Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks: The Untold Story
In 1974, Bob Dylan was looking for renewal. His marriage to his wife, Sara, was headed for divorce. Over the previous few years, he’d left Columbia Records and the music he was making was indistinct a
Originally written and posted by Shrinky on Apr 16, 2011 here: http://shrinky.net/2011/music/bob-dylan/bob-dylans-blood-on-the-tracks-the-untold-story
Bob Dylan Books the Studio
In 1974, Bob Dylan was looking for renewal. His marriage to his wife, Sara, was headed for divorce. Over the previous few years, he’d left Columbia Records and the music he was making was indistinct and not well received.
That year I was working at A and R Recording Studios in New York City. Phil Ramone, the owner and “R” in A and R, was to eventually go on to become a legendary producer after working with Billy Joel on “The Stranger.” At that point, he was merely one of the world’s greatest recording engineers. I was his personal assistant engineer.
In September, Phil came to me with exciting news. Dylan was coming in to record his new album with us. The record marked Dylan’s return to Columbia. He would celebrate his renewal in other ways as well. We’d begin recording on September 16th, the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. The recording was to take place in the studio where he had recorded his first.
A and R’s studio A-1 was on the 7th floor of 799 7th Avenue on 52nd Street in New York City. It had once been Columbia’s studio, where Dylan had done his early work, but they had sold it to Ramone and company in 1968. This was Columbia’s earliest recording room, operational since the 1930’s. The walls rang with the echoes of sessions with artists from Sinatra to Streisand. Not least of the astounding hits recorded there was “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan’s signature.
A-1 was a beautiful room that enchanted everyone who sang or played in it. It was a good size, 90 feet long, 60 feet wide, with 30 foot ceilings. From the street, you could see this big box with a peaked copper roof (the copper was there to keep out stray electronic interference), stuck on top of the building.
The building has long been torn down, replaced with the Prudential Insurance office tower. So has gone my city of dreams from music to finance.
The rest of the building at that time was home to the Manhattan Community College. The hundreds of students who crammed the front elevators were oblivious to the shenanigans and stars that occupied the floor above.
If you were going up to the studio, in order to avoid the crowd at the front, you took a freight elevator with a side entrance on 52nd Street. It being the 70’s in New York, the entrance was anything but glamorous. Its fetid decay was immortalized on the cover of Billy Joel’s album, 52nd Street. It stank from the rancid oil of Child’s Coffee Shop on the corner.
The freight was hand operated. The Reverend Bob Blalock manned that elevator most days. Over the years, the reverend had transported the likes of Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, James Brown, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, and countless other superstars to the studio at the top. When he pulled the switch to raise me to the exalted land, I’d ask how he was doing. His job of elevator man had brought him to the deepest understanding of human existence, like the ferryman who carried souls across the river. His answer was always the same: “up and down brother, up and down.”
Soon he’d be bringing the incomparable Zimmerman up to the studio and I would be there to greet him.
It was a central part of our job to protect our star’s privacy. This is one reason I’ve waited to tell this story for almost 40 years. Discretion was inculcated into us. It wasn’t uncommon to light the sign outside the studio entrance that said, “Closed Session.”
Our job was to make the artist feel safe. Only then could they create freely. In order to make the great comfortable, we ourselves had to be cool in their presence. Blasé was the order of the day.
We were used to eccentric artists and indulged their every whim. But no one’s reputation for self-protection preceded them like Dylan’s. We were warned he was quite paranoid about exposure and we were to be hermetically sealed. We hoped that this isolation wouldn’t include us, but we were told to expect that he would arrive with a consort from the label to gate keep contact.
“Someone’s got it in for me
They’re planting stories in the press
Whoever it is I wish they’d cut it out
When they will, I can only guess . . .”- – - Idiot Wind
We were told to have the least amount of people in the control room as possible. That meant it would just be Ramone and me. This was all the information we had. We had no idea what he was going to do, so we had to be ready for anything.
Bob Dylan Kills the Studio Cats
Studio musicians started showing up for the gig. These were cats I knew. Eric Weissberg was the first to arrive. He was a lovely man, as most studio heavies were, and an amazing banjo player. He was bringing in what was called the Deliverance Band. These were the guys who created the soundtrack for that groundbreaking film. Eric’s banjo picking is an unforgettable and central part of the movie.
