These tracks were recorded live by Nick Worley at Paul Burch’s Pan American Sound studio in Nashville, Tennessee.

All photographs by Laura Brown

Paul Burch records tight, unadorned, we daresay, timeless tunes in his studio space near Music Row in Nashville. Burch and the WPA Ballclub spent months in this reclaimed garage that isn’t more than four walls and a vaulted ceiling adorned with a pair of skylights. But, as Mr. Burch will tell you, the space possesses a golden, full vibe to it when he and the band sit down to cut tracks or just fool around. He’s bought cheap rugs on eBay and place cloth-covered planks in the corners to tame the echo. After almost two hours of hanging out there, we can attest to the place’s clean acoustics and foremost—to the talent of Burch and his cohorts.

Mr. Burch salvaged the space for a few reasons. The first being necessity. Studios are great, he exclaims, and the studios in Nashville are wonderful and staffed by highly competent engineers, but like many things, it gets expensive. It also limits what one can do, meaning that renting a studio time can result in hurried recording sessions. For Mr. Burch, this garage is freedom from all that. It offers the liberty to cut dozens of takes, re-work arrangements mid-stream, and control the sound. It also allows one’s muse to steep and soak in more from outside sources. It’s a freedom that comes with price tag.

He’s not only writing songs, playing lead guitar and singing lead vocals. Mr. Burch is recording everything to tape, placing the mics, and then there’s all the mixing—it can feel like an album is never done. Burch asks the question out loud, “Am I done with this album?”

From what we can gather, the album’s not only done, but one of Burch’s finest efforts to date, replete with precise musicianship backing up honest-to-goodness songwriting. Here, Burch talks to us about how he put his studio together, the recording process, and the trials and tribulations of being a working musician in Nashville.

So you recorded your new album Still Your Man all live to tape in this home studio?

Yeah, I started off just recording a few people at a time, just to see what it was like. Singing and playing at the same time. It started off where I certainly wanted to record it here, but I hardly had any rugs and stuff was going back and forth. I had the tape machine and a drum set and an amplifier and the first song I did had a lot of charm to it because there was so much stuff going on so it sounded really live. Well I don’t know if live is the right word…it just had a lot of character to it. So I thought, well, rather than try to fight that, we could make that sound, was my idea. I’ve been an amateur recording person for a long time, and I never would have done this, but I just couldn’t afford to go to studios, and a lot of the studios that I would want to go to don’t really exist anymore. It’s hard to get a big room like this, cheaply. Most affordable studios are someone’s basement. You can’t all look at each other and play at once. And, you know, this is still a little work in progress, trying to figure out how to hear. And I can use headphones, but it changes the way you can play.

You know, my idea is that recording should be different. You know, it is for me. It’s different than doing something live. But I hope that it shouldn’t be too different. You don’t put headphones on in front of people. And it makes a difference. I think the musicians are more free to make comments and offer new ideas if they can look right at each other. Something about if you can’t see each other, you pummel through take after take without having any idea what it sounds like. Whereas if you look at each other and it feel good, it is good. And if it doesn’t, you can just say, ‘Wait, try this, try that.’ And it’s instant conversation.

The modern way of recording is really to make things easier on the engineer. You know what I mean? Cause if everyone’s in a separate room, then the engineer can always fix it later, but if you put everybody in the same room and on the spot, that’s real recording engineering. You know, you have to decide what the character of the room is, what the right microphone is. You have to do it right then. You have to make your decisions and live with it. And for some reason that has kinda disappeared, and some musicians have taken the advice that its better to do things a little at a time. That it makes for better music. And there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not a case of liking older music better. The records feel a lot better. Not all of them, but a lot of them do.

Can you tell us about actually building this studio in your garage?

Well the whole thing was just kinda falling down….when I first found this garage, it was this size, but it was falling apart. It had been neglected for a long time. But I noticed it had the footprint, the size of it, even thought it was square, the size of it was very much like old studios that aren’t used anymore in Nashville that were called, like, B-rooms. For instance, Columbia Records had a B-room that was sorta the same size as their A-room, but a smaller space where they’d send, like, bluegrass groups or things like that when the A-room was occupied, but when they needed to do something that wasn’t quite a pop session. Something that was really, really live, like bluegrass music, or a honkytonk record. And so I thought, ‘Wow, if this got built up, this might be a good room to record in, and even if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t care, it would just be a nice place to go.’

But then once the ceiling was built up and it had a concrete floor and it was a big room, I was really excited. It made lots of noise, but the music sounded really good, when we started playing. So then I had a really big room that was really, really noisy, but when we recorded it had a lot of charm to it, it just had a lot of personality. So I would bring in one or two musicians at a time where it wasn’t too complicated for me to record and just sorta put a mic in front of one guy, put a mic in front of me and somebody else, and we’d get a level that wasn’t distorting on the tape machine and I’d just hope for the best. And then concentrate on having a really good take, and usually we would do four or five takes and pick one of those and that would be it. Gradually I’d bring in more and more people, sort of as a duo, and I’d cut some things like that – and then as a trio – and the takes were live and they had a lot of personality. It was really easy, and if I needed to overdub something, I could do that. But there’s something about, for me, if you overdubbed on something that was recorded live, if the overdub was a good idea, it would sound good right away, and if it didn’t, it would sound really added on. It’s something that was just trial and error, really. And as I got more and more comfortable, the more rockin’ numbers, I actually braved having everyone in here at once, and it was just a big mess cause I was running around trying to sing and…

Is it harder to concentrate when you are the songwriter, singer, guitar player, engineer and producer?

