The press release was innocuous enough, yet if there’s a formula to get our attention it’s this backstory:
“The Shivers hail from Queens, NY, and are fronted by songwriters Keith Zarriello and Jo Schornikow. The band scraped together enough cash together to travel to Manchester, England to record to tape in an all analog studio. The resulting album, More, runs the gamut of American rock ’n’ roll, delving into everything from gritty Lou-Reed-inspired rock to the swaggering soul of Nina Simone.”
“Wait-wait,” I thought. “Who does that in this day and age?”
Well, bands I admire actually, and More delivers on both craft and execution. And it’s damn catchy into the bargain. “Love is in the Air” is right up there with some of my favorite tracks of the year.
So, we’ve invited The Shivers to hang out with us this week, to get more on what inspired the recording process and to rummage through their record recommendations from their own collection beginning tomorrow. First, Keith has more on what informed that trip to the UK to record More:
Our recording process started here—Analogue Catalogue Vintage Recording Studio. There is a reason we traveled half way across the world to record here. Julie the owner simply doesn’t believe in Pro Tools and that’s why I love her.
You will not find a computer in the studio. You listen to music with your ears, you don’t watch it on a screen so it makes perfect sense to me. Trust your ears, not your eyes. A picture of a wave form means nothing. We knew going in we wanted the album to be on vinyl and that we wanted the vinyl version to never touch digital. Here we were able to have that mind set from the start to the sequencing. It forced us to keep our album short.
The owners Rob and Julie are amazing people. The studio is housed in a beautiful Victorian home on a hill side right outside of Manchester, UK. These people love vinyl and love rock and roll. The Trident board is one of the best sounding boards in the entire world still. That they take the time to maintain this out dated gear and these tape machines just speaks to their passion and love.
Rob Ferrier, the engineer there really helped us get good takes. I strongly recommend this studio to anyone in the world! I will say again and I’m sure your readers will agree that Pro Tools is destroying rock music. I strongly believe the creators of this miserable program should be tried for crimes against humanity.
And here’s where the process ended in our journey of having never touched the awful world of digital, Joe Lambert Mastering. We brought in tapes to Joe’s Brooklyn studio, he mastered from tape to tape and straight from that to a lathe with his own hands. This skill is incredible and rare.
Let him tell you more about it at the link above . . .
