"Don't sing like Michael Bolton"

That was Dave Lill's advice to me last night, as we dug in and really started working out the vocal tracks for the Burn Rome Burn album.

Advice like that makes him the producer/engineer extraordinaire he is. Dave is also the drummer for the Chicago band Stylus. And, the above nugget aside, he is one kick ass engineer and producer. What makes him so good? What makes any engineer/producer good?

I guess each role requires different skill sets... A good engineer, first and foremost, has great ears. And knows how to get good sounds onto tape or hard drive. Dave's technical knowledge of his equipment is strong, as is his ability to manipulate his digital recording program. His prowess at editing (he calls it "Frankensteining") is second to none, although BRB generally doesn't require a ton of editing (do we?). From a purely sonic point of view, I've realized I should just defer to Dave. If he hears a problem, well, there's a problem. If he's happy with the sound quality, it sounds good.

Now as far as a good producer goes... this is such an incredibly important aspect of making a great album. It doesn't really matter if the album sounds good sonically, if the performances or the artistic approach suck. And the producer is responsible for managing these aspects. Really, the producer has to play psychologist more than anything. We're producing this album together with Dave because we all have pretty well-shaped ideas and good ears.

That being said, Dave has really stepped up in this role. And we are all deferring to him on performance-related questions. Which helps immensely, especially when recording vocals, where you can go around and around about whether or not a take is good enough and really damage yourself mentally and physically.

The uniting principle here is that Dave is willing to try anything we have in mind. And then tell us honestly if it is worth keeping or not. We had a lot of fun recording guitars because we spent the majority of the time getting the right sounds. We also blew a bunch of fuses in the various amps we used. I have one extended guitar solo on the album, and it is basically the sound of three amps self-destructing.

Good times.

It also helped that we got Brett Semenske (bass player for Stylus and owner of the house where the recording studio is) involved in working on guitar tones. His approach is pretty simple: turn all the knobs to the right.

Back to yesterday.

We spent an hour or so Saturday night just working on microphone placement and some other technical aspects. Dave worked his ass off to understand the sound of my voice and how he could move the mic and tweak the knobs to best capture it. We went back and listened to the four song EP we did last year, which Dave also recorded.

Once we got the recording set-up straight, I was able to walk in yesterday and start recording immediately, without wasting any energy on technical aspects. After working through the song Four Words three or four times to warm up, we settled on the "verse/chorus at a time" approach to make sure that the energy stayed up throughout the tune.

One of the biggest things I've learned in recording with Dave is how to go for feel over perfection. I generally sing in tune, so I've learned to not even worry about hitting notes and focus on emoting, phrasing, and vocal quality. Which means leaving some "mistakes" if the take has the right vibe, especially on a song like Four Words.

We took a really stripped down approach to this song. One seamless guitar take throughout (best-guitar-tone-ever) and just a few violins. And we'll likely have a string quintet on some of it, too. So the vocals had to match the intensity and character of the recording.

The song is about a writer who is just crushed by his own artistic ambition and futility of it. Crushed to the point where he can't go on for another day.

I used an apocryphal story about Hemingway's suicide as my starting point and kind of went from there. My friend Ben told me that when they found old Ernie dead from a self-inflicted shotgun wound, he had hung a sign on the door of his cabin that just said "Ex-Writer."

So the character in Four Words hung a sign on his door that said "Bury It Over There." The whole song is a cautionary tale about the dark side of artistic ambition. And the vocals turned out great. There's all sorts of great character and cracks and really... vulnerability.

That was the biggest thing the song needed. The vocals needed to convey the tragedy in the story, and I think we really nailed it.

Here are the words to the tune:

FOUR WORDS

When he checked out, he put a sign upon the door
Four simple words, what they meant no one was sure
Can't say I blame him, for giving up his bones
All the wasted hours left him empty and alone

Bury it over there

Love was the question that split his head in two
And sometimes in the morning he'd believe that it was true
But silence overwhelmed the day and with it his resolve
It left him to fade away and watch his faith dissolve

Bury it over there

Now the stark fluorescence is the wound that wouldn't mend
And every word he writes it brings him closer to the end
Finally with sympathy the daylight starts to creep
Four words on the door, there's something of him in me

Bury it over there

And even though he's gone it still remains
Running through the room like blood in vein
All the shattered hope written in the birds
All the shattered hope written in four words
Give me four words

jbg