The Bomb Shelter’s Andrija Tokic on Resilience and Increased Access To Music
Nashville-based recording studio The Bomb Shelter is an “analog studio wonderland” founded by producer Andrija Tokic, reaching its current incarnation in 2012. With two separate recording rooms and accommodation nearby, The Bomb Shelter weathered the ups and downs of the pandemic period through embracing flexibility and remaining determined. It then experienced a new challenge, the influx of demand combined with tight scheduling as so many bands headed into substantial US and international tours, but applied the same flexibility and enthusiasm to these changing times.
Andrija Tokic has been the producer/engineer on for Alabama Shakes, Langhorne Slim, The Ettes, Sunny War, The Deslondes, Margo Price, Jeremy Ivey, Kyshona, Ian Noe, and so many more and continues to work with those who are die-hard analog artists and those who are analog-curious. He’s joined by cohorts Drew Caroll (Silver Synthetic, Josephine Foster) and Jack Tellmann (Stuck Lucky, Snooper) at The Bomb Shelter and finds that learning the ropes of production is still very much a learn-by-doing process. However, he’s also awed by the ways in which increased access to music is creating a new foundation for future producers who get their start as serious listeners. Andrija Tokic kindly agreed to talk with me about The Bomb Shelter and his work there in recent years.
Americana Highways: Do you think of yourself as having a start-date as a producer, or do you have a founding date for The Bomb Shelter as a studio?
Andrija Tokic: It’s hard to date because I started off doing things at home, but I think of myself as having a good few years around 2008 working the way that I work now out of my house. I built my current location around 2012.
AH: I think I saw mention that The Bomb Shelter had moved location at one point and the old location is now used as somewhere for artists to stay. It’s not so common to offer accommodation options these days. How necessary is it?
AT: Sometimes it’s extremely necessary. If a band’s been touring for a month, and then they have two weeks in the studio, it’s way better than living out of hotel rooms. Even B&Bs can get expensive. Often if people are on tour, they’ve had one vehicle, and they’ve been together the whole time, so it’s really great to have people come in and record, and then they can several days where not everyone needs to be there. Some people can stay behind and walk over when they are needed. It allows people to spread out a little bit. Most people enjoy having a kitchen and not moving every night! It’s for bands that aren’t based out of here [Nashville].
AH: With everyone getting back to touring, and there being a big rush of touring, I’ve noticed more bands telling me that they’ve come straight off the road into the studio.
AT: Oh, yes, there has been a rush of touring. I am getting a lot of that. Last winter, we heard that tour schedules were crazier than usual because the bands were making up for the prior year. So, last winter was sardined with everyone needing to record before springtime. After that they would be gone until the fall on tour. It’s like that this year as well, but it was especially true last year. There were plenty of bands who were going back on tour for the first time last spring, even, making up for what they’d missed.
AH: How did all of that down-time of lockdowns impact you? Was having your own studio awesome because you could go in and continue to work, or was it nail-biting because you’re running a professional studio and can’t operate normally?
AT: It flip-flopped between those. At the beginning of it, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to get by. In a matter of a week, everything scheduled for March through June fell through because everyone’s tours fell through. They were going to be in Nashville for a week, for instance, because they were supposed to be touring through. Then they were not traveling anywhere, with so much uncertainty. Also, a lot of bands changed their sounds. It was a time for a lot of people to do that, having more idle time than usual.
At first, it was a standstill for us. But once testing became possible, we could schedule things with lots of space between the sessions. People would do tests before every single session. Things started to trickle in. Most of the Indie people were stuck with nothing to do, but people with labels were still able to be recording. So we had an influx of label records and a total end to indie records for a while. Once things started opening back up, indie bands had been saving up ideas, and since they weren’t summer touring, they were ready to record all the stuff they’d been sitting on. It was interesting. It went from a scary, dead standstill to that.
I don’t do that much remotely, particularly, so that affected me. We did a little bit of Skyping, but the way that we work doesn’t really lend itself to that. We’re much more about people working with one another, and working up the songs together than we are about people sending files back and forth.
AH: I feel like flexibility must have been the key concept for keeping any schedules going through that time, and then changing again to accommodate the influx.
AT: Yes, we took everything very seriously, and everybody was just honest about testing. One time we had to push back thirty peoples’ schedules by one week and everyone just said, “Okay!” If anyone woke up feeling weird, we’d push everything back. We had to do it right.
AH: There’s a lot of determination and bravery there that helped keep music moving. With so many people recording more at home at that time, were more people coming in post-pandemic with pre-recorded material and wanting to work with that?
AT: For sure. We lean towards analog, and it’s more of our calling-card, but there’s all kinds of stuff we can do. Sometimes people say, “I have this recording because I had all the time in the world at home with limited tools.” And I’m a huge fan of that. I love bedroom recordings. People can trial and error a lot that way. They often later want help mixing it or there are things they weren’t able to do that they now want to do, for instance, they didn’t have a piano in their apartment.
AH: I’ve spoken to a lot of people who experimented a lot with electronic sounds over the pandemic period because they were at home with electronic tools. Have you noticed people changing up their sound more readily lately or trying new things?
AT: Yes, I felt like a lot of people took that time to do that. They asked, “What do I want to do creatively with my band?” They changed their identity a little bit. Some bands folded, new bands were formed, some changed around. I feel like plenty of people had the time to try something new and then come back to what they did before even better. [Laughs] There was every combination of that.
