The Lickerish Quartet is a Pop Rock Supergroup with Serious Pedigree

See below for a complete transcription of our conversation!

Warren Huart:

Ladies and gentlemen, we’re sitting here with the Lickerish Quartet. How the devil are you?

Roger Manning:

Best as can be expected. Thank you.

Tim Smith:

Yeah. Doing well.

Roger Manning:

First of all, how are you but where are you? Starting on the top left, we have Mister Eric Dover on the picture everybody’s going to see here. How are you, Eric?

Eric Dover:

I’m doing super, Warren. And yourself?

Warren Huart:

Marvelous. Are you in sunny LA?

Eric Dover:

Yes, I am. Yeah. I’m in Northridge.

Warren Huart:

Lovely. Tim Smith, how are you?

Tim Smith:

I’m good. I’m in Atlanta, Georgia, on the East coast so keeping it real, rocking the 9:30 T-shirt.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. Were you there when it was both, the newer and the older one?

Tim Smith:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

So you were there with the rats.

Tim Smith:

Yes, and was told, “You’re lucky to be here.” It’s like, “Thanks. All right.”

Warren Huart:

It was very famous in those days for being rat infested backstage. You’d just see these rats running around.

Tim Smith:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

Roger Manning Jr, how are you?

Roger Manning:

Really good. I get to hibernate in my recently, recently, recently finished workroom or house in Mount Washington area, Los Angeles. I just didn’t stop to shift gears much. Went right into my hibernation with all my modules and vintage synths surrounding me.

Warren Huart:

Amazing. And then of course last but no means least, Mister Ken Sluiter. How are you?

Ken Sluiter:

Hey. Thanks for having me, Warren.

Warren Huart:

And you are in the LA area as well.

Ken Sluiter:

I’m in beautiful Monrovia, California, just a bit East of LA.

Warren Huart:

I have a million questions. How did this come about? My guess is did it take a long time to come about? Were you talking about it for quite a few years on and off? I know it’s probably not an easy question but it’s a long answer.

Roger Manning:

I’ll take it. No, it wasn’t. The making of the EP was a long time coming because of a variety of reasons, but I called Tim up with an idea just getting together and writing for old time’s sake because we hadn’t hung out as friends or as musicians since I couldn’t remember. He loved the idea and was getting ready to jump out on a plane, and then we kept taking some more and realized that it would be in our best interest to call up Eric Dover and see if he was also interested in this kind of experiment.

Roger Manning:

That all happened at Eric’s backyard/workspace March of 2017 believe it or not. Long story short, it was a series of writing sessions. We got excited enough about what we were doing to want to record it, and our good friend Jeremy Stacey for years had said, “Anytime you guys got something going on, give me a shot.” He made good on that. He just went beyond the call of duty, flew in from England, cut us the super bro rate and next on the list was call Ken Sluiter, “We need a drum sound buddy.” I just worked at his studio in Burbank where he was at the time and thought it would be the perfect modest accommodations for what we wanted to do. That all happened I believe in the spring/summer of 2017 if I’m not mistaken, and then it was just patchwork from there for the next two years.

Warren Huart:

What’s amazing, when you and I first talked I mentioned that I’d seen you playing at Clapham Grand in London, so it would’ve been you three guys playing there. Of course, the open that opened was Lemon Trees, and of course the Stacey brothers were in the Lemon Trees.

Tim Smith:

Yeah. They kept us with us, Jeremy particularly kept up with me. We would hang out a lot on that tour. I actually got him an audition to play with Sheryl Crow and I was playing with her. We were doing some TV stuff in the UK. We needed some people to mime a TV show. He came along and did that, and Mike Rowe also ended up playing with us, another Brit who plays with Oasis and I played with him in Noel Gallagher’s band. Anyway, they jumped on board and we just stayed in touch and played in other bands forever.

Warren Huart:

That’s amazing.

Tim Smith:

I did a lot of stuff with Jeremy. Yeah.

Warren Huart:

He’s an incredible drummer. I remember that show really vividly. I remember Lemon Trees were fantastic. One of the guys from The Flying Pickets were singing with them. Guy Chambers obviously is a great writer. We knew Guy, my group of friends, but we came to see you guys. It was wonderful that they were opening and we’re all like, “Yeah. They’re amazing.” And then you guys came out and just, probably unfair to say blew them off the stage, but you did. The harmonies were unbelievable. After just hearing Guy and all of his guys, it was such an incredible show. A very strange venue. You remember the way the stage kind of funnels up? It’s an old Victorian style musical.

Tim Smith:

Yeah.

Eric Dover:

I remember that.

Warren Huart:

I remember thinking Eric looked like Paul Kossoff. He had the flares on just like Kossoff and he had the Kossoff stunts and I remember just thinking that was the coolest thing. It was an absolutely amazing show. Did you do it all together or did you end up due to geography doing some of this stuff remotely? What was the process of recording?

Tim Smith:

We started out working over at Ken’s studio. I can’t remember the name of the studio, Ken. What was the name of the-

Ken Sluiter:

Any place I’m working in these days I just refer to as the sweet spot. I think at the time we called that the sweet spot and now we call this the sweet spot.

Tim Smith:

Okay. So we started working with Ken over at the sweet spot, and when we brought Jeremy and we did all the basic tracks … Mate, what was it? A couple of days, and then it became a question of just finding time for us to get together. I would fly out to Los Angeles between things where people were on tour, and Roger was doing back touring and stuff, so we’d find time and try and come out for 10 days to two weeks and just start going through all the chunks of things that we had worked out, and working them out. At the lab studio, we moved over to with-

Roger Manning:

Frankie.

Tim Smith:

Frankie Siragusa. Sorry. That was a little bit more mellow because it was over on the side of town near where Roger was and I was staying at the studio there. We just had a list of things to go through. It was a little harder for me because I had to bring what I could bring. I ended up buying a Kemper which I hadn’t really used before but it became really useful for me to quickly be able to dial in just at least getting us in the ballpark of sounds. We ended up using it a fair amount and mixing it with other amps and stuff as well. That was a real big game changer for me to work on.

