Producer John Congleton on Recording St. Vincent and the Wonderful Weirdness of Texas
Producer/engineer John Congleton has been making recordings in and around Dallas, Texas, for more than half his life. He has a style that is edgy and often ornate. And as skillful as he his, for Congleton, perfection has always been beside the point.
John Congleton
For a someone with such an impressive discography, Congleton is almost enviably young, just barely into his mid-thirties. Of course, he started even younger. While still in his early teens, his band recorded its first demo, and “it was like a light went off,” Congleton says. “It was just like ‘click’: This is clearly where I belong.”
After a quickly aborted attempt at music school and a handful of tours with his band The Paper Chase, Congleton settled eagerly into studio work, first at the Dallas Sound Lab.
“Way back in the day, when staff engineers still existed, I was a staff engineer,” he says. “I think it was from age 21 to 23. I’d come in every day, look at the schedule to see what studio I was working in, and it could be some terrible 1980s metal band, or an ADR session for a movie, or we might be recording Barney the Dinosaur — which actually I did a lot of, since Barney was produced in Dallas. Just engineering grunt work you know?”
As the studio business began to change, Congleton went freelance, and within a few years, his bold aesthetic sense helped him find work with some unusually colorful artists, including St. Vincent, Modest Mouse, The Walkmen, Swans, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, David Byrne, Okkervil River, Erykah Badu, The Roots, The Polyphonic Spree, Explosions in the Sky, Amanda Palmer, Bill Callahan, Xiu Xiu, The Mountain Goats, Rogue Wave, Chairlift, Maserati, Jens Lekman, Baroness, Antony and the Johnsons, The Toadies, Buddy Miles, The New Pornographers, and Pattern is Movement.
Deep in the Heart
Today, when he’s not traveling to destination studios like Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota; Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, or Water Music in Hoboken, Congleton works out of his own personal studio, Elmwood Recording, in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas.
Tracking room at John Congleton’s Elmwood Recording
The Elmwood studio is a homespun operation, but it’s ample in size, and based around a classic Neve 53-series console that was originally made for the BBC.
Here, Congleton surrounds himself with vintage Neumann, Lomo and Altec tube microphones, Otari and Ampex tape machines, old RCA and Beyer ribbon mics. His list of esoteric instruments, amplifiers and effects seems to stretch on into infinity.
This is one of the perks of living in a place like Dallas where, though the economy has been booming, the costs of living are lower than the national average, and real estate expenses can be 40% of what they are in a city like New York or San Francisco.
A music studio business isn’t going to be a cash cow anywhere, but here, Congleton can own his own home, and afford to let the studio lay fallow as he travels for work outside the state. “My studio can act as a non-profit, essentially,” he says, “just to facilitate me working.”
Dallas doesn’t quite have the hipster cachet or the density of musicians you’d find in neighboring Austin, but Congleton seems to like things that way. His clients, largely unconventional and envelope-pushing artists, don’t seem to mind that much either.
“People seem to feel better about Dallas when they’re here than they expect to, going into it,” he says.
“Honestly, I don’t know if I’d want to be completely surrounded by musicians and studios. You can throw a rock and hit a studio in a place like Austin, and it’s almost like everybody is making music and everybody is involved. I don’t really want to be totally surrounded by that at all the time. I think that it’s kind of unhealthy to just live in an artistic bubble.
“I’m constantly around art and artists, and every time I meet somebody who does something else for a living that they’re passionate about, I just want to pepper them with questions. Like, “You’re garbage truck driver? I don’t know anything about that! That’s fascinating. What goes on in your day? How dirty are do you get by the end of a shift, how do you deal with it?”
“Honestly, the older I get,” Congleton says, “the less impressed I am with someone who can play guitar really well. I’m like, ‘that’s pretty cool, but check out theoretical physics! What we do is cute and all, but check out the Large Hadron Collider. That’s really cool!”
Lonestar Style
“There’s a certain breed of weirdo that comes from Texas that I’ve yet to see anywhere else,” Congleton says. “And I really love it.”
“Bands like Scratch Acid, The Jesus Lizard — I hear that music and that just sounds like Texas to me. The Butthole Surfers? That couldn’t come from anywhere else. Only Texas could make a band like that.”
“I guess one of the guys that I was always pointing out to people as the quintessential Texan for me—who everybody seems to love but nobody seems to remember is from Texas—is [the late comedian] Bill Hicks.
