James Barber
America's Sweetheart, Some Friends, & PeakBy Randy Alberts
After years of experience both as a manager and as a major-label A&R representative, former Geffen Records A&R VP James Barber has finally broken free from corporate drudgery as the producer of Ryan Adams' Rock N Roll and Courtney Love's America's Sweetheart. And he's found a lot of that freedom in the shape of a waveform as he uses Peak to tighten Ryan's arrangements or to actually create songs from hours of Courtney's demos.
Barber helped write and record Love's recently-released America's Sweetheart by extensively editing and rearranging her "circle of friends" song demo sessions using Peak, an indispensable tool for him in creating new arrangements for the notoriously prolific Adams. Now he's just now getting started to archive Kurt Cobain's home recordings using SoundSoap Pro, as well.
Turning Almost Golden Into Platinum
Rearranging and co-writing with Love, Adams, and others these days, Barber is especially excited about Peak's capabilities as a 2-track editor. Calling it an "infinitely better way" to edit 2-track recordings than using a multi-track DAW recorder, Jim even wonders if the folks at BIAS see Peak the same way he does.
"I use Peak for a huge chunk of what I do and in ways they may not have intended at BIAS," he offers. "On Courtney's new album I have a co-songwriting credit for the song 'Almost Golden' because I went through a few hours of her jams and rearranged them into possible songs. I imported those session DATs into Peak and cut those up and played it back for the band to re-learn the parts of songs they wanted to take further and multi-track. That's how most of American Sweetheart was recorded: She jammed with people sitting around in a circle inside the loudest monitoring system in the world, and would yell over the music 'Mark that!' in to the tech in the room every time they had something that was really working."
It doesn't bother Barber that his meticulous process working with Love, and all the nice accidents therein is creating a boatload of work for himself. Typically doing his best work at 3 a.m. when he's about to enter a premature REM cycle, he combs through every one of Courtney's counter markers on the DAT as its stereo outputs pour into his Griffin Technology PowerWave I/O, laptop, and Peak.
"There are three other songs from those sessions I really want her to record that were made exactly the same way as 'Almost Golden'," says Barber.
This Is How Rock N Roll Should Sound
Ryan Adams' Rock N Roll was another beneficiary of Barber's fresh "Peaked song" approach to song arrangement and creation, as well. The Heartbreaker Adams gave Jim a seven-minute demo tape of a song and the two debated what to cut and what not to cut from the new tune before they could move ahead.
"Finally, I took the demo and rearranged and edited it with Peak," Barber continues. "I played it for him and said, 'See? This is how your song is supposed to sound,' and he loved it. As a writing and arranging tool, Peak has been my favorite thing because it gives a band and a producer freedom to sift through things later and to get a different perspective. Ryan has literally hundreds of unreleased songs and he doesn't have the patience for endless tinkering in the studio. Peak was an incredibly efficient way for me to show him exactly how the new arrangement could be worked."
Jim says artists can turn 2-track demo tapes over to Peak jockeys like himself and, given an hour or two, they'll always come back to the artist with something completely different. He says that opening a multi-track DAW session to do the same process just isn't the same to him, that he feels like he's then "committing to a large architecture for a project" that distracts and slows him down from his creative songwriting and arranging goals. He used to handle a razor blade and 2-track tape during his days as a musician, self-taught engineer, and Geffen A&R VP, so he appreciates Peak all the more.
Says the experienced tunesmith, "A 2-track editor is perfect."
Keeping Kurt's Ideas Real
Barber, who was on the Producers Panel at this year's SXSW (South By Southwest) conference, knows how personal and revealing every musician's old demo tapes are and says that Kurt Cobain's are no different. He also happens to see the parallels between his Cobain work and a new collection of R&B recordings made in Nashville during the 1940s called Night Train To Nashville (Lost Highway). He finds guidance in the archival audio footage of that record for his own faithful archaeological audio work these days.
"A lot of those old R&B songs were poorly recorded, and they didn't clean it up much when they mastered it, either. They respected the original master and didn't try to make it sound ridiculously clean and modern, so it sounds great. Kurt was not a guy into gear who had a fancy home recording setup when he was making up songs, either. In fact, in 1992 even a [TASCAM] DA-88 was a complicated thing for him to operate. He used a boom box with a built-in condenser mic, and it sounds like he spilled things on some of the tapes. The boom box tapes were the easiest way for him to work out song ideas when he felt like it at home."
But through the stains of time Barber has already found some real Cobain gems. He will update BIAS on his progress as the much anticipated and delayed Nirvana box set nears release next year. "I'm excited about what I'll be doing with SoundSoap Pro on this project in the months ahead. I think this is going to really knock me out for what we're doing with Kurt."
Barber works with his BIAS software mostly on a laptop at a place called The Red Ceiling, a gigantic house/studio/office complex near Hancock Park in Los Angeles. He's done a lot of recording there and uses it as his main base for overdubs and editing, including the work he's doing on the boxes and boxes of Cobain tapes. BIAS couldn't help but to ask for a sneak peak into what Jim has come up with in his first weeks working with SoundSoap Pro and Peak on this massive, vital important project.
"Amazing stuff. There are some incredible board mixes from Nevermind, too, that will be worth hearing," concludes Barber. "There's also a live French TV performance that includes four songs filmed just six weeks before his death. Courtney and Kurt once played a show together at Club Lingerie that was videotaped. It's an amazing performance of them doing 'Where Did You Sleep Last Night' and their high and low harmonies are just great together. I'm hoping there will be moments like that on the home tapes, as well."
What's next for James Barber? "I'm waiting for Ryan's broken wrist to heal and working with a group of unsigned artists that are as good as anyone I've ever had the privilege to work with at a label. It's an incredibly exciting time. All of the chaos in the business has thrown the majors off their game, so there are more opportunities now to do something unique than I've seen since the early days of punk rock."