Warren Huart:

Did you create your own Kemper sounds from your own stuff or were you using some of the sounds inside?

Tim Smith:

I had some of my stuff. I had an AC30 and a 65 amp that I’d profiled just because I knew them and it was a reference point for me to go. You know how that thing is. You just sit there going through so many AC30s your head’s just … You’re exploding.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Tim Smith:

I actually found the more useful ones were obscure like really directly through the console kind of sounds were more useful to me than … We had an AC30 there. It was fine, but there were other things that were just more quick and easy to get to that I liked like the Kemper.

Warren Huart:

Fantastic. Can you tell me a little bit about the writing process. I sort of skipped ahead to the recording. The writing process in itself, was that a remote thing though? Obviously, that can be quite time-consuming. Were you doing it one on one? Were you coming up with ideas and just emailing them to each other, or I suppose a bit of both?

Roger Manning:

For me, and anybody can chime in here, but the actual writing part, the sharing and exchanging of ideas, that was the funest part for me in a lot of ways because we knew we wanted to hang out and have dinner for the first time in 20 years together, but burying your soul and sharing ideas no matter how many times you’ve done it with people you trust and feel safe with is always a very challenging, potentially challenging experience. We each just started offering up, “Hey, I have this chorus idea. It sounds like a chorus to me. I really, really believe in it, don’t know where to take it. Let me play it for you and Tim and see where it goes.” We just did a lot of that.

Roger Manning:

It was pretty rewarding pretty fast. We tried not to be precious about stuff. If we felt excited about working on something, we’d pursue it, save it into our phones, listen to it the next day. We just did that for … If I’m not mistaken it was two two-week sessions. We had something like 20+ ideas from scraps that we each had. Obviously, each person took the lead on an idea, especially if they were the one presenting it, and singing, and mumbling gibberish. I’d hear this melody line and somebody might just chime in with a harmony.

Roger Manning:

We even went as far as to really try to arrange them beginning to end just vocal and guitar, vocal and piano, because I think we all were in absolute agreement that if we didn’t leave Eric’s workplace with a skeleton that was solid, we could have the best drummers and the best drum sounds and all that stuff on and it wasn’t going to amount to anything. It was very much trying to get clarity on our ideas at Eric’s place there.

Warren Huart:

Do you feel like you all have individual strengths or do you feel like it’s all equal? Is it one of you feels like you are predominantly a lyricist? Is there any sort of dynamic or is it each song just went its own way, so maybe you were more predominant, one of you on lyrics on this song? I’m just interested in the process because you’re all obviously very talented individually. One of the things I think we all admire about the best bands in the world is that there’s more than one songwriter in them. When everybody says Beatles, Queen, blah, blah, blah, Supertramp, you had two lead singers and two great songwriters. There’s no doubt they had like … What is it? A top 10 single every year in the 70s. 10cc is probably the most obvious one outside of the Beatles. Four amazing songwriters. For you, I’m really intrigued how that process would work.

Eric Dover:

Tim or Roger would bring an idea for a song that inspires other things to happen. Once Tim played Magic Number, [inaudible 00:11:34] certain kind of a spookier guitar sound, that kind of thing.

Warren Huart:

Right.

Tim Smith:

I think we trusted each other more than anything because part of what was exciting about getting together was that we hadn’t seen each other for a while, so we were catching up and talking about things, but we were all able to use our knowledge and love of music that we could share. Roger spoke of a keyboard thing and I went, “It sounds like Roxy Music,” but it would be the Brian Eno period of Roxy Music versus the later Avalon stuff or whatever.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Tim Smith:

When you already have that in your head and you already have all these bullets in your gun that you can trust each other with, then I know Eric was specifically pretty good at doing lyrics to some things. Just out of nowhere the next day he showed up with the lyrics to Lighthouse Spaceship and he did the same with Fadoodle. It was just like we didn’t have to collaborate on them. They were completely mostly finished ideas that came out of just him hearing what we were doing, and we trusted him with that. It wasn’t much we had to go, “Yeah. Sorry. No, thanks.” He just knocked it out, I thought.

Warren Huart:

For me, you’re probably the only band that I can hear all of the influences without it ever sounding like you stole. Does that make sense? There’s lots of bands, there’s some current bands, we don’t have to get into names, that basically sounds like Led Zeppelin but without the songs being necessarily as good.

Tim Smith:

I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re referring to.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. Exactly.

Roger Manning:

Who the hell are you talking about?

Warren Huart:

Yeah. I don’t want to be like the old wagging finger guy, but you know what I mean. When anybody hears the work that you did with Jellyfish in this new record, you can satisfy us as fans and we love all of your references, but you don’t ever sound like you just took the guitar part or this bit, which is very, very unique. I suppose my question is are you ever conscious of that? I remember working with Jet on their second album and they were so freaked out because people were telling them that this song sounded like AC/DC, that song … And it made them second-guess their whole creative process. Does that even come up in your mind or you just don’t give a crap, you just do what you want?

Roger Manning:

I’ll speak for myself on this as one of the three songwriters. For me, it’s all about coming up with an idea that you’re excited enough about and you believe enough about to share with your writing partners first of all, which is kind of the first audition. Somewhere in there, I personally put an idea down on my phone. Some of these songs on the new EP are from ideas I had literally in college. They would’ve been on cassette tapes and stuff. [inaudible 00:14:30] calls it the let it simmer process. I put it down, I’m excited about it. That doesn’t mean in a week or two when I come back to it it’s going to be as exciting for me and as novel and all that.

