“It’s not AI, it’s not robots creating music. This is people – real humans.”
Sound on Sound Studios in Montclair, New Jersey, is considered a state-of-the-art facility. Maybe that’s because of the extensive amount of equipment and gear they have available, or because of the physical and sonic space they have, or even because of their rich history in-and-around the Big Apple. We think it’s because David Amlen, founder of the studio, is a state-of-the-art creative. His acclaimed catalog as a masterful studio owner and musical engineer is a large part in the success and evolution of Sound on Sound. The experience and expertise he brings to the table is immense and is arguably worth more to artists than his recent Grammy win.
Amlen is currently in the midst of a passion project – a true labor of love that he spoke to us about candidly and kindly. Elton and Jenny Today is a concept album where voices and instrumentalists came together under the guidance of Amlen to revisit and reinvent five songs from Sir Elton John’s catalog, and five songs from the late Jenny Amlen’s catalog. It’s a beautiful collection, arranged with an intimacy and an intricacy that only a valiant, multi-skilled producer with a connection to the subject could hone in on.
Elton and Jenny Today is personal, but boasts a multitude of voices other than Sir Elton, the late Jenny, and David Amlen himself. Although a close-to-home record, the impassioned, specifically human collaborations are what bring the bold soundscapes and hearty narratives to life. The vocalists are Cecile Williams, Iris Schaffer-Hall, Julie Dobrow, Meg Beattie Patrick, and Stacia Thiel; all five bring two tracks to life in a distinct way – something that Amlen himself was enamored by.
The Aquarian sat down with David Amlen, our musical and thoughtful neighbor from down-the-road Montclair, for the below conversation on Elton and Jenny Today, as well as Sound on Sound Studios.
Your studio started in Times Square and moved to Montclair now right down the road from us. How has that move and that shift from the bustling city to the semi-bustling, but also very quaint town of Montclair, changed how you either operate or just how you listen to and observe music?
When we were in the city, at our peak we had a six-room facility and literally every day four or five rooms where A-list people that everyone has heard of, so that has changed a bit. We’re a two-room facility now, so just the number of artists that come in is less, but there’s still an amazing wealth of talent. When you go from like Maplewood-South Orange all the way up to Englewood and Teaneck and areas like that, there’s an incredible amount of musicians, actors, directors, and writers. It’s an incredible area. So we gave up the craziness, the hustle and bustle being in the Time Square area, and at the same time, doing business in New York is incredibly expensive, so there are trade-offs, but the quality of life is definitely better here [Laughs].
I think anybody will tell you that business is business. I don’t believe that there is such thing as easy business; you still gotta work on it. The hats that I wear here, I mean… it’s my business, so I’m attuned to all ends of it, but then I’m also creative. I always have been. Being able to switch gears, I think, is easier here than it was in New York.
This seems like it is a good location for you to foster creativity in a more intimate, personal, and hands-on way, which must have played a part in Elton and Jenny Today.
It was nice, and really, hopefully, this will honor my late sister and also honor early Elton John stuff, because that is amazing material.
The album features “Skyline Pigeon,” an early Elton track that has always held a special place in the heart of fans, seeing the song as part of this project was something that stuck out to me. It must have been a song that stuck out to you, too, having included it.
Well, it’s interesting. How that came about was because of my late sister and I and the last album we did together that was released in 2016, Stories To Tell. Among the collection of her tunes, three of them come off of that album, and two of them come off of an album that we did like six years earlier called Many Hats and they’re reimagined versions. We did an album release show for it and the closer for the show that we did was just the two of us playing “Skyline Pigeon,” and that was it. We had talked about how I always loved the tune, and I heard the alternate version that Elton did in the mid-seventies where it was more orchestrated with a band. I was like, “You know, that’s what the song always needed to be.” That was the motivation for that song. Then, as this project developed with the singers who were involved, I said, “Ok, we’re going to this album ’cause this is an amazing album. It’s got great material on it, so which one resonates to you? And they would come back and, one by one as there were less songs to choose, they chose their own, and it’s kind of funny that none of the five chose to sing the same songs. It was very interesting that way.
Wow. I am stuck on the fact that these vocalists, these singers, all gravitated to different tracks. I bet you didn’t expect that that would happen in that way.
Happenstance. […] As far as my sister’s songs, those I definitely had clear ideas of who should sing which tune, so I didn’t have them really choose their own. I was more like, “No, your voice would be better for this one,” and “You would be better for that one.” That was more cut and dry. But when it came to the Elton tunes, I wanted each of the vocalists to feel a connection to them, the songs they chose.
The way it came together feels very well-rounded and introspective and beautiful, so the way you navigated the singers and the placement was great. Everything feels like it makes sense and there is a cohesion to the voice and the lyrics.
Well, thank you. I appreciate that, it means a lot. It’s funny – the three of the songs from Jenny, “Freedom,” “Sister,” and “Faith” – we originally were like, “Oh boy, wouldn’t it be great if a political party picked it up and used it as a rallying song for the election?” And we know, of course, without me having to say it, which political party it would be for. [Laughs] Beyoncé beat me to her version of “Freedom,” but we do kind of dance a line as artists for not wanting to turn off a potential base of people who may get some message out of the song that resonates with them in a positive way.
Music is a very funny thing. It hits people in different ways and definitely doesn’t want to be used for wannabe dictators. I mean, that would be completely unlike my sister, because that would’ve gone against everything she and I and my family know and believe. Her songs resonate that positivity and the ones I picked have that message.
