From cracker to crows... counting on the sound skills of producer/ writer david lowery.

you're adam duritz, counting crows frontman and one of the most literate songwriters of the decade. you've got a couple of multi-platinum albums under your belt, and you're looking for the right setup to cut your next record. oh, you also need a new producer. and not just anybody, because you've already been with one of the good ones: t-bone burnett helped capture the sparse urgency of 'mr. jones' and the rest of august and everything after, while gil norton's subtle sound skills made the most of recovering the satellites' radio tracks 'daylight fading' and 'a long december.'

so are you really going to trust your next record to a guy who's the author of 'take the skinhead bowling'?

sure you would. maybe his words don't always rhyme and his best songs use just three cords (four tops), but cracker's david lowery knows a little something about making a cool-sounding, no-frills rock and roll record.

for the same price you also get lowery's partner, dennis herring, whose technical vision helped bring the sounds of lowery's former band camper van beethoven into this world as well. not a bad deal.

already a fairly seasoned sound mechanic, lowery's been sharpening his production chops ever since he helped launch the richmond-based sound of music studios five years ago. in between his various cracker projects (the fourth, gentleman's blues, hit the streets last fall), he's found time to oversee the works of joan osborne, sparklehorse, september 67, and a host of others.

the counting crows' record (lowery's first major-league gig) came partly as a result of lowery's longtime friendship with duritz, whom he'd first met during the camper days, then again when cracker and the crows toured together several years back. yet what really brought the two together again, oddly enough, was the lowery production credit on the critically lauded mid-'90's debut of sparklehorse, the richmond-based outfit fronted by songwriter mark linkous. vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, a collection of colorfully arranged linkous pop nuggets, turned more than a few heads in the business --- including duritz's.

'all my production gigs have been a result of that sparklehorse record,' says lowery, en route to l.a. to complete mixing of the crows album. 'a really diverse group of people have told me how much they liked that record. so that's basically how this came about.'

for his part, lowery -- who's trusted most of his own cracker recordings to multi-talented producer don smith -- claims that there's nothing unique about his approach to sound crafting. 'i don't really have any method, or any particular sound that i think is really good,' says lowery. 'i'll just come to an artist and say, 'okay, well, what do you guys want to sound like?' that's it! maybe they're expecting it to come out with that sparklehorse sound -- except nothing ever sounds like that record.'

as has been their practice in years past, duritz and the crows shunned the big-studio approach in favor of working out of a house -- this time around, the setting was a sprawling mulholland mansion ('... that looked like it was designed by mr. brady while moonlighting as a porn producer,' remarks an observant lowery). for sound baffling, crows guitarist david bryson had devised some plywood-covered enclosures for the guitar and bass amps, but aside from that, the band set up like at a normal gig, placing drums off to one side of the big living room and even using floor monitors (with headphones provided as well). a vocal booth was constructed at the opposite end of the room for duritz's vocal and piano.

arriving late last spring, lowery and herring brought along everything they'd need to cut a record -- except the proper recorder.

we just set up as much gear as we could, except we only came with a tascam da-88 cause we didn't have the patch bay built yet,' shrugs lowery. 'so we figured, 'well, they're just writing songs now anyway, so we'll just work with this for now.' as it turns out, it became much more useful than we thought.'

as is often the case, the best stuff happens right at the beginning, and the crows experience was no different: two songs recorded as 'reference' tracks on the tascam actually made the final cut. 'one of the songs is just a stereo mix of the drums, bass, acoustic guitar, and then we did the overdubs to that, just to have as the demo. but then later we listened back to it and thought, 'shit, this is great! let's keep it!' so that's how we got going.'

after finally procuring their studer 827 machine, lowery and crew were proceeding with the making of the record when a new distraction came along -- a new otari radar 24-bit 96k machine that herring suddenly introduced halfway through the sessions.

'dennis brings in his radar one day and says, 'you know, you can do some cool stuff with this thing, you really should take a look,' remembers lowery. 'so at first we started using it for editing, moving stuff we'd recorded on the studer over. and then by the end, we were recording on it. i mean, i think it's the first digital hard-disk recorder that sounds decent.'

in fact, lowery's disdain for digital tracking ('i hated pro tools,' he says bluntly) has kept him (and his sound of music cohorts) analog-bound all this time. but his head finally got turned around when he first started working with the otari and its many analog-style features. 'it acts like a tape machine: it doesn't crash, for one thing,' notes lowery. 'it's got this little remote that looks like a tape player, you know, to fast-forward and rewind -- i need stuff that acts like it's fast-forwarding, you see everything go by -- as well as having its 'locate' features: tricks to make you think you're actually using a tape machine.'

one of the perks of recording outside of an expensive pro facility is that the project can proceed at a more leisurely pace. such was the case here -- and with nobody in any particular rush to get things done, the band ended up revisiting the various tunes countless times. under those circumstances, lowery found the otari's sizable storage to be a real bonus, but even more convenient was the machines ability to cobble together numerous sections from the multitude of takes.

'there might be 10 or 12 versions of each song,' recalls lowery, 'so what the radar really started being handy for was foraging through each version, and cutting off bits and pieces of each... you know, 'that vocal was great, let's just grab that and put it on this take over here.' it made it so that dennis and i had more technical things to do -- we'd have to have a whole day where nobody would come in because we'd be synching everything back up because we'd taken the guitar part off one version, or maybe the vocal off something else. but the good thing was that it helped the band keep the right mood and vibe. to me, those are the hardest things to get recorded. i guess this was the first time that i felt that this digital technology didn't become a monster and take over the recording sessions. it actually improved them.'

for lower, the real beauty was getting things reworked on the otter, then flying them back over to the steadier once all the pieces had been properly assembled. 'so after all that crafting in digital, we could then fatten it back up. we did quite a bit of that routine.'

lowery sought to take advantage of the 'at home' environment by recording the band tracks live, as well as experimenting with various other configurations, such as having duritz perform his piano parts alone with drummer ben mize. 'we'd try that, then have the band overdub onto that,' says lowery. 'that worked well for a couple songs.'occasionally, though lowery was forced to resort to some fairly unorthodox measures. after being stonewalled for days by one particularly tricky crows track called 'hanging around,' lowery hit upon an idea.

'i'd had the original demo of the song which was literally recorded on a boom box, and i noticed that it had this great character to it,' says lowery. 'and everything that we'd put up on tape just wasn't matching it. so while adam was off taking a break one day, we took the demo, and sort of made this thing that sounded like a loop, and then we had ben play along to it. pretty soon adam comes back and hears this and says, 'hey, let me play piano to this.' and it just evolved like that! so the song that you hear is essentially the whole band playing along to this boom box demo. and it kind of turned into the way the original demo sounded -- which is what we wanted in the first place.'

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