The Doughboys
JPG: For yourself was it just a matter that it was much easier to get out of bed and work for four hours, take a dog for a walk and come back and work for three hours and you don’t have to deal with anybody else?
RXH: It all started from being in bands that for one reason or other would break up and you’d have these personality conflicts. You have all the tension that goes with being in a band. And when I finally started to find myself in a recording studio I wasn’t in a band at the time, I just started to overdub one instrument at a time which was fun and I got the song done. So, it was just the way I did it.
With the Doughboys we’d lay down the tracks altogether. It’s great! Something great about being in a room, musicians all playing at once, the different chemistry that happens. The spontaneity. It’s all valid. Whatever works. I once got a review early on and some writer was grousing about the song “Sidetrack” or something that was a little bar band sounding track. He admitted this track was great. It’s rockin’, and then he said, ‘But just knowing that he’s playing all the instruments kind of discredits it for me.’ I felt like that’s bullshit in a way. Once something can be done, once the technology is there, I think it’s valid.
JPG: I find it more impressive and more shocking to compartmentalize it in your head. Doing the drum track and having the feel and the swing to make it go with everything else that gets added on to it in order to make it sound like a full-fledged band that’s playing together.
RXH: That all stems from being a drummer. If I was not a drummer, I guess there’s people that play drums, but that’s not their main thing. Being a drummer, even though I’m not hearing the song, I’m still playing it pretty much the way I would play it with the whole band around me because I’m just sitting there singing the song to myself. I wrote the song and I’m singing it. I can feel the whole groove that I’m playing. Once you lay that down…The other advantage, too, is it all started with the drums and as you layer each instrument in you just make sure that next instrument really fits the drum track ‘cause once you’ve locked in with each instrument, all these little flaws go away because these recreate a band playing live.
JPG: The new albums are more piano-based, did you still go with that method of drums first or did you go piano first this time around?
RXH: This was the first album that I didn’t do the drums first. That’s because we had our little studio set up here, Logic Pro set up here. I live in a New York City apartment, so I can’t do the drums obviously, so I was so into the piano at the time, writing these songs, that I just laid down all of the piano and vocal tracks first. And then I went to a place called EastSide Sound, here in the city, and did the drums. Then I took that home and filled in the rest. Actually, when I did the drums I didn’t even listen to the vocal track. I just listened to the piano, just pianos and drums.
JPG: You bummed me out a bit when you said that you went somewhere else to record the drums because I imagined your apartment studio being like a soundproof panic room where you could even record the drums.
RXH: We, obviously, have people living right above us and below us. I’ll be like in my boxer shorts screaming vocals out on a microphone in our bedroom and then we start laughing wondering what these people must be thinking. They, honestly, can hear us because we can hear people when they play their TV or talk loud through the wall. It’s a little restraining in a way that technically somebody’s listening.
JPG: There you go. You may not do live performances, but technically you are for better or worse for your neighbors who may not be in the mood or are trying to take a nap.
RXH: (laughs) I am. We would always stop at 10 p.m. We just knew people could hear us.
JPG: Maybe that’s how you can start an album with the sound of a fist banging on the wall.
RXH: (laughs) We haven’t got to that point. We have had a few times at our other apartment recording there. We try to be respectful, we usually do a couple hours a night. Afternoon, we’ll do a couple hours there, a weekend afternoon.
JPG: With the way you write and record are you always writing and recording, working on something at your home studio every day?
RXH: Oh, not every day, but if I get an idea for a song… The only thing that’s changed really radically for me coincided with the time we moved to this new apartment, which was eight years ago. I stopped doing demos of any kind. I don’t really do work tapes. I always would just sing into a cassette playing guitar, piano and the vocals. So, I had a record of what to remember, what I did. I just got this thing in my head where I just didn’t want to do it anymore because I felt like I’m just gonna record it for real as soon as I can.
Of course, things pile up and other things happen, so a lot of songs are lodged in my brain and then they either disappear or they stick with me. I’ve been losing a lot of songs over the last years, have come and gone through my head and I didn’t get time to record ‘em. And because I didn’t get to record them in time, I forgot ‘em. Just kind of silly and stupid, but it’s just the way I do it now.
JPG: Why be so anti-demo?
RXH: Because I couldn’t keep buying these little cassettes. I’ve got literally, I don’t know how many, thousands of these cassette tapes in cabinets and drawers, filled with ideas over the last 30 years. Never probably going to ever listen to ‘em again. I pity the poor person after I die that’s going to discover the drawer with all that crap.
JPG: With the new albums, tell me about the ideas behind them as far as was it a concept first or did you just have a batch of songs that happened to fit a particular approach…?
RXH: I wanted to do a piano album. My original idea was I wanted to do something akin to “Ladies of the Canyon” by Joni Mitchell. I wanted to do a very acoustic — piano and vocal — very sparse, adorned with little things here and there and maybe a couple of guitar songs with it, but acoustic guitar. That’s how it started. And then things got out of hand. I started going back to my old ways of filling everything up. But instead, the only conscious decision I made was to try and keep the guitar to a minimum or not at all. I had just done that to death. How many guitar type albums do I need to make? I made a lot of ‘em, 95 per cent were guitar-oriented.
I got to write these songs on piano and that was the general concept, and then after I wrote the songs the whole lyrical theme was just coming out naturally. I wasn’t attempting to write about my relationship with Nancy. Sometimes you write and beget phrases that pop up right with the chord changes, kind of sparks the rest of the lyrics. And they all seemed to be about how I met Nancy. How I left her to go to L.A., and…I just let it happen. At a certain point, I had five or six of ‘em. Every one’s archived. I have to finish this now. Then, you get a little conscious of, ‘Okay, I’ve started this story which is based on fact.’ I knew what part of the story was. Very basically, it’s boy meets girl, boy leaves girl, boy gets back to girl, gets books and cats and lives happily ever after.
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