E, WALLY GAGEL & JIM LANG (EELS): Recording Daisies Of The Galaxy

After poor sales of an album that dealt with death, Mr E and his Eels returned with a beautiful‑sounding, poignant, and often funny record about life, recorded mainly in the basement of E's house. Matt Bell talks to E and his collaborators about how the album was made.

Progress isn't always a force for good, but when it comes to music technology, it's usually a pretty positive influence. As many of the articles in this magazine point out, it's possible to make recordings at home whose quality far surpasses that of commercial releases of a few years ago. And the rise of (relatively) affordable computer‑based digital audio recording workstations has now thrown the door open to everyone from medieval music ensembles to two‑step tabla players. Even musicians fortunate enough to have landed recording deals, who have the pick of studios in which to make their albums, now often choose to install suitable equipment at home instead, and do the show right there.

Mark Oliver Everett, better known as E, lead singer and composer with the successful American outfit Eels, is one such recent convert to the joys of release‑quality home recording. Although steeped in the honourable tradition of the bedroom‑bound Portastudio musician since his teens, E had never taken the plunge and made any full recordings at home for release on albums before early last year. But with the aid of a few friends, some rather battered instruments, and a shiny new Mac‑based Digidesign Pro Tools system, E managed to put together most of Eels' latest album, the stunning Daisies Of The Galaxy, in his own deeply ordinary basement.

That's Progress

Talking to SOS while on a whistle‑stop live tour of the UK, E sees rich irony in the fact that although Daisies Of The Galaxy is Eels' most "organic‑sounding" album yet, it is the first to be recorded on a computer. But this is only the latest novelty in the story of a band who have come further in just three albums than many do in their entire career.

E first attempted to make it big as a solo artist in the early '90s, and released two albums on Polydor before being dropped unceremoniously mid‑decade. When Eels emerged in late 1995 as a three‑piece featuring E's old touring drummer Jonathan 'Butch' Norton and a bassist, Tommy Walters, it seemed at first that E had forsaken the solo spotlight for the confines of a group. But following the success of the introspective, Brit‑winning debut album Beautiful Freak and hit singles such as 'Novocaine For The Soul' and the Gladys Knight‑sampling 'Susan's House', the 'Eels as band' pretence wore off. Tommy Walters left and Eels became a vehicle for E's creative vision alone.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, 1998's follow‑up, Electro‑Shock Blues, was even more inwardly focussed than the debut; it dealt frankly and unflinchingly with the death of E's father, the mental illness and subsequent suicide of his sister, and the terminal illness of his mother.

With inspiration like that, it would have been easy for E to create an utterly unlistenable Nine Inch Nails‑style stew of self‑pity and terrible music, but surprisingly, the album is actually a life‑affirming and ultimately positive effort, which features some truly beautiful songs and fascinating production ideas. The public at large, however, stayed away, perhaps put off by the superficially challenging subject matter and song titles like 'Cancer For The Cure', 'My Descent Into Madness' and 'Going To Your Funeral', which certainly did the record no favours in the sales department.

Having done his best to put the awful events of the past few years behind him, E returned earlier this year with Daisies Of The Galaxy, a record no less poignant in many parts than Electro‑Shock Blues, but this time including also a palpable sense of humour amongst its assertions of joie‑de‑vivre and on‑the‑nail observations. A further progression in Eels' music is also immediately evident from the moment a brass section strikes up at the beginning of the first track. On Beautiful Freak, Eels made music as a three‑piece group, supplemented by E's then‑new‑found fascination with the creative possibilities of sampling. On Electro‑Shock Blues, the group was gone, and sampling and loops were to the fore, leavened with a smattering of session guitarists, violinists, woodwind and brass. On Daisies Of The Galaxy, the sample‑driven approach is still in evidence — three tracks, 'The Sound Of Fear', recent single 'Flyswatter' and the UK Top 10 hit 'Mr E's Beautiful Blues' are as infectiously loop‑driven as anything Beck ever wrote — but elsewhere a 24‑piece orchestra weaves its magic, and lilting piano, beautifully recorded acoustic guitars, and the aforementioned brass section add fresh colours to Eels' tonal palette. That's some basement Mr E's been working in.

