The Process: Recording
by Shaun Groves | posted 4/01/2003
 1 of 2
On August 5, recording artist Shaun Groves will release his sophomore album, entitled Twilight. Having just finished the initial recording process for the album, Shaun shares the fears of an artist troubled by the prospect of creating mediocrity in this third installment of a monthly series.
Remember those thin yellow boxes whose tops featured pictures of impressionistically painted kittens, horses, clowns, and, of course—my favorite—the Lord's Supper? Inside each small package was a brush made to shed plastic bristles all over my masterpiece, a strand of plastic paint buckets numbered from one
to 10, and a "canvas" printed to the edges with numbers inside a
line drawing just waiting to be filled in with matching-numbered
watercolor samples.
I'm thinking of those boxes as I approach a big wooden house in downtown Franklin, Tennessee. The house is decorated as though awaiting a Pottery Barn photo crew, and is stocked with enough chips and bottled water to feed one. I walk in with my guitar and a head full of songs, give a few hugs and handshakes to guys I
haven't seen since we made the last record, and make myself
comfortable on the large leather couch in the darkened control
room.
Jim Dineen, walnut lover/nice guy/poster boy/engineer, sits in front of me in his rolling chair, tweaking knobs and faders as he will for the duration of the recording process. He and his assistant David are making the last preparations for the
sessions—laying cables, moving mics, and a bunch of other
stuff I don't understand. Thank God for Jim and David.
My producer, Monroe Jones, stumbles into the control room from the kitchen of the Bennett House studio complex—not drunk—just really relaxed. He always is—even now, minutes before we try something he and I have never tried before. We are attempting to do more than paint by numbers and stay in the lines that insure approval from all. I've written songs that are less like line drawings and more like faint sketches. It's less obvious what colors should go where, what choices to make, and, so, this time there is far more freedom and far less certainty to this process. For me anyway.
But that's not scary for Monroe. With or without definite boundaries from an artist, he's apt to challenge every
expectation, blur any hard lines, and question every have-to.
That's why I love him. That and the fact that I'm sitting in a
circle at a student model upright piano—Gary Burnett playing
electric guitar on my left, Mark Hill on bass across from me, and
Dan Needham slamming drums to my right. I'm in a band. Yes!
The band—MY band—and Monroe gather around me at the piano to hear the first song: "Twilight." As I play, I think of every place where my performance is weak, every spot in the tune that I might blow when we roll tape. (There will be no easy way to fix mistakes this time, since everything I play will be heard by
everyone else's microphones as well. That's the downside to
setting up this way and not in separate rooms as usual.) While I
fret, the guys write. They scribble, in Nashvillian shorthand,
every chord and rest they hear while Dan stares at the floor—hearing everything he'll soon play in his head. I finish
"Twilight," and there are no questions about anything they just
heard. These guys are amazing.
Monroe gives a few instructions on tempo and feel and guitar sounds, and the players go to work making the necessary
adjustments to their gear—cracking jokes on each other and me
as if to say, in a testosterone-filled, I'm-no-sissy way, "I've
missed you too, man."
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