Roger Manning:

One of the things that happens is if I’m listening back hopefully more objective and you can go right away, “Man, you can’t do that. You basically took Maybe I’m Amazed and you just shifted it a little bit.” As a practiced songwriter having done this ad infinitum, that alarm goes off within seconds ideally. To me, it’s not going off for other people. I don’t know if it’s practice or self-aware, but it’s like I don’t want any of my heroes including my band mates to go, “You know you just ripped off, right?” I don’t want that to happen, so I’m going to be very hyper aware of those types of things.

Roger Manning:

As far as going into the arranging of the tune, we’re going to put the electric piano here, a background vocal of this style here, a guitar riff of this style here, we’re always going to be inspired by the great art that’s preceded us, but again, I think through practice and diligence there’s that place where you can’t be afraid to be yourself. I think really for all of our heroes, it’s all about just wanting to try to do something that great. For the XTC for example, I can’t hear their record collection but I know what age they are so I know what the record collection was but I don’t hear it in the final arrangements and songwriting because they’re too practiced at honing their own sound.

Roger Manning:

I’m happy that our ideas and what we offer have a familiarity for people to sink their teeth into and make them feel good, it reminds them of something that’s inspired them, but we’ve never … None of the projects I’ve ever been involved with have had being The Dukes of Stratosphear as the goal as much as I love The Dukes of Stratosphear.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Roger Manning:

To me, it’s always been I’ve been very self-aware of the genre of rock pop. It has inspired me, and that my writing tendencies borrow from that toolbox. To me, great art doesn’t mean, “Hey, guys. I got somewhere within the proximity of that brilliant John Lennon song.” That’s not an achievement. It’s I set my own thing and made my own contribution to that great legacy. It reminds somebody of John Lennon? So be it. That’s how I look at it.

Tim Smith:

I think even working with Ken that was … Ken brought a lot of his Midwest Chicago dirty side of town. He knew all this stuff because he had done so many records where like I said you have this catalog of sounds in your head that he could hear a tune and go, “Okay. This is clearly this. Let’s try this, or whatever.” If it got too far … We’re not going to gate the drums like [inaudible 00:18:01] or something, but it could’ve, we could’ve done all that and been laughing at ourselves, but it wouldn’t have served the song in the way that was the intention or whatever. It’s good that we were surrounded together with people like Ken that could have that knowledge and could pull back when they needed to, when it was more important to get this song idea through.

Ken Sluiter:

I think everyone has the same pace. I don’t think I would’ve been in the room if I hadn’t made a connection with Roger, that Roger knew at some level I could reference these sounds in records but at the same time … Just even in the tools that we use. Nobody was going down saying like, “It has to be a real [inaudible 00:18:42]. It has to be an actual AC15, it has to be a solid [inaudible 00:18:48].” You know what I’m saying? No one ever asked me, “Can we make this record sound like it’s from 1972?” You know what I mean? As far as I’m concerned, it’s a modern sounding record. It’s a modern sounding record sounded like made by people who have been listening to all of pop music since day one up until the day that we worked on it.

Ken Sluiter:

I think everyone involved, and to even say who was involved with what, I was surprised myself as a fly on the wall not being in the band watching their chemistry. The fact that everyone showed up with a song idea that wasn’t 100% written to people finishing the other songs, it’s not a collection of songwriters’ tunes. It sounds like a band because Eric would write a lyric on top of a melody line that Roger had been humming. Fadoodle as Tim mentioned is the perfect example. When I did the scratch vocal for Fadoodle I remember we were in a stage where we were focused on getting acoustic guitar and piano blocking out the chords for every song because then they were going to go up into overdub land. We said, “Okay. We got half a day left. We wanted to do some scratch vocals.” Eric walked in with his iPad going, “Hey, I got some lyric ideas for this song.”

Warren Huart:

Nice. Very nice.

Ken Sluiter:

The lyrics were really funny, but also I got to say that he hands them to Roger. It can’t just be [inaudible 00:20:24] lyric. It has to sing right meaning it has to roll off the tongue smooth, and the fact that these guys were doing this and that on Roger’s first take those lyrics rolled right off of his tongue and those had to be a final vocal, they could’ve been. And then, these guys-

Roger Manning:

You’re too kind.

Ken Sluiter:

Also, they’re like, “We got some harmony ideas. We want to do some harmony ideas. Let’s just all get out our headphones [inaudible 00:20:52] mic.” With most bands, that’s going to be a train wreck like, “No. This is going to be a bad idea. No. Let’s do one at a time.” These guys were out on one mic just trying out little harmony ideas. As you would imagine, it was impressive sounding. I can count on my hand the number of times in a recording session that somebody comes up with an idea that radical and they’re actually like, “Wow, it works.” I remember Tim was in the room this moment Eric did his first scratch vocal, and we hear Eric sounding like the most gigantic voice ever and we’re just looking at each other like, “Is this happening? This is crazy.” A crazy moment. I’ll never forget it.

Warren Huart:

That’s amazing. I like this idea of what was intimated by Tim about you Ken is the bit of the edge, the bit of the indie, and that’s probably what I’m getting because if any of us went full blown Supertramp or 10cc, it would probably end up as being like, “What a nice record. Those boys were very nice. They made a really nice record.” But it doesn’t have that. It has an edge. It has the influences that we’re all talking about a lot, but it still sounds like people that like rock and roll. It’s not the twilight of your career going, “Hi, everybody.” It’s got some edge to it.

Roger Manning:

Thank you for noticing.

Ken Sluiter:

I’m a knucklehead. I really appreciate the … Jim Scott calls it the big no, meaning I like a little bit of art in my rock and roll. I don’t like my rock and roll and my art. I think that that’s something that we all-

Tim Smith:

I just made a T-shirt for you with that.

