Music and Recording Features

If you are at all familiar with the Netflix sci-fi/horror phenomenon known as Stranger Things, you've heard its foreboding, pulsating theme music dozens of times. The familiarity of that signature Stranger synth bed should in turn lead your ingrained sound-sense memory to conjure the music of Tangerine Dream, the pioneering German electronic band.

Each side of the one-sheet lyrics insert accompanying Squeeze's latest LP, Trixies (Love/BMG), has been divvied up into three equal columns that can be folded over to replicate a 4" × 11½" nightclub menu. Subtitled "Trixies Concoctions Menu," the insert conjures the theme of the 13-track song cycle that comprises Trixies, whose storyline traces several scenes set in and around a fictional nightclub.

You could say that guitar phenom Derek Trucks grew up in a musical family. His late uncle, drummer Butch Trucks, was a cofounder of The Allman Brothers Band, and his younger brother Duane drums for Widespread Panic. Derek's jam-centric DNA shaped the sound found in the grooves of Future Soul (Fantasy), the sixth studio album from Tedeschi Trucks Band/

Steve Earle was born in 1967. Well, that's not exactly true. Earle was in fact born on January 17, 1955, in Fort Monroe, Virginia, but the singer, songwriter, and master interpreter's musical awakening came in 1967, when he was 12 years old, growing up in his acknowledged hometown of San Antonio, Texas.

To write about music, you must first come to terms with your fanboy urges. You must brush off the fairy dust and see your heroes for who they really are—a picture that in many cases is all too human. Yet that first blush of idolatry is an experience you never quite forget, no matter how many times you interview a person.

There was a time, back in the St. Elmo's Fire 1980s, when Steve Earle's first album, Guitar Town, was an object of abject slobbery for a generation of rock critics. Turning a near-mint LP copy of that album over in his hands, Earle begins to reminisce about a record that changed Nashville and country-rock music and, for many, remains his undisputed career masterpiece.

If you really want to know how your favorite albums came to be, you can't go wrong talking with the men and women who are in the studio day in and day out with the artists—i.e., the producers and engineers. So we're doing exactly that. In Part 1 of our Studio Confidential interview series—there will be three parts this week, with perhaps more to follow—Mike Mettler talks with Chuck Ainlay, who has worked with Peter Frampton, Mark Knopfler (and Dire Straits), George Strait, and many, many others—about his production philosophy and who inspired him to get behind the board in the first place.

Producers and engineers are the human engines that drive and shape the sound of the recordings we know and love—as well as the ones we've yet to hear. In Part 2 of our three-part Studio Confidential interview series, Mike Mettler talks with Sylvia Massy, who has worked with Prince, Jason Isbell, Tool, and many, many others, about what elements make a hit record, what album made her want to become a producer, and why Prince was such a, shall we say, tortured genius.