15 Songs in 14 Days: Making “The Storm Is Passing Over” Sandy Benefit Album
KENSINGTON, BROOKLYN: The mantra of Brooklyn multimedia collective Mason Jar Music is “Preserving Analog Principles in a Digital Age”. But that applies to a lot more than just recording techniques.
100% of the proceeds of “The Storm is Passing Over’ benefits Occupy Sandy.
In keeping with that grounded philosophy, MJM has just released a heartfelt Hurricane Sandy benefit album called The Storm Is Passing Over, an all-star collection of indie-folk artists who recorded fifteen classic American storm songs. 100% of donations exchanged for the recordings — available now at thestormispassingover.com — will go directly to Occupy Sandy’s ongoing relief work in New York City and the tri-state area.
MJM had to draw deeply on their experience of pulling off complex projects — for the likes of Feist and Alicia Keys – to create The Storm. The album’s 15 tracks were recorded and mixed over just a two-week period in December, 2012, by a range of artists that included Roseanne Cash, Abigail Washburn and Bela Fleck, Town Hall, Tift Merritt, and many more.
While some of the musicians worked remotely from their homes and studios in Nashville, Portland, and Paris, most of them came to record at MJM’s facility in Kensington, Brooklyn. Collaborating with MJM co-founders Dan Knobler and Jon Seale, along with the collective’s highly dedicated staff, the group workshopped highly moving new interpretations of classic American songs. Next, the album was finalized in the suite of Arf! Mastering’s Alan Silverman.
Each track of The Storm is Passing Over centers around a real performance, recorded live, and the raw artistic passion is palpable. Knobler told SonicScoop how this essential project – equal parts marathon and sprint – came together so quickly.
Once MJM decided to do a benefit project for Sandy, how did you select the form it would take — indie folk artists re-imagining American storm songs?
Jon Seale, the other MJM co-founder, called me late one night and left a voicemail that essentially said, “I have a great idea, call me ASAP.”
The original idea was as simple as NYC artists doing public domain songs, but we quickly reached out to our friends at Dust-to-Digital about curating a list of old songs centered around themes of storms, floods, disasters and recoveries.
With such a short timeline for the project, we ended up culling the list ourselves – leaning towards a lot of old delta blues and bluegrass ballads. We sent out a list of two dozen or so songs, and made suggestions for certain artists, but generally let people pick songs that they gravitated to. We encouraged artists to suggest other songs, and a handful of artists came back with great ideas as well.
There was obviously a time-sensitive need to record the album as fast as possible. What are the logistics of tracking and mixing 14 different artists in just two weeks?
It was a crazy month! We sent out the tune list in late November, scheduled most of the sessions for mid-December, and mixed it in a series of marathon 9 am – 4 am days/nights.
For the main tracking days, we generally had two or three artists coming in each day. We had our house rhythm section (drummer Jason Burger and bassist Zack Rosen) try to keep their calendars as open as possible. Jon and I both play a variety of instruments as well, so there was a lot of passing instruments back and forth and last minute, i.e. “Hey, it’d be great to have perc on this, let’s call Jason” situations. In fact, Aoife O’Donovan did exactly that and called Punch Brothers banjo extraordinaire Noam Pikelny, who showed up 20 minutes later and cut a beautiful track together.
After a while, we stopped setting up the studio in advance, because artists would keep coming in and the song would go in a completely different direction than what we had expected.
The sessions would go something like this: artist comes in, hangs out for a bit and listens to some of the other tunes; they play down the tune solo; we talk about instrumentation and arrangement and how the track would fit into the rest of the record; assemble the musicians to play it down a few times; set up mics and start tracking.
We encouraged everyone to cut as much live as possible, doing vocals with the rhythm section on almost every track, using headphones only when we had to. Several tracks are entirely live and “Let The Mermaids Flirt With Me” (by The Relatives) is the first take.
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