|
The
Very Ms. Perry
“I’m
not a songwriter,” Perry says, in her sharp, impatient purr.
“I think my biggest problem with where I’m sitting
right now is this ‘songdoctor’ title that I get. I
hate it. I don’t like writing songs for people. People have
a misconception that’s what I do. That’s just what
happens. If you and I are connecting, something is going to happen.” She
reached into Stefani’s head, for instance, and pulled out
the hit first single for her eclectic, dance solo album, Love
Angel Music Baby. The No Doubt style-kitten was a reluctant partner
— Stefani was skittish about Perry’s penchant for
mid-tempo ballads and quirky pop with her former band, 4 Non Blondes.
When the two did finally get together at Enterprise Studio in
Burbank, Stefani was hesitant and uninspired. As the singer gave
up that first day, frustrated, Perry was left with a question:
What are you waiting for? By
daybreak, Perry had built a song around it. Stefani walked in
and pounced. They ad-libbed lyrics for a few hours, then listened
to what they had and wrote a new melody. Channeling Stefani as
a character gave Perry an idea: She immediately built four different
microphone set-ups to produce four distinct sonic personalities,
reflecting the singer’s schizoid swings between self-confidence
and collapse without the band that had made her famous. “I
put the mics right in a row: the U47, the 251, a 67, and a C12.
I labeled them all for her. I said, ‘What you’re going
to do is, after every line you’re going to switch to the
next mic. So I had all the tracks up, and she’s like: ‘Like
a cat in heat, stuck in a moving car’ — switch —
‘A scary conversation, shut my eyes, can’t find the
brake.’ She sang the vocal down like that. That’s
the exact vocal that’s on the radio, that take.” This
illustrates two points about Perry: 1) she gets the sound through
the gear, not by fixing it in ProTools or on the board; and 2)
she doesn’t have any standard way of working. She’s
the first to admit she doesn’t even know what some of her
gear is supposed to do. She doesn’t want to know. She wants
to be surprised. She
ran the Telefunken U47 through the Neve 1073 mic preamp and the
Teletronics LA2A Compressor/Limiter. The Neumann U67 also went
through the 1073, her favorite pre, and through a Fairchild 670
compressor (she owns three of these, plus a couple 666s). The
AKG C12 mic went through the 1073 and then through the light touch
of the E.A.R. 660 compressor/limiter (“Because it’s
such a nicer, pristine little mic, and the E.A.R. is best when
you have a real pretty singer,” Perry says). Finally, the
Telefunken ELAM-251 ran though an Avalon EQ and an Avalon AD-2044
compressor. She tweaked them, driving the U67’s compression
hotter than the U47’s, making them all distinct. The
rest of the song was built around that vocal. Perry did most of
it herself, programming the beat on a LinnDrum with a snare sample
from her archives, and playing the bass line (she considers herself
better on bass than on any other instrument) on the Juno 60 synth.
The guitar was her own ’53 gold top Les Paul through an
overdriven Fender tube, miked with a Neumann U57, again through
the Neve 1073 pre and then through the compressors on Enterprise’s
SSL 9000 board. (“I absolutely love the compressors on that
9000,” she says. “I’m trying to find a set pulled
out of an old 9000 that I can get in here.”) Stefani
left the studio with not just a demo — but with the actual
tracks. Perry wanted Gwen to have them when she worked with Nellee
Hooper putting the songs together. Hooper, she says, went on to
use most of her material, and gave her no co-production credit.
They are still wrangling about this now. “I’m
bitter about that,” she snarls. “Welcome to the production
business; you get screwed over here, as well. That’s the
first time I let someone have my tracks, and the last. It came
down to asking: What did you use of Linda’s? He went, ‘Oh,
I used the guitar and a keyboard.’ I listened to the track,
and I was like, ‘You’re using my lead vocal, all my
background vocals, my rhythm guitar, my keyboards, all my little
fluff. You used 75 percent of my tracks, Nellee, what the hell
are you talkin’ about?’ So I know better now.” It
wasn’t the first time she’d used the shock of near-telepathic
empathy and awe of weird science to get results. When working
with Christina Aguilera on the 2002 album, Stripped, she was agonizing
over whether or not to give Aguilera one of her most personal
songs, “Beautiful.” While putting together a demo,
she let Aguilera read the lyrics, memorize the melody, and then
gave her one vocal take. “I
just got this feeling, that shiver, and I’m like: This is
my take. This is my vocal take,” she recalls. “I had
her on the U47 through my 666 Fairchild, through the Pultec EQ.”
