Arrivals & Departures In The Making Of John Garrison’s Latest Record
It’s a crisp October night, and British singer/songwriter John Garrison’s playing Rockwood Music Hall. The intimate showcase venue on Allen Street is a far cry from the 50,000-capacity arenas he’s been playing on tour with James Blunt. But that’s just fine with Garrison.
Departures, released in 2009.
“I’ve realized I have no interest in being a global megastar,” Garrison says humbly, in a post-show interview. “Of course, if that’s what I have to do to make my music than I’ll do it, but that’s not the goal. I just want to make records and sell enough copies of each to make more. I don’t need a Ferrari, I just want to make music. It’s what makes me tick.”
Of course, Garrison’s already done the major label thing and survived the highs and lows of getting a record deal and getting dropped with his band, Budapest, who had a record out in the U.S. via Universal back in ’02. He’s also supported other major label artists — in the studio, playing bass for Leona Lewis among others, and on the road, as Blunt’s bassman.
Garrison’s recent work has been as a solo artist. He will release his latest record, Departures, through AWAL (Artists Without A Label) in the UK (and digitally, worldwide), and independently in the U.S. on November 10.
“If a label steps in, I’m open to it,” he says, “But what I’ve learned is I’m never going to go on a major again and not know what’s going on. Right now, I have management looking after me, a publicist and licensing companies representing my music. I’m doing everything I’ve ever done, I’m just not running it through a major label, I’m doing it myself.”
TO NYC AND BEYOND
A singer and multi-instrumentalist, Garrison moved to NYC after Budapest broke up in ’06 and began his solo career. He’d already recorded the material for his first record, Above The Cosmos, when he hooked up with producer/engineer Matt Shane to mix it. The two hit it off, and Garrison — who’d played all the instruments on the record himself — invited Shane to plunge deeper into the project as a co-producer.
“It’s very rare to find someone with the same kind of musical brain,” says Garrison, of Shane. “We don’t even need to discuss things so much, I don’t even have to say what I want, he just knows it.”
Naturally, when writing and pre-production on Departures began somewhat early in ’08, Shane came onboard as producer from the start. The tunes were written mostly in NYC, but when Garrison got the gig to go out on tour with Blunt, the writing and production of his record went with him.
“The first few songs I wrote for Departures were about moving to New York, but then it was just about ‘moving,’ in general,” describes Garrison. “And realizing that no matter where you live, you have to be at home within your own skin. You don’t realize that until you start moving around. And when I left to go out on tour with James Blunt, all I was doing was moving. We did 188 shows all over the world.”
THE MAKING OF DEPARTURES
On break from the Blunt tour, Garrison and Shane met up in London to record basics at Sleeper Studios, the magnificently-equipped studio of songwriter/record producer Guy Chambers. (see in video below) Departures would be produced quite differently from Above The Cosmos.
“The first record was really more meat and potatoes — drum, bass, guitars, piano, keyboards,” says Shane, to which Garrison interjects, “And it was all played by me, and you can hear it. It sounds like one person playing everything and that is not a good thing.”
Departures opener, “Let’s Run,” demonstrates just how far away Garrison’s moved from ‘meat-and-potatoes’ instrumentation. It’s a brilliant, soaring track, of anthemic Eno-produced Coldplay proportions. “Where we recorded most of the instrumental tracks was any musician or producer’s dream studio,” Shane qualifies.
“And the beauty of it was that everything is setup and ready to go, with all of it running through an EMI desk that recorded the Beatles and Pink Floyd. Every day we’d go in at like 10-11am and the next thing we knew, it was 8pm before we broke for lunch.”
“Let’s Run” was the first song they cut their first day in the studio. “It started out like a basic band track — bass, drums and guitar based on this arpeggio that John laid down on piano,” says Shane. “We added parts here and there until we thought we’d finished it, but it only ever sounded only about 75% there. So, we gave the load of tracks to John’s buddy Tom Visser, a musical mad scientist, and told him to go nuts with it. He sent us back a whole bunch of files, re-recorded drum and bass parts, and additional sounds. We added from that and created the final arrangement.”
