If you’re a songwriter or producer, check out this clip. ZZ Ward says something that every artist should be saying about you:
He just knows how to take his time with crafting a song. He doesn’t make it something completely different from what I came in with… what I wrote.
Pretty clear how comfortable ZZ feels in that studio space. You can hear it in her voice.
This actually reminded me of a phone call I got one afternoon from a country artist I’d recently written songs with. We’d recorded the demos in the tiny Phoenix apartment I was living in at the time.
Today, she was calling me from a multimillion-dollar studio.
“Seven, what are you doing right now?” she said, sounding a little nervous and slightly frustrated. She was in the A room with three top-flight musicians and a platinum producer-engineer. “Can you come down?” she continued, “I just need you here.”
When I arrived, she strangle-hugged me like I was a firefighter who’d just axed through the door. She was pretty ready to leave, but there was already so much time and money on the line, and her songs were not done.
Long story short, we sat, talked a bit, she relaxed, went back into the booth and (with a little coaching from me) proceeded to drop the sweetest vocal anyone had heard all day. Everyone seemed surprised.
Don’t get me wrong, the producer she had was a consummate pro. He just didn’t know her.
Which brings me to another quote from the video above:
I love working with Neff-U because he’s my friend, for one, so we have a good time together . . .
—ZZ Ward
When you get to know, really know an artist, you start to gain a sense for what kind of atmosphere he or she needs in order to find his or her best performance.
It’s a trust thing, and it often requires a bit of a time investment.
How much time have you taken with your artist prior to the recording date? Have you ever grabbed beers, or a bite with them?
How much listening to them have you done? Not just to their music. To them.