Performance Production: The Civil Wars' "Poison & Wine"

Of all the ideas proffered for the decline of the record business I'd have to say it's people like me and some of the music we've produced that are most to blame.  If early commercial recordings were about capturing performances, and everything after The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper was about a combination of performance and production illusion, somewhere along the way we settled for illusion alone.  I understand the seduction of illusion and magic, the whole wizard of Oz thing, playing the role of the mastermind behind the curtain pulling music out of thin air.  It's god-like and very tempting to the soul.  But the Oz-like producer immersed in Pro Tools led to the thinly-worn joke of the producer saying to the singer/artist: "Let me swab your cheek for DNA and I'll have your record ready for you in two months."  Funny, but not funny.  As it turns out, what people really like is recordings of performances and not evidence of how industrious and intricately clever producers are.

Now that I've accepted some personal blame, let me assign a little to songs and artists.  There is some sort of universal production law at play: To the degree that songs and performances do not deliver a powerful emotional connection, record producers set about compensating for the absence, creating every sort of musical counterfeit for the essence of great artistry and songwriting.  It's what we do.  We seek wholeness, even if our 100% production isn't really 100% artistically nutritious.  Bottom line is that compelling performances of artful songs ought to do the majority of the heavy-lifting and not the production.  

In the last several years I've gone back to this idea as a "first thing."  My job is setting the stage for, encouraging, and capturing a great performance.  Seems to me this is at the heart of lasting record production.  Maybe the best, recent example of this performance production focus is The Civil Wars, Poison & Wine.  Joy Williams and John Paul White make up this enigmatic duo of sultry, southern-gothic heartache.  They are mostly two voices and an acoustic guitar -- sometimes a piano.  My idea was to take a combined direct/ambient sonic picture of them performing songs they already knew and loved.  If I could do this successfully, I knew we'd have something good and right.  

The first thing was to put them in a space where music can thrive.  We used the sanctuary of our 100 year old church-house -- some carpet but mostly heart-pine floors and a twenty foot ceiling.  Next, they sang and made music.  Engineer Richie Biggs and I recorded it -- maybe three passes of each song.  We stopped now and again for a noisy train in the distance, or to comment on what was good or what might be improved.  In two sessions we had nine keeper songs.  I listened through all the performances, made notes, and then comped the performances together just as I might a lead vocal.  There was no click track and all the mics bled into one another.  I went for mostly complete performances but didn't pass up a better performance of an out chorus or instrumental section when it presented itself. 

Thankfully I learned multitrack comping from producer Steven Soles back in the early eighties.  He told me it was the way he and T-Bone Burnett made records.  Soles was in Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue with T-Bone, and the two of them, along with David Mansfield made three records together as The Alpha Band.  We were cutting on 2" tape.  Soles made a map of the song's sections then listened to the three or four takes we had of each song (yes, that's 10 to 15 rolls of tape).  Once the best sections were selected Soles had the engineer cut the 2" multi-track master into intro/vs/chorus and every sub-division combination thereof.  These very long pieces of tape were then taped to the control room glass window, labeled, and then carefully reassembled on the reel into a song.  Now we had a new master. 

This is essentially what I did with the mult-track Pro Tools sessions with no click or grid.  On tape you always try to cut on a spike, like a snare drum.  In cutting together an acoustic performance with vocals like "Poison and Wine" you cut on guitar bass notes at the start of a phrase or backbeat strums that sit between the vocal melody.  Because there is no click, when inserting a new section from another take, you often have to move all tracks on the left or right of your edit very slightly to compensate for the natural, fluctuating time.  Essentially you use your ears to determine timing.  And no matter how difficult or antiquated cutting off the grid in Pro Tools may seem, it is nothing compared to cutting tape, an act which does not tolerate error or offer any mercy.  After this project I regained my fearlessness in cutting performances together.  Clicks are over-rated.  

