Interview: Vance Powell Talks Sputnik Sound, Phish, Stapleton, Radiohead and more

Vance Powell Talks Sputnik Sound, Phish, Stapleton, Radiohead and more

Vance Powell is a seven-time Grammy award winning producer, engineer and mixer, who has worked widely with globally recognized and celebrated acts for many years, including Chris Stapleton, Elle King, The Raconteurs, The Dead Weather, The White Stripes, Arctic Monkeys, Wolfmother, Seasick Steve, and many, many more. He and Mitch Dane have run a private production and mix studio in Nashville, Sputnik Sound, for over twenty years, where a great deal of his work is done, but he’s also known to work all around the world when duty calls.

With so much constantly changing in terms of how music is recorded and distributed, Powell’s perspective on studio work is invaluable whether you’re someone who wants to record in a professional studio or just someone wondering how traditional studios are fitting into the evolving landscape. He’s also someone whose work spans genres to a remarkable degree, not to mention national borders, giving his breadth of knowledge even greater range and significance. Having previously interviewed Matt Ross-Spang about building Southern Grooves in Memphis, I was delighted to hear from Vance Powell about the construction of Sputnik Sound, his thoughts on local and destination studios, the major economic challenges independent studios face, and his multi-genre career so far.

Americana Highways: I spoke with Matt Ross-Spang not too long ago about the setting up of his studio Southern Grooves and the careful ways in which he picked out and chose what it needed most. Was it similar for you when you first set up Sputnik Sound? Did you and Mitch have a shopping list?

Vance Powell: You would think that’s what happened, but that’s not really what happened. There have been three iterations of Sputnik, basically. The first iteration was a basement studio for Steve Mason, the guitar player from Jars of Clay. He built the studio to have a studio in his basement to make demos. Now, he didn’t have any gear, but Mitch did. So Mitch, who had had a studio at his house, basically moved into Steve’s basement and Mitch did a couple projects down there.

Then, in early 2001, the Jars of Clay guys came to me and said that they wanted to make a Christmas record. They wanted to do it at Sputnik, in Steve’s basement. We bought a bunch of gear, enough to take us up a level. We bought the most current ProTools you could buy, got a bunch of mics and pre[amps]. But it was all on a shoestring. We literally recorded drums in a two-car garage. We could only record up until two o’clock because from two to four, his son would nap.

Sometimes in 2003, Mitch got kicked out. There had been enough of people pulling up at all hours of the day and night. At the time, I was working at Blackbird, building it. Mitch and Jacquire King moved into the old accounting office at what was then called The House of Blues, which is now Universal Music. This is Sputnik II basically. Jacquire moved out in 2006 and I moved in in 2006 and Mitch and I have been together ever since.

In 2013 or 2014, the owner of House of Blues told us that we had to move out. So we started looking and Mitch purchased a property. Then we designed a studio on graph paper, I kid you not. We hired some framing guys to come and frame it up. I believe the first session that I did there was July 5th, 2014. Ever since, we’ve been working to make it better, changing things, adding things. It’s been a long-running upgrade. There’s always some sort of upgrade in the works. We did build my part of the studio and Mitch’s tracking room from the ground up, but it was a little less designed like a commercial studio as it was a place designed for me and for Mitch.

AH: It makes sense that it has to be right for you all more than for anyone else.

VP: I don’t know if a studio is ever really right. You end up with the budget that you have, and the time that you have, and you just decide that that’s good enough, to be honest with you. That’s true for anyone who is really in the trenches of the business.

AH: I know that anything that’s happening is also happening in motion, weighing how much time things can be offline.

VP: Well, we have to keep working. It’s a problem. We have to keep working to pay the bills while building a studio that may be costing an arm and a leg.

AH: Do you think that was as true in the past as it is now?

VP: If you go back in time, you see that the label system built studios. Here in Nashville, Cowboy Jack Clement was just doing what Owen Bradley did. Basically, they were all being funded by the label system. RCA had their own studio, Columbia had their own studio. The reason that no one else had their own studio was that studios were expensive. My console that I own now, in 1986, was $309, 000. I calculated that in today’s money, and that’s about $800,000.

AH: I can’t even comprehend that. Wow.

VP: The thing is, how can you fund an $800,000 purchase? Well, the only way to do it is to sustain bookings, with guaranteed bookings from labels. I used to own a tape machine that I sold to Jack White, that was $69,000, new. Today, I can go buy a $1,000 MacBook and a $300 interface and have more tracks, more power, more everything than those two things that that million-dollar investment could ever create.

The thing is, people do want to record in real studios, even though laptop records are all over the charts. The people that I care about and the people that I want to make records with are not down with a record made in somebody’s kitchen. There have to be guys like us, Matt Ross-Spang and other people who are investing in real studios. It’s kind of like investing your life savings, because that’s what you’re doing, you invest your life savings in this studio set up that even the labels don’t really support anymore. It’s a tough one. It’s not “feast or famine” now, it’s “snack or famine.”