Yeah, it’s pretty impossible to concentrate, but you don’t do all those things at once. And I’m not a real recording engineer, I’m just sorta point and go. But after you do something three or four times, you figure out what microphone sounds good on what particular instrument. There’s hundreds of mics to choose from, but not everything sounds good on the drums. Maybe one or two things sound good on the drums. But after a while you just kinda figure it out. And then if the same people are coming in, you just write down what sounds good, you mark it in Magic Marker just like everyone else did. At Muscle Schoals, for instance, they used to nail the drums to the floor and say ‘this is where the dreams always go, and this is where the bass always goes.’ And that’s, a studio that’s working with the same musicians everytime, they’ll do that. You just find what works and this set up that we did tonight is very much how we did “Black Market” and the Little Walter song and “Waiting for My Ship” and “Little Bells.” I gradually figured out that you make a room within a room, and put the amps on the other side so you can look at each other and the amps are sorta going this way and everything else is going that way, and it seemed to work.

For the recording of the album, what was your start to finish process?

The process was usually myself and Jen Gundermann or myself and Dennis Crouch would just really close to each other and just run through the songs. The process of the record was I’d usually start off with either me and Jen Gundermann or me and Dennis Crouch. Jen plays piano and Dennis play upright bass. We would, I’d put a mic on them and a mic on me and we’d just run through it. And then I’d sorta listen back and sometimes that’d be the take and sometimes it would be a blueprint of where we want to go. But because we were doing it live and we didn’t have to do a lot of takes, we sorta spend a half hour or an hour sorta learning it and then we’d do it three of four times and we’d always walk out of here with a take that we liked. And the process of figuring out what the sound of the record was going to be mostly came from those sketches. Like hearing a lot of space and sometimes it’d be three people or sometimes it’d be four people. The volume level wasn’t like heavy electric instruments; it was more a lot of energy and intensity rather than volume. And this room sorta gave a lot back to you. If you were loud, it was loud back. So I had to find a volume that was sustainable for everybody so we could hear each other and still enjoy it.

So did the space itself play into song selection?

I don’t think so. The piano had a lot to do with the songs I wrote because I don’t have much of a vocabulary on piano, but since Jen Gundermann was in the band, and she was kinda new, she had a great ability on the piano and she might come up with something. A lot of times, songs would start off on piano, which was a new instrument for me. I don’t have much of a vocabulary on it. I would come up with something and a lot of times I would play it for Jen and she would make it her own. Or she might say, ‘I like the way you play piano on that, why don’t I do something else.’ The piano ended up being a really strong element in the record, which it never had been before, also because I didn’t have a piano and also there was no piano player in the band.

And Jen Gundermann joined the band at the same time that my family sent my grandmother’s piano down to me so all of a sudden I had access to one and I could make chords on it, but I didn’t have a really great vocabulary, but I was able to sorta compose on it and it was just a completely different sound than guitar. Somethings you can do on guitar…you can make a lot of noise on it, you can crunch some strings together, and you can’t really do that on piano. But there’s some things on piano, like a sustained note on the piano is really beautiful, you can just hit two notes and that can be really nice, because its those reverberations. And in a room like this it can just go on forever, and it can set some atmosphere for the other musicians. And on a guitar, it might not sound as exciting.

I just saw it as maybe like a new paint, as a new color and, you know, everybody in the band, they’re all kinda unsung heroes in Nashville. They all kinda opted on their own, you know, not to go on the road. And if we had the chance to, we probably would, but a lot of people do it kinda against their will. They put themselves in a position where they can do nothing else but that so they end up playing a lot of things that they don’t want to play. And almost everyone at WPA is kinda a risky musician, because they all have a really individual style. And somebody who wants to hire a keyboard player and listens to somebody who has a unique style might say, ‘well they have too much personality’ and for a modern country band, you need a pretty bland drummer who’s gonna just hack away. But mostly they’ve taken the choice of trying to become better on their own terms, so I hope the WPA is a chance for them to do really what they want to do. And a lot of times, I can dabble in a few other instruments, and I might try to play piano like Jen does, or play bass like Dennis does on a little demo. They’ll play it back to me they’re own way, but they’ll recognize that I’m trying to make an atmosphere that’s sorta within the real estate of what they play and in that way, its kinda interesting because we’re all playing each other’s part back to one another. Then it’ll go off into some other improvisational place that we never expected. I never thought of myself as an improvisational player, but my favorite parts of the band are when we record live and we go off on some tangent that we never thought it’d go into. And it’s really fun to do that on what might be a really simple chord structure or progression, where you think, ‘well there’s really no way for this to go,’ and you play a couple of verses of the solo and you’re done. But then if you pick one of those chords, and you hang on it for awhile, and someone picks that up and goes somewhere with it, it can be really exciting.

Stay tuned for audio and video from the Paul Burch home studio Session.