Behind The Release: Wilco “The Whole Love”

Wilco is one of those rare bands that have become something of a household name without the benefit of media saturation or even a single platinum-selling release. They’re the sort of group that seems to attract more GRAMMY nods and diehard fans than they do bell-weather listeners, and although their roots are deep in classic Americana, they’ve developed a reputation for being inveterate experimenters.

“The Whole Love” comes out September 27

In these ways, Wilco may have less in common with fellow Midwestern roots-rockers, and a whole lot more more to do with genre-defying artists like Tom Waits, Sonic Youth, and The Flaming Lips – The kinds of prestige acts who seem to get signed by the major labels for the credibility (and increased bargaining power) that comes from having them on board.

Not counting brief and well-documented break from the majors when the band was dropped by Warner Bros, only to be picked up by none other than… Warner Bros, Wilco have only seemed like independent artists. That is, until now. This September, the band is set to release The Whole Love on their own dBpm imprint.

For The Whole Love, the group enlisted New York-based producer/engineer Tom Schick, who served behind the console when Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy produced the GRAMMY-winning Mavis Staples album, You Are Not Alone last year.

For the Behind The Release series, I talked to Schick about recording and mixing Wilco’s first indie album at the band’s private studio in their hometown of Chicago.

JC: Tom, thanks for taking the time to talk. This is new territory for the band: Recording exclusively in their own studio for a release on their own label. How early did you get involved in that process?

TS: I was lucky enough to be involved with it from the very beginning, when everyone was coming in, plugging in and just starting to play with each other.

For this album, they did a lot of writing in the studio. Jeff [Tweedy] would come in with an idea or a riff and begin playing it – pretty soon they’d all be playing together. Based on that initial seed, everyone would gradually find their part. It was kind of like watching a puzzle click together piece-by-piece. Sometimes they’d work on a song for a little while, put it away and come back to it later. And a few times they would get something together that would be the song and they’d get the take. Thankfully we were just recording everything.

That’s interesting. So they’re kind of creating whole arrangements at once in a collaborative way?

Yeah. But also, everyone would take their turn adding whatever they felt like adding to it. It was an extremely collaborative process, and really a lot of fun. As far as the creative process goes, there were no limitations, any idea anyone had could be done. Of course some things would work and some things wouldn’t, but it was a very open process.

When every run-through has the potential of being a keeper take or an important reference-point, how do you set up in a way that’s conducive that process?

Well, it’s a tricky thing, because there are so many people in the band and each of them play so many different instruments.

I wanted everything set up at once, so anybody could pick up any instrument and play it at any time and there would be no changeover. Before they even came into the studio I spent about a day plugging everything in, so they could just walk in, grab an instrument and start playing. Of course, it would get fine tuned as we’d go along. We’d add mics, take mics away, but a lot of that foundation remained the same. That way, they could always come back and try an overdub or a whole song again.

Originally, we had it set up to go to 24 track tape. But as soon as we started, we realized we would have gone through probably $50,000 worth of tape at the rate we were going [Laughs]. We ended up going to Pro Tools, and put the whole mixes through tape with Bob Ludwig during mastering. We still went through the line amps of the Studer 827 at The Loft [Wilco’s private studio].

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen pictures of The Loft, but it’s a big open space. There’s just a bookshelf between the recording console and the rest of the room where the band is playing. There are some baffles around the drum kit, but it’s not really a soundproofed or acoustically treated space. It was a really fun way to work because everyone is just in the room, playing together.

In a lot of ways it was a kind of simple and straight-forward setup.

For drums it was just a D12 on the kick, an SM 57 on the snare, and couple of Coles [4038]s as overheads, and a [Neumann] U87 in front of the drum kit. All that went through some API pres.