Once I saw who was coming in, I set up the microphones for the band: drums, bass, guitars, keyboard. I put Dylan’s mics in the middle of the room, surrounded by these players. Dylan skulked in with his protector, said hello to us, shaking hands, and then retreated to a corner, basically ignoring us.
John Hammond with Dylan
John Hammond arrived. Hammond, a visionary record-man who discovered and promoted artists from Billie Holiday to Bruce Springsteen, had signed Dylan to Columbia. He sat behind the producer’s desk, massive disks for blue eyes, a spike of salt and pepper hair, and the big smile of a true fan on his face. To any Dylan aficionado, this was a timeless moment. Dylan and Hammond in this studio together again for Dylan’s comeback to Columbia.
Feeling out the vibe for the right moment, I led Dylan out to the studio and placed him in front of the mics. We used old Neumann microphones, the kind he would’ve used in the early 60’s. I stood inches from him.
Dylan had his acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder and he wore his signature harmonica holder around his neck. It hit me: I’m standing next to Dylan; the little wiry body, the hipster-rabbi black vest and white shirt, the tangled up jew-fro. He was 33-years-old. He looked past me, to some place in another dimension, as I carefully positioned the mics for the best sound. Maybe he mumbled thanks.
As I ran around the studio tweaking mic positions, he called off a tune.
“Let’s do Tangled up in Blue, in G.”
He hit his guitar, but instead of a G chord, it was an A. He was playing in a different key from the one he had called off. And the lyrics were, “If you see her, say hello,” another song. If any of the musicians, trying to keep up with the unexpected switch, missed a chord, he’d wave his hand, signaling them to drop out.
The feeling in the studio was tense. This was Dylan. No one would tell him he couldn’t do this, but this was wrong. You are at least supposed to tell the musicians the key and the song.
Everyone there had been incredibly excited to be playing with the guy, making a record with him. You could tell that even these jaded studio cats were jazzed. It was all anticipation to that point, but it was becoming apparent to each musician, as they were summarily dismissed, that this was not likely to happen.
The feeling just got worse. We all stole looks at each other, not understanding what was going on, not knowing what to do, hardly believing it. He did this again, and again, calling off one song and starting another, oblivious.
Musicians dropped liked swatted bugs, writhing on the ground, waiting to die. Studio musicians are tough; they’re hired to do whatever it takes. When we would record with guys like Steely Dan, you might work on a basic track for 12 hours, searching for an impossible perfection, and you’d never say no, or show the slightest bit of attitude.
But that was the game. This hurt. You could see it in the musician’s eyes, as they sat silently behind their instruments, forced not to play by the mercurial whim of the guy painting his masterpiece with finger-paints.
After a few disastrous takes, it ended up just Dylan and the bass player, Tony Brown. Tony sat inches from Dylan, watching his hands, trying to follow the chord changes as Bob made them, never knowing what chord or song was to come in the next moment. Dylan was on his own wavelength, and you either were on it or you didn’t exist.
We cut the entire album in one day like that. Now that blew my mind. I was 19-years-old and trying to learn how to make art. The style of the time was set by guys I was working with like Paul Simon, who would take weeks recording a guitar part only to throw it away. I thought that was the way one was supposed to do it: one note at a time and a year to make an album. Dylan cut the whole thing in six hours on a Monday night. I was confused. It was like the floor, barely built under my young soul, was being ripped apart, board by board.
Then Dylan came back in on Tuesday, and recorded most of the album again. This time he had Paul Griffin, the keyboard player, try it out. That seemed to work but it turned out not. Wednesday we did some overdubs. On Thursday we recorded the album for a third time, this time, just with the bass.
My job was to get the thing down on tape. The goal of the recording engineer, as Ramone taught me, was to be invisible. If I did it right, the artist wouldn’t notice this cumbersome process of microphones, headphones, cables, tape machines, consoles, and all the rest of the technology required to turn someone’s brain bubble into an eternal universal truth you could stick in your ear and listen to.
I was prepared. When Dylan walked into the studio the gear hummed. Everything was checked twice. We were ready to go. The instant he moved in front of the mic I was back in the control room manning the multi-track tape machine. My job was humble. I sat on a stool with a tape box and a take sheet on my lap.
