Is Fireside Studio completely focused on country music, or is that a mistaken perception?

I’ve been trying to get away from the hype around Fireside as a country music studio. When I look back at the history surrounding this place – for example at the time when Merle Haggard was in here – it was more of a rock-n-roll type of feel than it was a country feel. It was a party going in there: They just cranked the speakers wide open and went for it.

Lately I think our business has been a bit too peaceful and I’m trying to get away from that by bringing in country music, rock music, and reggae music all at once. Right now I’m working on a Cajun artist, a rock band, some country acts, and even some calypso. You ought to hear my calypso-country records!

The atmosphere at Fireside is so cool that everybody just gets along. Everybody that plays country loves to play rock-n-roll – in fact, the guys that play country usually play rock-n-roll really well, because of their technical skills. Nashville has a way of really putting the clamp on session musicians, so they really have to concentrate quite a bit.

The session musician scene must be really competitive in Nashville.

It’s extremely competitive because it’s really hard to get into. If you look at any given group of producers and engineers, you find that they begin to really trust a group of maybe five to ten pickers, and they’ll use that group for a long time because they know what to expect from them. So the guys who are starting out need to find someone who feels like they can trust them. That’s kind of hard to do.

I’m a little different. I like to mix up new players with the older players. If I find a new session player that comes in and does a good job and really gets along with everybody, I’ll call them back to come in with the old-timers. Of course, when I say ‘Old-timer’, a lot of the people I’m referring to are only 25 years old. But I figure that’s the best way for the new players to get into it, and also the best way for me to find new session players. It’s just like how I got into engineering, just trying to jump into as many big sessions as I could and just go for it.

Could you run us through some of your history as an engineer?

I started off pretty early in music, playing guitar and joining bands when I was eight or nine years old. I learned about singing in church. Then I started getting into rock and roll bands when I was an early teenager. At the same time, I started to get interested in recording. There were always a few old analog machines lying around in garages and barns, back in North Carolina. You learned a lot just seeing other people working with them.

I came into Nashville mainly as a songwriter, with engineering just as a means to make some money. But then over the years, I devoted so much energy to engineering that it came to be my main interest.

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