Jordan Brooke Hamlin: Recording Anthropologically

How did you make the transition from being a musician to being an engineer?

What's funny is, even now, I feel those in the same place in my experience. I wasn't necessarily thinking of them in such different lanes, because I was already a generalist, and sort of still am. I have to make peace with that. I feel like I'm always fighting an apology about being interested in many things, and not focusing and being great at something. It seems like that's bad, but that's my proclivity. So, the transition; it's not like I left one, and now do the other or vice versa. When I'm collaborating with somebody on a project, it's like, “What do you need me to do? How am I best utilized on this project with these people and their skills?”

When you're producing and playing music for a client, do you have another engineer there?

I've probably got five things in my production pipeline right now in various stages. Some I produced, engineered, and mixed. I'm planning one coming up where I need it to go well and quickly. I don't need to be at the board, because I have a finite amount of bandwidth. So, I can engineer and produce at the same time, but those are two different parts of my brain. If I'm thinking about a converter error, I can't think about the emotional experience of the vocalist. I need to bring somebody in who I can communicate with about what I want to hear.

Do you have a roster of people you pull from?

I have a roster. I've got a very intense database. I use Airtable to run my whole life, and other apps that talk to it. This is really demented…

You're speaking my love language.

Yeah, I love this. There's so much to keep track of, whether it's crediting, technical data, schedule, or budget. I'm often working on projects that don't have a project administrator, so I have to have some touchstone resource so that I don’t have to memorize all the details of all the projects. I've got all these different tables that talk to each other. I make filtered views. If somebody wants a female drummer, I'm like, “Oh, let me send you these names – I already have their emails and phone numbers.”

Have you always been an organized person?

I'm thorough. The level of thoroughness that is satisfying to me doesn't always match up with everybody else. It can look slow, because people are often willing to push past things to just get it done. Often, on record making particularly, they're like, “I just need the track.” They’re skipping past what, to me, is the most important part of it. It feels messy and unstable unless I have information that I can access and reference. I need to make sure we're eliminating blind spots. I think it's a stress response. Some of the people who I think are “capital O Organized” are organizing from a different spiritual place.

I'm organized, because if I'm not I'm off picking wildflowers in the forest. Have you read Chris Schlarb’s On Recording [Tape Op #129]? It's full of wisdom about the recording industry and how to treat your clients. He talks about the cheap, fast, and good axiom – choose two, you can't have all three.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the ways that we're making music. I think about it on a generational level; like whoever's here now and how we're going to be thought of. I want to make the best thing that these people can make in here. So often the ceiling is set before the artist does their thing, because of how many days they have in the studio, and how prepared they are going in. I'm trying to play with a different format. I have camps where I'll cherry-pick my favorite artists and writers and think about their combinations, and then put them up at my studio for a week. We have this feral clubhouse just off Music Row. We’re on 20 acres out here. It's a different vibe. If I can get people who want to invest directly in artists, and companies who want to provide mental health access to artists, it’s a wheel with a lot of spokes. We did one with a grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission where MOXE matched the fund. On another one a private donor matched funds. Any way that we can pay the bills and do the kind of stuff I'm trying to do. Once I go public with it, and tell people about it and say, “If you want to support this, you can.” I hope that that can be a bigger part of the calendar as things go on.

Talk a little bit about the design of the space.

I started designing the space, sketching it out in Google SketchUp, and then I took it to a draftsman friend of mine. There are three big rooms: What we call the gym, the tracking room, and the dining room. There are hexagonal vaulted ceilings, and then I've got the curtain in here. I love the menu that I can choose from. In the pre-call, I'll map out some scenarios, like, “Oh, my gosh, you know what would be cool? I bet the guitarist wants line of sight. So, I'm going to put him in the tracking room. But it'd also be cool to amp into the gym to get that ‘verb, because nobody's in there.” I love thinking, “Where's everybody going to be? How can I mostly utilize these naturally occurring things and make sure the artist still feels like they're the reason why we're here?”

Obviously, a ton of time and finances went into the development of this place. What are some things you learned, in terms of funding?

