In February 2016, Shawn Everett won a Grammy for his engineering work on Alabama Shakes’ Sound & Color. The album title, like the accolade itself, was fitting. Although technical details are part of the job description for audio engineers, Everett shows how the recording process can also be deeply creative, like painting with sound. “When you say you’re an engineer, a lot of people don’t even know what you mean,” Everett says, laughing. “There’s a whole secondary emotion that comes out of how you record something, the color of it. Sometimes when I’m mixing, I’ll say to the artist, ‘Send me a picture of what you want the song to sound like.’ It sounds so art school and ridiculous, but you can immediately tell what you need to do just by looking at this photograph.”
Besides Sound & Color, Everett’s past credits include some combination of producing, engineering, and mixing (or all of the above) for Weezer, John Legend, Broken Social Scene, Julian Casablancas, Lucius, the Growlers, Jesca Hoop, and more. He seems to be having a particularly strong run this year, engineering some of 2017’s most anticipated albums, from Perfume Genius’ No Shape to the War on Drugs’ A Deeper Understanding to Grizzly Bear’s Painted Ruins, among others. Though he often works with the songwriter and producer Blake Mills, a longtime collaborator, Everett has projects on the way alongside everyone from Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado to indie-savvy pop maestro Ariel Rechtshaid.
The 34-year-old grew up in small-town Alberta, Canada. His father was a longtime drummer with a love of all things antique, so much so that the family lived in a converted 1950s gas station by the side of a road for a time. “People would show up with their cars and want to get their gas,” he recalls. Everett balanced the old-timey quality of his surroundings with an interest in futuristic technology, so it’s easy to see why albums he engineers often have a sound that feels “classic” while also seeming new. “I think it’s where my brain naturally sits,” he explains.
After high school, Everett studied at Alberta’s respected Banff Centre, before moving to Los Angeles a little more than a decade ago. Within days, he had met prominent industry figure Tony Berg—a producer and A&R exec who famously signed Beck—and, through him, Mills, launching a formidable partnership. Fresh from a stint in Spain, where he was recording the next Hinds album, Everett recently called us from his L.A. studio to share stories from inside the booth—and out. Unsurprisingly, some of the most interesting sounds he’s captured were the result of working outside traditional methods.
Shawn Everett, by Jeff Kite
Pitchfork: Adam Granduciel from the War on Drugs was telling me how he got to a point where he was staring at a speaker to see whether a kick drum was too loud. What was it like working with him?
Shawn Everett: He’s obsessed about recording way more than I am [laughs]. He knows every piece of gear, what everything does, like it’s his favorite thing. If you just bring out a piece of gear, it will inspire him so much that he’ll almost think of a whole other section of a song.
Any examples? It sounds like you guys did some kind of pitch-shifting on the vocal on “Holding On.”
Oh yeah! That’s weirdly what I was going to bring up. Several years ago, I was doing a record with Julian Casablancas. He’d said he wanted the record to be like a cassette tape from the ’80s in a gutter in New York, but found in the future. We had a recording space above the Strand Book Store in New York, and one night Peter Hook, the bass player for Joy Division, was down there doing a reading. I saw it and started reading his book, and there was all this stuff about that producer Martin Hannett. He would use insane techniques, like putting the band on the roof, and he was at the forefront all the digital equipment that you could use creatively. So I got kind of obsessed with this delay he was using. I found a guy in Manhattan who had one and he sold it to me.
Finally I was doing the War on Drugs record. Adam has so much gear and we were working in the best studios all over L.A. I don’t even have that much gear, but we’d come to my studio specifically so we could play with that delay. One day he wanted to do something different with his vocal at the end of that song. He had this melody that dropped down, and we figured out instead of him singing all those drops, he could just sing one note, and then I could program each drop with the delay. So it sounds like a futuristic effect, but it could easily have been done on a ’70s record, because that’s when the delay came from.
You worked with Grizzly Bear on their new album. Chris Taylor, who’s in the band and produced the record, also seems to think like an engineer.
