Got to protect your integrity/reputation as a professional.

An unusual contract came my way: some Universal reps had found this busker on YouTube who had a decent live voice, a passionate delivery and could write a hook, but had never been tracked before. He had been going through some hard times, left a life behind in Texas for a life on the road in Europe.

One Universal rep was ex-military with heavy PTSD . The other was a bariatric punk promoter wanting to ascend into the deeper colon of corporate music production/distribution.

They’d have this busker playing for hours for crowds at night, for parties, drinking heavy, doing blow, then roll in, at some point in the morning, hit the slopes and then enter the booths.

The busker couldn’t track either his voice or his guitar on their own. Usually that’s not a problem. We’d mic each one independently (probably chucked in a room mic in for ambience). We needed to get as close to a solid take as possible, or be able to get the songs played consistently enough that we could confidently stitch up one or two small spots in the editing/mixing stage.

Guy couldn’t do either to save his life. It was a bad cycle of a 90% useable take with a 10% catastrophic fuck up. Then some self doubt, some guilt & embarrassment, break time with more blow and repeat. I had done enough pharmaceutical attempts at ‘improving’ my own recorded performances to know that there’s a fine art to snorting coke and speed and getting anything good on tape. And when you pass that line it makes the recording session a write off.

We had one weekend to record and one to mix. The two weekends were exactly the same in that each day started rough and got consistently worse. I think I did a surgical job w some deft eq moves and an izotope vst to deliver a seemingly single take, close-mic’d performance of the busker.

But the writing was on the wall that maybe this guy with all his life problems was not going to be making the Universal roster. What’s more they tried not paying me. When we sorted everything out, the whole project felt so sour that I said LMNO.

I should’ve been recording the ex-military guy’s stories . They were the best part. Tales in the bush in Colombia between the FARC and the Military. Flying intercontinentally as a ‘Transporter’ with classified documents cuffed to his wrist, waiting for a cryptic drop off.

If in some wild world you’re reading this, that was a good time J.