Neilson Hubbard photo by Thea Mauk
Neilson Hubbard on Capturing “Portraits” in The Studio
Neilson Hubbard is a producer, a filmmaker via co-founding Neighborhoods Apart Productions, a solo artist, a founding member of The Orphan Brigade, and a photographer, having released his book The American South, in 2022. He runs his own studio on his property and is known for working under the Americana umbrella, with a wide swath of sonic possibilities in tow. Those who work with Hubbard often seem to be striving for an accomplished but unvarnished quality that he helps them reach. Some of the artists whose work he’s produced include Mary Gauthier, Sam Baker, Glen Phillips, Amy Speace, Buffalo Blod, and Rod Picott, to name a few.
There’s no question that Hubbard’s own experiences in bands and recording solo have shaped his approach to capturing music, focusing on the songs, and in particular, the vocals as a way of capturing portraits of the artists in motion. Having branched out into photography, he’s finding his motivations are largely the same and that he has one goal across multiple fields, to capture the authentic. I spoke with Neilson Hubbard about how he works, how artists work with him, and the challenges that recording music poses in a hectic world with so much emphasis on branding and content.
Americana Highways: I’ve been talking to producers more and I’m hearing various perspectives and approaches. This is not a uniform thing.
Neilson Hubbard: Oh, for sure. There’s a million different ways that you can make a record. When you work with someone, they are always stressing out about what producer they can use. I always say that you have to go with the person who you feel comfortable with and that you’re vibing with. Especially in Nashville, there’s no telling how many people could make you a good album. It’s just finding the right fit with how your personalities fit and who makes you feel comfortable. That’s the main thing that you want.
AH: There’s the technical side of things with producing, then there’s the other half of it, which is what you’re describing. It seems to be very important. My cheeky question is: Do you think that producers are easy going about this? If someone decides to work with a different producer on their next album, do they take it personally?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=GIV6NGRrpSU%3Fsi%3D7VUXtnw6gXr6ApWj
NH: [Laughs] Of course people take things personally, always. That’s just something I’ve tried to get through, the more I’ve done this, is trying not to take things too personally. We’re talking about art and artists have to make a decision about their art. Maybe I’m not the right person for their project or their art. I work in another field, too. In the last several years, I’ve started a video company that started through music and we end up doing a lot of music videos. We worked with John Prine before he passed, and we just got back from London shooting with Lucinda Williams. We’ve worked with The Killers. That business has been built up a lot with a similar theme. That’s also led me to doing a lot of photography, and that’s very personal to me. I just put out a book of photography last year.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9u_GvzLzsXA%3Fsi%3DlX7QsQP5iudJhsd0
So I think a lot about it in those terms, because I’m an artist in those things, too. Even as a producer, you’re an artist on some level. So you have to try to understand that thing, that sometimes you’re not the right person for every job. That’s something I’ve tried to learn as I’ve grown through working. When you try to force yourself into something, sometimes that’s not the right move, and the result is not what you want. I try to be able to make fun of myself! Art is both a luxury, and something that can be made fun of, but it’s also something that’s very important to me. Sometimes I think we can get a little too precious about it. I try not to do that, if I can!
AH: You just summed up the perfect paradox about all this. Sometimes people are surprised when their work is taken seriously because there are two sides to things, there is the serious side and the sillier side.
NH: That’s the thing. I had a friend, an engineer I worked with a lot, who said, “There’s never such a thing as a musical emergency.” There are people who have live and death issues, and I think sometimes we get wrapped up in art to the point that it’s life and death. I think it is life and death in some ways, on a spiritual level, but it’s not life and death for our physical being. So that’s the paradox right there. I’ve had people ask me, when I first started as a musician twenty years ago, if music was a blessing or a curse, and it’s a similar thing. I don’t really know how to answer that, because it is both. It gets into you and that’s the part that kind of trips people up. Once you go down that path, and you are an artist, you will always find a way to make things, and that can be to your detriment, or that can be something that gives you power and makes you feel great. Those are all things that exist together. [Laughs]
AH: Something that occurs to me based on what you said earlier is that some producers really hone in on one sound, or one niche that they always work in. In that case, it might not be surprising if someone changes producer if they change their sound. But you are in a different category, since you work very broadly in terms of sound.
NH: I come from a song background. I was an artist and a songwriter first, so that informs it. The song and vocal are the things that I’m most concerned with on a record, really. I’m not talking about a snare sound or a guitar sound usually. That’s not me. I’m more about, “What does this song need? And how will we go about that?” That radically shifts how songs start. Sometimes we’ll start with a band and we’ll record live, sometimes we’ll start with a vocal. It changes depending on that, and what an artist wants to do.
That was always what drove me, from the beginning. I agree. I don’t think I have just one thing that I do. If it’s genre, I probably sit in the Americana world, but that’s so broad. Sometimes it feels like it’s leaning towards the pop, sometimes it can be a little more rootsy or folky. I think that’s always the litmus test, though, the song and the vocal.
AH: This is just my opinion, but I think there’s something else that people seem to want when they work with you. What I mean is that you don’t make things super-glossy and thereby bury that human element. I think that maybe people understand that as a baseline about you. I know that there are people who come back to you for that reason.
NH: [Laughs] Thank you. I do hope so. It’s the same with me for photography. There’s an honesty that has to be reached. My goal is to try to get the listener as close as humanly possible to what that artist is and what they are trying to say. You’re trying to get that veil away from that. That could be perceived as being “not over-produced,” or you could call it “very natural,” or “organic.” Those are words that are used a lot with the style that I do. My obsession as an artist is that.