“He was just so smart and insightful and aggressive and kind. And when I hear him talk, he just kind of sounds like a Texas guy to me. We all have some of that: This sort of dark, strange way of looking at things.”
St. Vincent
Speaking of strange, sort-of-dark artists who you don’t often think of as coming from Texas:
If there’s a single collaborator who stands out most distinctively in John Congleton’s career, it may very well be Annie Clark, that restless, ambitious, and critically-acclaimed musician known best as St. Vincent.
Like John Congleton, Annie Clark grew up in Dallas, and like Congleton, she went to music school for a while, before dropping out early to actually get to work making music.
St. Vincent era St. Vincent. Photo by Renata Raksha.
Like Congleton, she started playing early, in her case, touring with her uncle and aunt, the popular jazz duo called Tuck & Patti.
And like Congleton, she has an ear that bends toward the unusual, tempered by a firm, though sometimes hidden grasp of pop aesthetics and form.
The two met and became friends while working with The Polyphonic Spree, Congleton behind the board and Clark holding a guitar. This year marks their 4th major release working together, a self-titled album, St. Vincent, which is probably Annie Clark’s best to date.
When Clark started off as a solo artist seven years ago, she was an intriguing stylist. But while working with Congleton, she has continuously improved both as a vocalist and as a writer.
Where her arrangements on prior releases like Actor have felt at times like beautiful sketches strung loosely together for the purposes of an album, St. Vincent brings all of her best instincts into a cohesive whole.
This time, Clark’s abstract, absurdist lyrics and intricate textural arrangements sound as if they have been filled out with a real foundation of masterful songcraft and pop form, instead of swirling by loosely in the air like a finely-tailored dress without a frame to hold its shape.
Evolution of an Artist
The process for making St. Vincent was a departure from the way Clark and Congleton had worked together on Actor, Strange Mercy, and Love This Giant, their 2012 collaboration with David Byrne.
On Actor, Clark came in with ornate and inventive arrangements and tied them together without too much conventional form. (“She’s got an incredible ear; In a way you can kind of hear her insane ear on Actor more than on anything,” says Congleton.)
For Strange Mercy, Clark brought many rough song ideas into the studio and fleshed them out in the laboratory with Congleton, building songs from the ground up out of a kernel of an idea or a single riff.
St. Vincent came out in February on Lomo Vista/Republic.
During Love This Giant, so much collaboration occurred remotely, over email, with Clark writing horn arrangements, David Byrne taking the lead on writing vocal parts, co-producer/engineer Patrick Dillett cutting the live horn sections in New York, and Congleton adding percussion and editing tracks from his Dallas studio.
But before beginning St. Vincent, the pair decided they would need to focus more on pre-production and songwriting than in the past.
“Before she got started on this one, we talked a lot on the phone and realized that if we approached everything the same way again, we’d end up making the same record again, or at least something so close to it, that it might not really be worth doing,” Congleton tells me.
“So we decided together that the way to get something much different would be for her to come in with much more codified song ideas, without building so much of it in the studio and without her being so influenced by me on the songwriting.”
“So, what we did months and months beforehand were demos. I kept my comments to broad stokes: ‘This is great, this we could work on.’ Much more of a classic ‘producer’ kind of approach. We then had a good set of songs we could just jump in and work on. Working that way, Annie really brought her A-game when it came to the songwriting.”
“On Strange Mercy, basically by the virtue that we constructed it in the studio, we’d get a song idea together, then bring a drummer in to see if it was worth pursuing. But this time, we decided we were going to pursue everything from the start, and went at it with a little more of a live band approach.
“We had a few drummers who played on the record, and we had Bobby Sparks, who did all the synths with such an incredibly cool feel. They would play along to some rough tracks we had made —which would be just her and guitar or her and piano—and we’d just cut take after take of these two badasses playing together.
“I would come in in the morning before anyone else, and go through these amazing takes and pick out the grooves that felt the best. These are great musicians who don’t need to be comped to death, so it wasn’t really tweaky ‘comping’. You just pick the performances that feel the vibiest.
“We would do upward of 3 versions of each song this way. One song, “Psychopath” — jesus christ we did so many versions of that song. We did a krautrock version and a reggaeton version, and then the one on the record ended up being a proto-punk kind of version which would never have been my guess when she came in with it.
