Many years ago, through a chance connection, a crap demo of an even more rubbish song I had written, ended up in the hands of a manager named Ian Wright. Ian who had passed the song around to a bunch of his producers, who had somehow miraculously reported to him that I had talent, had decided to sign me on as developing artist.
One day Ian and me were sitting in his Notting Hill office listening to my usual run of the mill rubbish, when Ian gave me a press copy of Achtung baby and said, “Steve (Lillywhite) just finished this and when we heard it we were all like holy shit. I think you’ll like this one”.
“Ian, why don’t you hook me up with Steve Lillywhite?” I asked.
“Nah, you don’t want to do that. Steve can make your record sound great but he can’t make it into a hit. You need to write that first and then give it your sound, he’ll then just make it sound great”.
Back then, of course, I had no idea what he was talking about. I was knee high to a chicken and thought my musical droppings where ultimately brilliant. In many ways I saw that as Ian denying me the opportunity to work with Steve, something that hurt me and ultimately led to the end of our working relationship.
Ian was right of course. Steve Lillywhite is a captor and what captors do is capture the essence of a band that has their songs, and has their sound, but needs to make sure their essence is not lost in the mechanics of the recording studio.
Steve Lillywhite has during his incredible carrier produced tons of great albums for bands such as U2 and Dave Matthews Band (including the famous Lillywhite sessions after which the band and Steve split and DMB for the most part lost the art of capturing their magic in a studio). If Steve would have only produced my album the ky would have been the limit. I would have formed a super band with Bono and Dave, been as cool as Jason Mraz and Chris Cornell….a boy can dream, can’t he…
Not so long ago I was sitting in Pete Glenister’s studio in London, working on Ashes, when we started talking about Steve (Steve and Pete have a long history). The conversation began with Pete mentioning to me that he had played Ruin to Steve. Steve had really liked it and had made a comment about how much he liked my voice, and asked to be sent a CD of my music. Steve was at that moment in time working at Columbia Records as an A&R manager.
Again, I jumped on the opportunity and said to Pete, “why don’t you ask Steve if he wants to produce this album with us?”
“Nah, not sure if he is right really. Steve is great at getting a band that has their sound and capturing them in the studio. I am much better at understanding what a singer/songwriter is all about. He just doesn’t get it.”
This time the older and wiser Raman knew exactly what Pete meant. Steve had just won a grammy for his most recent work on U2’s “How to dismantle an atomic bomb” and had produced really rubbish albums for Jason Mraz and Chris Cornell. Pete was right, but then again he is rarely wrong.
A few weeks later Steve Lillywhite called. He had received his copy of the Buddahead material and he invited me to meet with him at his office at Columbia Records. Armed with my copies of the Steve Liilywite produced albums I wanted him to sign I arrived at this office.
“You are a tart,” Steve said to me as he signed the album covers, “Shall we listen to some music?”
Steve looked entirely different to what I had imagined the great British producer who had produced so many cool albums would look like - he looked, well, to put it mildly quite Hollywood. Bleach blonde hair and chiclet white teeth. I stared at him while he played his air guitar along to a song from “Crossing The Invisible Line” called Strong.
“I love it mate. This is fab. So, I have an idea, can you write a song for Aerosmith?”
WHAT? WHAT THE HELL IS HE TALKING ABOUT?
“What kind of Aerosmith song?” I asked politely.
By then Steve was half way out of his office. He turned around hurriedly and said, “Anything. I need a new single for their greatest hits album”.
Ian Wright and Pete Glenister had both been right. Steve was not right for me. He got my music but not my essence. He didn’t know what to do with me. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying the rule is that a singer/songwriter can never work with a Captor; but before you do you have to meet a very basic requirement: You must be really developed in your writing and performance, and confidence. So much so in fact that all you need is for your producer to figure out how to capture your essence.
A great case and point for this is the relationship between Andy Wallace and Jeff Buckley when they were working on Grace together. One night Andy and I were sitting in his studio listening to mixes he had done for Crossing the invisible line when somehow we started talking about his work with Jeff Buckley. That is when he told me the story of how Hallelujah was recorded. These are Andy’s words, pretty much word for word as he recounted the story. They have been ingrained in my mind:
“I knew that Jeff played a lot of shows around the city and he was really good live, and that everyone talked about his live performance. So, every night after we finished recording I would invite a bunch of people to the studio to sit around and watch Jeff perform. I would set him up like he was sitting on stage and then while he played I would just have the record button pressed. The album version of Hallelujah is just one of those performances. One night he just nailed it”.
So the lesson of this story is if you are an artist, and you really honestly have your songs and sound together but something is lost in translation when you record in a studio then you may benefit from a captor. Captors are not there to make you sound good from a technical point of view; they are the ones who capture the essence. Still, not every artist who is great is great because of his or her essence. Sometimes there is no essence to capture. From Chris Cornell to Jason Mraz, there is no essence. Essence is that identifying factor that no other artist or group of artists can recapture except for the one artist or the one band (and their captor). Think Dave Matthews Band, think U2: It is exactly that combination of musicians with that producer that make that sound happen.