AH: What do you think of the idea of destination studios, going a specific location to record because it’s an appealing situation?

VP: Like where U2 recorded Unforgettable Fire, or Led Zeppelin recording at Hedley Grange.
There are places you go to live in a studio, like Sonic Ranch in Texas. There’s a great studio in Belgium called ICP that’s a residential studio. I did a record last year at Ocean Sound on an island off the coast of Norway. It was amazing, beautiful, and the control room was 30 feet from the ocean, facing west, so the sun goes down right next to you in the windows of the control room. Having destination studios is something a lot of people love because they can go there, they can disconnect from life. They wake up, and they eat, breathe, work, and sweat music. That’s cool. Some bands don’t want to do that.

It is really good when there’s nothing else to do except play music, and when you’re done playing and recording, you can sit around and talk about playing and recording. I did an Old 97’s record back in 2014 or 2015 at Sonic Ranch where we’d record all day, then all sit around the fire pit and have some drinks or coffee and talk about what we were going to do the next, or look at the stars. It was beautiful.

AH: I think that’s the public, romantic view of recording an album. I did wonder if you would work in other studios and to what extent you do that. Is it good for you to occasionally get out and try other places?

VP: Recording knowledge, or how to record, is a tool and that tool is always yours no matter where you are. The biggest catch to going elsewhere is that a lot of the time, maybe the tools that you’re used to are now ones you don’t have. You might have to substitute stuff. It’s a little like cooking. If you don’t have one thing, you might substitute for something else.

AH: If you know that you’re going to be working at another location, are you preparing ahead of time, making sure that you know what they have there?

VP: Absolutely. As a matter of fact, I’m about to fly to Vermont to record in Vermont. I’ve been there before and I know what they have, so I ended up shipping almost $100,000 worth of gear to the studio. Gear and microphones get moved, and microphones get expensive quick. This studio business becomes your capital and retirement. If you have to sell some in a fire sale, it’s tough because then you don’t have those tools. If you’re a fine woodworker and your nice set of chisels gets taken away, you might be able to work with a screwdriver. You can make that happen, but it also gets really tough.

AH: Is anyone else allowed to work in Sputnik Sound, or just your people?

VP: My space is very tailored to me. The people who I let in there are my assistants. They know how it works because it is so tailored. There’s booby traps! There’s a hole in the floor you can fall in and get trapped for ever! Stuff like that.

AH: Well, given the expense of the equipment we’re talking about, I can understand not wanting anyone else to touch that stuff.

VP: It doesn’t have anything to do with that, really, at all. If one my engineer peers in the business said, “I’ve got to do a session at Sputnik,” I’d say, “Go for it. Take my assistant and do it.” Tom Elmhirst, the mix engineer, came down and played mixes at my studio on New Years’ day, for the new Kills record. I was elsewhere. I don’t advertise the space for anybody, but I do say “No” all the time. It’s just my private space.

Also, I actually don’t charge any more to record at Sputnik than I do to go and record somewhere else. I never charge for the studio. I don’t consider it a fee. If a plumber comes to fix my toilet, he doesn’t charge me for his wrenches, he charges me to fix the toilet. Often music is just that simple.

 

AH: That’s kind of a relief to hear in an age of increasing complexity. Based on the work you’ve already done, I can see that you are very multi-genre, but are there limits to that?

VP: I just spent most of the year on the road with Phish mixing their pay-per-view livestream.
I’m about to co-produce Phish’s record. If I can do Velvet Two Stripes, and Stapleton, and Phish, I can kind of do just about anything. One of my favorite artists, Seasick Steve, is someone I just finished a record with. I think I’m relatively versatile and I get it. There are a few things I don’t really get and those are things I just don’t really do. I don’t understand pop country. I don’t understand why it’s even a thing. That’s fine because I get zero work from music row.

Obviously, I don’t really understand a lot of modern rap and things like that, but I love old hip-hop. I was just at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and watched Missy Elliot perform. The band Clutch is someone I’ve mixed, so I understand the heavy rock side of things. Tyler Bryant and the Shakedown, those guys are rock ‘n roll. Illiterate Light are all rock, indie awesomeness. I’ve recorded and mixed Stray Cats. I recorded Radiohead. No one in the world’s ever heard it, but I did it.

AH: What on earth did you record with them?

VP: I recorded two demos, “Supercollider” and “Indentikit.” “Identikit” is on their last record, but I just did the demos. It was one day and it was fun.

AH: It sounds like it brings you joy to have that freshness to things where you work on totally different things from one day to the next or one week to the next.

VP: Yes. Though I was asked to record David Byrne & St. Vincent on a song, but I couldn’t do it and was bummed that I was booked that day. There are always things that you have to accept. For any artist, the day comes where you can’t do the thing that you’re asked to do.

Thanks very much for chatting with us, Vance Powell!  Check out his website here for more details: https://sputniksound.com/index.html