Producing Country - Michael Jarrett Music/Interview

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kind of neat to have sat back and let them inject things into what was going on. Anybody who didn’t, back when I was playing, usually had to pull teeth to get something to come off. Boy, I’ll tell you what, working with those guys was so great! It was hard to make a bad record in this town. There were bad songs. There weren’t very many bad records.

      ALLEN REYNOLDS (produced Garth Brooks, No Fences)

      The job varies according to what’s needed for an artist in a given situation. But my bias as a producer is and has always been toward performance. Two things are important. One is great material for the artist in question. So it may be a great song, but if it’s not great in the hands of the artist you’re working with, it doesn’t mean anything. Record labels never seem to understand that you have to find a song that’s a great song for the artist that you’re working with. Record companies tend to think, “Well, this is a great song. Paste it on Charlie over there, and it’ll be a hit for him.” You can’t do that. It has to be a song that the artist handles well—handles magically—and that they feel some enthusiasm for at least by the time you get through. As I’m saying that, I’m remembering Kenny Rogers doing “Lucille,” which was a huge record for him, and Larry Butler, the producer, told me Kenny didn’t really want to cut it. They did it in about the last fifteen minutes of the session. So I don’t want to generalize overmuch.

      My handshake deal with the artist has always been this. First, we both look for songs. We meet and talk and listen together lots, and our hard work is basically done before we go to the studio. The studio is where you have fun. The deal is this: neither of us has to go into the studio and work with a song that either of us has serious problems with. If there’s a problem, we just keep looking until we find material that we both feel great about. We may not feel equally great, but we both feel great about it. And then you can go in there and do wonderful things.

      BLAKE MEVIS (produced George Strait, Strait from the Heart)

      I’ve always looked at music as something that there is no right or wrong. It’s almost like fashion: what’s in or out. There’re some sounds that are in; some are out. They change from time to time. But I always think that the job of a producer is to make sure that it sounds different, that it stands out on the radio, that people reach over and, maybe, turn the knob up.

      JIMMY BOWEN (produced Reba McEntire, My Kind of Country)

      You have one type of producer who is heavy, heavy-handed. Heavy-handed sounds negative. It’s not meant that way. I use Burt Bacharach as an example. He and his lyricist, Hal David, wrote the song; he selected the musicians, he did the arrangement, and he told Dionne Warwick how he wanted her to do the song. He was very definite. That’s one kind of producer. I did that a lot in the ’60s in California with pop artists.

      When I started working with Kenny Rogers, it started to dawn on me that there was another way. That was to help an artist to do their music, and to do everything you can to make it better. Fill in only when needed, and try never to insert your own thing. One thing I did learn from working with Sinatra: it was his music, not mine, even though with Frank I had to find the songs, get the arrangements and the musicians and all that. There was never any question about whose record it was when it was finished. With Phil Spector, those were his records. He was the artist and the producer. It didn’t really matter who sang the songs.

       BLAKE MEVIS

      A producer should help artists get their music on tape—and really stay out of the coloring process as much as possible, in the sense that it’s the artist’s music that has to be on tape, not the producer’s music. Every artist that you do should sound different. If you can accomplish that, then I think, hopefully, you’re doing the job of being invisible, yet you’re making sure that the quality of music is there. The technical part of the process is there, but at the same time you know it’s impossible to totally stay out of the process because you’re in it. If a producer’s music starts sounding alike and he’s got five different artists, then he’s being too intrusive.

      PAUL WORLEY (produced Lady Antebellum, Need You Now)

      I think it’s impossible for a producer to be invisible, but I think a producer should try to maximize the creativity and the point of view and the musical vision of the artist they’re working with. So in my view the role of the producer is a facilitator and a translator, someone who communicates the artist’s musical vision and direction to the engineers and the musicians and, ultimately, to the record company involved. He tries to give any specific project its own identity.

      CRAIG STREET (produced k.d. lang, Drag)

      Production in that way is what I’d call translucent. That is, it’s not transparent. It’s not not there. But it’s not completely apparent. It could be very much like the air that you breathe. If it weren’t there, you’d definitely know it.

      PETE ANDERSON (produced Dwight Yoakam, This Time)

      I think it’s important to be invisible. If the [film] director was a writer, you’re going to see influence. He’s directing his script, his writing. The producer’s never the songwriter. I mean sometimes he is, but it’s more in things that would be understood as technical that he appears. Things that you like to do technically in film are visible; in music they’re audible. So you’ve got to be a little bit more sophisticated or educated in it to pick up audible things that a producer would do—that he likes to do. I don’t think those are negatives. I always have sonic concepts for records and songs and artists that I work with. People that really, really knew the business would be able to go, “It sounds like you did that” or “That’s something you would do.” But it’s not anything that would in any way cloud the artist. If you start to have a formula, and people pick up that you have a formula, I think it’s really dangerous.

      STEPHEN BRUTON (produced Alejandro Escovedo, Thirteen Years)

      The production should be such that everyone wants to hear the recording again and again. I don’t think that you should have this [sounds a grand entry]: Stephen Bruton Productions. You might get in there and the song that they’ve been playing as a band—it’s their anthem—you listen to it and go, “This song would be best with you and a piano instead of a guitar.” If that’s what gets the song out, then that’s the way I go.

      GURF MORLIX (produced Lucinda Williams, Lucinda Williams)

      I’ve always felt like the producer’s job is to make the artist happy and to enable them to come out with the record they want. Maybe they don’t have the ability to get that done. That’s not their job. Their job is to come up with the concept. I figure the artist writes the songs; the artist has the vision. The producer’s role is to bring that to fruition. The artist should be satisfied with the work.

      TONY BROWN (produced Steve Earle, Guitar Town)

      I played with Elvis during the last year and a half of his life. To be able to play in that band with Ronnie Tutt, Jerry Scheff, David Briggs, James Burton, and Joe Guercio, who conducted orchestras for Streisand, Diana Ross, and you name it! If you get great musicians together, you have to find a way where they become one. Otherwise you don’t get to experience great music from great musicians. If they’re fighting and bickering, and it’s not harmonious, it’s just a bunch of shit.

      Every night, there was so much chaos on that tour. Elvis would walk out on stage, and he was out of it. You could see

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