[Jenny] had whimsical, kind of silly songs that we did together, but also others that were like a lot of songwriters, about heartbreak and breakups and crazy stuff that happened with exes. I was like, “No, those aren’t gonna be the ones. It’s gotta be these particular ones, because they really have a message.”
Just the titles of her songs alone have a little bit of weight to them, in my perspective and how I read them, as well as how I connected them to the music itself.
Yeah. “What If?” is a great tune. It’s a ballad. It’s really a pretty tune, and this is different version than I produced for her back in 2016. When you go back and you revisit a song, sometimes you want to just do a straight cover. I should say, for all five of Elton’s tunes, none of them are in the original keys. All the singers were like, “I love this tune, but can we change the key?” And I was like, “Sure, no problem.” We would sit down and go, “What key works for you?” That is part of an arranger’s job, a producer’s job – find the right key for the singer.
Four of the singers are sopranos and one of them is an alto. The alto, she’s the one who is singing “Western Ford Gateway” and Jenny’s song, “Faith.” Those were the two she sang. I think at times it pushed her to the upper end of her range, but she used to be a jingle singer, so it wasn’t too hard for her.
You are adamant about all of your work, all of these songs, being made by humans. There is no AI, nothing like that. With that in mind, you’re clearly listening to your collaborators and working with them on quite the personal, human level.
It’s very important to have that in my approach. I’m very much from the organic old school mindset of things; if you play this stuff, people play it. Now, a slight variation on it is that it wasn’t a room full of these people, because I couldn’t clone myself to do that [Laughs]. There were people playing together in the studio, but on “Freedom” in particular, there’s a horn section. Same with “Faith.” Those are the only two songs that I actually arranged the horn section and brought in three of my friends who were great players, and so the horn section in “Freedom” is a little complicated. It’s actually all three playing together in unison and in harmony. The rhythm was very, I have to say, inspired somewhat by Phil Collins.
Trumpet, saxophone, and trombone that sounded effortless and soulful in this day and age? It was wonderful to hear, and it’s evident there was thought you put into this.
Growing up, I was listening to Chicago and loving that band. I still love that band.
There’s this interesting thing, for me, when I hear it – I don’t hear my favorite band in any of the material other than the bass lines. That’s the only thing I hear in any of the tunes. It’s a very driving present, forceful bass line. Some people might go, “Oh, yeah, now I hear it,” but I think overall, the vamp section is much more classic rock. Pick your band, whoever your favorite was, it’s probably in there somewhere! I hear on “Gulliver,” a heavy early Genesis in the vamp section, because that’s the pedal stuff there with sort of the arpeggiating guitars and the piano.
It really gives it an atmospheric quality.
Yeah, it does, whereas on “Western Ford Gateway,” it’s almost like a “Crocodile Rock” version that we did. It’s playful fifties kind of stuff without being fifties classic.
So a bit anthemic, too, which, I think sounds good and juxtaposes each other, but also complements each other.
Well, it’s funny. When we did the original version of “Freedom,” my wife knew a guy who is actually Larry Hartke who runs the Hartke Speaker company. They make all these amps and speakers for people and he was always a big fan of this song. We played it out and he just loved it. He was like, “Oh, when you get it done, give it to me. Let’s see what we can do with it.” Well, that never happened [Laughs]. Here we are eight years later, and maybe something will happen.
I always felt like you could be singing it in any different way, like the chorus is just an anthem kind of chorus. It’s one of those, it just kind of happened that way. This version is a little different from the original version, but once again, it is loosely pulling out of that a classical technique, which is something that Genesis used a lot. Call it a pedal note on the bottom, but with the same bass line. It doesn’t change keys, even though things around it do. The chorus has that, so maybe it’s not, but it sounds great. I studied classical music in college – it’s one of the two degrees that I got. I can draw on that stuff as much as anybody.
There is also a heavy [Led[ Zeppelin influence in the jam sections, like on “Freedom” and then also “Empty Sky.” There’s a definite idea of “just have fun, play, have fun.”
Right, because at the end of the day, it’s about the music and how it brings to people and shared the life of Jenny and yourself and Elton, as well. With that in mind, going into this with the weight of it being a tribute to your late sister, and having these songs be reimagined and hearing them come to life in a different sense, was there a different sort of pressure going into this than maybe something else you’ve worked on recently in your studio?
Sort of, but I would sort of sketch the songs out and set up a ProTools session and play kind of a rough rhythm guitar part, maybe a rough keyboard part, knowing what the melody was gonna be and kind of mapping out the sections of the song to just to get a vibe on it, get the singer to kind of get a vibe on it. Then I would start to go back and work on it from the bottom up – try to keep a bass part, then drums. There is a great drummer who works here and he was incredible. It was like three or four takes at most on any song once he got the vibe of it. Then it was, “Ok, I got it now,” and we’d get a great take. It’s about the feel, right? It’s not about it being perfect, because if you want perfect, you use drum machines and sequencers, you know? And that’s not satisfying. Things are so much easier now, though. The last project I did on my own was 30 something years ago with a good friend who does instrumental stuff. If you made a mistake in a part where otherwise it was fine, but it came in late on a note, you had to fix that. Here I could literally just go, “Ok, I got this,” because I anticipated the downbeat,” and “Let me just slide this a tiny bit and it’ll be fine.” You can do that now very easily. That’s part and parcel of modern production, but the bottom line is that everything was well played and pretty much what you hear is what happened on any given part.
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