Chris is very similar to Adam in a way in that they both are very studio-orientated guys. Both of them I had a line of communication with that you can’t always get with artists. With Chris, part of the magic of Grizzly Bear that people don’t quite realize is how much of a sonic world that guy’s building. He really has an idea of the color of what he wants to create. So it comes down to every aspect of the drum tone, the snare drum they pick, the guitar amp that they use. It’s just everything. He’s a real master of that.
He’s a cook, which is not many worlds away from what he does as a producer. And I was thinking about that, this combination of elements. At one point I said to him, “Man, have you ever been to this restaurant in London? It’s so good!” Now I’m forgetting the name—it’s like Anthony Bourdain’s favorite restaurant in the world, or his favorite place to get bone marrow [St. John]. Chris was like, “Not only have I been there, I worked there.” He took time off from Grizzly Bear to essentially almost intern at this restaurant, so he could learn more about what they were doing, because he thought it was so inspiring. He was telling me, “I’d have to carry a dead pig across the alley,” this and that.
Adam is the same way, and I found out later he went to school to be a painter.And I was like, “What painters are you into?” He started showing me pictures by these painters he was into, and then I started noticing that these paintings sounded like his music. And on top of that, these guys were using this technique where you’d paint and then you’d scrape away the painting and reveal what was beneath it and then you’d paint a little bit more and then you’d let that dry and then scrape away more layers. I was like, “Dude, that’s what we’re doing!” [laughs]
You know Haim well, too.
They were always like this secretly insane band, where I think everyone in this close circle of friends was wondering, “When are they going to break?”
For years we would record demos with them. We had a whole record of just Danielle [Haim]. One summer break [around 2011 or 2012], Danielle and Matt Sweeney from Chavez, we made a record up in Malibu, weirdly, at the guitar player from Incubus’ house [Mike Einziger]. We were up there for the whole summer and there was for some reason no air conditioning. We had the drums in the living room. I don’t know if it’ll ever come out. I doubt it.
It was that feeling of having moved to L.A. and met all these cool people. You were like, “These people are so talented and cool, and one of these days the world will know.” And now the world totally does know.
On the Perfume Genius record, did you have any of these types of creative moments in the studio?
I bought this microphone that’s shaped like a human head, and the sound moves around the face like it does an actual human face. I’d always been obsessed with this microphone because when I was really young I was into Pearl Jam and I heard about this producer/engineer Tchad Blake, who later on in my life became a real influence. He worked on Pearl Jam’s record called Binaural, and they said they called it that because he was using a lot of this head, this binaural head. You could turn it around, and by recording the guitar with the mic facing the wrong way, listening through headphones you’d have the distinct sense that the guitar was coming from behind you.
I was actually working with Adam [Granduciel], and because Adam is so into recording techniques I was telling him how excited I was that Tchad Blake used this binaural head all the time. And he was like, “Man, you have to get one.” I used it on the War on Drugs, and then I brought it to the Perfume Genius session. It was perfect for the Perfume Genius album because we we were really trying to create a different fantasy world for each song. You could use that microphone in ways that you’d use your own ears. You know that game where you’d take two cups and there’s a string and then you talk to your friend on the line? We were doing stuff like that, where you’d record through one cup that was up against the head, into its ear. Or there are all these apps you can use on your iPhone where if you wear headphones it does all these delays and sonic shit to the environment. We’d put an iPhone with headphones on the head.
The first song on the Perfume Genius record [“Otherside”], we talked about how it could feel like a lonely church up in the Ozarks, this sad church where most of the town had died. There’s a few remaining people sadly singing the songs they’ve been singing forever. We set up the studio like we were in a church. We had these seats aligned like a church, and we put the head right in the middle of the room, and then everything we’d record in that room we’d record through the head. We put Mike [Hadreas]’ vocal through the equivalent of an old PA, like the way that a priest would sing into the room with a shitty PA. And then it would cut in the chorus to something totally ethereal, like he died and went to heaven.