Garret "aka Jacknife" Lee
in the third of our exclusive interviews, matt brings us up to date and tells us more about still life.
It's an exciting part of the process now, because I get a chance to listen to it. The one thing you can't do while you're making an album is listen to the album you're making. You always look forward to that moment when it's done and you can put it on in the car or in the background, just like any other album. There it is, your album.
I've never made a second album, and in some ways it is as hard as people say it's supposed to be, but not in the way it normally is - some people don't have time to write the songs, but that wasn't a problem for me. I had plenty of songs, but the problem was getting everyone to understand and believe in the way I wanted to make the record. But once that was done it was a treat. Now I've got to know it as a listener rather than a producer, I'm really happy with it, and really proud of it too. I think it is perhaps ... pretty good.
I couldn't decide what to call it. In the end I waited till I'd finished it, which seemed like a much more sensible point to name something than whilst it's half-made. It's a bit like waiting for a child to be born. I didn't even know what sex the album was going to be. I couldn't go round calling it Graham when it might turn out to be ...(lengthy pause) ... Sally. So it turned out to be called Still Life.
I don't know if it's a boy or a girl. I think it's a bit androgynous. Appropriately so, I suppose. I think Aqualung music is quite androgynous. That may be why it's appealing, because it's written by women and men together, and I'm not particularly blokey.
Still Life just seemed appropriate. It was Kim [Oliver]'s idea, who once again co-wrote a lot of the songs. I was floundering - I'd been through a number of other suggestions and not quite settled with one. I'd spent that day doing the photo shoot for the sleeve, working with a photographer who makes photos that look like waxworks, and Kim had seen some polaroids of that which did look like studies of, in this case, me and my head, and it came to her in the middle of the night. But it is somehow just right, because there are a number of ways in which the title works with the subject matter of the songs. It could be like an album of detailed paintings of different aspects of my life. It could be a photo album, but it's songs. It has that quality of a collection of studies.
Well... these songs were written by me and my brother and my wife. Sometimes the words are not by me, they're by Kim or Ben. I think they're always personal from their point of view, but I can't speak for them as for what they think it's about. As for the songs I wrote on my own they are very personal, the most personal, really. More than ever before they're really about and provoked by actual things in my actual life that have been going on in the last year, or happening to friends of mine, or happening around me.
A lot of the songs on the first album, though personal, were written in retrospect. They were about historical events in my life. This was much more about things happening in my life now. So in some ways this is a much more personal album than the first one.
The thing about Garret is that he has no reverence for the source material. The reason he's such a good remixer is that he doesn't care who it is or what it is, he wants to get inside the track and pull it apart and play with it. He's got a great playfulness with sound. He was able to mangle and mess around with the source recordings with less care and worry than I would because I was so engrossed in them, whereas he would do whatever he liked.
The main thing he was able to do was to not be me, and that was the whole idea. Someone who wasn't me would be given free reign to do whatever they liked with the recordings, and then we would see which aspects of that fitted in with my overall vision of the production of the songs. It's a measure of how well Garret understood me and how I wanted the songs to sound that when he eventually delivered his versions of the tracks with his arrangements and his sounds - lots of things processed and some things left as they were - on the whole that became the definitive version. They worked straight away really well, very interesting, with nice twists and turns, but never missing the point of the song.
The tracks we worked on together were the first three to be finished, and they did set a tone for finishing the rest of the album. It certainly inspired me when I got home back from recording the basic tracks for the other songs to try to apply the same irreverent spirit to the production I was doing here, and to always think 'just because this is currently how it is, there's no reason why it has to stay like that', just because a guitar line comes in there now doesn't mean it couldn't be something else, or it could be backwards, or upside-down. Maybe we don't need any drums, or we just use the stupid mic that was pointing at the drummers arse ... just be really open minded with the material. The great thing about working on the computer is if you start messing around with stuff that you've lost the original version, it's not like slicing up two-inch tapes, with the risk that you actually damage the original. You can do whatever you like, and get back to where you were if it turns out to be a dead end.
Everyone who was involved made a contribution, no doubt about that. I was very happy with everyone I ended up working with, the performers and the engineers. The locations we ended up working in were very significant. A couple of songs are from the first session at Real World studios, which was where we were recording the band live, and Tony Perretta who was engineering that session did a great job of getting a really warm and luscious sound. That sound set a tone - literally a tone - for the way the rest of the recordings were taken.
