Inside the Studio Where Nobody Wanted to Leave
How a converted grain silo became the unlikely birthplace of three consecutive breakout records.
From the outside it looks like exactly what it used to be: a grain silo, rust streaking down the corrugated steel, surrounded by a gravel lot and not much else. Inside, past a door that still has a padlock hasp from its farming days, is a control room built by hand over four winters by an engineer who wanted, in his words, "a room where the walls do not have opinions about what a record should sound like."
Three records made here in the past two years have gone on to define a small but influential corner of the current scene, and none of the artists who made them describe the space the same way. One singer calls it "a pressure cooker with good coffee." A producer who has worked there on and off since it opened calls it "the only room I have ever tracked vocals in where the singer stops performing and starts just talking." What they agree on is the schedule, or rather the absence of one — sessions run until the take feels right, not until the clock says stop, and more than one artist has stayed for six additional weeks after their booked time ended because the record was not finished telling them what it wanted to be.
The silo's acoustics are, by any conventional studio standard, wrong. The ceiling is thirty feet of curved steel that should produce a slap-back echo violent enough to ruin any recording. Instead, through a combination of hand-built baffling and what the engineer insists is "just luck," the room has a natural reverb that several visiting mixers have tried and failed to replicate digitally. Plug-in emulations of the room now circulate quietly among producers who have never set foot inside it.
What keeps artists coming back, though, is not really the room. It is the isolation. There is one bar within walking distance, spotty cell service, and no natural light in the tracking room after dark. Musicians who arrive planning to record for two weeks routinely describe losing track of what day it is by day four. "You stop performing for an imagined audience," one artist told us over coffee in the gravel lot, still wearing yesterday's clothes, clearly reluctant to leave. "You start making the record for the four people in the room. That is the whole trick."