Ramone was at the flying V. That’s what we called the custom made recording console in A-1. In the 21st century, all consoles are manufactured by a handful of companies. Then, in the ancient 20th, everything was being invented. New techniques and methods came out daily, and we were always adapting: 8-track, 16, 24. The consoles were made by individuals, by hand. Ramone had a crazy concept for this one. There were knobs in multi-colors in the shape of hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades.
This ship was like Han Solo’s in Star Wars; it was the era. The 1970’s. It wasn’t the antiseptic space ship of 2001. It was dirty and falling apart. It was all tubes, no transistors. The board would get hot.
You never knew when it would start to sputter and sparks would fly from the patch bay. Maintenance! The whole thing would stop working, and we might lose the moment of inspiration. The technical guys would fly in. We’d see their perplexed look. Ramone would bellow, they’d kick the thing in the right place, it would shudder, the lights would come back on, and we’d be traveling through hyper-space again. It was tenterhooks, always waiting for it to fail.
Meanwhile we’d feel the burn of creation from the other side of the glass. Dylan. Songs bursting out of him like a volcano spewing lava. I worked with a lot of brilliant artists but none like him. He was mainlined to the source. What they call genius. I saw him write a song’s lyrics on a yellow legal pad like he was taking dictation, he couldn’t write fast enough. And the songs would rewrite themselves as he sang them. Take 1 would have a verse that sounded so good you could scream with surprise, and then he’d do Take 2 and it would be gone, another verse flying out of his mouth.
“And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burning coal
Pouring off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
Tangled up in blue”
We could feel it coming fast and when that happened the pressure was on to capture it. Ramone’s foot would start tapping, his hands on the big round black knobs, controlling the levels, making sure that what went down on tape was optimal. One chance, no going back. He’d whip around to me,
“Roll tape, roll tape!”
The red lights were already lit; I had achieved the sweet spot, I knew what Ramone wanted before he did, I was Ramone, we were one. We locked eyes, no time for appreciation, was it going down on tape? I checked the lights, all tracks in record, I checked the meters, console, tape machine, the same. What was coming out of Dylan’s mouth and guitar was going to the console, coming out of the Altec 604 speakers as big as tanks and as heavy, loud to the verge of human tolerance, 101 decibels, going to the tape machine, to be captured, forever. Or if I screwed up, never. Can’t screw up, not now, not with Dylan. Meters moving in rhythm to the song. And Dylan, just a few feet away, behind the glass, throat tight, Tony Brown watching his fingers blast against the fret board, also trying to ride the stallion, Dylan, sweating, feeling it, deep, the way he’d twist his vowels,
“EEEEEEE—iiiiiiiihhhhhhhdeeeeeeeeeeeuht wind
Blowing through the buttons of your coat
Blowing through the letters that we wrote
You’re an eeeeeeeee-iihhhdiot, babe,
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe!”
Dylan! Holy shit! Me, 19-years-old watching rock-and-roll history being made right before my ears, spit flying out of his mouth against the U-47 microphone that I placed there.
My mind flashed back to four years earlier. I was in my room at home sitting shivah for my dead father who’d told me, sitting in a wheel chair, dying of bone cancer, that he accomplished nothing in his life. I listened to Elton John on the radio. Little did I know that the sound coming out of the little speaker was being broadcast from A and R’s studio A-1. Elton’s radio broadcast was to become the live album 11-17-70. And now here I was, with Dylan.
Dylan. The whole studio throbbed, the big box with the copper roof about to blow off, the pain, the anger, the truth. The tape machine flew in circles, the tape whirred, it seemed faster and faster than the 30 inches per second that I knew the tape travelled, the red lights seemed to brighten, the needles pushed into the red zone, Ramone’s shoulders tensed, his total focus on what was in his hands, temperature rising I started to hallucinate, the red lights turned to blood, the blood ran on to the tape machine, blood on the tracks . . .
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves!
And then silence. The song over. No one speaks when a take is done. You need to leave seconds of silence at the end for fade outs. We sat and waited. Just the sound of the tape machine still whirring: flap, flap, flap. Now the needles still. The blood back to lights glowing, telling us it was all down on tape. We waited. Dylan turned to the control room, and said,
“Was that sincere enough?”
Bob Dylan and Phil Ramone Mess With My Head
Crash. Boom. Crash.
