Rishi Keshe Hirway

It was recorded live, which I'd never done.

I just had spent so much of my life recording in my bedroom, writing the parts and layering them.

Even the song between there and here, the song with Yo-Yo Ma, that was one that I had made track by track building it up.

But for this, I worked with a producer named Phil Weinrobe, who has a very specific way of making music, which is he thinks that everyone should be able to hear what everyone is doing and react to it in real time.

So rather than having somebody come in and record the drums, and then somebody comes in and records the bass, it's like, no, maybe what you were playing in the bass part would be different if you were there in the room with the drummer.

And rather than listening to a metronome and everybody playing

to the same speed, it's like, well, sometimes you do naturally slow down or you speed up and essentially making everything about the music more human.

Yes, relational.

And also instinctive.

You know, I thought, oh, well, we should spend a week, right, as a band practicing every song, figuring out what the arrangement is so that then when we go to record it, it is super, super tight.

And he said, no, actually, the way that I prefer to do things is to have everybody listen to the song.

You'll come in, play it for us, and then we'll discover what the song is together.

And in a matter of just a couple hours, we'll have recorded it, which was not only terrifying, it seemed crazy to me.

Because it's like, don't you need to just know it in your bones?

And he said, no, there's a point at which you can hear the music is alive and exciting.

And there's a point at which that changes and the music becomes just a performance.

And that's a different feeling.

And you don't know when that's going to happen.

You don't know where that shift happens.

But once that shifts, you can never get it back.