Local Heroes

The Pro Tools interfaces and hardware samplers in the racks at Knobworld, used by Jim Lang to mock up the string and brass arrangements for Daisies Of The Galaxy.

The homegrown approach to recording Daisies Of The Galaxy came about thanks to Eels' A&R man at their record label Dreamworks (and sometime Eels producer) Michael Simpson. Simpson, best known as half of legendary US production duo The Dust Brothers, was unavailable to help E produce the new album himself due to prior work commitments, so he recommended a trusted engineer acquaintance, Wally Gagel. Although Wally had worked with E before, he had recently moved to the LA suburb of Silverlake, right next to the district of Echo Park where E lives, along with various friends and collaborators.

The first task, in early 1999, was to equip E's basement with some recording gear suitable for the production of the album. Although there were already two Alesis ADATs and a rackmount Mackie 1604 mixer there, Wally had a clear preference from the moment he became involved: "I have Digidesign's Pro Tools at my place, and it made sense for E to have a setup that I was familiar with, so that we could get as much done as possible. So the first thing we did was set E up with Pro Tools." Far from maintaining a Luddite attitude, E quickly embraced the new technology. "I think he thought 'Hey, I can do it all at home and control it all...' "

E began work in January 1999 by amassing song and lyric ideas in his basement. Even before the installation of the Pro Tools system, E had run a basic project studio containing various cheap synth modules, Genelec 1030 and Yamaha NS10 monitors, an Akai S2000 sampler, a battered Slingerland drum kit, a Fender Twin amp, and various guitars, including a small‑bodied acoustic, the trademark sound of which ended up all over the finished album. There were also several vintage keyboards, including a Hammond B3, a Wurlitzer electric piano, and an original Mellotron fitted with Chamberlin tapes rather than Mellotron ones. The only gear of real note was the main vocal mic, a Neumann U47, and the outboard — two Empirical Labs Distressors, a Manley Tube compressor and two Neve 1073 mic preamps. It was with this gear that most of the album tracks were written (and later recorded), but fittingly for an project that was being recorded in a totally new way for the group, E also changed his songwriting methods. "If I felt like writing a guitar song, I'd force myself to go over to a different instrument, like the auto‑harp, or the Hammond B3, so I'd get something fresh. Or I'd try a lot of weird samples together on the keyboard or sounds on the Mellotron, which you would normally never think of trying to write a song with — like the choir samples, bells and distorted organs in 'Flyswatter' and 'The Sound Of Fear'."

Going A Bomb

Wally Gagel at his home studio with his personal Pro Tools rig.

With a few song ideas tentatively sketched out, Wally and E booked two days at Burbank studio The Bomb Factory to get some group‑played backing tracks recorded. Grant Lee Phillips (of Grant Lee Buffalo fame) therefore stood in on bass, while Butch took his usual position behind the drums. The sessions proceeded efficiently, and several backing tracks were recorded, of which five — 'Jeannie's Diary', 'Packing Blankets', 'A Daisy Through Concrete' and parts of what became 'Grace Kelly Blues' and 'Flyswatter' — would make it to the finished album. The recordings were made almost totally live to 2‑inch 24‑track analogue tape, as Wally Gagel explains. "These are musicians that can all nail a take. If we needed to do something to a recording, we usually addressed it at the time of the recording. We tried to keep the Bomb Factory sessions as traditional as possible, and then all we really needed to do in E's basement was dump the recordings into the computer."

The Sound Of... Distorting Mackies

Jim Lang by his MOTU Digital Performer/Pro Tools system, with the scores for one of the album's more haunting tracks, 'Selective Memory'.

Returning to E's basement, Wally converted the Bomb Factory recordings into 16‑bit Pro Tools files ("I just didn't feel it was worth going to 24‑bit, and it saved space"), and the duo began work in earnest, helped occasionally by Butch on the Slingerland kit. Wally: "The 'drum room' was just a tiny little blanketed area, but it worked out. You just needed one or two mics to get that cool little open sound.

