I'm a big fan of the last two Bon Iver albums, 22, A Million and i,i, so when I was in Los Angeles recently and the opportunity came up for a last minute interview with co-producer and collaborator BJ Burton, I jumped at the chance. I was born in Raleigh. I had a studio in downtown Raleigh called Flying Tiger Sound.
It's not a studio anymore; it's shut down, but the room's still there. It's a cool-sounding room. That's where I met the Megafaun band, and a lot of the Merge Records people, around I started producing a lot, doing rap music, like Petey Pablo, to Merge Records' indie rock with guitar and drums. They b rought me to Wisconsin to make records, and I ended up going back and forth a lot, eventually moving to the Midwest.
I was there for seven years. Me and Justin actually lived together for a couple years when we made his album, 22, A Million. Me and him making fucked-up sounds together. There are two rooms; a Studio A, and then he built a Studio B, which is this state-of-the-art room. It has a giant window that looks over the woods.
Pretty amazing. It was a vet clinic, originally. And the live room was an indoor pool. The floor is built on a pool. It's covered up with gymnasium hardwood floors. It's a cool sound. It doesn't sound perfect, but I dig it. I use a lot of room mics to capture it and make it unique to its environment. After living at April Base, I eventually moved to Minneapolis. I ended up buying a recording studio in northeast Minneapolis and operating that the past year.
I'm renting it to some artists I work with now, to hunker down and write their albums there. Hopefully they'll take care of it. The last Bon Iver album, we mixed four of the songs in that studio two weeks before I moved to L. That's us [BJ and Justin], trying to find sounds that we've never heard before and putting them together. Songs would develop out of that. It's a backwards-ass way of writing music, but I still do it now. The first session we started for that album was on that tape machine.
