Recording - March 2012 - 14

comfortable. If you are with a band, the band has to augment that and make you feel more comfortable. I have been very lucky, I started with Brian Ahern who taught me how to make records by respecting me, but I also respected him and appreciated his ideas, and it was always about serving the song. There is no point in getting someone in to make a record with that you are going to argue with all of the time. Maybe you doubt your intuition and your ideas, but they need to be listened to and respected! You also need to listen to and respect the producer and, again, always serve the song, don’t let that get lost. Does that make sense? Absolutely! Any other advice for the beginner? I think it probably is good now to learn more technical stuff than I have learned, sometimes my ignorance intimidates me a little bit. I mean after all these years I still don’t know what to tell people to give me in my headphones [laughs]. So a little technical information is probably a good thing to have. It sounds like from everyone that making this album was a blast. Sometimes it can be hard, but ultimately music should be a joyful experience. What’s more joyful than creating music? When it’s right and you know its right, it’s total bliss!

GR: I would walk in the studio in the morning and Jay would say, “Hey, we are doing this song, and I want you to play this or that.” And maybe he would send me an MP3 the night before to chart out, so we would be set up and ready to before she got there. JJ: The typical way we went about it was: Giles might lay down a loop on the drums to get a tempo, and then I would either play bass, electric guitar, or keyboards, and Giles would play Moog bass (a Little Phatty keyboard), percussion, or other keyboards. GR: We didn’t track drums at that stage because Jay wanted me harmonically available rather than rhythmically available on an instrument where I could play and suggest chords. JJ: Giles and I would kind of bounce around between instruments until we felt that we had a nice little tracking situation. Then we would lay down the bare bones of the track along with Emmylou playing and singing—her performance was the focal point of the whole thing, so it was good as long as we did not get in the way of that. GR: That gave us a big full initial sound, even though the drums weren’t nearly close to what they would be, but that gave her a good backdrop to perform to. JJ: That was the approach to every song—we would just play and mess around with the arrangement, but basically we would go for a live take on the spot.

Jay Joyce and Giles Reaves
How did working with Emmylou Harris on the Hard Bargain album come about? Jay Joyce: We had already worked together a few times on a couple of little things. We did a song for a movie and it was just her, Giles and myself, and then we did a John Lennon song for a compilation. So we already had kind of a thing going, and then Emmy and I hung out a little bit here and there for about a year, just listening. I would go over and hear some songs she was working on. So we were kind of homing in on the songs over a long period of time. Then we decided to do a record and we talked about bringing in other people (session musicians), and then I thought, “You know, this little trio thing is working, maybe we should just start with that? If we need to bring in additional players, let’s do it...” But as we got going we realized that this little trio had a vibe, so we decided to just keep it that way. Was there any sort of pre-production? Did you demo out the songs? Giles Reaves: Jay used a Flip video device and videotaped her playing a lot of the songs because she uses a lot of open tunings and capo positions, and he did this instead of making charts. JJ: I always do that, instead of just recording the audio on my phone I’ll record their hands on the guitar neck to see what chords they play, if it’s an open tuning, and kind of get the vibe of what they are doing. What was the working method, how did you build up the songs?
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Jay Joyce, Emmylou Harris, and Giles Reaves It sounds like you treated this as a mini band that jammed vs. the usual modern way of building up a song with session musicians or MIDI sequences and such. JJ: Yeah, absolutely. It all started from a jam. Some of the vocals were live and were keepers, maybe with a few punch-ins if we needed to, and there were things later on that we decided to switch around. For example, on “New Orleans” it was originally a Moog bass and we could not get it to fit in the mix, so I just put an electric bass down on it instead. There were a few things that changed here and there, but for the most part it was always some sort of trio. Giles and I are able to play a lot of different instruments, so no two songs were the same instrumentally in the beginning. Another example was on “The Road”. Giles just laid down a drum loop with the kit and we played to that; I think he played keyboards as we were tracking it to the loop. As we built the song we realized that nothing felt better than that four-bar drum loop, so we pretty much used that. Maybe we punched in the drums later in the song...

Recording - March 2012

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