Ken Sluiter:

There we go. Yeah. For me, it’s still … For example, on the Facebook 20 favorite albums comes along and I sit down and I think about what my 20 favorite albums are. [inaudible 00:23:02] are all my, “I love this wire record,” and stuff like that, but most of it is classic rock like Aerosmith and stuff that we’ve talked about. We were all brought up on the same thing, and I think that yeah, maybe this Chicago indie edge is … That combined with I think the … My sonic mentors being … I’ve mentioned this before. Jim Scott, Chiccarelli, Don Smith, there’s been nothing subtle about it. It’s blunt. If anything, better to air on the edge of too aggressive than not aggressive enough. Too aggressive can always work. Not aggressive enough can’t.

Ken Sluiter:

Also, if you listen to a psychedelic Birds record or something that’s like a new wave record that’s for the girls. You know what I mean? This is [inaudible 00:24:01] sexy thing for the girls, and then you listen to it, there’s a lot of meat on the bone there. Those things are recorded like proper rock records. I wanted to compliment with Roger’s and all these guys’ ability to really go into this Wrecking Crew style thing, to compliment that, to balance it out you got to have somebody who’s a little bit trying to keep it for the kids, if that makes sense.

Roger Manning:

I just wanted to add real quick to your comment, essentially what you’re describing for me is Elvis Costello.

Ken Sluiter:

Yeah.

Roger Manning:

When you’re talking about him as a songwriter and a performer or the best band in the world that he seemed to have attracted to himself and the huge body of literature and genre exploration that they’ve done as a group whether it’s a ballad or an actual kind of in your face two and a half minute pop punk song, the edge, that desperation, that street wise urgency as Robert Hilburn always used to review bands with, it’s always there. There’s a [inaudible 00:25:18]. The passion is not open to interpretation. It’s, “Here’s my passion. Take it or leave it.” I think again, it is that era that we grew up in because you understand finesse, subtlety, high art and simultaneously you were listening to music that was al about search and destroy that very thing. The joy was to acknowledge that, recognize it, even honor it, and then almost sabotage it as an art form. This has been going on for the past century, but certainly in music we all live through that. Of course, that’s present in what we do thankfully. Again, thanks for noticing.

Warren Huart:

When is the release date? When is the EP out?

Roger Manning:

May 15th officially.

Warren Huart:

May 15th.

Roger Manning:

We’ve been doing two months of pre-order and getting people, just refamiliarizing them, making an announcement. Again, because the record business has changed so much and because I had a generally successful campaign on pledge in 2018, it’s been very important to us to be as smart and honoring of our fan base that by some crazy miracle has hung in there with us no matter what we’ve been up to and just making sure they all know there’s new original music available to you. That’s why there’s this kind of process and this arc of announcement to everybody and engaging with them. There’s ways that they’re going to be involved in the fan funding aspect of this. That’s really exciting because again, our fans are like a mini Grateful Dead collective in their obsession. It’s so incredible and we’re so thankful for that.

Warren Huart:

That’s amazing. There will of course be a link for that pre-order down below this. Everybody that’s watching, click below the video and you’ll see a link to pre-order down there. Also, young Ken over here has done a mix breakdown of one of the songs, haven’t you Ken? Tell us a little bit about that.

Ken Sluiter:

It’s true.

Roger Manning:

What?

Warren Huart:

What?

Tim Smith:

What?

Warren Huart:

What?

Ken Sluiter:

Yeah. We did that a couple weeks ago. We just went through all the tracks and I don’t know, I haven’t seen it since … It was funny because that was the day if you remember we were filming the mix breakdown and my wife comes home with half the grocery store and we’re looking at her like she’s out of her mind, and literally within a couple hours as we’re reading the news, while Warren’s wife is telling him to go buy what’s left of the grocery store and [inaudible 00:28:03]. Yeah. We dug into the multitrack and I just kind of explained as best as I could. I wasn’t around for a big chunk of the overdubs, but as best as I could-

Warren Huart:

That’s for the single, isn’t it? That’s for the single, which is actually out, is it not?

Ken Sluiter:

Lighthouse Spaceship. Yeah.

Tim Smith:

Yeah. That’s a lot of stuff to go through.

Warren Huart:

It’s a lot of stuff, and we will put the link, the Spotify link to that track below as well, so for those of you watching, you can … If you haven’t already. I’m sure you’ve already listened to it 100 times, but you can go and listen to it even more. It started off at Ken’s original studio. Then you went to … Sorry. Frankie’s studio. Is that correct? And then I presume you were doing some stuff remotely. Did you end up doing overdubs on your own?

Roger Manning:

All of the above. Yeah.

Warren Huart:

All of the above.

Tim Smith:

Yeah. A little bit.

Warren Huart:

Okay.

Tim Smith:

I recorded some bass tracks here at my house and would send them and stuff.

Warren Huart:

Give me a little bit of an idea about some of your individual setups. If you’re cutting vocals on your own for instance, what is your vocal setup? Eric, what is your vocal setup?

Eric Dover:

It’s just I have a [inaudible 00:29:12] classic and a small outward optical compressor [inaudible 00:29:19] setup as far as tracking vocals in. Yes.

Warren Huart:

Would you end up doing some of the vocals on your own and then sending them back to Ken to mix?

Eric Dover:

Primarily, as far as the lead vocals we did over at Frankie’s place because Roger has a really fantastic U67 clone. Who makes that, Roger?

Roger Manning:

It’s Peluso 67.

Warren Huart:

I love Peluso.

Roger Manning:

That was a recent acquisition just as we started really leaning into vocals on this EP.

Warren Huart:

Fantastic.

Tim Smith:

We did some mic shootouts for that too, didn’t we? You had a couple of other things we sang on.

Roger Manning:

We rented. We went down to Vintage King for starters.

Tim Smith:

That’s right.

Roger Manning:

It’s just like we were at our welcome.

Warren Huart:

That’s great. Peluso’s great. You probably know this. That’s a husband and wife team, and they make it … I can’t remember where it is. It’s pretty remote. I know somebody went to interview them and told me that they flew into an airport and then drove for an hour and a half. Where are they?

