Nov. 21, 2023
Last week I had the pleasure of working in the studio with my old friend Nacha Mendez, producing a new album she's recording as part of a residency at Jack Straw Cultural Center here in Seattle.
Nacha and I first met as co-workers in New York City in 1988. She had come there from Santa Fé, and I was just about to move there. She returned to New Mexico a year or two later, and we ran into each other on the street (it's a small town) and soon began working on songs together. We eventually became neighbors and recorded a demo tape together as Dueto Le Mômo. That project went nowhere, and Nacha focused on becoming a solo artist – a much better plan. Several years later, she asked me to produce a couple of her albums.
I don't often get to wear my Record Producer hat, but I enjoy it when I do. It's not easy to explain exactly what "producing" means for people who aren't in the music biz, and it doesn't help that my skills are a little vague. I'm not a particularly good musician, so I rarely play on sessions myself, though sometimes I do. And I'm not much of a techie, so I usually leave the knob twiddling to the recording engineer, though I've been known to do some editing. I don't have an identifiable trademark "sound" to impose on anyone, like a Phil Spector or Daniel Lanois. I believe my main job is to help the artist realize their vision and sound the way they want to sound.
Mostly what I do is listen intently, acting as an extra set of ears for the artist and engineer, and offering opinions and suggestions without really telling anyone what to do. And sometimes I act as a kind of mediator/therapist/coach, hopefully encouraging people to do better without discouraging them if they fall short. I also enjoy helping connect the artist to other musicians who I think will be a good fit with the project. Very often I get to work with excellent musicians and engineers with years of experience, and I end up learning something from them.
One of the other things I love is getting to work with artists who make music that is very different from the kind I make myself. In fact, it has been a long time since I produced an album by an artist doing any kind of experimental music. Aside from producing Nacha’s Latin singer-songwriter music, I also got to produce two albums of folk and country music from the Ozarks, one of them for a film soundtrack. I love working on these other kinds of music, although nobody would typically associate me with them.
I find producing records to be quite interesting and rewarding work, and I'd like to do more of it. So if you have a recording project in mind, I just might be available…