Once The Civil Wars and uber-manager Nate Yetton approved the final performances we all gathered back at the studio with musical friends Jerry McPherson (guitar), Tim Lauer (keyboards), and Ken Lewis (percussion).  Our goal was to listen together until we heard any additional musical ideas.  If we did, we pursued them.  But just because we pursued ideas, did not mean we kept any of them.  If at any point the performance resisted adding a part or sound we quickly abandoned the idea.  In the case of the single "Poison & Wine" we ended up with anonymous, intersecting pads, bass drum, an ambient snare pattern, and low end bass notes.  The goal was to enhance the extraordinary performance arc that already existed.  Richie Biggs prepared the final mixes and we all weighed in for a timely finish.  Artists take note: This is the kind of performance that producers are looking for.  Give us something in this family and we won't screw around with your song as much.  Poison & Wine appeared on Grey's Anatomy last fall and the "making of" and "official" videos on You Tube now have over 100,000 views.  I've included the "making of" vid above created by Sam Ashworth so you can watch some of the actual performance of the song as we recorded it.  A link to iTunes for purchase of the single is in the iMix to the left of the page.  A full EP download is available at the Amazon link to the right. 

The Gear We Used:

Joy Williams sang through a Heil PR20 mic into a Neve 1079 mic pre with a Distressor compressor in the LA2A mode.  John Paul White sang through a Shure SM7 with the same vocal chain.  We used a Neumann KM84 and/or AT4040 on the acoustic guitar and a direct box -- both going into API 512 Mic preamps and Tube Tech CL1A compressors.  We also added a Fender Tweed amp on the guitar with a Shure SM57 into a Neve 1064.  Joy played my Yamaha C-7 piano into a matched pair of Earthworks TC-30K mics into Avalon M5 mic preamps and the SSL G384 Stereo Compressor.  Room mics were Manley Gold Refs into Universal Audio LA-610s.
 

Official Poison & Wine video

The Civil Wars on Myspace

Steven Soles Bio

T-Bone Burnett Bio

Comments

[Andrew Camp]

This is like manna sent to this young artist/arranger. My mind is officially blown.

[Reid Davis]

I so utterly love this way of working (or at least the results of this way of working) I cannot tell you. And I knew once you got through the first 2/3 grafs that T Bone was going to come up. He is the master of mic bleed, of sympathetic vibrations, of overtones and resonances.

I remember when I first hear him talk (ahem: preach) about all that I thought it was ridiculously outdated in an era of click tracks, immaculately clean isolation and building tracks part by painstaking part. Gillian Welch, "O Brother" and many other amazing records later, you might say that I've come around.

[Ryland]

This is an great post. Exactly what I come here for. Thanks!

[Keith]

YES YES YES!!!

I am as guilty as anyone of playing god with record production but there is such a hunger in me to produce this kind of music. I'll admit, I feel far down the road of slick production that when I try to jump ship and record something pure and emotional, I have trouble fighting the urge to clean it up.

Just a few weeks ago I was recording a great song with a lot of vibe and heart. I punched after the bridge and didn't realize that the click was not on. I was SOO energized by the performance and how dynamics, skill and TEMPO SHIFT played into the energy of the song that I decided to leave it. For me it was like the moment at the end of Shawshank Redemption when he breaks free from prison (the shot with the rain.) It felt really good to be there that day.

I guess, I'm just trying to say THANKS for posting this in such detail. It is so incredibly inspiring!!

[Judah]

Well said, couldn't agree more with your perspective. The soul of the artist is what the listener perceives foremost in good music. The arrangement should clarify, not confuse/distort/overwhelm the vibe.

[Don Chaffer]

Before I moved to Nashville, on the last day in the old studio in Kansas City, after everything was moved out, my engineer, Greg and I sat on the floor of the empty control room and reminisced. We realized that our favorite moments in that space were all live tracking moments, especially the ones with no click, and no headphones- people in a room with instruments and voices. They were always the times that I felt the actual magic of doing what I love to do, which is to make music.

At those times, yes, there are physical realities: overtones, resonances, shared air. And yes, there are musical realities: one musician hears another and responds, and the shape of the whole thing takes an unexpected communal shape. But beyond even those things, there was often another intangible reality at play. People close their eyes. They bathe in the decay of the last note as the song dies off. It feels both very human and superhuman at the same time. There is a real sense of soul, or spirit, in the room.

God, I love that stuff.

Anyway, good one, Charlie. Nice to hear stories like this one.

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Lovely stuff, and I agree about 'you just can't stop' as the one to have, although I have never been able to cope with this name nonsense, so far as I'm concerned they'll always just be 'The Beat'.

[Matt Brock]

Brilliant, Charlie. Thanks to you and your team for such a beautiful project.

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