Ken Sluiter:

John’s from Chicago and he was the head studio tech at Universal Recording which was the original Bill Putnam studio. He was like the top most knowledgeable guy in Chicago. He would fix your tape machine if you [inaudible 00:30:39] and fix your microphones obviously. And then, he moved to West Virginia and started his microphone company. If you look at it in context, if you open up a German microphone, if you have access or can create those components, the reason why a U47 is $1,500 is because of the absolute gear fetishism. And then, you got a guy like John Peluso who comes along and says, “I’m going to make this microphone and I’m going to price it as if it was a new microphone that was coming out.”

Ken Sluiter:

When [inaudible 00:31:24] first came out, they weren’t expensive because there wasn’t the internet creating the mythology behind it all. All his lines are fantastic microphones. Yeah. I’ll tell you just from a mixer’s point of view, the biggest tale of a cheap microphone is if you’re finding … It’s not just about is there a lot of siblings or is there not a lot of siblings. Often times, it’s what is the quality of the sibling. If you don’t have enough siblings, you lose all the … You want a vocal to be upfront 3D, and so you need to have that upper mid-range quality. That’s the difference between a cheap mic and a well-made microphone in my opinion, especially once you start really wrenching on the compression, if your microphone doesn’t sound good you’re going to hear it. That said, any of these dudes are going to sound pretty good on any microphone you stick in front of them.

Warren Huart:

Are they [inaudible 00:32:32] money? [crosstalk 00:32:39]

Tim Smith:

He wants the big money.

Warren Huart:

Has he not got his backend yet? [crosstalk 00:32:46]

Roger Manning:

Backend? This is 2020. What does backend mean?

Ken Sluiter:

I’ll give you your backend.

Warren Huart:

I have no idea, no idea whatsoever. This is fun. People who watch this channel love gear. Is there any fun gear stuff? We’ve heard from Ken and Tim that you both said you had to choose whatever was available, whether it be a Kemper or whether it be a virtual instrument. I remember when we did the mix breakdown, Ken, there was a couple of things on there that were virtual, weren’t there?

Ken Sluiter:

For example, and Eric Dover you could comment on this because a lot of stuff by the time they came to me, a fair amount of the guitars were just Native Instruments guitar rigs. They were still in place, so a lot of the guitar sounds that sound classic sort of you’d imagine really satisfying rock is like an AC37 on a guitar rig. I got the impression from what I could tell from looking at the mix session that all that matters is how it sounds coming out of the speakers. That’s all that mattered. These guys are picky.

Warren Huart:

I can imagine.

Ken Sluiter:

Yeah. For example, to get a bass core sound on Fadoodle wasn’t like usually I can just throw up the first chorus and it’s like, “Yeah. Right. Bass chorus.” We listened to every chorus plugin I had because in my mind what I see, and the guys will probably agree with me, I can say this with all the guys but particularly Roger because Roger sat with me and we mixed the record together. The one thing with mixing is that any mix that you do, it has to be one person’s vision. Now, if you’re a young band and you’ve never made a record before, that vision’s probably going to be the mixer’s vision and that’s often the situation that I’m in, but with this it didn’t take me long to realize Roger hears this whole thing in his head finished. I’m not just randomly turning knobs looking to see if he’s happy or not. There was maybe a little of it.

Roger Manning:

You like that?

Warren Huart:

Mute, unmute, mute, unmute, pan, pan, mute.

Ken Sluiter:

My point being is that in other words if Roger heard a [inaudible 00:35:25] it wasn’t because he was like, “Hey, let’s just try a bunch of things. Let’s see what we like.” I think he heard it as it was meant to be, and the great thing about that is as frustrating as that could be as an engineer kind of going, “Do you like this? Do you like this? Do you like this?”, once we nailed it, boom, we nailed it and then we were moving on. The process was slow but it was never like getting lost. I never felt like we got lost and we didn’t know up from down, left from right, but it was just a process of getting it to a certain point.

Ken Sluiter:

On top of that. Because sometimes on these songs the lead vocals, the baton gets passed between three dudes and so you have to dial every guy in in the most flattering way to make their voice so when the baton passes from one to the other, it’s got to make sense. You got to find something that makes all three of these guys sound great on their own, but also there has to be a common theme amongst them. That was something that took some time as well. Yeah. I think that any process or technique that needed to get it sounding right coming out of the speakers, everybody was up for. This is just from day one in the record making. There wasn’t any … Shortcuts aren’t going to work on this project, meaning that thing that you do that most people go, “Yeah, that’s fine,” it’s like no. For example, I remember Jeremy showed up with six drum kits maybe more.

Warren Huart:

In your own studio. Where did you put them?

Ken Sluiter:

We couldn’t even [inaudible 00:37:19]. We had to move [inaudible 00:37:22]. The funny thing is that the first one we put up was the [inaudible 00:37:29]. And then, we started feeling like, “We are making a proper record. We should try out some other kit. We might even just put back the original one.” In other words, that one just worked all the time. Here’s the perfect example of something. Jeremy would hear the song, would hear the demo or [inaudible 00:37:55] or not, and he would have it in his mind like, “This is the hi-hat I need for this. I see drummers changing out their snare drum a fair amount, but I don’t see drummers changing hi-hats as often. If you think about a drum beat, the hi-hat is the busiest instrument in your entire mix happening. He would know like, “I need one that rings. This one needs to be an old Al Green one.”

Ken Sluiter:

These kind of records that are [inaudible 00:38:27], it’s a million tiny little tweaks that make up the cumulus of whole of the quality of it. That started from day one, and no one was ever interested in … There was never any good enough because anything that was good enough was going to have to be readdressed later and was going to have to be done right.

Warren Huart:

Roger, I have to let you know. When I was sitting with Ken talking about this record, he spoke about you when you weren’t there just the same way. He said, “Roger was really, really particular and he really had a very clear vision.” Yeah.

Roger Manning:

And I was in his living room greeting his family every day as they came home from work and from school.