She called in session players and built the rest of the song around
that one take. Aguilera didn’t like the idea, saying she
could do it better. After arguing about it for seven months, Aguilera
agreed it was gripping and put it on the album. “And if
you solo the vocal, you can hear the pages turning!” Perry
laughs. The two of them are currently working on new material. The
point is: imperfections and happy accidents rule. Perry’s
job, the way she sees it, is to make them happen. To push artists
out of their comfort zones, even if it takes a posh, deeply contemplative
studio to do it. And this goes for herself, too: At one point,
she was writing with Aguilera from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. every day
and then moving to another studio, and from 3 a.m. to 8 a.m. unleashing
loud, raw rock’n’roll as the self-appointed new guitarist
on Courtney Love’s album, America’s Sweetheart. “We
were drunk, we were tired, we were delusional. The demos sound
better than the album — sloppy, really rock, like the Faces,”
she says. And
yes, despite her protests, Perry does write for other artists.
She co-wrote the entire new album for Kelly Osbourne, Sleeping
In The Nothing, while the famous “daughter of darkness”
was in rehab. Looking for a breakthrough, Perry convinced Osbourne
that her pop rock debut, Shut Up, was weak, and this time wed
her highly emotional recovery lyrics to a deep ‘80s electro
pulse done mostly on electronics. Osbourne was only let out long
enough to nail her vocal tracks. “That’s
my job: to make sure that it’s not another Linda Perry production,”
Perry affirms. “People are going to start hearing a lot
of stuff coming out right now. And you’ll be very shocked,
because it’s all so different.” Okay,
but it’s still nice to know some things are sacred. She
didn’t mess with Cheap Trick. They came to Kung Fu Gardens,
plugged in, and played two songs like they know how to play. “I
was so intimidated!” she laughs. “I used to get stoned
to Budokan every day!” She couldn’t abandon herself
to wild experimentation. “In my mind, I didn’t write
something better than ‘Surrender,’” she says
wistfully. “How could you write something better than ‘Surrender’?”
LINDA
PERRY POST-FACTO “I
tend to favor the older stuff, and not because it’s cooler
— it’s just better. It is. That Marshall [a 1971 Marshall
JCM 800] sounds way better than that brand new Mesa Boogie, and
that’s 1971 and that’s 2005 or 2004. That’s
just a great-sounding friggin’ amp. And not because it’s
old. They just hand-built these things, and these are manufactured.
The Mesa/Boogie — I just don’t get it. I bought one
because I wanted to find out what that sound was that I kept hearing
on the radio [laughs]. So I bought a Mesa/Boogie, and I went,
like, ‘I think it’s a Mesa/Boogie with a Paul Reed
Smith.’ And so I put it in there, and I went, ‘There’s
that friggin’ sound’ [laughs]! Kids don’t know
the difference between a 1971 Marshall and a Line6 Pod. No, they
don’t. I use Line6 for, like vocals. I throw vocals through
it. Because, when you want that wacked out sound, that’s
what I use that for.” ON
THE GENIUS BILL BOTTRELL “When
I got together with Bill, I asked so many friggin’ questions,
he finally just grabbed me, sat me down — he had the same
board, the 8058 — threw me in front of the board, and said,
‘This is the 1176, this is what I’m putting on the
guitars. The Pultech I have in on the bass and on your vocal.
The Fairchild, I’m running the stereo bus. You know, the
whole mix through. Okay. Here’s your effects sends. Here’s
your channel, obviously, here’s your volume. These are your
lows. These are your low mids. These are your high mids. And these
are your highs. You don’t like a sound? Push this in here,
and tweak those until you like it.’ And I’m like,
‘Well, isn’t that wrong? DO you go too far?’
And he’s like, ‘Linda, you tweak it until you hear
it. Don’t watch the meters. Don’t listen to the speakers.
Just listen to your ear. And if it sounds good to you, then that’s
the right way. There’s no right or wrong way about it.’
And from that moment on, I thank him for why I’m here now.” |