EVERCLEAR - Art Alexakis & Co. Record Two "Movies"

EVERCLEAR
Art Alexakis & Co. Record Two “Movies”

Back to Rec Notes

It’s been a whiz-bang-boom type of year for Everclear’s Art Alexakis—a new marriage, an appearance before Congress (testifying about deadbeat dads; he was abandoned as a child) and the release of two albums in two different styles. The two albums actually took 18 months to record, though they were both released during 2000 and they both move in that Everclear way between melodic pop and harder rock. Alas, with all that running around, Alexakis got a bit run-down.

His condition finally came to a head after he finished polishing up “When It All Goes Wrong Again”—the first single from Songs From an American Movie, Vol. 2/ Good Time for a Bad Attitude—in the wee morning hours. “ I was heading home to my apartment in L.A., and I threw the mix in the CD player in the car,” Alexakis explains during a break in the mixing sessions for the new CD. “It sounded off-key to me. The vocal sounded out of tune, and I was freaking out. You gotta remember, I hadn’t had more than three hours sleep in three weeks. So, sleep deprivation is a big-time issue.” Rather than turn around and recall the entire mix, he found a Big Brother & The Holding Company disc in the car and threw it in the CD player. That was out of tune. “So, I’m thinking, ‘Well, this was recorded way back when; this could very well be out of tune.’ Then I turn on a radio station in L.A., and I don’t know what song it was, but it was sounding out of tune. I started laughing, thinking, ‘Somebody needs a nap.’ I woke up the next day and ran out to my car to go master this thing, and it sounded perfect. It was one of those dark moments.”

A couple of years ago, however, when Everclear came off their tour supporting So Much for the Afterglow, Alexakis was raring to go. He was gearing up to record what he originally planned to be a solo album. Toward that end, he built a studio in the basement of his home.

Neal Avron and Lars Fox, who assisted Alexakis with the studio construction and on both albums, laugh now while thinking back to the basement days. “It wasn’t acoustically set up by anybody,” explains Avron. “It was literally some drywall slapped up and the ceilings were very low, so a lot of the ambiance had to be artificially created.” The ‘control room’ was a 7x7x14 box that boasted a Mackie console, a Pro Tools Mix Plus setup and Alexakis’ outboard gear. The space had bad room nodes, Avron continues, “so one minute you’d have no bass, and if you moved your head, you had too much bass.” The plate window wasn’t quite set up correctly, so it resonated whenever a bass drum was hit and he would have to turn up the monitor. “There were all kinds of challenges. In essence, we were lucky any of it came out,” he adds with a laugh. “It’s one of those things.”

For Alexakis, the home studio was a natural. “It seemed like a way to do it without spending a lot of money in the studio,” he says. “I could put the money into gear like a Pro Tools system and Neve and API and UREI equipment—vintage equipment that I could use from project to project. Also, the main reason was to spend more time with my family,” he says. He purchased Neve 1073s, API 550s, Teletronix LA-2As, a UREI 1178, as well as microphones like an AKG C-12 (which he used for vocals) and a Neumann TLM103. They also had a ribbon microphone and an assortment of standard Shures.

Because the team was still thinking that the sessions were for an Alexakis solo album, the acoustic guitars and vocals were recorded with a click track directly into Pro Tools. From there, they could figure out how any number of studio musicians, who were also recorded in the basement, would fit into the template. (The only parts not recorded in Portland were the strings and one background vocal session.)

REC NOTES | NEXT

[an error occurred while processing this directive]