We added a couple of mics as we went along, because [drummer] Glenn [Kotche] will bring in some pretty un-traditional pieces to the kit. But the 5 mics is a pretty good way to get started and lay the foundation. If you start with too many mics, I find, it slows the process down. It takes forever to get sounds, people get impatient – it’s easier to get something sounding good with as few mics as possible and add things as you need them. The more mics you have the more issues there are with phase, and sometimes adding too many mics to an instrument ends up making everything sound a little smaller.

Bass was just an RE20 on the cabinet and a DI. For the electric guitar amps for Nels [Cline],

Jeff and [Co-Producer] Pat [Sansone] we had some Royer [121]s, and those were going through Neve modules.

WIlco (l-r): Pat Sansone, Mikael Jorgensen, Jeff Tweedy, Nels Cline, Glenn Kotche, and John Stirratt

So you had the same setup for each player, and the differences in tones came at the instrument and amp level?

Exactly. You know, I think Pat’s amp may have had a 57 on it, but that was really because we just ran out of Royers.

The board at the studio is a Sony board, which is kind of like an old MCI board. But we didn’t really use the board at all except for monitoring. There’s about 20 channels of API pres and EQs and then there’s a Neve sidecar with another 10 or 12 channels of Class A Neves, so all the tracking was done through those.

For Jeff’s Vocal we used a [Shure] SM7, partially because that’s the mic that he’s used to, and partially because when you have everybody in the room together, that’s a good mic for [eliminating] bleed. If you have a U47 or something like that, with guitar amps blasting in the same room, it can be hard to control.

On Jeff’s acoustic guitar we used a CMV 563 Neumann mic which is a mic I had that we used on the Mavis Staples record that Jeff produced. Jeff liked it so much that he went online and found one for himself! It was a pretty nice luxury to have access to two of them.

We had some spot mics on other stuff – a single [AKG] 414 on the piano in mono, a couple of 57s on the organ, and a couple of DI lines for Mike and Pat. Eventually there were a couple of DIs for Glenn.

Was that piano an upright or a baby grand?

A baby grand, just mono. When there’s that many instruments, I find it’s much easier in a mix to pan a mono piano left or right, where when you have a stereo piano, a lot of times it just eats up too much of the track, and you don’t have room for all the other instruments.

When you’re recording piano in a room with instruments blaring, where do you put that AKG C 414 to get some semblance of isolation? Or is it just not that much of a concern?

It’s not too much of a concern. The piano did have a short stick, so I used that and threw a blanket over it, and had the mic in right over the hammers. It does make it sound a little more like an upright when you record a baby grand in that way. I try to get as far away as I can without making the bleed too ridiculous, and when we’d do something that’s more of a solo piano, yeah, we’d open up the lid and pull the mic back a little bit.

Coming from my time engineering at Sear Sound, if I had the choice, I probably would have used an [AKG] C12a or something, but they had a 414, and that worked too.

So you pretty much used all the band’s gear, right? Were there any pieces that you just had to have and brought in for yourself, or did you just use what was already there?

Tom Schick

They had a great amount of stuff there. They had a good amount of compression too. They had a couple of Manley compressors, a couple of Chandler TG1s, some 1176s, a pair of Distressors. For the mixing I brought in a few things of mine. I brought in a couple of dbx 160 VUs and a Pendulum 6386 compressor just to have on hand.

Where did you end up using those?

The dbx I used on the kick and the snare. The Pendulum I used on a variety of different things, on a song-to-song basis. It could have been an acoustic guitar, sometimes it would be some background vocals.

Do you track through some of this stuff too?

Yeah I did. Kick and snare I think had an 1176, for the overheads the studio had a stereo Tube Tech, and then for the bass amp and DI we had a couple of LA3As. On Jeff and Nel’s electric guitars I think we had a Manley ELOP compressor, for vocals we had another 1176, and then there was a Chandler TG1 which did a nice job on acoustic guitar.

Well the record sounds pretty great. It’s very well-controlled without ever seeming over-compressed. How do you like to approach compression going in?

