A Conversation with the Be Good Tanyas (continued)
PM: Yeah, you can still go out and listen, no matter what language you speak.
TK: Oh, totally, yeah. And there are festivals. There's a street festival in Montreal every year, where they shut down the middle of the city, and it's all free to go to, at least a lot of it is free. Every year they have one huge name that they get, and that's a free concert, somebody like Prince or something will come and play. And it'll draw these massive crowds. There'll be 90,000 people there, all dancing outside in the sun. [laughs]
PM: Have you ever seen the great bluesman from Montreal, a guy named Ray Bonneville, play? He's really something.
TK: I've seen him, yeah, he's great.
PM: What about places abroad? Do you have favorite places?
TK: I haven't gone to many places abroad. But we were in Glasgow, I really liked that, and London. I really liked Manchester also. Bristol, I liked. Yeah, we've been all over the U.K.
PM: Have the BGTs played the continent at all, or just the U.K.?
TK: No, just the U.K.
PM: Are there plans to hit the continent in the future?
TK: I'd like to. It's possible. It'd be great to tour France or Italy or Belgium, to play Paris, anywhere like that, Amsterdam, all over. I'd like to go all over.
PM: Yeah, I'm sure you're going to.
TK: Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland...
PM: They say Czechoslovakia really rocks right now.
TK: Prague would be cool.
PM: What song in the current repertoire works most consistently live, and why?
TK: Oh, I don't know. There are a lot of them that work pretty consistently live. I guess I couldn't say one more than another.
PM: So there's not one that you'd say "Oh, when we play this it just works like a son of a gun every time"?
TK: No, I don't think so. Some songs really have their moments at certain times, and then other times they're not as great. I don't think there's one that's just awesome every single time. Some of them are generally good, [laughs] for sure, most of the time, but I don't know. I mean, it's always different.
PM: Tell us about your co-producer, Futcher, who has the shack that's a studio.
TK: He didn't work on this newest album. He worked on the previous album, Blue Horse. And he's a guy who was teaching at a recording school, and he came to open mic. We were playing open mic, and he saw us, and he said he would be interested in having us come in as a student project for the class to work on--to learn recording techniques. Because I guess they'd been doing a lot of rock bands, and he thought our folk music with our acoustic instruments would provide them with some useful training, help them to learn different techniques for capturing more interesting sounds, softer and more delicate vocals and stuff.
PM: Right.
TK: So about half the album was recorded as a student project. And that way we just came in and we played the songs, much as we played them live, with very little overdubbing.
PM: Oh, and it made it a lot cheaper for you guys also.
TK: Yeah. So maybe half the album happened that way, and then when it came down to it, Futcher was like, "Well, I'd really like to help you finish the album." And we negotiated with him to record us on spec in his home studio. So we did the other half of the album that way. It took us about two weeks to finish it. Two weeks just for an evening, not full days or anything, short sessions. It came together very easily, and we basically did a lot of it live with minimal overdubs.
PM: And that's all Blue Horse.
TK: That's all Blue Horse. On this new album [Chinatown], we mostly just mixed it by ourselves, because we didn't really feel like we needed any additional assistance. I mean, on Blue Horse we pretty much directed the project as well, but we didn't know a lot about recording in studios.
PM: Right. He was turning the knobs and you were playing.
TRISH: Yeah. And he was kind of helping us have an idea of how we should approach the thing. This time we'd already done it once, so we basically used that understanding to do it again.
PM: How would you say that Chinatown differs from the debut, and how was that done, in contrast?
TK: It was done sort of the same way. We had a bigger budget, so we were able to take more time in the studio experimenting and trying out different ways of recording. But then, in the end, we wound up liking most of the live, less multi-tracked stuff the best. So we kept it pretty raw. We did hire a really good engineer from New York, Danny Kopleson, who is a guy who worked on Olu Dara and Cassandra Wilson albums. Anyway, he did some engineering and mixing. The rest of the engineering we did with a local person named John. So we just had a couple of people in the studio engineering stuff.
PM: Help me spell the New York guy's name right.
TK: K-o-p-l-e-s-o-n. He's really good. He just was with us mostly for the mix and for some of the final phase of recording.
PM: And did he bring in Olu Dara?
TK: Actually, it was our idea to get Danny because of Olu Dara. We didn't personally know Olu Dara, but we were familiar with his work. He's sort of, collectively, one of our favorite artists. continue
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