Joel-RZ said:
Hey Neil,
I remember you talking a little about these albums on the PM board but I was hoping to get a more in depth view. These are my favorite from F & J by far and I especially love the touches of electronic programming throughout...but Drift seemed to have far less of those moments. Wasnt there originally more on that album?
Just out of curiosity, was this something the band wanted to explore or was it your influence as the producer or a combination?
After hearing their last few efforts as a band I desperately hoped they would contact you again and recapture some of that mid-career magic.
Joel
Joel: On Cuatro we definitely tried more different things, as I think things had become somewhat stagnant in the Flots camp (by their own admission) and so we really worked hard to get the enthusiasm back into the writing and song structuring. As a result, I think we succeeded in getting the spark back, and Cuatro did really well compared to other releases. That prompted everybody to want to do another album together, Drift, which for me had even better songs than Cuatro, as the focus and the fire were back in full force. For me, Drift was a much more focussed album, with stronger performances all round, plus as you correctly mention, we did use a lot of electronics on the album, including loads of spoken samples, sequencing and all sorts of other colours.
However, there was a shakeup at the label during the mixing of the album, and a new head of A&R was appointed (he was a pop guy) who didn't quite "get" what we were doing. I was just about done with the mixing and got a call from him saying that he really wasn't sure about the "in your face" approach to the mixes I was doing. The band and I had been very heavily influenced at the time by the sound and production of the Prong album "Cleansing" which was exactly the way we thought we'd take Drift, in terms of sonics and recording and mixing approach. In fact I think we succeeded in making a very fiery and interesting sounding album. At that point, the A&R person who had been on the project now had her hands somewhat tied by her new boss, while he suggested I do three mixes of the songs that would most likely be the singles, that were mixed more in the line of 80s hair metal, you know, loads of big reverbs etc. I of course obliged, but the band wasn't really into that approach, so it didn't sit well with them (or me either for that matter, but I wanted to try to make everyone happy).
The A&R head preferred those mixes, but still felt that they could be done a bit more along his lines, so after the album was finished up, he asked Mike Barbiero to mix the same 3 projected radio tracks, which he did. I think Mike did a great job on those, and it made the label happy. The problem at that point was that the band only wanted those mixes to be used for radio, and the A&R guy wanted them on the record, and that would have meant having 7-8 songs sounding one way and 3 sounding very different. I should mention that I had fortnately managed to bring the album in well within budget by the time I delivered my mixes, so we did have some surplus in there to pay for some remixing. However, after some wrangling between band and label, the label got the upper hand (of course) and eventually had the entire album remixed (after the band successfully pleaded their case about some songs sounding one way etc.) to keep the sound cohesive. A good plan, but all this ended up pushing the album way over budget which precipitated things into rather messy territory, and started strainging the relationship between label and band. Also, for the remixes, due to label concerns, all the samples were removed, and the electronics downplayed or removed entirely. My mixes had a lot more stuff going on in them, as of course we had all the stuff we had recorded still in those mixes, plus the approach was a lot more aggressive than the album ended up sounding.
So, while I still like Drift, I still remember the way we had originally intended it to sound, which may or may not be better or worse - it's just different, and what I had become used to, so the final result still sounds rather barren and colourless to me in places.
All in all, I thought it was a real shame. Add to that the poor timing of the album's release in terms of trends - metal was in a steep decline - and the sales of the album were very poor by comparison to Cuatro, perhaps less than a quarter of the sales in fact. All this contributed to a big feeling of disappointment at the end of the day and the band ended up being dropped from the label as a result of the rather poor showing.
And so it goes. Sad story. I really loved working with Flots - they were all great guys, and I'd love to have the chance to work with them again.
Neil K.
