[ANN POWERS] Welcome, Dave Cobb.
You probably know Dave from his outstanding
work on so many amazing albums — all of my
favorite albums —
[DAVE COBB] You're just saying that.
[POWERS] OK, I do like a few David Bowie
albums as well.
[COBB] I like them, too; I'll pick David Bowie.
[POWERS] But everyone from Jason Isbell to
Sturgill Simpson to Brandi Carlile, Ashley Monroe,
Lori McKenna. The list goes on and on — Anderson East.
Dave is also the man behind the label
Low Country Sound.
And we're here with a Low Country Sound artist,
Savannah Conley, who is just beginning her career.
[POWERS] How did you develop the skill set
to become a producer?
Did it just come naturally?
[COBB] I think you just lie.
[SAVANNAH CONLEY] Oh my God.
[COBB] I'm serious!
Have you ever asked for
somebody's production degree?
[CONLEY] Uh, no.
[COBB] I mean, not that that's a thing,
that's not a thing, but you'd never go, "Hey man,
before we can work, let me see your —"
[CONLEY] I'm going to need your credentials.
[COBB] Yeah, yeah.
There's no credentials.
So you just — really, I'm not even joking,
I just lied.
My favorite part about being in a band was
making the record, and I could sleep in my own bed.
So that's kind of how
the production thing started.
And I watched, you know my band,
we worked with producers and I watched them work
and I thought,
"Man, wait a minute, this guy gets paid.
[Laughter]
This guy gets fed well.
He gets to drink, and he gets to do this?"
So to me, it checked all the boxes of
what I wanted to do.
You know, I moved to Los Angeles from Atlanta
because I wanted to produce rock records, so.
You know, in my mind LA is
where all the rock people live.
You think of Led Zeppelin and —
not that they lived there, but in my head they did —
so I moved out there to do that,
and the first guy I produced out there
was this guy Shooter Jennings.
Through Shooter, I met Sturgill Simpson.
I met Jamey Johnson.
I met all these people
and worked with them,
and the lie got so good, I eventually
convinced myself I was a country music producer,
so now I'm here.
[POWERS] Take us to that moment
when you first heard Savannah.
[COBB] Steveo from Atlantic who's here tonight,
he brought her by the studio and she sang
about half of one song
and I'm like, "Pff, done."
I mean, I didn't need to hear any more.
[CONLEY] That's not what I thought you thought.
[COBB] Really?
[POWERS] OK, let's get
the he said, she said here.
[CONLEY] No, no, no, I know that now
I didn't know it at the time.
Because it felt like a —
he brought me by and
I'd never met Dave before, and I played half
of one song and he stopped me during it,
and I was like, "[sharp breath] Oh, God."
Now I know how you work and it's amazing
because what, really, he doesn't want to hear
the whole song because he wants to hear it when
it's time to cut.
And that way we can get a vision together,
and I know that now, but at the time, I was
like, "Oh, no.
I screwed this up bad."
[POWERS] How do you find the artists
you would like to work with?
[COBB] I heard about so many artists
the first time through other artists I worked with.
I mentioned Shooter Jennings earlier.
He's always been, you know, like a brother, and
he told me about Sturgill, and
that's how I met Sturgill.
He told me about Jamey Johnson.
He told me about half of the great artists
I know about.
[POWERS] I've heard it said that there are
several different kinds of producers.
There are vibe producers who just create a
great environment, a great hang for musicians.
There are curator producers who know
every great player, engineer, arranger — and put
those people in the studio with you.
There are track producers who actually make
sounds, make beats or make other sounds that
they then share with an artist.
How would you classify what you do
in those categories?
[COBB] I'm a bit of all of it,
except for the track producer.
I don't know how to work computers,
so I don't know how to do that stuff.
I was always a guy who would
make accidental hangs all the time.
You know, I'd be at dinner, "Come hang out,"
and I'd have two people that you would think
would be competitive with each other, and next
thing you know, they're buddies.
And you know like Sturgill and Chris Stapleton,
or Jason and Chris.
Whatever it is, I've always been in these situations
where I try to make a gang out of it, because
I think, you know, when you look at London
in the '60s, you had the Stones hanging out
with the Who, and the Who hanging out with
the Beatles, and there was a scene — and
Hendrix is part of that.
And in the '70s you had all the, you know,
Jackson Browne hanging out with the Eagles,
or whatever it was.
I love those scenes.
I think they happen because of community.
So, when I got to Nashville, the first thing
I wanted to do with this label — with Elektra
and Atlantic — is I wanted to create a community.
I feel like there's strength in numbers.
