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| JOE
JACKSON Back to New York for "Night and Day II" Back to Rec Notes/Page 1, 2, 3 |
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“I usually
have a sound in my mind, because it’s part of the arrangement to me
if something has a delay on it, or a lot of reverb or none. So I leave it
up to Dan to come up with something that sounds right to me. Sometimes I’m
only able to express it in a vague way like, ‘I’m standing in
a back alley between two big buildings and shouting, and that’s the
kind of sound I want,’ or ‘I want to have a repeat that’s
going in time with the beat, but not quite, it’s a little slow so it
kind of rubs against the beat.’ Sometimes I’ll say, ‘I want
it to be kind of like this, but not too much,’ and it might not make
a lot of sense, but he seems to get what I’m talking about.”
“It was a very creative atmosphere,” Gellert continues. “For example, there were different attitudes he wanted to portray in the songs, different characters he wanted to be. One of the songs is called ‘Happy Land,’ which is about a club that burned down in Brooklyn, and people died in it. And the song is about that, and Joe sings it as a bit of a journalist, telling the story. So he wanted to get into that frame of mind. It was a result of Joe doing it, listening to it back, then adjusting. He has great ears that way. The process was fun, hearing the ideas come out of him and then having them be realized and have them come out of the speaker.” The toughest one for Jackson was the last track on the album, “Stay.” “I wanted the vocal to have a sound that was sort of spacious, that was kind of floating in a lot of space, but without sounding distant or muddy,” Jackson says. “I wouldn’t have known how to get that sound, and I don’t know how Dan did it. I know he combined two or three different effects, and I think it sounds great.” “I think that one sounds really good, too,” Gellert concurs, going on to explain the process. “I basically used ‘expensive’ reverbs. [Laughs.] It’s a combination of reverbs. A lot of time when you want something very complex when it comes to reverbs and something is very sparse, you need to use a couple of different ones that affect different things in the spectrum. So it’s a combination of smaller spaces, of longer spaces, of delays all kind of combined into one, cohesive unit that makes it sound better than just one program. It kind of makes it into one big program using different devices. To be honest, I don’t remember exactly the devices—probably Lexicon, probably the new Sony S777 reverb and delays; maybe a Publison delay. Again, the more important thing is what the music needed, because it’s such a great vocal performance, and it just needed something to uphold it. It didn’t need to be extreme in any way. It just had to be sitting in something really nice, and that’s what Joe described and what the music needed, so it was just finding the right combination.” Gellert mostly uses the Neumann U67 tube mic on Jackson’s vocals. “It really sounds nice for his voice, kind of amplifies the right things for him. We’ve tried different ones throughout the various projects, and the U67 seems always to win. And we’ll use different compressors depending on what tune it is and how he is singing, anything from a Neve compressor to an old LA2A, and that’s about it.” “The tracks had different challenges,” Jackson says. “Compositionally, the hardest thing was ‘Just Because,’ the beginning, the fugue. I had this idea that there is supposed to be mounting paranoia with the string quartet fugue where it’s gradually filling up space. It’s a simple concept, but it wasn’t easy to do. I wrote it a couple of times and scrapped it. I have a definite vision, but it doesn’t come with every single note mapped out, so I have to work out the details. I had trouble working out the details on that one.” From Gellert’s perspective, no particular track comes to mind as “a problem child,” but there were a couple of harder tracks to mix. “There were a couple that weren’t as obvious when I was working to mesh the two worlds together and create the right atmosphere for it to fit into the rest of the album,” he says. “It was a matter of really getting into each particular sound and mixing it maybe a little differently or putting a different effect than what was originally thought of. “It’s really a pleasure to be involved in the entire recording, though, and do all the vocals and know the comps and then mix it,” Gellert continues. “I’ve already been mixing it while I’ve been recording it, more figuratively than literally, but when it comes to the mix, it became a more creative environment rather than trying to learn the songs and figure everything out and then get to be creative. Because I was thinking about it all along, we started at a higher level in the mix, which is nice, and unfortunately that doesn’t happen often these days, because projects are scattered. We don’t always have the pleasure of working on a project all the way through, seeing a song from its infancy, become a teenager, then a young adult and have it evolve. It makes a difference.”
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