It’s the same when I take a photo, and I don’t really see the distinction between taking a picture of a person and getting a vocal of the person. In one, you’re seeing something, in one you’re hearing, but you’re trying to get as close as possible to the essence of those two things, what a voice sounds like, or what a person looks like and what they can emote through who they are. I think that’s been my process and journey through my career. Hopefully, that’s what people are coming to me for, so that we can show authentic things and be honest.
AH: I recently interviewed Rod Picott about his album Starlight Tour, which you worked on. That album really exemplifies a lot of what we’re talking about.
NH: Yes, Rod is the king of that. He’s so great as an artist, and at knowing who he is and what he wants to say. He’s such a great writer, even outside of music, with prose and stories. We have conversations beforehand, and we talk a little about it, and then he might theorize about sounds, referencing some album that we all like. But in the end, you get in there, and you end up making an album that’s, hopefully, what that person is. That involves someone coming to the studio, willing to open up themselves to that, and to be unafraid of what they are trying to say and who they are. That’s the big secret of that kind of recording. I think that’s another element of my production style, trying to make people feel comfortable and like they are in a safe place to create.
AH: I’ve seen in past interviews that you like to get to know artists a little bit, or else it would be difficult to have an authentic experience. How long is that, usually? Do you try to hang out for a certain amount of time first? I know it would be very different from person to person.
NH: There’s not really a set thing to that, and some things aren’t possible. You’re not always able to do that. A lot of times, I work with people who come from overseas, so you’re talking on the phone. You’re doing whatever you can so that whenever someone gets into that studio space, they won’t freeze up and feel like they can’t say what they want to say, even in terms of their opinions about their own music. I think sometimes people do feel that way.
There are a lot of things in life that are not fun, and being in a studio should not be one of them. Anybody I work with, we work hard, and fast, and we don’t mess around, but it still should be fun. Having that little bit of experience beforehand might be grabbing a coffee, getting a meal, or having multiple things like that. Also, when you’re working with someone more than one time, it gets easier. And that’s always fun. It’s always good to try as much as you can to have that connection before you go in there and start pushing “record.”
AH: I hadn’t really thought about it, because I was assuming it was about you getting to know their music in order to do it justice, but what you’re saying is that it’s as much for them, that they need to know you.
NH: Yes, of course. Even more so, to be honest. It’s all these songs that they’ve worked on for months, years. It’s the money they are putting into it. All those things bring pressure to a situation, so they need to feel comfortable. We need to create that atmosphere. We are not going to do something that you don’t want to do or doesn’t match what you want to say.
AH: Are you involved in picking the songs for albums if artists want you to?
NH: Oh, yes, almost always. I think that’s one of the main things a producer does. I definitely love Rick Rubin as a producer and that’s one of his biggest things. A lot of producers now, in the current world, come out of engineering backgrounds. They come from a technical side. I always liked the producers who came more from the side of songs, and song-picking, more of the older traditional producers.
Rick Rubin is one of those and his production style is very involved in songs and pushing the songs through the filter they’ve decided for the record. Sometimes he’s not as involved in engineering, because he has great engineers. To him, it’s the songs and the performances that matter, and he always gets that right. The old-school producers decided what was a great song or a great performance, and their hands weren’t as much on the instruments. But out of the necessity of how we make albums these days, producers often play a lot on the albums.
AH: That happens a lot these days if the producer is an instrumentalist.
NH: I play drums on a lot of my albums now. I’ve gone through all different versions of that. It does save a little money on a record. I like being a part of the band to play on songs, too, and I can be on the tightrope with the band and the artist. I love records like that where we all get in the room and play together, and the artist is singing at the same time. There’s something really honest about that.
AH: Do you think that artists, entering the studio, worry too much about how a record will be received, and it’s distracting? We were talking about the seriousness and the silliness of music earlier. The seriousness is that it is a big deal to make a record, but the seriousness is that you don’t know what will happen to that record.
NH: I also think there’s a lot of concern at this moment with being so aware of that moment in time and who they are at that time. I don’t think that you can know all those things in real time. You have to go make the story. I think that’s just the nature of the digital thing that we’ve created. I think we’re all trying to self-define everything at all times, and art’s no different. To be true to the art itself, you have to turn things over to it, and not be trying to define it.
You have to do the art, and it may be the greatest thing, and it may be the thing that takes the artist to the next level, but you won’t know that until you make it. Then, you won’t know more until it enters the world, and it’s beyond someone’s control. That’s a different process. The only thing the artist is going to get is that time in studio. That’s the moment that you have. That’s the thing you’re going to get. So don’t let it go by freaking out about something that you can’t control.
AH: The whole pressure on artists to brand themselves and present themselves on social media must put that extra pressure on them to somehow inhabit the right tone, the right feel, when they go into the studio. If you can’t really be present, how can you focus on create art from inside yourself?
NH: I think that’s the problem. You can’t let that affect the process. If you do, you’re ruining it. The pressure of constant content and having to have an opinion on everything is demanding the artist to shine the light on themselves rather than the art. And that’s where you always lose. Your art is what you need to be shining the light on, the stories you tell and the songs you make, not yourself. I think we all have personas, and artists have done that forever. That’s cool and a big part of it. But I think there needs to be a little mystery to it, too. I think that’s important. To me, that’s a big element of art.
Find more information on his website here: http://www.neilsonhubbard.com/
Neighborhoods Apart Production: http://www.neighborhoodsapart.com/
His book: https://kianprojects.bandcamp.com/merch/the-american-south-by-neilson-hubbard
Enjoy our previous coverage here: Video Premiere: Neilson Hubbard “Our DNA”
