Aaron Dessner Quotes

To me, there is nothing better than me going into the studio with a live band and hearing those violins and that echo and that sound. I mean I loved it.

I go in and sing the song and arrange it and mix it and that's it. It's no different than playing in clubs.

Normally, you go into the recording studio, make a record and then take it on the road and you think... wow... I could have done THIS to it, or something.

We always record with the whole band. That's key to capturing the feel, especially trying to get a good basic track.

I've finally figured out how to make a Rodney Crowell record, and that's let it be, leave the mistakes.

I make records from top to bottom. Bring the best out of the vocalist. I deal with live instrumentation on all our records.

In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool. On paper, though, it's all stripped back. The musical idea is the one that wins.

I like being in a recording studio. I like watching a song go from the simplicity of the original music.

When I was recording from '70 to '82, I always played piano and laid the tracks down. But I used to talk to the other musicians while the track was playing.

I've got the recording process down, and I can knock it out very quickly.

Being in a recording studio is a very different feel from performing onstage. I mean, obviously, you can't just go in and do what you would do onstage. It reads differently.

I was trying to do the same thing that I always do which is make an interesting record.

What producers did was mostly recording in the studio, so it never changed our sound just that much.

In the studio you can auto tune vocals, and with drums, you can put them on a grid and make them perfect. I hate that sound. When someone hands me a record and the drums are perfectly gridded and the vocals are perfectly auto tuned, I throw it out the window. I have no interest in rock music being like that.

We gave up on the idea of trying to make the record a good representation of the live performance.

It's big production. It's huge. It's using studio technology to your benefit. You don't go in and play live and then just take the tapes and get them mastered. You have to create.

I always want to make an album that lets people immerse in it, kind of like you get caught up in a good movie.

I didn't have a lot to do with the first record.

Records have never really been my strong suit. I've always been a much better live act. I didn't understand the language of the studio. You sing differently in a studio. The language, the craft - it's just a whole different deal. I avoided the problem on my first record by doing a live album.

Then I loved the fact that we were actually recording live.

I write a song to be recorded. And to some extent to be performed, but definitely more to be recorded than performed, because the recording will last longer than a performance.

On record dates like that I never felt too nervous because everything was really overdubbed. When we did that album, we were in the studio for probably a week, so you had a lot of opportunity to fix things.

'Close To The Edge,' we actually had played it from beginning to end before we recorded it in the studio. So we knew how long it was, and we knew it would fit on the album fine, so we didn't do any editing.

I sit and write songs alone and then get together with people to help me flesh it out into a recording.

For the most part, I like to record music as I write it.