How important is the producer/engineer in the studio environment?
Well, we were really helped by our expert sound engineer Gregg Jackman, who worked with us on Good Vibrations and Spirit Voices – and he did an excellent job on both of those too. He seems instinctively to know what sound is right for which song. You can be in the booth singing your bit on a track and thinking “I’m not feeling so good this morning, I hope this doesn’t take too long”, then he calls you into the control room and he’s somehow brought the sound to life! We co-produced this album with him, and Robin and I really got into that side of it. It’s hard to describe the quality of the sound. It isn’t a reverb. This album has a newish kind of sound. If you listen to Good Vibrations and compare it with this album, the group sounds much more upfront on Simple Gifts. How long did it take to record the album? We started recording with odd days in October and November 2007, and finished with 10 days in January 2008. Obviously a day in the studio is not like a day in a normal acoustic re