When I’m going into Pro Tools I often use compression just to save my ass from going into the red.

I don’t like to over-compress things because you can’t undo it, but at the same time if you’re hitting things hard and it sounds good, I’m not going to change anything if that means losing the take. When you have a group of musicians out there and they’re really playing together, and they might go from a really soft song to a really loud song, you know, you’re all of a sudden going to be slamming the compressors on some of the meters. You try to get it as good as you can, but if they’re ready to record, you’ve got to just start recording.

I’m embarrassed to say it, but I had always heard about Wilco, but never had a chance to give them much a listen until the first time I heard their drummer, Glenn Kotche, play.

I was doing sound for a couple of shows with Bryce and Aaron from The National and he was their opening act, just doing his solo drum performances. I ended up mixing his set too, and was immediately blown away. It’s this very ornate, well-orchestrated stuff that you’d never expect to all be coming from one person. It’s challenging, but thoroughly listenable and engaging at the same time.

Both Glenn, and Wilco’s keyboard player Mikael Jorgenson, seem to love playing with sound, and they’re often credited as coming from a more experimental background. What were their contributions to record?

Well, I’ll say that nobody in the band does anything “far out” just for the sake of being “far out”. But if you want to hear a good example of what Glenn brings to the band, you just have to listen to his drumbeat on the song “The Art Of Almost“.

When he first started playing that rhythm I thought to myself: “Is he hearing the rest of the track, or is he just randomly playing this beat?”, because it was just so crazy. But as he kept playing, it started to make so much sense.

As I listened more and got the proper balance together it just sounded so great. In the end, that part is so much fun – and so natural, too. It sounds like the song was written off of that beat, but in reality, a lot of the more atmospheric sounds were already there on that song. It just fit.

Does he ever need to be reeled in a little bit?

No, he never really needs to be restrained. If you listen to some of his stuff that sounds simple at first, when you dig a little deeper, it’s not really simple at all. I think he’s just a really musical guy and he has the ability to play something that’s really complex without having it sound that way on the surface. If you listen to the record, his playing really does have a lot of layers. I don’t remember anyone ever saying to him “play something more straight ahead”. If anything, Jeff would even say, “I want something even crazier,” and Glenn would just say, “Ok, great. I can do that.” [Laughs]

And what about Mikael?

Now Mike, they call him Doctor Science. When he’d get his time with a song, he would spend a few hours just dialing things in. If you listen to the beginning of the song “Sun Load” there’s a crazy vocal effect on the first verse. That’s a feed of Michael manipulating Jeff’s vocal in real time.

The way I’ve heard you describe it, the band was doing less of a traditional “overdub” process where after the basic tracking, people just lay down parts they’ve all agreed on in rehearsal. You’ve mentioned that each person might take a few hours on their own with each song.

Yeah. We’d be listening, and somebody would get inspired, have an idea, and everybody would give that person their space to flesh it out. Rather than having everyone sit around weighing in on it, saying “that’s great” or “I hate it”, they would all just step away and let that person see his idea through.

That sounds like it takes a lot of trust.

Yeah, trust and respect. They really seem like such a cohesive band. There’s nothing “precious” about any one part – Jeff may have a song thought out, but there’s nothing precious about the arrangement. He’ll let it grow organically. He won’t stifle anybody else’s input. They’re all allowed to do what they do.

Sure, I guess if you wouldn’t trust them to do that, why have them in your band, right?

Exactly! [Laughs] That’s why they’re in this band together.

So those sessions are as much workshopping and arranging the songs as they are overdubbing?

Sure, they’re a little bit of each.

You can only play a song for the first time once. A lot of times, that first take just has the magic and you can’t recreate it, so you might end up building on that take. Or other times we might come back to a song a few days later so it’s fresh again and you’ve learned all these things about where you can go with the song, and what it’s about.