And I only really sign people who
I want to work with personally,
who I like hanging out with.
[POWERS] You know, it's interesting to think
about YouTube as a place where a lot of amateur
artists are — people are just recording
in their bedroom and having huge, hundreds of — millions
of streams.
[COBB] We found the drummer
for Sturgill off of YouTube.
[POWERS] Huh, really?
[COBB] Yeah, he was looking —
you know, if you ever need a drummer for your band
do a search — drummer of your favorite band cover
— and you'll find him.
He was killer
16 the first time I ever saw him,
and yeah, now he's, yeah — it's a great thing.
I mean, listen, I come from Savannah, Georgia,
and there's not a lot of opportunity musically,
so anything that's gonna give somebody
bigger than their hometown an opportunity to be seen,
I'm for it, you know?
[COBB] I have a trick I play on people a lot.
[CONLEY] Yeah.
Oh.
Yes.
[COBB] And she's heard the trick, because
I think music has been so calculated for so
long, people expect everyone to be perfect
all the time.
And there's a couple songs —
I play "Honky Tonk Women" by the Rolling Stones, if you
count the way that starts
can we, do you have that song cued up?
I'm gonna do it right now.
This is what I play on everybody,
and it messes with their head, and by the end of it they
want to sing out of tune on purpose.
If you can find "Honky Tonk Women"
and the other song is Otis Redding
"I've Been Loving You [Too Long]"
To me, he's the best soul singer of all time,
my favorite singer of all time.
Period.
There's nobody even close.
But you hear him sing and he goes sharp.
Really sharp, and the band is kind of not settled
— the piano's out of tune, the guitar's
rushing — but that's why it comes together,
and it's soul.
I mean, that's what the word soul means.
So, I play those two songs all the time.
OK, let's play a second — can you start again?
Somebody clap.
I want one clapper, you're going to be the clapper.
You're the clapper.
[Clapping] OK, now can you skip to the end?
Hold that time.
Stop the song?
Stop the song real quick?
You keep clapping that time.
Go to the very end of the song,
the last 10 seconds of that song.
We got it.
[Laughter; fast music plays] It's perfect.
[CONLEY] Yeah.
[COBB] It's perfect.
It's a perfect song.
Because when they get excited, they left it.
And it's almost like the car's driven
off the road and ran off a cliff, and you know
that's what music is all about.
It's a feeling and emotion,
and we were talking about
rock 'n' roll earlier; rock 'n' roll came
from the church, but it was the danger
that rock 'n' roll added to the church
that made it so interesting.
So, I'm still a rock 'n' roll guy at my heart,
and those songs, you know, that passion, that power
that looseness is what I like about music.
[CONLEY] On this record, I think probably
the most takes that we did of a song is three.
Maybe. If that.
And it's because Dave wants to capture the rawness.
I can get nitpicky, especially on myself.
But that doesn't allow me to do that.
[COBB] The drummer is super important to me,
so casting is really the drummer for me because
I want to make sure we never lose a vocal.
Because I always think the best vocal
happens when you're tracking live and the singer's
singing with the band.
You can never get it to feel the same way.
So, he's super important — Chris Powell
to my whole success, you know?
[POWERS] They say that the greatest innovations
in music come from mistakes.
Feedback was a mistake, you know?
Everything interesting about sound in the studio
probably was an accident at first.
So, I wonder if you found that as a producer?
[COBB] Uh, you know, I think now
music has a lack of mistakes, and that's why I'm not
really interested in it, you know?
When I listen to any genre of music
circa 1950 to 1980, maybe, there's lots of mistakes,
and I think that's endearing.
I think people attach themselves
to human aspects of music,
and I think that's something
that's lost, so,
to answer your question, yeah, I think mistakes are
what is fun.
I remember being a kid listening to the Police
I was really into the Police, and listening
to — there's a mistake in a punch on
Stewart Copeland's drums — and just obsessing about it
like, "Play it, check it out, check it out."
Nobody else got it.
Like, "That kid is weird."
That's why I had no friends in high school.
But I remember just obsessing about that, you know?
And there's — I can't say this because it's NPR.
But there's a Van Halen song,
"Everybody Wants Some," at the end
David Lee Roth says, "Look,
I'll pay you for it, what the F."
And I thought it was the coolest thing, and it's so quiet.
So those mistakes that get left in
that probably wasn't a mistake,
but I love trying to catch
somebody, you know, a mistake on a record.
I always thought that was my favorite part of records,
in a way
[POWERS] Savannah Conley and Dave Cobb.
Thank you all so much for coming,
being such a great, attentive audience.
I'm Ann Powers, thanks again.