The floor was gone. I fell. A lifetime of ideals destroyed in one sentence. I didn’t know what a trickster Dylan was, nor was I old enough to understand what that was even if I did. 19 is the peak of black and white purity and idealism. It is when you are ripe for Ayn Rand. The noble artist against the world. We held the future, we knew what was right and good and true.
I’d dealt with a number of egotistical pricks in the year I’d worked in the studio, but that was all good fun compared to this. The icon of an age, the guy who punctured all pretense, who brought down the whole hypocritical building, the guy who sneered at sanctimony — totally full of shit?
Vertigo. I was spinning like the fat tape on the machine. Ramone gave me the signal and I hit the stop button. Rewind. Playback.
What could this possibly mean? I had taken the oath, that’s what you did when you apprenticed to the master in the house of recorded art, you’d go to any length for the sake of rock and roll music, the highest state of reality yet created by human design. And now the king, the god of it all was just a guy behind a curtain yanking the world’s chain? He’s bloodied his musicians acting like a jerk; he recorded his album sloppily in a day and then did it again three times more, and now this? Was it fucking sincere enough? I was ready to puke.
I was lost. And I was to stay lost on a dark journey that was to last 20 years. Disillusion can really mess with your head.
“And when finally the bottom fell out
I became withdrawn
The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keeping on like a bird that flew
Tangled up in blue.”
Dylan didn’t show up for the mix. While most artists were using the studio like an instrument, Dylan didn’t care about the recording thing. He left it in Ramone’s hands. At that time we were working 20 hour days. I hadn’t slept more than 3 or 4 hours a night in a year. That week we were working with Mick Jagger during the day, mixing live tapes from the Stones’ ‘74 European tour for a King Biscuit Flower Hour radio broadcast. But that’s another story. We had to cram in the Dylan mixes after we were done with the rest.
It was late at night, just Ramone and me left in the studio, all but the skeleton crew gone home.
Lighting was a big deal in the rooms. It was all about setting the mood for creativity. I turned most of the lights off. All was black except a glow over the flying-V mixing console. Once you blocked out all external stimuli and you were listening for endless hours, the space between the beats got bigger and bigger. You could hear inside the sounds all the way to their core.
Ramone spent a long time messing with the reverb. This was the signature Phil Ramone sound. He had these big boxes, called EMT’s, in the basement that, when tweaked just right made this beautiful echo, rich and evocative of something you couldn’t quite name. The mixes were just Dylan and the bass, mostly, so the sound of the voice and the guitar was the whole thing. The reverb would create the sense of dimension and the feeling of the tragic shortness of life, or duende, around him. Ramone got it right, as he always did, and we were ripping through the mixes.
I wanted to know all the secrets. I was trying to grasp onto to any shred of sense, any rule, that would give me something to hold onto when the bottom had fallen out. How did you make great art? Paul Simon, one brilliant guy, did it one way. Dylan, another master, couldn’t have been more different. Simon was Napoleonic (another story), Dylan a man in disguise. What was I to believe anymore? I still wanted to know.
I sat behind Ramone watching, listening. Exhausted from lack of sleep and too many drugs, I struggled to focus. I noticed that the meters looked strange. Usually they all lined up, bouncing up and down in parallel, but this time they were lopsided. What was Ramone up to? What was he doing to get his incredible sound? He would sit down at the console and just touch the faders, the knobs that controlled the volumes of the various instruments, and it would sound like magic. I’d sit down behind the board, and change nothing but just touch the console and it would all sound like crap. How could I get the magic?
Between takes, I said, “Phil, can I ask you a question? I notice the meters are uneven. What are you hearing? Why are you doing that?”
I was just trying to learn. I assumed he had a good reason for everything he did. He didn’t answer for a few minutes.
Now Ramone could be a scary guy. We were all terrified of him. The studio was a rough scene. Very masculine and 70’s New York. That was before we got the whole service mentality. You’d go in the Carnegie Deli for a corned beef sandwich and the waiters would yell at you. You paid extra for the abuse. That was the New York charm of the time. It was part of the training as an engineer to get thrown through the air, yelled at, insulted. If you learned how to take it, you could become a major cat. Ramone must’ve thought I was busting him for a mistake. That wasn’t my intention at all, but clearly I stepped in it. He turned around, and laced into me.