The two engineers were very significant in how the whole thing sounds. And of course the players, Jim [Copperthwaite], Dan [Tuite], Ben [Hales], Dave [Price], Kerry [Frampton] and Kim, Paul [Winter-Hart], Owen [Rees] who played trombone and Becky [Jordan] who played cello. Everybody bought something to it, and it was a great pleasure to work with them all. It's been hard but a lot of fun.
We had recorded all the stuff and I took the stuff home and messed with the stuff and Garret took some of the stuff home and messed around with the stuff, and I recorded the vocals and things and then we all got together in a place called Eden in West London with a guy called Steve Harris, who is a producer and mix engineer. This was another new relationship that was untried. He's got a great CV, and he's obviously a quality guy, but it's so much about taste with mixing. When we came to do the first track (which was Brighter than sunshine) it was going to be immediately obvious if his taste was in tune with mine or not.
I'd decided to let someone else mix, because I wanted to bring someone else's input into the process. Before, I mixed everything myself, and there's a risk that you're so close to the material that you can't really spot what needs doing to it to make it as good as it can be, and Steve, it turned out, was excellent at that.
I remember going into the studio at the end of the first mix, and being played the track and being very pleased indeed. He'd done the minimum, which was what I had wanted. You spend so much time and effort on the sounds that you record, on getting them really right, and getting the arrangements right, that a mix engineer really shouldn't have to do all that much. They just have to get a balance and get everything working just right, and that was what he'd done, but he'd obviously got a great ear and great musicality. I was very excited because the track sounded brilliant, and we were clearly going to be able to work really well together. At that point I decided I wanted him to mix the whole lot so that it would have a uniform sound.
We had a strange couple of weeks of me finishing off tracks and then driving to Chiswick and giving him the parts on a hard drive and driving home and doing more vocals and percussion and bits and pieces and finishing another track just as Steve was finishing mixing one. It was a conveyor belt, which was fairly full-on and quite tiring, but meant that we got loads done, and over about ten days we finished the whole thing.
I think there's quite a lot of Paul Simon in it, in the sounds and something about the spirit, and his album Still crazy after all these years was around a lot when we were making it. There's more Beatle-y-ness in it than I was expecting; something about the sound - this thick, quite warm sound. It reminds me of Abbey Road a little bit. I don't know. You decide.
Another album which was a big influence on it and which it reminds me of in places is a Wilco album that Garret introduced me to, which is called Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. That was an album that was recorded and then deconstructed and then put back together in a different order to great effect, and that was certainly influential on the way this album was put together.
Well people will react to it in different ways, the way people always do. The way the running order is now is almost like a day. It feels like it starts with a glorious sunrise and lovely sunlit morning, and gradually the clouds get a little greyer around early afternoon, and a big black cloud rolls in, so you go to bed early because there's no point in staying up, and you get in your duvet and you feel all snugly because it's raining outside, and you fall into a peaceful sleep, perhaps cuddled up to the one you love.
There are moments which are ecstatic and full of joy, and there are moments that aren't really sad but just lost in thought. And some moments that are desperately sad, but never without any redemption. As a collection I hope people will feel that there's a warmth to it, there's a kind of friendliness that, even when it's concerned with darkness and loss and death and separation, there's a consolation for the listener. And when you get to the end of the album you're left in a peaceful place.
It doesn't sound like I thought it would. It's much fatter, and in some ways more conventional and band-y than I thought it might. I don't think anything really sounds the way I thought it would, but I'm very happy with that. The mood of it is what I hoped it would be. I like the fact there are big fat moments and tiny, extremely delicate moments. I feel like there's a broader range of colours and a broader range of dynamics, and I think for people who enjoyed the first album it will be a bit like in The Wizard of Oz when it suddenly goes into colour, which is a good or bad thing depending on whether you like that bit in The Wizard of Oz or not.
Personally I hate it.
We recorded fourteen or fifteen tracks, and there are ten on it. I didn't want it to be a long album, I don't like it when albums outstay their welcome. So I decided I wanted it to be eleven or ten, and in the end I found that in ten songs I had it covered, and the other songs, whilst good and interesting and valid in lots of ways, seemed to overlap too much with songs that were already there.
Then I had to decide what order they should go in, which was hard because there's such a range of moods, but when I got into this idea of a day that seemed to help.
No. The harmonium is still in my new house which I was hoping to move into before I made the album, but it wasn't ready in time, so I was back in the hall where I made the first album. The harmonium is under a large pile of tools and rubbish, so it's a bit difficult to play.
None taken.