Electronic patterns and textures build out the big rock sound in “Let’s Run.” It’s a totally lush arrangement but with just enough space built in to hear everything. Ultimately, says Shane, “We ended up having to rush through the mix, and Richard Flack who mastered the record, asked if he could do another mix of ‘Let’s Run,’ where he stripped it down a little. It had been a bit too sweet, there was actually too much ear candy. Richard nailed it and also mastered the rest of the tunes.”
“Let’s Run” (video below) sets the stage for the rest of the album, as far as sound and production, adds Shane. “Everything else that happens on the record can be traced back to what we do in that song. We use a lot of really organic sounds, and you’ll hear that they’ve been really cleanly recorded, but you also hear loops and production elements and tricks. It all blends together really well.”
Another Departure, “I Leave on Friday,” goes down more of a straight-ahead alt-rock road and the blend of cleanly recorded tracks with a dirtier electric rock guitar sounds keeps it from sounding too polished and pretty.
Garrison’s craft is sentimental pop songwriting, and he does it really well. To that, his and Shane’s combined sonic aesthetic adds interesting and certainly commercially appealing dimension. And, if a James Blunt comparison happens to come to mind, on a tune like “So Close,” for example, it’s not because of a sappy sound or vocal. (In fact, if anything, hearing all of these tracks performed solo on acoustic guitar or piano at Rockwood, I hear more of a Glen Hansard or Fran Healy.) Garrison’s a talent and the sound that grew up around these songs seems to add conviction to the material.
“The sound really kind of evolved naturally,” says Garrison. “It’s really organic. We wanted everything to be authentic, so if we’re going to have some synth sound, let’s find the actual vintage synth and use that. At Guy’s you can do that. Want a Moog sound? It’s all ready to go!”
“The record is pretty sonically (as opposed to stylistically) diverse though,” assures Shane. “It goes from really giant roomy rock-and-roll drums to really dead 70s drums and we incorporated all these great synths and live strings and percussion.”
BACK TO NYC, BACK ON THE ROAD
From Sleeper, Garrison and Shane flew back to NYC to record vocals, strings and other overdubs at One East in Manhattan. Then, with Garrison heading back on tour between recording and mixing, they kept the project alive via email, sending edits and ideas back and forth.
Shane mixed the record when Garrison came over on a couple breaks — the first sessions went down at Looking Glass just before it closed and the second leg of the mix happened at Fluxivity in Williamsburg, a uniquely well-equipped facility (owned by Nat Priest, a studio equipment technician: http://www.musicvalve.com) that Shane calls “a treasure.”
“NYC still feels like home to me,” says Garrison, of working in New York over London, “I just don’t live here at the moment. But something about this place brings out the best in me. Plus, I admit it was also more economical with the pound vs. the dollar.”
And, the studio hopping and intermittent production schedule may have worked to the record’s benefit. “It was cool that we had the time between sessions because we really got to look at it from every possible angle and work out all the kinks,” says Shane. “We tried everything and ended up with exactly what we wanted.”
Garrison adds, “There were some songs we were loving at one point, but then they died. By the next time we’d picked back up, we weren’t into them anymore. You get that benefit when you have the gaps.”
Though it stretched out over several months, the team kept a brisk pace when actually in the studio. “There was nothing we couldn’t try and no idea that was a bad one, but it never felt like we were stretching too far because John and I think so much alike in how we approach music,” says Shane. “So, it was all productive.”
Garrison concludes, “It was such an amazingly enjoyable experience, much more so than any of my band records. I remember when we finished mixing and I was flying back to the UK, I didn’t want it to end! I was so happy, waking up in NYC, getting a coffee and going into the studio, and Matt would already be there an hour listening back to my music and it’s sounding absolutely amazing because I’ve left it in his hands and he totally understood it.”