Ken Sluiter:

That’s the craziest thing. I was building my room out so the first 15 minutes of the session was getting my dog to get off Roger’s lap.

Roger Manning:

Yes. The most [crosstalk 00:39:29] dog on the planet.

Ken Sluiter:

Yeah. The one thing I’ll say is that what was interesting though as I could tell that like my son for example he’s like, “Yeah. I’ve heard a lot of stuff that you worked on over the years. This stuff sounds like it’s a whole another quality than most stuff that you work on.” He’s like, “I think your friend Roger might be working at a different level than some of the other people that you work with.” I’m like, “Yes, son. You’re right.”

Roger Manning:

Very astute kid you have there.

Ken Sluiter:

That’s right. Yeah.

Roger Manning:

Yeah. He’s a straight-up teenager, so I was very, very flattered because I know what all of his peers are listening to including him. Ken and his family’s credit … Yeah. I just start going because I don’t, as I told you Warren, I don’t have the hours on all the gear. I just start describing what I’m hearing and there’s a whole way to be a quality communicator that gets his point across and respectful. Sometimes, I fell terribly short of that and Ken never kicked me out of his house.

Ken Sluiter:

There was never a point where I felt like … I can’t say this with everything I’ve worked on, but I never felt like … If I felt like he was just like wavering and just not respecting my time, but I could always feel that we were getting somewhere. I never felt pure frustration of like, “This is going nowhere. I liked yesterday’s mix better.” There was genuinely none of that.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. I remember that. What is it? The Quincy Jones quote about Stevie Wonder, that he was left enough in the room for God, meaning no ego. For me, it’s like I’ll try 57 different things to ger the right thing. I think we all will if we know it’s coming from a pure place to actually make it better. I think the only time I’ve ever personally [inaudible 00:41:40] with somebody where I feel like it’s just somebody wants to be right, they don’t want necessarily to be better. I love the idea. Trust me, I can imagine it was a pretty amazing experience to be in your position. Roger, even though he’s there I’ll cover him up, these guys are stupidly talented just speaking engineer to engineer here. You want to know what’s going on, we want to know what’s going on in your guys’ heads because we learn from that. If you change your mind and come up with a better idea, we want to know it, “What? You mean there’s something better?” It’s only when it’s ego that I think for us it gets a little frustrating as an engineer.

Ken Sluiter:

I think that often times people are trying to … Sessions go weird when there’s a struggle for who’s going to control the session. You just realize that sometimes I’m the guy controlling the session, sometimes I’m not the guy controlling the session. And then, you just realize pretty quick for me to get this to where he wants it to be … I got to say one other thing about Roger. As the studio is, as Roger is, he might do some overdubs and stuff, but he doesn’t identify with being an engineer. I think part of that is because he’s worked with so many good engineers over the years. This isn’t like a get off my lawn type of thing, but younger guys [inaudible 00:43:14] role of engineers changing with modern times because it’s getting easier to do. If you’re a guitar player guy who did a couple overdubs that you sent on to your buddy’s girlfriend track, that’s not engineering, that’s not being an engineer.

Ken Sluiter:

I think on some level if Roger showed up and he had his own ideas about the way I should get him the results, that would’ve been harder to do, but all he cared about was … In other words, he would explain to me on a top level what he wanted it to sound like and then he would leave it to me to figure out how to get it to him. As I said, once we got it, we got it and we were moving on. It was methodical.

Warren Huart:

I do love that. We all know this quote, the famous Tom Petty quote where he said if he’d been a good guitar player he wouldn’t have been a very good songwriter. I think that’s also the thing, isn’t it?

Tim Smith:

I was going to say, even when we were tracking stuff, I don’t consider myself a virtuous of any instrument. I can play a bunch of things and I have with other people, but Roger would often ask to play a part until we got it right. Even in the Jellyfish days I know Eric and I, when we first learned how to sing in harmony together as an ensemble, the dedication that it took just … It sounded cool, but it wasn’t 100%. To get to 100%, you really had to put in the hours and you just can’t have an ego with that. When you’re doing this kind of stacked big vocal things, Roger would say, “Okay. Prepare yourself. The next five hours are going to be boring and trivial and we’re all going to be going ah, ah, ah, a thousand times.” Again, it’s a matter of trust because we knew he could go out and block the chord on the piano and say, “This is the end game, but we got to get there by doing these five things.”

Tim Smith:

Some of it was harder for me to do, but I liked that struggle of not being a virtuous guitar player but trying to play a solo I can hear the struggle, and that’s important to me. We had Roger play a punk rock guitar thing on one of the songs. He would tell all of us how to play it like, “No. It’s got to be like this,” and in just about three minutes it’s like, “Here. You do it,” and he nailed. He’s awesome.

Roger Manning:

I didn’t nail it, but let’s just say [crosstalk 00:45:34] it was a punk rock song. In other words, there’s some good lack of technique struggle in the performance.

Tim Smith:

Right.

Roger Manning:

It worked for the tune.

Warren Huart:

That’s fantastic.

Ken Sluiter:

[inaudible 00:45:48]

Warren Huart:

Talking of playing live, we’re in the middle of a freaking lockdown obviously, but are you going to tour this? Are you going to [inaudible 00:45:59] and tour this?

Roger Manning:

We’re not opposed to it. It’s just other starts have to align. I think we’d be very game if a promoter or somebody presented to us some kind of key market tour that made sense and we could pay everybody who’s going to be our infrastructure to help us do that. As Tim just said, we set the bar way the hell up here. We give no concern to is this replicable live, reproducible.

Tim Smith:

Yeah, we haven’t.

Warren Huart:

I was sort of thinking that.