AH: I have also noticed that a number of projects that had actually stopped before the pandemic period, but now had decided to get back together and start again. That was an amazing thing to see because you expect the difficulties in the world to discourage music, not promote it.
AT: Yes. I honestly feel like for a lot of people, the fact that the bump and grind got put on pause allowed them to think creatively. I remember my first session working with human beings after the lockdowns, driving to the studio and feeling so incredibly thrilled just to be able to hit a “record” button! I felt like a teenager! Just the idea of recording was so exciting, it didn’t even matter what I would be working on.
Everyone was masked and testing, but everyone in the room, across a wide age range, just had a glow in their eyes. They were so thrilled to even play a note with another person. It was the coolest vibe! People were so incredibly happy. It’s easy for some people, after 40 years of playing, not to feel the same glow, but then there was this feeling of “Oh my God, this is co cool! We’re playing music!”
AH: It was like a restart of being human. A lot of really joyful music came out of that early period. You work with a couple of other guys at the studio, right? Does having different tastes or specialties at the studio useful?
AT: I have a couple of engineers at the studio who work on other projects as well. We have two rooms at the studio. I absolutely adore these guys. We’ve all spent so much time together. It’s easy for us to trade things back and forth. They are both killers in their own rights. They get to see what I’m doing and how I do the things I do, and they get to add their experiences to that. It’s awesome. We all have the same “core,” I think. For the most part, I’ve taught them from the ground up and it’s been much quicker for them to move ahead than it was for me. [Laughs] We each have strong suits and our own tastes in music, though.
AH: This is the whole thing about producing, is it’s not really codified. It’s not something that you can easily access and download. It seems like knowledge that has to be gained through doing it. You, particularly, started very young on that road, building up your skills. Has that changed at all? Or do you think it’s always going to be about learning by doing?
AT: I do think that, but I guess different people learn in different ways. There’s an infinite amount of variables that can occur, so you need experience. Someone could tell you how to make a record on paper, but there’s no way to encompass every possible variant to it all. The more you do it, the more situations you find yourself navigating, and the more happy accidents happen that you learn from.
I do feel, though, that accessibility to music has changed in a way that I never imagined. Having to save up your pennies to go buy a cassette changed to paying a dollar or two to get mailed a bunch of CDs, to now, using streaming platforms. The ability to have music at home is different now. When I started, a home studio was very limited and extremely complicated and expensive. It was still all physical hardware. Even just computer stuff and plug-ins that emulate the real stuff are so accessible to people now.
Also, young people can listen to music that they never would have been able to listen to before. Suddenly, young people can listen to music from any country. They can choose what they do or don’t like and what hits them in a certain way, incorporating it. I think people are starting from a more and more advanced place. If they learn how to listen to music well and internalize it, you still have to learn how to do it, but I think younger generations will continue to push music further and further.
There’s something to be said for older people and lifers who I know whose instincts are so dialed in and they can accomplish so much with so little effort, but I think it’s cool that people can learn from other peoples’ successes and mistakes. I think you still have to be “in it,” though, because developing those tools really does come from experience.
AH: What I found really interesting about what you just said is that listening closely, widely, to a lot of music across the board, is really foundational to becoming a producer.
AT: I think so.
AH: People are sharing a lot more “behind-the-scenes” videos these days, too, showing their process on albums. There’s more access to the possible experiences one might have.
AT: That’s true. And it’s direct. You could spend a lot of time reading books and you could be wasting a lot of time because those books could be filled with misinformation. I feel like so many times the recollection of recording, whether its friends or other people, they only remember the wildest things that happened. And they don’t remember if that super wild thing actually turned out to be cool later! Or if they had to then record it later a different way. [Laughs] People might be spreading misinformation all the time. It’s the part you remember, but you may not remember that it got vetoed later.
AH: The late-night stories are the ones that survive! Your studio, by the way, is known for the kind of equipment you have there, mainly analog. Do you think that people choose studios to record based largely on the equipment that’s there?
AT: It’s a mixed bag. I have people who want to work with me who don’t even realize my method. They don’t realize the technical end of it. They don’t realize that we’re on tape until half-way through the day where they ask, “Wait a minute, where’s the computer?” Then I have people who are self-producing and looking for different sounds that they know came out of this place [The Bomb Shelter] and that’s how they want to record. I feel like it does come down to a case-by-case thing. There have been times in the past where people talking about tape was far more “buzzy” than it is now. Now, I think people are more likely to incorporate all aspects of recording and it’s not a hard rule for them. They just like results.
Some people do say, “I’m setting out to make an analog record,” whether they only work that way, or whether they are trying out something new. Most often people say, “Word of mouth is, you all are great to work with and the way that this stuff sounds great. I just want that same experience and good results.”
AH: It does seem like word-of-mouth still plays a major role in people choosing recording studios. It’s understandable, since that’s a human connection, and recording even one song is a big commitment.
AT: Oh, man, word-of-mouth is the biggest thing. That’s pretty much it! [Laughs] But there’s also quality of work.
Many thanks to Andrija Tokic for talking with us. You can find more information on The Bomb Shelter studio on his website here: https://www.bombshelterstudio.com/
