by Bruce Feiler
This degree of perfection is possible nowadays because of the highly touted, yet still controversial, digital recording systems now standard in upscale studios in Nashville. In essence, the system works like this: All the musicians set up their instruments in the studio. The engineer then places multiple microphones on or around each instrument—twelve for the drums, two for the piano, one for the fiddle, and so on. The microphone, essentially a plastic diaphragm sprinkled with gold dust, functions like a high-tech eardrum, converting the acoustic energy from the instrument into electric energy. That electric signal then moves through the wire and passes into the console, or “board,” where it is equalized (frequencies balanced), compressed (squeezed into a narrower band), or simply left alone, before proceeding on to what appears to be an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape machine, so big that it’s stored in a room unto itself. Though it looks old-fashioned, this machine, a Sony 3348 Digital Multitrack Recorder, actually records not on conventional audio tape but on digital audio tape, otherwise known as DAT.
First introduced into Nashville in the early 1980s by L.A. Über-producer Jimmy Bowen (Reba McEntire, Vince Gill, Waylon Jennings), DAT technology marked a dramatic breakthrough in the history of studio recording and opened a still-raging debate about what constitutes genuine music. Unlike traditional analog recording, in which the sound actually saturates the tape like, say, water poured onto a paper towel, in digital recording the electric signal literally sits on top of the Mylar in separate sections, like water poured into an ice tray. This breakthrough allows a great number of tracks to be available, up to forty-eight, instead of the previous maximum of twenty-four. That’s forty-eight different sounds that can be isolated from the others, tinkered with, toned down, retuned, or just plain recut, before being seamlessly reconnected to the whole. Compared with the early recordings of Elvis at Sun Studios in Memphis, for example, in which everyone had to play their part perfectly at the same time, the improvements are staggering. Two tracks followed that system, then three (Patsy Cline recorded on three), rising quickly to eight (the Beatles pioneered this), and finally ballooning to twenty-four tracks by the 1970s. The arrival of forty-eight tracks in the mid-1980s has meant a much wider array of options, but has also left a nagging concern among some that technology is overtaking the artistic process.
In analog recording, because the sound actually saturates the tape, sound from one instrument often bleeds into sound from another, giving the recording what some believe is a warmer feeling. Some of Nashville’s leading producers, among them Tony Brown (Wynonna, George Strait) and Kyle Lehning (Randy Travis, Bryan White), still use analog recording occasionally. By contrast, in digital recording, because each sound is isolated from the others and is converted into electronic ones and zeros, the music tends to be crisper and the overall feeling more precise.
“How you feel about this tends to reflect how you feel about technology,” a techie friend of mine explained. “Would you rather drive a twenty-year-old Porsche 911 and get the organic feel of the car or would you prefer to drive a Lexus, which is snappier and has all the latest gadgets?” For Don Cook, the answer is clear. “Digital sounds better from top to bottom,” he told me. “I’ve cut Brooks & Dunn records with both, done blind tests with them, and they picked digital thinking they were picking the analog because they’d always heard that analog is warmer than digital. That’s bullshit. Digital’s just better. Better because the frequency response is more complete. Better because it’s just cleaner. And better because it doesn’t deteriorate when you overdub. Every time you run analog tape through heads, it deteriorates. Digital doesn’t.”
As a neophyte, discovering how much such technology has altered production was shocking. This was especially true when it came time to record vocals in week two. These days if a lyric simply reads “I love you,” it’s not only possible, but also likely that a singer will sing “I” on one day, “love” on the next, and then even go on vacation to Mexico, have throat surgery, get married, get divorced, fall in love again, lose a parent, have a child, and in the process completely change his conception of what love means, before returning to the studio to sing the final “you.” George Jones’s 1980 seminal hit “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” which won a Grammy for Country Song of the Year, was notoriously done in this way, taking nearly a year and a half to complete. Since most consumers have no idea this occurs, I couldn’t help wondering if the whole process isn’t a bit fraudulent: People think they’re getting a sublime batch of brownies from Garth Brooks, when in fact instead they’re getting the best brownie from seventeen different mediocre batches.
