Reviews
Putting It Together
BACA Members With New CDs Talk About The Recording Process
By John Amodeo
March-April, 2003
Go to the newly refurbished “Recordings” page on the BACA website (www.bostoncabaret.org), and you will find an impressive 24-26 recordings by BACA members. What is even more impressive is that 20 percent, or five, of them were released since last September, including Bobbi Carrey and Tomi Hayashi’s Between the Wars and Erica Leopold’s A Burst for the Sky, as well as the upcoming Reel One by At the Movies (Will McMillan, Brian Patton, Michael Ricca, and Nina Vansuch), due out this April. I spoke with Leopold, Carrey, Patton and Ricca to find out what kind of product they were after, what they loved about recording, what they didn’t love, and what they would do differently if…
JA: How does your recording compare with your live performances?
Erica Leopold: The CD is different from what my live audiences who have seen me for years have come to expect. Generally, I do a lot of funny bits. When I first started recording, I did a lot of funny songs. Then I realized, I don’t really like listening to funny music. Generally, I listen to funny tunes for the entertainment value maybe once or twice. I decided that I wanted to make a listening album - the kind of album that I would choose to listen to driving in my car on long night rides home…songs that make me think deeply about the important connections in my life.
Brian Patton: It’s interesting, because it’s so different from putting together a new show. [If] someone’s going to listen to it, it’s got to have the perfect balance - not that you’re ever going to achieve it - of enough ballads or mid-tempos, so people can actually continue to wash their dishes [while they listen], enough novelty numbers and up-tempos that they really grab people’s attention, and something in-between. We all talked about our concept, about what the CD should be for people. I love Audra McDonald, but with her CDs, I find that you can’t continue to wash the dishes while they’re on. You have to sit and listen to them. I wanted [our recording] to be not quite so in-your-face. I wanted it to be really entertaining. Like when we’re doing “Where The Boys Are,” which is going to be on the CD, normally when we do it live, we just do it one time through with a little song that goes with it, but I’m thinking, no, for the CD, I want to do a full-length version of it, with an instrumental in the middle, because people are going to enjoy that.
Bobbi Carrey: I love the spontaneity and the fluidity of live performance, but I love having this baby. [I was recently] in Mexico, and of course I bring one CD. A number of people asked me what I do, and I tell them, “Well, I quit my corporate job in order to be a cabaret singer.” They say, “Can we hear?” I find a little theater, I play the CD, I sell 15 CDs on the spot. It’s not the transaction of money, it’s being able to have something that I can share with people, whether they can get to a performance or not.
JA: How was the recording process for you?
Michael Ricca: The challenge for me was the self-consciousness of recording. It can be daunting. It’s a very naked thing. You can’t take it back. Of course, there are several takes, but at least in our instance, those takes are happening in one day, and so hopefully you’re in good voice and frame of mind. The challenge is to relax and remember it’s not a live performance. As a group, it is achieving a balance. Allowing a person, like Brian [Patton] to take a lead, and trusting him, but also being willing to speak up and say perhaps we could try it this way or that way.
Patton: I like recording, I don’t love recording. I get tense. In live performance, there are other things for people to focus on. I do love the editing, and the mixing. [When] there are four singers, you have to listen to everything 7 million times. Then all the nitty-gritty details, it’s amazing: the website has to be up by the time the CD release is out, the licensing, and the researching for the licensing, how many copies do you make? We’re the producers of it, so we have to be careful.
Carrey: [Last year I] produced a CD where I sang backup with Nick Page. I certainly learned the ropes about making a CD, which was my intention. It was like being in CD graduate school. It was especially helpful with what I would call CD logistics: the mechanical license process, the recording-mixing-mastering process, working with the duplicating companies, working with the designer. I even had a taste of being inside the recording booths. So by the time I went in to do mine, I felt completely familiar with the process, I wasn’t the least bit daunted.
Leopold: I had made a commitment to myself that I wouldn’t give up, but I wanted to give up a lot. Some full days in the studio, I didn’t get a take that day. It was really humiliating. It’s like looking at yourself naked. It’s so precise. But I also really got into the precision of it, like putting pieces of a puzzle together…like just getting the mechanical rights. Some of the songs were hard to get the mechanical rights for. It took hours and hours. There was one song; I wouldn’t be surprised if I spent 50 hours trying to get the mechanical rights for it. Still, I loved the process. And playing with Doug [Hammer] is just bliss. I love what happens when he plays. I feel like I’m a sailboat on the water, and he’s the wind on my sail. It’s such a privilege.
JA: What were some of the lessons you learned that might make the next CD easier?
Ricca: [When] we were singing material that we had been singing for a long time, we were very secure and more relaxed…[it was] very easy. Then we recorded some things that took longer, because we hadn’t spent as much time on it. The more preparation you have the better. You can’t just wing it, saying, “I have the music in front of me.” Better to record something you’ve worked on an enormous amount of time, because it saves you from having to go back and record again. Rehearsal time is much cheaper than studio time, especially if you have musicians there.
Patton: In the recording studio, the drummer’s in one booth, the bass player is in another booth, and I’m in the center. We can’t really see each other, so we have to rely on just hearing [through headphones]. It was my first experience recording something with a click track. It can work for songs with a steady beat, like “Where the Boys Are.” But we have this really driving number called “Journey to the Past,” which is also really hard for me to play, and it was a disaster [laughs]. It was [our drummer] Gene Roma who said, “Let’s not do it with the click track, let’s just boost the piano level, and just do it by feeling.” It was perfect. It allowed us enough flexibility that if we needed to speed up here, or slow down there, we could just do it.
Carrey: When I started doing performing with Tomi [Hayashi], music of the ’30s and ’40s is what he is committed to, so in truth, I can’t really say that I don’t have an interest in music of other periods. I’ve gotten a lot of letters and e-mails from people. This is music they learned from their parents, and this is music they’re sharing with their kids. It’s been exciting, and yet, in hindsight, it didn’t occur to me that I would be identified as someone who sings music of this period, which of course, has happened. It is one of the results of having your first CD be such a period piece.
Leopold: There’s a huge learning curve that comes with not having any experience singing in the studio. I’m a very physical and big performer, and that is too big for a recording. I had to do less, do less, do less, and trust, take a leap of faith, that it was enough. I think I’m a better singer having gone through this. I’ve seen where the flaws are in my phrasing, how I take a breath, how to sustain better. I haven’t studied voice in almost two years now, yet I’m singing better than I ever have. This process has been a great teacher. Doug and I did this Leonard Cohen song, getting a little crazy with the improvisations, and ended up with something that should have been on another album. We had like African drums on at one point. And I had spent, like, $1,000 on it. And we had to just let it go. You have to get objective about it. With photography, have a very clear sense of what you want your photographs to say before you have them taken. I thought I had a clear sense of what I wanted. I even did a little storyboard. But once I got the pictures back, I realized that it was wrong. I got my pictures taken before I got my graphic artist. Then after I got a graphic artist, I got a different idea of what my photographs should say. I had to get them taken again. That was $1,400 wasted.
JA: Any last bits of advice for those planning to record?
Leopold: Before I mastered the CD, I picked three people I thought would be honest and critical for feedback, and they all were really honest. They all said one thing that was the same that made me make a different choice, so that was good.
Patton: You have to make sure that everyone feels they’ve done a good job, and if you need to do another take of something, everyone needs to feel that they’ve had a good whack at their part of it. CD’s are forever. You just want to be happy with it.