“Who the fuck do you think you are asking the great Ramone a question? You are just a little piece of worthless shit. You don’t question what I do! I do everything I do because I am the great Ramone! You will never be one percent of what I am! You think you’re going to be a recording engineer? You don’t have ears. You’ll never make it! You should just be content to sit behind me and wipe my ass! You don’t question, you just obey!”
I tried to protest, to tell him, I meant no harm, I just wanted to learn . . . but every word just incensed him further, there was no arguing, his voice got louder and louder, the screams more insensible, the insults more cutting,
“You’re nothing! To you I am a god! You’re the lowest piece of shit in the presence of a god!” You will never be anything!”
“But, Phil, but Phil . . .”
Finally, the hours, the brutalization, Idiot Wind, the lack of sleep, 19-years-old, “was it sinceeeeeeeeere enough . . .” my dead father, the cocaine, the crash, it all came down. I hit the stop button on the tape machine. I thought I saw blood on my fingers, I couldn’t hold it any more. I started to cry. I walked out of the control room and down the silent hallway to the bathroom. Under the glaring fluorescent lights, 2 A.M., I sat on the pot and blubbered.
“I was burned out from exhaustion buried in the hail
Poisoned in the bushes and blown out on the trail
Hunted like a crocodile ravaged in the corn” – Shelter from the Storm
Despite my utter worthlessness, I knew that Ramone needed me to get through the mix. The folks at Columbia were expecting it the next day. I had taken the oath. I knew I had to pull it together and do my job. I staggered back into the control room and silently took my seat next to the tape machine, box and take sheet in my hand, behind him, ready to keep my mouth shut for the next century and just do my job, or at least till this mix was over. I saw little scraps of paper with a mangled scrawl written, “Ramone is God.”
“Life is sad
Life is a bust
All ya can do is do what you must
You do what you must do and ya do it well
I’ll do it for you honey baby
Can’t you tell” —Buckets of Rain
Ramone had popped a tranq and was mellowing into a good mood.
“Glenn, we’re going to get out of this place. We’re going to build a studio together, you and me; it’ll be the most amazing place where everything will always work. Who do you want to record? Stevie Wonder? We’ll get Stevie in and you’ll be his personal engineer.”
Phil wanted to do that with me? Really? Ok, Phil, I’ll go all night, I’ll take any abuse . . . I was back in all the way. We would make amazing records together.
“All I can tell you is, it’s all showbiz . . .” – John Lennon
We finished the record that night. I stayed up till the bagels arrived, sequencing the thing, splicing together the master mixes with a razor blade and tape into the final order of songs. Watch out for the blade, especially late at night. You never knew when it could be a finger instead of the tape.
Dylan Panics
The record was to be released after the first of the year, 1975.
Phil and I started on our next amazing project, Judy Collins. The consummate and dearly departed Arif Mardin was to produce. In case you don’t know, Arif’s last hit was a little number from a woman named Norah Jones. Judy’s hit “Send in the Clowns,” came out of those sessions.
We’d be in the control room recording, and the phone would ring. This must have been an important call to interrupt Phil during a session. I’d hear Phil say, “Bob, it’s amazing. Really, probably your best album ever. Don’t worry. It’s great.” Phil and I would look at each other and shake our heads in disbelief. Dylan, insecure? What next? This went on, week after week, increasing in intensity as we approached the New Year deadline.
The studio life was hard, but I thought it would all be worth it. 1975 looked like it would be a great year. At the peak was to be the release of the Dylan album. With this run, what would be next?
When we returned from the holiday, Phil sat down with me, pale and dispirited. Bob had panicked. He was visiting his family in Bemidji, Minnesota, and over the Christmas break decided to re-record the album. Minneapolis was in its pre-Prince days; a recording nowhere- land. The only studio and musicians available were from Sound 80, the local jingle studio, where they recorded commercials for Mom’s Biscuits and the local Oldsmobile dealership.
It was my job to cut out the tracks we worked on, and splice in the new ones recorded there. I listened to the new recordings as I did so. Dink, doink, dink doink, bum, bum, bum, “We’re Idiots babe, it’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves . . .” This searing, wrenching, burning, bloody song turned into a happy little jingle! WHAT?