Vocal Tracking
“There’s no real consistency as to what microphones we used for vocals,” says Congleton. “If I remember correctly, we used the Lomo 19a13 quite a bit on the voice, and a Shure SM7 on a lot of the rockers. I seem to recall using an Neumann 563 with an M7 capsule multiple times. But I don’t think anything else.”
To Congleton, gear fiend though he is, these were far from the most important considerations. The most significant part of the signal chain, as always, is on the other side of the mic. There, one of Congleton’s goals is to keep Clark from second guessing herself, and keep her aiming for what mattered most in her performances.
Congleton with some of his mic collection
“Early on, before we even did Actor, together, Annie played me [her debut] Marry Me before it even came out. When we were having lunch one time, I told her that my only critique of the record was that she sounded a little bit like a deer in headlights vocally at the time. She sounded like someone who was so concerned about the pitch, and so nervous about the enunciation.
“And I remember she just shook her head up and down, “yes yes yes,” and said “yes I’m so concerned with it.’ She had grown up playing jazz where everything was about technique, and for me that’s just not what moves me about music; it’s just not what excites me. I said that ‘if we ever record together, I’m going to break you of that.’ And that’s what we did.
“You can tell that on Actor she’s looser, vibier, and feeling it more than she is on Marry Me, but certainly not as much as she is now. That’s something we’ve always strived for and work toward: To make her voice connect, as much as possible.
“I think so much of that is her singing night after night, and playing live and connecting with an audience. My part of it was getting her in the right headspace before she did her vocals, and not letting her second-guess herself, because she can be very critical of her voice.
“Certainly, in this last record there were some moments where we completely disagreed on vocal performances, because she felt one thing was out of pitch or I felt something else was too stiff; So definitely at times there was a yin and a yang about what needed to happen with the vocal performances. But ultimately, Annie wants it to be evocative.
“There are also certain songs, like “Severed Crossed Fingers” that came together very fast. That one was just pure id—pure Annie—straight from the heart. I know that was an emotional experience for her. And we did that vocal very quickly.
Guitar Tracking
“The one thing I can take more credit for would be guitar tones and what not.
“There are some exceptions, like on “Birth in Reverse” where she had a pretty good idea of what she wanted going in. But for the most part, she wouldn’t really come in with ideas about guitar sounds. We would just kind of figure that out together.”
“Now, Annie is an amazing guitar player and there is absolutely no way any of those tones would come without her technique in playing. But we would still go on little quests, and honestly, would find things really quickly. 80% of the time we would freak out and try all kinds of things. She is so much fun as a guitar player, and so much fun to be creative with. It’s always a blast to find things with her because she’s so willing to explore.
Photo by Jason Persse via Flickr
“There were some pedals that she brought with her, but for the most part we used a lot of mine. One pedal that she really liked and that we used a lot on this last record was the old Expandora pedal with the silver dip switches.
“It’s the old ZZ-Top pedal basically. She loved it so much that she actually ran off with it! Somebody showed me her pedalboard the other day and there it was on there. But to be fair she did buy me a new one!” he laughs.
As far as amps, guitars and mics: “We don’t worry too much about it. She’s not a guitar geek. Some people might think she is, but she’s not. You hand her a guitar and she’s going to play it, whatever it is. She doesn’t care. You just give her guitar she’s going to destroy it, basically! It really doesn’t matter.
“A lot of guitar was tracked through an old 70s Princeton just kind of cranked. Some of it was done to an old Fender Champ of mine. Almost exclusively small, small amps. I’m a big fan of small amps as far as recording goes, and she seems to like them too. It seems to me like when you have four speakers, you have all this dispersion and more chance of phasing issues. One speaker with the signal cranked always comes out sounding tougher to me on the other end.
“She did have a couple of boutique amps with her that we certainly did use. Man I don’t remember what they were! Just sort of little oddities that I’d never even seen before. Just throw a mic in front of it and that was it. There’s not a lot of fussiness to those sort of things. The main thing is keeping it really fresh and vibey sounding.
“We didn’t worry about the ‘fidelity’ so much,” Congleton says. “As long as it felt good we kept it. I think that stuff matters more. I really do.”
Justin Colletti is an audio engineer, educator and journalist.
Please note: When you buy products through links on this page, we may earn an affiliate commission.