"Once we'd done those basic tracks in the studio, we got into a daily routine. E put a list of unfinished song ideas on the wall, and we began to work through them. He always had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do.

"I did a fair amount of the cutting and pasting for arrangement with E as we were working, and we mixed as we went. I didn't use that many effects, but those I did use were all inside Pro Tools — the TC Works' Megaverb and Digidesign's D‑Verb."

Wally attempted to keep the signal path into E's single Digidesign 888 interface as short as possible. "I'm a fan of that 'less‑is‑more' approach. The Neumann U47 and the two Neve 1073 mic pres were the basis for 90 percent of what we recorded, although I also had him go get an old Beyer M160 ribbon mic, which I'm a real big fan of using on guitar or even piano. I often just went right into the 888 on XLR from the Neves. We did use a little compression sometimes — usually from the Distressors, but sometimes from the Manley — to avoid a digital overload going into the 888, but if I could get away with not using one, I would.

"I used the Mackie 1604 for monitoring and submixing keyboards before digitising them, and I ran some turntables into it as well, which E used on 'Estate Sale'. We created a lot of gritty textures by putting things through the Mackie, cranking the mid EQ up and overloading the channels. Usually Mackies sound too clean for that kind of thing, but if you work with 'em a bit you can get a nice result.

"We also got some great distorted sounds by running an organ through a Tech 21 guitar amp simulator, a Sansamp, with a little drive. I'm a big fan of Sansamp on just about everything but guitars, actually! I do occasionally use it for guitars, too — it makes a really nasty, gnarly sound which can fit well on top of other stuff. You have to really work with it to get a good guitar sound out of it, though.

"The Sansamp made the organ really gnarly and dirty, and very percussive. You can hear little stabs of distorted organ in some of the breaks in 'Flyswatter', and also in 'The Sound Of Fear'."

Bells & Distortion Pedals

'The Sound Of Fear' was a half‑finished idea that E had begun recording with programmer Mickey Petrelia, consisting of a '60s drum loop and a cartoon‑like xylophone sample (heard in the third verse of the finished song).

E: "The drum loop is the one rhythm loop on the whole record, I think. To me it sounds like the drums and bass were recorded together in 1962. But the bass is new — I played that myself."

Unfortunately, Mickey P was engrossed in recording Beck's Midnite Vultures album by early 1999 and was unable to help E finish the track. Wally put the unfinished recording (which was on one of E's old ADAT tapes) into Pro Tools, managed to get some of Mickey's original sound files from him, and together E and Wally finished the song off, adding bell samples and distorted organ and electric piano.

The naggingly infectious 'Flyswatter' was also realised in a distorted, ferociously compressed production, spattered with tinkling bells, sharp shards of crunchy Clavinet and eerie Mellotron female choir voices, which E calls 'the ladies'. The bell figure which starts the song dated back to the sessions at The Bomb Factory.

Wally: "I know E had something in his head when we were at The Bomb Factory — the main bell riff, I think. He certainly had enough of the idea that he got Butch to drum at the eventual tempo of the song, and also trying to describe the feel of it to him."

E: "I think I got on a piano and played Butch the figure. We recorded him playing the beat to a click."

Wally: "I was saying, 'Try a straight beat', 'OK, now make it a little skippy', 'Right, introduce the floor tom', 'Try a little ride cymbal' and so on. If you listen to the song, all those parts ended up in there! I put the drums into Pro Tools, chopped 'em up, compressed the shit out of them, and built a drum track from that. E also punched in a few drum fills in the basement later — he was a drummer himself originally — and now it all sounds like it was done at the same time. We used the Waves L1 Limiter plug‑in on the drums, and a lot of EQ, so that it was squashed, but with some definition. I set up very heavy compression with a really fast attack and release, and then slowly laid off the attack until the kick was just coming in, so that the rhythm still had that crunch."

