Sara Evans: So I want to talk about Born and Raised. I would say it’s one of my favorite albums of all time, and it has a lot to do with what you did on it. I love your drum parts on that record. And the way your kit sounds. It’s just—everything about it. Will you please tell me about making that record, as much as you want to talk about it?
Aaron Sterling: Yeah, that was a special record. Yeah, it was a really magical time. I met John at Electric Lady, shake hands, and we immediately start playing.
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Yeah, we did it there. Met him, and then within five minutes we’re playing Queen of California, which wasn’t a song, it was a riff. He just starts playing that riff. It’s funny—I’ll tell you a fun story. What you hear on Queen of California, the bass and drums, is me just meeting him. We then played that song 150 times over the course of the year, but then he ended up, he kept going back to something about the drums and bass when it wasn’t a song. He just had a riff, you know? He was just trying to figure out a song. No melody, no lyrics. But he kept going back to wanting to add things to the original thing that had had happened when we were just sitting going, I don’t know, what are we doing now?
There was an out of tune piano that Chuck Leavell from the Stones played on, and that was his solo. And they had tried to autotune. And eventually everybody kept saying, I don’t even hear it out of tune, what’s the problem? So little things like that. There’s just so many stories like that. But that was a magical record. And then we spent essentially a year making that record. Just back and forth. In New York, then you go to LA. Go back to New York. Try another studio. That’s just his thing.
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I think there’s a record that Don [Was] was a part of with John that never even came out, that we made. So I think four records total that they’ve done together.