This transcript is excerpted from the full interview in the video above.
Mike Dawson: So did you record [Sob Rock] all remotely or were you able to get into a room?
Aaron Sterling: Most all of it was me and John and Sean Hurley in a room for an entire year. Yeah. Five days a week. There are definitely some things on there that I did remotely, here and there. And sometimes he'll send me stuff and I'll start a song remotely. But just the way he likes to work, every record that he makes, it's just five days a week for a full year. Almost to the day.
And it's just that way nonstop. And that's how we've made every record that I've ever done with him. I think every record he's done was like that. Maybe with the exception of his first one. So yeah, we were in the same room the whole time.
The drums were in a small room. We tried a couple different rooms, but I think pretty much everything drum-wise on there was done in a room—I mean I've been in this studio a million times making a lot of records, but we usually don't put drums in there. But we figured out a way how to do it, and it was really cool. But a very small room.
MD: So did you do—gosh, how many songs are on the record, twelve songs. Did you do one song a week, or did you do a hundred songs? What was the process?
AS: We probably recorded a total—if I can take a guess, I could be off— a total of twenty-five songs. But it's hard to explain his process. You're just whittling away for a year. It's not like, we're gonna work on this til it's done. That's never how it goes. We'll work on this, and then we'll work on this. Then tomorrow we'll go back. Then tomorrow we'll just think about a snare drum choice on that one song. Then the next day we'll start a third song. And six months later you've done a lot on twenty-five songs, or twenty songs, but they're not even close to being done, still. According to him. And he wants to redo them, and he wants to think it through again. Then you revisit those same songs multiple times. It's like you're workshopping a bunch of songs for a long period of time, to see if they stand the test of time, I guess.
MD: Interesting. Do your parts change much from the first instinct?
AS: Oh, absolutely. All the time. Yeah, like "Last Train Home" is a good example. He started playing it—we were in the middle of recording a song, and I think there was some technical issue. So he and I are just sitting there waiting for something to be done. And he starts playing me that song, but he's playing on an acoustic guitar, because that's what he was using to track whatever song it was we were working on at the moment. And he's playing it in a style—I thought it was like super super half time, Neil Young type of thing. And that's just how I thought the song would be. For weeks I just figured, every time he mentioned that title, I was like, oh yeah, it's that thing. And I started playing this groove. And eventually he was like, I don't think that's what it is. He was like, I think this is gonna be, like, a big 80's thing. I was like, oh, okay. But we had already gone through multiple iterations of that song at that point. Until he starts mentioning that, and now I'm like, oh shit, we need to do something different. So yeah, every song is like that, to some extent, with him.
MD: Just knowing how you go about choosing gear, you must be tearing down kits constantly with him to try new sounds.
AS: All the time. And what's great about John is, he doesn't care whatsoever. If you say out of nowhere, "hey, I need an hour and a half," he'll be like, "great, let's eat!" And there's literally no part of him that gets flustered, or like, "ugh, I thought we were gonna—". He's like, whatever has to be done has to be done. So at any moment if you say, "I really really think I need a new kit for this. I know we're in a zone, but where we're heading, this kick drum is totally wrong. I feel like it needs to be this type of snare, to be honest I think we need a new reverb, compression type of situation going on," he'll be like, "say no more. Just do your thing and let me know when you're done." And he'll go sit in his other studio he's got, you know, he's got his own room. It's a really nice process. The idea is to, like, do whatever you have to do for the song.
So, yeah, my drum tech was there every day, and we're constantly just switching stuff out. Incessantly.
MD: What gear did you have at your disposal?
AS: I mean, with John, we just sort of bring everything. And so, you have a lot of stuff inside the studio, in the room, and then you have stuff lined through the hallways. We're those guys, where it's like, everywhere you go in the studio it's just road cases filled with shit. Just kind of, like, I don't know, I probably had, like, thirty snares sittin' around somewhere in the building. I don't really think in terms of drum "sets," cause it's mostly kick drums and toms and I just do whatever I gotta do for each song. But yeah, I don't know, I probably had, like, ten kick drums and ten sets of toms. And then just buckets of cymbals.
Cymbals are probably less important, I find, with him. It's usually more about the kicks and snares. And toms.
MD: Was there one snare or kick that you kept going back to for that record?
AS: I would say in general, and I don't know why this is, but the kick and toms that I seem to go to the most with him, from the day I met him and we made the record Born and Raised, is this old 70s Slingerland kit, 20-12-14. And it's tuned extremely dead. And the kick drum is really small. It has no head on the outside. It's just super tight, and for whatever reason it seems to work. I don't know why. I always love it, he always loves it. It just makes sense. So we used a lot of stuff, but that always seems to be the majority of the stuff.
In terms of snares, I don't know if there's a specific one that's used a lot. I switch, probably every song has a different snare on it, I would guess.
MD: What is your home-base cymbal setup?
AS: I don't have one. I've never had one. Any time I do a session, they'll just set up whatever, cause it makes no difference. I can hear the first song and I'll change every single time I hear a song. I don't have anything that's, like, "oh, this is where I start." I don't have any starting point, ever, for anything.
MD: I was looking at AllMusic, you've been busy as heck the past couple of years. How did you manage all these sessions while he had you locked in five days a week for a year?
AS: It's brutal. But basically the way he works is, it's typically around 2 to 10. Or 3 to 10. Something like that. So I would do songs in the morning. It was a lot, but I didn't want to stop working for all the people that I work for. There's hundreds and hundreds. I don't like the idea of being like, "no, I'll just take the mornings off and just lose all these people." I was getting up, taking kids to school and starting around 8. Just trying to get two or three songs done before I would be with John.
MD: So all that was done in your space?
AS: Yes. I would say probably 92% of all the recordings anyone ever hears me on, I do at my own place. And then the other 7% or so—apparently 92 plus 7 equals 100, I didn't know that, fake news. The other percent is just gonna be some other studio or something. But pretty much everything I do is at my place.