Wally and E also experimented heavily with the song structure of 'Flyswatter' in Pro Tools. E: "A lot of the stuff that's in there is not where it was when it was recorded. We shifted a lot of it around later." Wally: "That's the great thing about Pro Tools — we couldn't have done any of that with tape."

E claims that the track contains a good mix of the spontaneous and the carefully planned. This can be heard in the percussion, some of which Wally programmed with great care: "I added some backwards rhythm sounds which you can hear most clearly at the end of the track. They were part of a loop I was trying to put together for the song which didn't work out, so I turned them backwards and put them in that way!"

However, some of the percussive effects ended up in the track completely by accident. E: "We also got some nice percussion going through the vocal mic by accident. In one of the breaks, you can hear this pitter‑patter of percussion on the mic track. We hadn't wanted that to come through there, but we liked it when it did, so we left it in."

The track also features a curious break where everything slows down rapidly as though a finger has stopped the record turning — and then the song bursts into life again. E achieved this by bending down all the notes on his Mellotron with a whammy pedal. "I got lucky the way it turned out. There's a lot of different Mellotron tracks on there, and on all of them I just bent the part down at the right time while I was playing. It was a bit random, but it worked. The hard thing was getting the timing right on the computer..."

Wally agrees: "Slowing down all the sampled rhythm stuff was a bitch. There is a plug‑in which allows you to treat audio like it's on a record deck, and slow it down or scratch it — but I didn't have that, so I had to do half a measure of time‑stretched audio, then half a measure of slightly more time‑stretched audio, and so on, for each part. It doesn't sound too much like a record or tape slowing down, but I still quite like it, because it sounds like something even stranger!"

Summing up the track, E says: "I love glockenspiel. I love bells. And I like the juxtaposition of, say, bells and Clavinet through a distortion box. That track was, I think, the most fun to record."

Strings Attached

As more songs were recorded, E realised that more than with any of his previous material, some of his new songs would lend themselves well to decent string arrangements — none more so than two slow, beautiful piano numbers, 'Selective Memory' and the elegaic 'It's A Motherfucker'. Despite the gloomy title, this is one of the most beautiful songs on the finished Daisies, featuring, like 'Selective Memory' a delightfully restrained, tasteful string arrangement complimenting E's soft vocal and simple piano chords. Recording the piano, an ancient upright once owned by Neil Young and used on the early '70s album After The Goldrush, proved murderously hard on both E and Wally's patience, as the thing creaked at the slightest provocation (E: "I was smashing my fists on it in frustration"). With the gain up high on the Neve 1073s to capture E's pianissimo playing, it was impossible to use any takes marred by the physical sound of the piano, but even after noise‑free takes were finally in the can, the job of finding an arranger for the strings had to begin.

Fortunately, Jim Lang, a local arranger E used on Electro‑Shock Blues, was free and willing to help, placing his Knobworld studio at E's disposal. Jim is a music‑for‑picture veteran with particular experience in scoring for children's cartoons and animation, but E felt he was just what he was looking for. "No‑one uses Jim for what I use him for. They might start to, though, if word gets around. A guy who does the music for kids' TV shows is a smart choice. People like him have to work so fast on cartoons, they can do anything you can dream up, and real quick."

E took finished stereo mixes of the songs requiring arrangements to Knobworld on DAT, and discussed his ideas for the songs with Jim before leaving him to get on. Jim takes up the story: "E had a pretty good idea of which songs he wanted strings on and which he wanted brass on. We also talked about styles. He's a big Randy Newman fan, as am I, so we used him as a reference point. Randy is the perfect example of somebody who writes like that; his harmony is always very clear and his voicings are just beautiful. He also doesn't make the players play outside the range of the instrument unless there's a musical reason for doing so."