“But you don’t think it’s fraudulent the way automobiles are manufactured or movies are made,” Mike Bradley countered when I raised this suggestion. “In the old days, everything used to be handmade; nowadays everything is machine-made. We spend a lot more time trying to achieve perfection than we did back then because a lot of times we couldn’t get perfection then. Time and budgets didn’t permit it. And if you listen to those records today, even the ones we thought were great turn out to be full of mistakes. There are places where the tempo shifts or where somebody’s out of tune. By today’s standards, you say, ‘Boy, is that sloppy.’ But at that time it didn’t matter to us. Today, we’re trying to make a perfect record.”
Perhaps that’s the essence of Nashville’s transformation: Perfection is the coin of the realm these days, rather than authenticity. A Hank Williams record is a performance of a song; a Wade Hayes record is more like multiple performances of a song, the Platonic ideal of that song, a perfect rendition that exists in digitas, if not in reality. If anything, recording an album has become more analogous to writing a novel—especially in the age of word processing. First you get the idea, then you lay down the plot, then you slowly build the characters. “Are people buying whole sentences from you and asking, ‘Did you write all the words at one time?’” Don Cook asked me in defense of this system. Fair enough, but especially in country music, where artists represent themselves as being real people singing about real emotions, the irony is almost too painful to accept: The same technology that allows songs to be recorded perfectly now almost guarantees that no singer will ever be able to perform them that way again.
Four days of recording in the Soundshop yielded eight complete tracks, including “Our Time Is Coming,” “The Room,” “Six Feet Tall,” and “Hurts Don’t It.” Four more songs would be added in February. Several more in March. That would leave Don, Wade, and assistant producer Chick Rains the freedom to choose the ten or so cuts that would make it onto the final album. For the moment, though, it was time for Wade to move on to vocals. This painstaking process began exactly one week after the opening day and, for the first time, offered a hint of the emotional struggle of recording an album, especially for a newcomer.
“Afternoon, everybody. How y’all doin’? Sorry I’m a little bit late.”
It was just after two on Monday afternoon when Wade Hayes strolled into the studio alone, dressed in his familiar tall, tight jeans, a BUZZ 107.9 T-shirt, and his now quite pronounced one-week-old beard. In his back pocket he packed a Primo del Ray eight-inch cigar, which he occasionally gnawed on for nicotine in lieu of his normal chew. And in his hands he carried a low-fat banana oat bran muffin and a bottle of Evian natural spring water.
“I bet Hank Williams never brought that to the studio,” Don Cook cracked. “He always came to record with Menatrol and whiskey, like you’re supposed to. Hell, even the real singers today say, ‘Bring me Robitussin and a blonde.’”
“Darn,” Wade said. “Sometimes I don’t know if I’m a real singer at all.”
Don winced. He propped his tan loafers up on the desk. “He’s not quite as scared as he was last time,” he said when Wade disappeared into the cutting room to begin his vocals, “but he’s still real pressured. The problem is, he has much less time now. It’s the age-old saying, ‘You have your whole life to make your first album, and you have a year to make your
second.’”
“It’s true,” Wade elaborated later. “The first time I did this I was so frightened I couldn’t sing. My whole body tensed up and I couldn’t function for days. This time I tried to get a lot of sleep. I sucked down vitamins for days. I tried to tell myself I could do it.”
They got down to work. For the vocal session, the assistant engineer had prepared a small blue spiral-bound pamphlet containing the lyrics to each of the songs, followed by eight empty spaces. As Wade made different passes through the song, each of the several people in the room would mark his copy of the grid, indicating which track they believed contained the best version of each line.
Once in place, Wade asked that the lights in the studio be turned off completely (leaving only the control room lights, filtered through the glass panel, to illuminate his lyric book). A small Oriental rug was placed under his feet to reduce reverberation. And a special pop filter—the round, saucer-sized piece of nylon mesh that prevents robust p’s and t’s from disrupting the balance of sound—was placed in front of the microphone, in this instance an old-fashioned, capsule-shaped Neumann tube mike, a deliberate throwback to the nontransistor age when mikes were thought to capture warmer sound.