Tim Smith:

This is not like [inaudible 00:46:40]. It’s like, “Hey, let’s [inaudible 00:46:42] in Chicago and start in G baby.” It’s just not that.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. I was actually thinking the same thing. I’m thinking to myself this is going to be … But then look, when I saw you guys at Clapham Gran, I had the same reaction Tim that you did. On their first album I was just like, “There’s no way those vocals are live.” Matt [Butcher 00:47:05] was the front of house. You probably met Matt. He’s one of my childhood friends. He was front of house for the Lemon Trees at that show. He was standing there watching standing next to your sound man. I was like, “What were they using?” This is pre rackmount auto-tune. We’re talking early 90s. None of that stuff even existed. I was like, “What are they using?” He’s like, “Their voices.” I was like, “No. Don’t tell me that. Tell me that there’s some magic …

Warren Huart:

I didn’t understand half the freaking magic of studio equipment in those days. Heck, I still don’t. I was expecting some H3000 whatever, and no, it was just the fact that, as you’re pointing out, you did your 10,000 hours just on the background, let alone everything else. Pretty amazing. Eric, outside of working with these lovely gentlemen, what are you currently doing? You’re currently in lockdown, but when you’re not in lockdown what have you been working on?

Eric Dover:

As you know, I have my solo project Sextus which I’ve had for a number of years. I believe when we actually met at the Swing House, that’s what I was working on.

Warren Huart:

Fantastic.

Eric Dover:

So I’m preparing to release half a dozen of those, so another EP.

Warren Huart:

Wonderful.

Eric Dover:

I’m having sessions occasionally. I do a lot of gardening, beekeeping.

Warren Huart:

Beekeeping. Wasn’t it Ian Anderson that was like a salmon, he owned a salmon farm, isn’t that right?

Tim Smith:

Correct. Yeah. I think he still does. Yeah.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. I remember the same thing, somebody asked him, “What are you working on?” He goes, “You know, salmon.” I like that. Gardening and salmon.

Ken Sluiter:

The musician career is really suited for I do this and then I do one other unrelated thing. Kate Pierson has her little airstreamer hotel like resort.

Tim Smith:

Yeah.

Ken Sluiter:

I don’t know what my other thing is yet, but I’m looking for it.

Roger Manning:

It’s called dad coach.

Ken Sluiter:

That’s right.

Warren Huart:

I think it depends on whether you’re a dad or not, and if you are a dad how old your kids are. My only other thing is kids.

Ken Sluiter:

When you mentioned particularly Steely Dan, the one thing I was really glad about when I got involved in this project is I felt like everything that I’ve been working on, and Warren you might have this too as an engineer and mixer, this is the first project in a long time that the band wasn’t asking me to add this amount of distortion to everything, meaning the decapitator on the vocal. I remember in my mind thinking to myself all these records with that production style sound so exciting for the first 30 seconds, and then your instinct is just to turn it down and then go check your email because your ears can’t listen to more of that.

Ken Sluiter:

Right around when I got involved with this I was thinking, “Somebody’s going to come along. I want to make the record … We weren’t trying to keep everything clear and pristine, but just not obsessed with distorting anything unnecessarily. This was the one and it came by, and the one thing I’ll say is that I think that one of the goals was we wanted to make a record that sounded like no matter how loud you turned it up on your stereo, the louder the better and there was never going to fry your ears out, which is the way records sounded like when I was a kid.

Warren Huart:

Yes. We must’ve all had the experience of listening to Highway to Hell or Back in Black in the car and you just kept turning it up and turning it up and you’d look down on the speedometer and you’re doing 85.

Tim Smith:

It was that time when I was young and learning these songs and thinking that they were way more distorted than they were, and pulling out my distortion pedals and going, “Why doesn’t this sound like that?”, and then making the connection, “Because they’re not that distorted. It’s just ballsy.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Tim Smith:

It was interesting.

Warren Huart:

And it just got better louder. [crosstalk 00:51:25]. Tim, outside of working with these wonderful guys, what are you working on?

Tim Smith:

In lockdown mode I’m baking a lot of bread. Most people are getting into … Yeah. I was touring pretty much as a side guy for so long and did the Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds for about five years. When that finished it’s sort of when Roger called me. I kind of decided not to do so much of that, and so been focusing on this, some session stuff here. I was on the road so much, then I got married. My wife’s British and she moved over here and then I was always on the road. We’re just having our second or third honeymoon of just hanging out, which has been awesome.

Warren Huart:

Beautiful.

Tim Smith:

Yeah.

Warren Huart:

Big Roge, some back stuff coming up once the lockdown mode goes? Are you guys going to tour? What are you working on?

Roger Manning:

There was. I’m sure we’ll try out best to resume. He was promoting his most recent record. It was all mapped out. I continue to wear as many hats as possible to stay creatively fulfilled and keep this beautiful roof over my head. I’ve actually been doing quite a bit of independent [inaudible 00:52:47] projects from different people around the country, many of whom I’ve never met. It’s been all via email like, “I’m finally working on my record. What do you charge to play some keys here or sing some parts here? Blah, blah, blah, blah.” I’m just like, “Man, you people are really helping buffer this crazy experience for me. I couldn’t be more grateful.”

Roger Manning:

It really goes to show too obviously we’re aware of those acts that get signed and they’ve got some kind of promotion machine behind them, and then there’s many, many people for whatever reason things didn’t happen for them that way or they’re not interested in that, but they’re as influenced by The Beatles and somebody else who says they are and it’s like stuff really fun to play on. I wish I could remember their name. There was a band from England I played on last year. I don’t think anybody knows who they are. It was somewhere between Bob Mould, Hüsker Dü meets [inaudible 00:53:54]. Imagine an even [crosstalk 00:53:56] more beautiful Hüsker Dü, Bob Mould. I was in awe. I was like, “How is this even possible?” I got to play on that. I’m very grateful. A lot of that’s been going on recently.

Warren Huart:

You’re probably still working with guys like Joe. Is he sending you stuff remotely to work on, Chiccarelli?