Jim loaded the backing tracks into his preferred sequencer of choice, MOTU's Digital Performer running under Pro Tools. Then, using sampled MIDI instruments, he began to build up the arrangements. "The quality of the MIDI orchestral pieces you can produce is really determined by the amount of RAM you can bring to bear, because the orchestra has so many more voices than there are samples; you're always striving to add another trombone articulation or whatever. I now have four Emu E4s and a Roland S760 that carry most of my orchestral instruments and percussion. On the Eels stuff, we used those, although I don't think the S760 was full. It was pretty straightforward string writing with a couple of solo voices. The only part that was at all tricky was going through and making myself a click track, so that I was writing to bar numbers that would make sense for the players.

"I used a very basic slow, melodic string sound to write the parts. On some projects, if you know you're not going to have real people play an arrangement, you can write as many voices as you like and be very free, but on this I knew real players were involved, so I kept track of the voices.

"I was glad I was working to fully complete backing tracks. Hearing as many parts as possible is important, because when you're adding strings and horns, it's a pretty big sound, and you want to be sure that you're orchestrating in a way that is sympathetic to the track. Also, this way, I knew that the string phrasing would fit with the way the vocals were sung."

Having completed a first attempt at the arrangements, Jim invited E back to Knobworld for his comments on the MIDI arrangements. "We did a fair bit of editing. There are some things that are characteristic of string writing that E doesn't like. He doesn't like a lot of rhythmic breathing in the string parts, and he prefers strings to be very legato in feel and very 'blocky', almost as if you're hearing strings off a keyboard, which is not surprising, as that is his main point of reference. Part of the challenge is to write that and get something that the strings will be happy to play naturally, but still get him what he wants. I really liked the fact that he got the musical sense of what I was trying to do, and even though it wasn't always what he had in mind, he was excited by it. As an artist, E's openness to stuff like that has expanded on each successive project."

Following tweaks to the scores with E, Jim sent MIDI files from Digital Performer to a copyist, who extracted and notated the parts for him. "I don't use the scoring facilities in Performer. I think anyone who's tried to do that has ended up being disappointed."

The string sessions took place with a 24‑piece string section (12 violins, six violas, four cellos and two basses) at one of LA's newer score recording studios, O'Henry's, best known for recording the scores for The Simpsons cartoon series. E, Wally, and Jim were all present. Jim: "O'Henry is a really popular place for scoring; a lot of film scores have been done there. It's very new, and the studio is technically absolutely pristine, with no hums or buzzes. They're definitely on the A‑team for score recording — they have fabulous mics and the people are great."

Recording took place directly into a Pro Tools Session containing the same stereo mix that Jim had received to do his arranging. The string players each wore one half of a set of headphones, and played to the stereo mix and Jim's click track on each pass. Wally Gagel managed the recording, which was made to six tracks per pass — a Neumann mic on each instrument type (violins, violas, cellos, basses), plus two tracks from a Schoeps stereo pair recording the room ambience. On some tracks, two takes were attempted, making the Pro Tools Session 12 tracks wide. Fortunately there were no computer glitches. Wally: "I was a little nervous, 'cause the most I'd ever done was an octet or something, and this was a 24‑piece orchestra with top players. If we didn't get it, we were screwed — it was a very expensive day! We made sure everything was triple‑backed up before we left the place. It was great to hear those string arrangements really come to life compared to the MIDI arrangements we had heard."

Brassy Latecomers

The major expense for the album over, the brass overdubs took place in the considerably cheaper surroundings of Jim Lang's Knobworld studio. Just two players were used, overdubbed several times: Andy Martin on trombone and Wayne Bergeron playing trumpet, cornet and flugelhorn. Wally Gagel engineered once more, using his trusty Beyer M160 ribbon mic and also Sennheiser 421s. "Again, there was a very short signal path between the mic and Pro Tools — and there was no mixer."

Very late in the sessions, two songs were written which made it unexpectedly onto the album. Since the string and horn arrangements were complete, these were entirely recorded in E's home studio. 'I Like Birds' was originally written as a B‑side, but E liked the mix of his small‑bodied acoustic guitar, detuned Mellotron choir, and Wally's Optigan rhythm loops so much that he put it on the album. You may remember the Optigan from the feature on Damon Albarn's studio in SOS August '99; like a Mellotron, it predates samplers by offering analogue playback of recorded instruments or rhythm loops, but these are played back from optical disc.