I cut into the tape like an old drunk western surgeon with a rusty knife. I cut out pink vibrating living breathing body parts and left them bleeding on the floor. It wasn’t my job to choose, it was my job to plunge in the blade and kill the baby that I helped deliver.
Bob Teaches Me the Truth
The album came out a few weeks later and went on to become a number one record, and has been heralded as one of the great records of all time, Dylan’s best next to his Blonde on Blonde. So what do I know. What do I know about anything, really? Have I really learned the lessons of those days? I learned what a trickster is – a mythical archetype – the shape shifter. Bob Dylan as Bugs Bunny. Hey, what’s up doc? Always popping up a hole you don’t expect, outwitting us slow-witted mortals. He’s meant to confuse, to upend the money-changers in the temple. The artist is not supposed to be nice. He’s on a mission from beyond. He goes down, deeper into himself than any of us dare, goes through hell on the journey, steals the sacred fire, and brings it up to share with the rest of us. Who are we to judge the way he behaves when he does that much for us?
“People tell me it’s a sin
To know and feel too much within” – - – Simple Twist of Fate
And Phil. He’s left a legacy that will endure for generations. His job was to break me down so he could put me back together as a man. I carry his vision and standard with me in my fingers right to this moment as I write this. “That sucks, Berger, do it again,” I hear him say. I’m fighting with Phil to this day, father and son, locked in the eternal struggle for domination of the universe. The old man still wins every time, damn him. They taught me: Ramone, Dylan, and the rest of the pantheon I had the blessing to encounter in my long and good career in the biz, but I don’t know how well. I’ve certainly been a major asshole in my day, but never made anything immortal like these guys.
When the album came out, I quickly flipped it to the back. That’s where the unsung heroes of recording look first. We take it all for the glory, but we also like the credit. I looked at every word of the smallest type, but was to find myself suffering the final indignity. No credit. My name nowhere on the cover.
Dylan’s Last Trick
Decades passed before I was to recover from all this. Now, in my fifties, me in my trickster uniform of middle-aged shrink, to look at me no one would know I’d ever been there. Recently, at one of my kid’s birthday parties, I ran into another dad, a major record exec, the only place I’m likely to meet them now. I told him I’d been in the biz, and he asked if I worked with anyone big. I said my usual sentence; I worked on the album WFUV named the greatest album of all time, “Blood on the Tracks,” by Bob Dylan. He was impressed.
When I was driving home, thinking about it, I imagined him googling the credits, and, not finding my name, thinking I was full of shit. There was no way I could prove it. I knew my name was on those take sheets, the place where I wrote down the names of the songs, and the take numbers, as one of two people who saw Blood being made. In the corner of that sheet’s notations of the sessions’ events, there would be a slot that said “Engineer: Phil/Glenn.” I knew the internet had everything and there were some major Dylan freaks out there. Maybe there was proof. Maybe I needed to prove it to myself. I googled “take sheets for Blood on the Tracks.” Amazingly, a guy named Michael Krogsgaard had found these pieces of paper, and posted what they said on the web. Under our sessions, it says, Engineer: Phil & Lenn. Ah well. Destiny. The final joke.
“I bargained for salvation and they gave me a lethal dose
I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn” — Shelter from the Storm
Blood on the tracks. It is painful to be an artist. That’s why so many of them break. Dylan poured his guts into these songs, and that’s why they will long endure. He was plugged in in a way that I can only sweetly envy. I can see the brilliance, I can almost taste it, but it eludes my grasp like an egg shell in the bowl. I stood so close to it that it burned, but it was always on the outside of me. It’s Dylan’s blood that are on those tracks, and that’s what makes them great. But no one will ever know that along with his blood, is a little bit of mine.
Stunning piece of writing!
I really don’t know where to start with this stunning piece. I’m going to need to read it repeatedly for incredibly obvious reasons when -- if -- you read the post below. I recently listened to Shelter from the Storm easily fifty times to hear ANYTHING new after years of listening to it. I discovered a lot, some I could capture in a simple list, much of it too subtle to put in words. Your window into the recording of the album is a delight and a sort of proof of what I heard.
I would love to hear your thoughts on what I noticed.
“Buried in the Mix: Shelter from the Storm”
https://www.adamnathan.com/p/buried-in-the-mix-shelter-from-the