I didn't do it any sort of traditional way. I was working out of the basement of my house, and it's much of the same gear. One of the guitars was one my mom bought my dad when he was in high school. I've been collecting this gear. I was being malleable in my mind about what's considered a commercial studio, what's a home studio, and what's a residential studio. In my situation, I was faced with the challenge of not having the finances that we needed to finish the project. I started using what I had and getting creative. So, I made this cloud, which is pretty fun: It’s just Home Depot wire that I soldered together. I added bamboo reeds, hand-dyed black, and then glued them on, one by one. Then I put the [Owens Corning] 703 [Fiberglass insulation] behind it. So, it's the same way of sound designing, the same materials, but in an artful way. The piano room here has ropes on the ceiling. Just rely on your ability to pivot and get creative.

What does nobody ask you that you wished they asked you?

I love records. I love music. I'm just thinking about the person who lived in records, kept headphones on, and listened to them over and over. It's a trip to make a record [One Lost Day] with a band like the Indigo Girls, who were one of those bands for me. I was like, “Emily, in high school I used to drive around and listen to ‘Watershed’ so intensely.”

They do not occupy the space they deserve in music history. I had an ex-boyfriend who I broke up with shortly after a huge fight that we got into about the Indigo Girls. I was telling him that I thought they were on the level of Bob Dylan. I think they're that prolific and that talented. He was like, “The Indigo Girls?” And I said, “Yes! What is wrong with you?”

I agree. That came to mind because I'm always thinking about how I could do a series talking about making records, particularly from the artist’s experience. I've been on both sides of that experience of making a thing and putting it out in the world, and then it's not yours anymore. That's such an interesting threshold. Your experience of it is largely unknown to the listening audience. I'm so curious to explore that space, to measure up what that means to both of us, and where that overlaps. There's some connection through time that is interesting, when you start to think about a life lived that long with people in your community and sharing music. I'm motivated to record anthropologically. Who are you right now? What record an artist makes when they're 27, maybe that's their big record. They have a different thing to say, there are different recording techniques in play, there are different mixing trends. That lets an artist off the hook sometimes if you're like, “Hey, say what you have to say right now, and then make the next thing.” Hopefully it's accurate. I'm more interested in the accuracy of it and finding out what they actually like, versus, “Let's Photoshop all the blemishes out and make this for a capitalistic aim.”

You're working with people who already have a pretty high baseline of unedited talent.

For some reason, I'm a pretty good mechanic on Ferraris. When I made the Indigo Girls record, Emily [Saliers] said in the documentary [Indigo Girls: The Making of One Lost Day], “She was tough.” I look back now, and I think, “I see what you mean. Because I know how good you are. I know the whole expanse of 30 years of how good you can be throughout your life, what records you make, what your live shows are like.” When they gave me the first round of songs, there weren't any ballads and there weren't any bangers. I was like, “You're so good at ballads. Do you have any ballads on this album?” She was like “Well, I can do that. I've done that.” I said, “Listen, I go to Beyoncé for ‘Love on Top.’ I know you’ve got it in your bag of tricks for an ‘incredible-poet-of-a-generation-folk-ballad.’ Can you give that to us?” She came back and brought some incredible songs.

Can you share a little bit about what it's like working with Brandi Carlile and The Twins [Phil and Tim Hanseroth]?

“Buddies” is the word that I want to say when I think about them. We toured so much. I love them so much. I love being able to share records we love together, and there's just such a sibling/peer thing whenever we get together. They've taught me a lot. They're committed to each other, personally and as a business, and committed to working through anything that comes up and staying a family. I love that about them. I adore those guys. Brandi used to camp out in parking lots to get Indigo Girls tickets. I love when an artist is that kind of listener. We used to play “Language or the Kiss” on piano, just singing our hearts out. By the way, I love how Indigo Girls-heavy this conversation is! [laughter]

I just had that revelation! When you talk about artist development and bringing in people who may be marginalized from the industry, what encouragement are you giving them?

You would think it's advice or whatever, but I think it's so subtle and nuanced. I've seen something shift internally for artists when you make an eddy of space for someone to exist in, and then see them. This artist I work with, we had this thing where she wanted this piano pushed and I wanted it straight. We went back and forth, and she said, “I really want it pushed.” And I finally said, “Okay.” She said, “What do you mean?” and I was like, “It’s your record. That's totally fine. That's how you hear it? Let's do it.” Everybody has a say in what's happening here. I don't need them to have prerequisite knowledge about the frequency that's bothering them. They’ll have a wealth of knowledge about their instincts. We can work together to technically achieve what we both envision here.