Sharp songwriting, a great mix of acoustic and electric
guitar work, and subtle and well-executed effects processing are the
elements that earned Deb Talan’s smoldering collection of original acoustic
pop, Something Burning, a Homegrown CD Award. Talan’s songs bring
to mind such artists as Beth Orton and the Cranberries, but the sound
is wholly her own. In addition to Talan’s acoustic and electric guitars,
clarinet, and harmony vocals, the CD features coproducer Ben Arons on
drums, Dave Palan on bass, Nancy Hess on slide and electric guitar parts,
and Rebecca Arons (Ben’s sister) on cello. The bulk of the recording
was done in Ben Arons’ attic studio using a variety of microphones and
mixed on what Arons refers to as "a full-blown Pro Tools setup."
Talan wrote these songs over the course of the past
two years or so and finished the last few just before the CD was completed.
Most of them are extremely personal, but Talan chose "Thinking Amelia,"
a daydream about lost aviator Amelia Earhart, as the opening track.
"I was interested in having a lead-off song that wasn’t just me singing
about my experience," she says. "That song’s about being hopeful, and
I like that as a beginning song for a CD." The song "Gladdest Thing"
was inspired by the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and the lyrics
to the chorus were taken directly from Millay’s poem "Afternoon on a
Hill." "It was in a poetry collection my mom gave me called An Awakening
Spirit," Talan recalls. "That poem really grabbed me. Her writing
is very musical, and it was fun to write off of something."
The recording began over a year ago in Portland, Oregon,
where Talan put about eight of these songs onto ADAT with the help of
her friend Nancy Hess. The project migrated to the Boston area when
Arons invited Talan to check out his new computer recording setup and
test his new microphones. The first song they attempted was the spare,
melancholy "The Darkest Season," which features Talan’s angelic vocals
and Hofner guitar.
Talan fell in love with the Hofner about four years
ago. "I wanted something gritty with a different kind of character,"
she says. The first time she played the instrument, at a used guitar
store in Portland, she knew she had found it. The challenge was capturing
the Hofner’s mellow, resonant tone on tape, which required a lot of
arranging and rearranging of the mics. "Everything else was built around
the acoustic guitar and the main vocal track," Talan explains.
"I recorded her vocals and acoustic guitar at the same
time on most of the tracks," says Arons. "I used a Neumann TLM103 (it’s
the same as the U-87) on her voice, with a pop screen and a shock-mount
to isolate it from low-frequency noises. Most of what you hear on the
acoustic guitar are a matched pair of Earthworks QTC1 omnidirectional
mics. A couple of tunes—‘The Darkest Season,’ for example—have a direct
pickup signal [from a Fishman under-saddle transducer] mixed in with
that. There’s no proximity effect with the Earthworks mics to make it
sound boomy, so I could put them pretty close to the guitar (about six
inches away and spaced about eight inches apart from each other) and
isolate her voice. Some leakage made the sound more natural. One mic
was near the soundhole and pointed up toward the neck, and the other
was near the neck and pointed toward the soundhole."
Arons and Talan finished recording "The Darkest Season"
in about a day and a half and moved on from there. "We’ve been friends
for a long time," says Talan, "and our working relationship grew very
naturally. We have a similar aesthetic. We’d do one song, find out what
worked, and [apply] that to what we did on another song." Later they
rented an ADAT so that they could dump the Portland tracks onto Arons’
system and rework them.
Arons’ studio is situated in a triangular space in the
attic of his house, just under the eaves. "It was just big enough for
me to stand up in," says Talan. "It was all wood, so it was a nice sound,
and we didn’t have any weird feedback. It was cold, though, and there
were these nails sticking out of the wall, so I had to be careful not
to lean into them. We picked up a little bit of street noise--recycling
trucks going by, the next-door neighbor working on his house."
Arons used a stereo preamp on the Earthworks mics and
a mono preamp on the Neumann. He ran the line-level output directly
into the Pro Tools Digi001 interface, where he mixed the volume levels
and added a little compression to Talan’s vocals. He did the final mixing
at a professional studio where he had access to the Pro Tools TDM system
and some high-quality plug-ins, such as a Focusrite compressor and a
TC Works Megareverb.
To record the electric guitar parts, Arons took a line
out of Talan’s Fender Princeton Chorus stereo amp and used a Shure SM57
and a Neumann TLM103 on the amp itself. For his sister’s cello parts
(recorded in Minnesota), he used an old Neumann mic from the ’40s ("the
kind of mic Hitler used to use") and the two Earthworks mics. To record
the drum and bass tracks, Arons and Palan played along with the existing
guitar-and-vocals track, and Talan’s harmony vocals and clarinet part
(on "A Good Day’s Work") were the last bits to go on.
Talan and Arons agree that they might approach their
next sessions differently—starting with the rhythm section and a scratch
vocal and building from there. "I also would have recorded all the drums
in the Theater Cooperative in Somerville, Massachusetts, where I did
the drum parts for ‘Amelia,’ ‘Good Day’s Work,’ and ‘My Favorite Coat,’"
says Arons. "It’s an old church, and they have an incredible-sounding
room that’s great for drums."
Something Burning is available at Talan’s Web
site, www.debtalan.com.
Talan and Arons hope to collaborate again in the future, and the $1,000
worth of gear from Sweetwater Sound (their prize for nabbing the latest
Homegrown CD Award) should help them make the minor improvements they
aspire to on their next recording project.
––Simone Solondz
Acoustic Guitar’s Homegrown CD Awards is a year-long spotlight
on CDs recorded and released by acoustic musicians. Winners are profiled
in the Stage and Studio department and receive a $1,000 gift certificate
from Sweetwater Sound’s music technology catalog. The deadline for application
was September 1, 2000.
Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar magazine,
January 2001, No.97.
Check out the other
winners online.
