“Heart Songs” was the 5th album we made for Rounder. The preparation, the origin, and the process of making the album was different from what we had done before.
Its origin was in dreams. Bruce “Utah” Phillips had a recurring dream that a good number of songs he had made —real songs actually made in waking life – were being sung and recorded by Kate and me. These were songs no one had heard before. They were like classic old-time country songs from the mid 1930s though 1950s. The songs sounded good in the dreams so he contacted us and asked us if we’d like to actually record them. We certainly did. There was discussion of expanding the “band” beyond our duet but we felt we’d do better on our own, and Utah agreed to that.
I say he “made” these songs, rather than “wrote” them that’s because Utah told us that he never put his songs on paper. He didn’t write or type them. He created them in his mind and stored them in his memory. However, when we began the process of learning the repertoire for this album, he did write out the words for us, as well as make cassettes of himself singing them. We still have the song sheets in his handwriting and the cassettes on which he sings each song and tells us the story behind each one.
The preparation went on for about a year. We listened to the songs —too many to fit on one CD— and we made our choices. We got familiar with the selected songs. We tried different arrangements until we settled into what we could do well. We practiced together and we practiced apart. I especially decided how I would play guitar and went over these phrases until they were reliable. Kate was adamant that we would not go over budget again.
An unexpected and, for us, unprecedented thing happened. We started thinking about the meaning of the words in a way we had not done before. The bulk of our previous repertoire was either composed by people who had recently passed away or was centuries old and had been tumbled and polished and reshaped, and misshaped and restored, and ruined again and restored again, and mixed with other songs, all before we ever heard them sung or saw them in a book. When we were in doubt about the intended meaning we had to decide for ourselves. But now, if we were in doubt, we could pick up the telephone and call the one who made the song. We’d ask and he’d explain. For instance, in “Hood River Roll On” we found this couplet:
The fire’s knocked down, the balloons are all packed
They’re coughing and flapping along the still track.
Do you get the image? Neither did we.
Utah explained. It’s morning. It’s still dark in the woods but the sun shines on the tracks. The hobos gather there to warm up. First they roll up their “balloons” which is old hobo talk for their bedrolls. They want to be prepared to jump aboard when the train comes. The hobos have been sleeping on the cold ground in the woods adjacent to the railway tracks. For some, it’s a habit of decades. They all have respiratory problems. So they’re coughing as they flap their arms to warm up. And here we were trying to picture rubber balloons flapping in the wind and making a coughing sound.
We had a number of such puzzles explained to us. It changed how we sing a song. There are many mysterious lines of verse in old folk songs. We would sing them in a way that left the meaning open to interpretation. Now we began to get a firm image in mind for all our repertoire. The result was a different emphasis, a different timbre, a different timing than how we would sing a line with uncertain meaning. How does this happen? I don’t exactly know. But it happens and we don’t interfere with the process.
The process of recording, editing, mixing and mastering was different than anything we had done before.
We recorded most of the 13 songs in one or two takes. We were Prepared with a capital P. This meant there was less editing to do. And because there were never more than 4 channels (2 voices and 2 guitars), mixing went fairly quickly.
But there were technical problems.
We made all our duet recordings at Mike Cogan’s Bay Records. On display in Mike’s office was a collection of “postal mondegreens” —mail he had received at the correct address with the wrong name of the company. Amongst the collection was mail addressed to
Gay Records, Bay Wreckers, and, for some reason, Coconut Bay Records. That mystery got cleared up one day when Mike’s phone rang, and he answered “This is Mike Cogan at Bay Records….. OH!”
The “oh” was his realizing that “ Cogan at Bay Records” sounded a lot like “Coconut Bay Records”. Some of us started referring to him privately and affectionately as Mike Coconut.
Our previous recordings at the Bay recording studio were done on analog recording tape. Mostly it was 2 inch tape rolling at 30 inches per second. But now Bay Records was making the move to digital. This was before recording directly to a computer hard drive was common. We recorded “Heart Songs” on a clumsy, not-entirely-reliable medium called ADAT. It malfunctioned once every 9 hours or so. It being a digital medium, computers were involved. Mike Cogan used a PC. We were working with engineer Bob Shumaker who used a Mac. The ADAT was connected to the PC. When the files got moved to the Mac for mixing something went very wrong. The sound became harsh and metallic. Our guitars sounded like crumpled aluminum foil. Our voices did not blend.
I sought out an independent mastering engineer. The name that kept coming up was Paul Stubblebine. I made an appointment with Paul who advised me to bring all my rough mixes as well as the “final” mixes of the songs whose sound I did not like. He used some of each and then he did a brilliant thing. He ran the entire edgy digital nails-on-a-blackboard catastrophe through an analog tube limiter with all the dials set at zero. The tubes warmed up the sound and the project was saved.