Roger Manning:

He is. I just played on the new Brandon Flowers which might be Killers, which wasn’t through Joe but that was something that your audience would know of. Joe will hand off a variety of miscellaneous stuff. The joy of working with Joe and the reason we work so well together is because he is the vision and he just harnesses me through that. He’s my, “Don’t waste your time with these 10 ideas. Focus on this idea here.” It has slowed down the process a bit, but I’m okay. With that. I’ve got all these toys and I’ve finally set up my room for the first time in years. I’m amassing all this stuff and now I’m just a few patch points away. I’ve got some synth module from ’83 or some synth module from 1997 or whatever, and I get to have fun trying stuff. I’ll just load a bunch of stuff on the tracks for the producer. It’s like, “All right. Here’s 10 ideas for your chorus. I like them all. Obviously, you won’t. Pick what’s going to work best.” Again, just super grateful that these opportunities exist in my line of work.

Warren Huart:

It is amazing with the digital what we can do now. I think Ken, with these guys having worked with so many incredible producers and stuff, that’s probably another perspective. You’re getting to work with musicians that have been beaten up by so many other producers that by the time you get the ideas, you’ve got that sort of focus through all of the accumulated knowledge that they’ve learned.

Ken Sluiter:

Yeah, for sure. I’ve watched them get beat [inaudible 00:55:57] the guy in the corner [inaudible 00:56:00]. Not so much for Tim and Eric, but for Roger … I used to have sessions with Roger before I think he even knew. There’s four bald engineers in LA. We all get mistaken for each other. [crosstalk 00:56:13]. Finally, you put the names with the face. Yeah. For sure. Warren, all of these guys you can tell that there’s a certain sort of … Things seemed like they’re going to be a good idea at the time or things that … For example, when I was a kid making demos, the moment I learned what double tracking a vocal did, I was like, “Oh, my God. I’m going to double track this vocal. I’m going to make it double as loud as the lead and I’m going to pan one to the left and one to the right. It will sound awesome.” It makes an awesome sounding demo.

Ken Sluiter:

And then, you realize if you’re going to do some real record making, it’s nice to work with people that you don’t have to kind of go, “Okay.” We didn’t have to go to rock and roll school, we didn’t have to explain a bunch of stuff to them like, “No. This is how we’re going to do it.” It was like everyone was, “I like that.” [inaudible 00:57:17] most comfortable.

Warren Huart:

Yeah. I think as a producer I’m sure you understand this. You hire guys of this level because you know that they’ve been in a room with guys like Chiccarelli and all the rest of the great guys around, and you can pretty much 99% of the way let them do their thing and then just guide it because lots of other people have done a lot of work for you. That’s the reality. My productions got better when I could hire great players who could get it like that, and then I was really just kind of guiding. I could just say big words. You speak to a great bass player and you say, “Carol Kaye,” and you talk about Beach Boys, they’re probably going to put a bit of foam under the bass almost immediately and go bum, bum, bum, bum. They’re going to know what you’re talking about. There’s just certain things that we say to each other that we take for granted, but that’s because of the massive amount of acquired knowledge that these guys have got from working with all of these different artists and all of these different producers and engineers. It’s pretty fantastic.

Ken Sluiter:

It’s funny because it’s sort of the end … Tim mentioned earlier that there’s a real charm to the sound of a struggle happening meaning when somebody is playing a lick that they have to … I really enjoy the sound of somebody playing right on the edge of what they can barely do, but I also like the sound of people playing so effortlessly. In LA, not just LA but any major music market that you get when you get guys who can execute an idea perfectly. My favorite is when you can find the two. A lot of post-punk bands will have the best … Think of Gang of Four, like the best rhythm section ever, and then the guys couldn’t sing a note out of tune in the world, and so it’s an amazing thing because you’ve got all [inaudible 00:59:13] you could ever want because the singer doesn’t even know [inaudible 00:59:17], but then the bass player and the guitar player are amazing.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Ken Sluiter:

I love bands that have a combination. Good bands will also know, “Hey, Roger, we want you to play this. If we wanted to sound like authentic punk rock, it kind of has to be … It’s also for example no one’s going to talk about how good Chrissie Hynde is as a guitar player, but just fro working with somebody at that level, if her guitar isn’t as loud and proud in the mix, it doesn’t sound like The Pretenders. You have to take the thing that’s the [inaudible 00:59:54] and then you build … All the great guitar players that she’s ever played compliment the fact that she keeps her thing dead simple, just dead simple. These guys have their ways of doing that by sort of switching up instruments or pushing themselves out of their comfort zone, keeping it so it doesn’t sound like Totò. No offense to Totò.

Roger Manning:

Ouch.

Ken Sluiter:

I appreciate it too.

Warren Huart:

Gentlemen, thank you ever so much. That was a lot of fun get to find out the making of the record, a little bit of the gear talk, love it. Ken, thanks for breaking down the process. There’s going to be a link to pre-order the album down there, also a Spotify link to the current single which Ken does a mix breakdown of, and there is going to be a link to download his course on that. All of this stuff is available, so make sure you pre-order the album. Yeah. I’m going to do it anyway. I always buy albums I like even if somebody gives them to me. Isn’t it part of the karma?

Roger Manning:

That is vert karmic.

Warren Huart:

Yeah.

Tim Smith:

Take it.

Roger Manning:

Thank you in advance.

Tim Smith:

Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Roger Manning:

Yeah. This was a lot of fun as always. Thanks so much for figuring out a way to you and your lovely assistant Eric for figuring out how to get us all on the grid together, all of the Brady bunch, to talk about this.

Warren Huart:

Marvelous. Thank you ever so much. Please, leave a bunch of comments and questions below, and don’t forget to check out all those links. Have a marvelous time recording and mixing, and we’ll see you all again very soon.

Roger Manning:

Bye everybody. Bye.

Tim Smith:

Bye.

Roger Manning:

Take care.

Ken Sluiter:

Bye, bye.