He started to sing. “Times are hard/And the money’s tight…” With each phrase he swayed from side to side. “Day to day/We fight that fight…” The mood, though hopeful, was notably tense. “Nothing new/ It’s the same old grind…” And the rhythm, for some reason, wasn’t quite right. “Uphill all the way.”
“Let’s start over,” Don suggested when the song was finished.
“That wouldn’t hurt,” Wade agreed.
“I don’t like the way your voice broke up.”
“Yeah, I think I’m not in the groove yet.”
The afternoon proceeded in a similar fashion—starting, stopping, rethinking, redoing. The day became evening. The evening became the following day. There was a slow, almost deliberate massaging to the whole process. First they would address the general issues. “Just whip it,” Don would say. “Really feel the passion.” He would offer periodic criticisms—“We need more emotion in the verses,” then “The chorus doesn’t grab me”—mixed with regular notes of encouragement—“Did I tell you you were a genius today?” And at times he would even stop the session and summon Wade back to the control room for a frank coaching lesson. “You have to remember that this is a song, not a blueprint,” he said during one such encounter before dinner on day two. “You can’t make it up. You must sing what’s on the page.” Eventually, once they had a general pass on each song, they would move on to fixing particular lines. “Give me more voice in ‘street of gold,’” Don would say. “I need to hear your anguish on ‘good Lord only knows.’” Finally, when the overall rhythm was right, they moved on to individual words. “Don’t get off ‘close’ so fast.” “‘Time’ had too much scoop in it.” Every now and then, the whole session would break down in frustration and Wade would return to the control room almost in tears.
“Man, I can’t hear anything through those headphones,” he said near the close of the fourth and most rigorous day when he was recording “The Room,” the most emotional ballad on the album.
“Don’t worry,” Don said. “The same thing happens to everybody. Hell, I can’t tell pitch through headphones at all.”
“Well, I can’t tell anything at all. I just don’t even know what I’m supposed to sound like anymore.” Wade sat down at the console and ran his fingers through his hair. Don stood up and pushed the door closed behind him. He waited in silence for several minutes, then wheeled his chair beside his pupil.
“Well, if you ask me, I think you’re pretty damn good,” Don said. He put his hand on Wade’s shoulder. “I think you can flat sing.”
“Shoot,” Wade replied. He looked up and stared straight ahead. “Sometimes I think I can. Sometimes I think, ‘What am I doin’ here?’” He turned to face Don. It was a look of total vulnerability. Don had seen it before. When they had finished recording Wade’s first album, Wade listened to the mastered cuts of the songs and announced he wanted to sing everything again. “It’s the producer’s job,” Don told me, “and hopefully the producer has enough experience to deal with that kind of problem, to say, ‘We’ve got to stop somewhere. This is it.’ In his case, we did sing a couple of things again, but we didn’t sing the whole album. Young artists who have never done albums and never had songs on the radio tend to get real freaked out about their perception of the quality of the product. Everyone else’s album sounds finished, but theirs doesn’t. Somebody just has to say, ‘We’re done.’”
Don was totally calm. “You’re not quite as insecure as Ronnie Dunn,” he told Wade, “but close….” He chuckled. “Just the other day, we were in the studio and a call came in from Tim DuBois at Arista and Ronnie said, ‘Oh, shit, what did I do?’ It was like the principal was calling to tell him he fucked something up, when in fact all Tim was doing was calling to tell him how much he adored him. The reason is, Ronnie Dunn is the embodiment of quality, only he just doesn’t believe it. And you’re the exact same way. You’re so good you don’t even know it.” There was a pause. Don offered a laugh again. “And I, for one, hope it stays that way. God help us if you ever discover what you’ve got.”
The grimace on Wade’s face slowly eked into a grin. “I hope it goes away.”