Wally: "I had all these weird old Optigan loops on a CD‑ROM, but we were quite restrained with them, and then we were glad, 'cause when the Blur album 13 came out last year, we couldn't help but feel that they had been pretty heavy‑handed with that one track ['Optigan 1'], which is basically just an Optigan playing its disc! I had a bongo loop from an Optigan session, which comes in and throws the timing a bit. The detuned choir sound is from a Mellotron CD‑ROM, not the real thing, and is made up of a female choir sound, a male choir sound, and some higher‑pitched voices, all mixed together."

The other late addition was the eventual single 'Mr E's Beautiful Blues', which was written by E and Dust Brother Michael Simpson after E thought the album was finished. Featuring a catchy looped blues guitar arpeggio, and punctuated by Michael Simpson's sampled pager and distorted single notes on E's Wurlitzer electric piano, the single would eventually go Top 10 in the UK, but E felt unhappy at being asked to put it on the album. "It just ruined the flow of the album for me anywhere in the sequence I tried to put it, because it already felt like it was in a really nice order. In the end, though, it was agreed to separate it off by 10 seconds of silence... and then while it was being mastered, I called and snuck in another 10 seconds, just to make it clear! I wanted it to be clear that 'Mr E' was separate. I didn't want this big 'happy ending' thing, you know? I really wanted the album to end with 'Selective Memory'."

Mixing & Mastering

Because Wally Gagel had made mixes as work progressed, mixing the album proved easy at first. Wally: "Because they were done as the songs were coming together, they had the right feel about them. When it came to mix the stuff, E often just said 'Well, I liked what you did for that overnight mix back then'. And of course, with Pro Tools, it was all still stored in memory. The most complicated were probably the ones with string arrangements, because we had kept the strings on several tracks so that we could raise the levels of say, the cellos at any given time if we wanted to. Thank God for Pro Tools automation!"

As time wore on, however, it became clear to Wally that E's basement was far from an ideal mixing studio. "E had his Genelecs set up really randomly in his basement, one high up and one low down, one near the computer where we were mixing and one far away... and it was terrible! I would try to put the phones on once in a while and try to get a good balance, but I felt a bit lost. And the Yamaha NS10s were running off a stereo receiver amp, so they just sounded like shit."

He needn't have worried. After completing mixes to DAT, CD‑R and 16‑bit Sound Designer II file via nothing more complex than TC Works' MasterX plug‑in and the stereo analogue out of E's 888 interface, Wally heard that Dreamworks had professed themselves delighted with the album.

E, by contrast, had mastering engineer Bob Ludwig make several attempts at the cut, but according to Wally Gagel, eventually plumped for Ludwig's first attempt. E still expresses concern that the bass levels are a tad high, but accepts that most listeners seem to like the album. Wally, for his part, has only one regret. "I do wish the strings were louder on 'Selective Memory'", he sighs, "because I remember hearing the strings on their own without the backing, and they're just huge. But E wanted them to be used sparingly, and relatively low."

What's Next?

Following the completion of Daisies Of The Galaxy, E has continued to work mainly in his basement, relishing the freedom it offers him. Wally Gagel describes working there as "the ultimate DIY ethic." He's now putting together a predominantly sample‑based album which may or may not end up as the next Eels album. Whatever happens to this project, with several tracks left over from the recording of Daisies..., E won't be short of material when it comes to the next Eels release. Nor is he worried that the splendid, quickfire results of recording in his basement will prove a false dawn. E: "I always work fast — nothing's laboured, nothing is very calculated. If it isn't broken, don't fix it'."

Not for E, then, the worry of becoming a 'Pro Tools casualty', forever delaying the release of an album while it is digitally tweaked to just‑so perfection? "I don't have the patience for that. You have to stop at some point, and I'm happy to stop as soon as it sounds good!"