and they compressed the crap out of it. My Apple colleagues and I prefer warm, dynamic sounds over that any day. I don’t care what year it is. “If I took a mix like this to Aretha, she’d tell me to get the fuck out,” Gene even conceded. We appreciated his stance, though. It showed that he repects us as musicians and thinks we deserve to be making money. Gene’s criticism is perhaps the greatest compliment we have ever received.
All in all, we learned a lot more this time around. And goddamn did Gene make the album sound good. I think we made his job a lot easier this time, though. He got his settings up for the first song and was able to use those as an outline for the rest, only making tweaks here and there. For the Home session he was all over the place, twisting multiple knobs and changing patch cables for every song. Hopefully that is testament to the continuity of Today Begins at Night as compared to Home, as well as our growth as musicians, songwriters, and producers. Only time will tell.
-Albis