By the end of the week, the first eight songs were cut. Later they would be mixed and then mastered, the laborious process by which an engineer arranges the tracks in perfect balance. The album, for the first time, was beginning to take shape. They had strong mid-tempo songs, “Our Time Is Coming” and “Oughta Be Over You by Now.” Emotional and fairly dark ballads, “The Room” and “Where Do I Go to Start All Over?” But only one up-tempo number, “Six Feet Tall.” They would try to add more later, though a tight release schedule might prevent them from having time.
Now, though, the time had come to play the cuts they had for the head of Sony Records, Paul Worley, himself a prominent producer hired to head the label several years ago, who came to the studio late Friday afternoon just before leaving town on vacation. Like many executives in Nashville, he was wearing blue jeans and a company leather jacket. He leaned back in the engineer’s chair and listened to the cuts with a visible—and growing—smile on his face. At the end he didn’t even pause before speaking. “That’s great,” he enthused. “That’s really great! I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. That’s an excellent Christmas present and a great New Year’s gift. I can’t wait for people to hear it.”
“Well, I’m glad I brought you over,” Don said, barely containing his glee. “Nobody believes me around here anymore.”
“Certainly not me,” Paul said with a grin that hardly belied the hint of rivalry that hovered over two of the most powerful men in town.
He stood up to leave. Don bounded to his feet. The two of them spent several minutes glad-handing each other and discussing their plans for the week ahead—skiing in Colorado for Paul, boating in Florida for Don. Paul reached into the half-empty tin of Danish cookies. Don Cook finished his umpteenth Diet Coke. And all the while Wade Hayes sat motionless at the desk, dribbling an occasional drop of tobacco juice into a cup and quietly smiling to himself.
THREE
THE TABLOIDS
The telephone rang in Hazel Smith’s kitchen at 8:32 A.M.
“Hello, honey,” she said, picking up the receiver. “You’re late this morning.” Her voice was uncommonly cheery for the hour, the result, she said, of over two decades of waking up two grumpy boys by herself. Though the boys were both grown now and had boys of their own, Hazel, a single grandmother, a lifelong songwriter, and for two and a half decades the leading gossip columnist in country music, still awoke every morning at daybreak. By the time of her weekly call from a syndicated radio show in Indianapolis, she had already downed a cup of coffee, eaten an orange (“I hear it’s better for ya than juice…”), and scanned the morning paper, p
aying special attention to page three, where onetime hard-nosed reporter turned tart-tongued gossip columnist Brad Schmitt parsed out a daily dosage of music industry innuendo, breathless musings about the romantic progress of Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, and constant drooling over his true obsession, the love life of Ashley Judd. “That marvelous Ashley Judd is at it again! Wait till you hear which Hollywood hunk got a handful of her delicious derriere.” On this winter morning, Hazel had also managed to pull a purple turtleneck with purple sequins over her upswept gray hair.
“Okay, listen,” she continued now on the telephone. Her bare feet were turning pink from the cold. A box of uneaten Krispy Kreme doughnuts sat on her counter. “I am going to talk about Wynonna this morning. But I’m not going to tell you what I’ve got ’cause I don’t want you to know until I go on the air…” She paused to wait for a response from the producer on the other end. With her Southern biscuit spirit and sweet cane syrup accent, Hazel could have been a stock caricature in a Hollywood sitcom: Ethel Mertz meets Martha White. But she was real. The framed picture of George Strait on her wall was autographed: “To Hazel, I love you. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“Good, baby,” she said when she heard what she wanted. “Now, I’ve also got a story about Faith Hill, but I call her ‘Faithless Hill,’ you know. And a story about Dolly singing at her nephew’s wedding. I don’t think anybody knows this. And I have to tell you where Garth and Sandy were shopping on Wednesday. You’re going to think that was very funny.” Her voice seemed to gain speed and titillation with every item she ticked off her yellow pad. She was bobbing up and down like a dashboard grandmother. “Oh, honey, I can’t wait till we get on the air. I’ll talk to you in fifteen.”