There was no real “set plan” for this record, like “Okay, now we’re going to do the tracking, now we’re going to do overdubs, and now we’re going to do mixing”. There were things being added and taken away right up until the end. Some days could be all tracking, some could be all overdubs. Some days we’d work on one song, and some days we’d work on three or four. It was pretty loose.

You worked in The Loft once before for the Mavis Staples record, You Are Not Alone. What was it like mixing in a new room for you? It’s not a place like Sear Sound, painstakingly designed over decades for critical listening.

It was great. The Loft was a really fun place to work. As long as the space is comfortable and I know what I’m hearing, I’m not super-picky. I can figure it out pretty quickly.

I mixed the Mavis Staples record there before this album, and I just brought in some stuff I knew. I cued up Neil Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, one of my favorite sounding records, so I had a reference point. From that, I knew how the speakers sounded, I knew how the room sounded, and I could go ahead from there.

Before we really got to mixing that record, I went to another more “proper” studio in Chicago, and did a couple of rough mixes there. We compared them to the rough mixes I’d already done back at The Loft, and when we listened there really wasn’t that much of a difference, and we kind of liked what we were getting at The Loft a little bit better. That put our minds at ease about it even more.

Cool. How was mixing on that Sony board? You don’t see them a lot in more commercial rooms around here

Well, for mixing, I split everything out onto the board, but I patched all the tracks into the EQ insert returns on the console.

That way, I bypassed the EQ and some of the electronics, like the line trims. I was really trying to use as little of the board as possible. This way, the only thing the signal was going through was the faders and the routing. Any EQ I’d patch into the Neve sidecar or one of the API EQs, and then we had all the outboard compressors, too.

Are you doing any processing in the computer?

A tiny bit of compression and EQ, but not too much. I kind of recorded the stuff the way I wanted it to sound. So if there was anything, most of the time it would just be a little roll-off to keep too much low-end build-up from happening, that kind of thing.

As far as echo goes, a lot of the slapback delays you’ll hear on the vocal was a Moogerfooger analog delay pedal patched into the board on one of the sends. But for the reverb, I set up a send on the board that would feed an aux track in Pro Tools set up with an Altiverb chamber or plate. The one thing the loft is missing is a good plate, so we had to get a little bit creative, and use the board to send to a reverb back inside Pro Tools.

Sometimes we’d throw up a room mic for mixing too. There’s a stairwell that sounds nice and reverby, and we’d use that as a bit of chamber too.

I know you don’t like to rely on the computer that much when mixing. Where do you like to keep the screen?

That’s a good question. On the Mavis record I had it on the side during tracking, and then brought it to the center, right between the speakers, when I was mixing. But for this record, I just kept it over to the side, on the effects racks. I was going over there to tweak compressor settings and things anyway, but I didn’t set up a chair anywhere near it. I just don’t like to stare at a computer all the time when I’m working on music.

Wilco have been subjected to fans leaking their albums in the past, and have sometimes provided promotional streams of their own albums in reaction. For The Whole Love, they’ve returned to that strategy, streaming the whole album themselves as a kind of pre-release. How do you feel about that strategy, and is it new for you?

It is new for me. I’ve worked on records that have been leaked before. What’s interesting about this is that the band is in control of the leak. I think it’s good. They get to play the record for people, and if people like it, I think they’re gonna buy it.

Since there are ways for people to get records for free if they want to, I don’t think the band is losing anything by doing it this way. People who like it are going to want to get a higher quality version of it. I’m not sure what the bit rate of the stream is, but I don’t think it’s going to compare to what this record is going to sound like when it comes out on vinyl.

Stream Wilco’s The Whole Love via NPR and pre-order the album – out on September 27 – at wilcoworld.net.

Visit Tom Schick online at http://www.tomschick.com.

Justin Colletti is a Brooklyn-based producer/engineer who works with uncommon artists, and a journalist who writes about music and how we make it. Visit him at http://www.justincolletti.com.

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