But that was an hour ago. Right now, seated in a swivel chair in front of his mixing board, a pencil tucked behind his ear and his foot tapping like an anxious schoolboy's, Espinoza is every inch the producer. He's in the zone, managing his handful of young interns with a gentle touch. Spinning in his chair, he grabs a CD and throws it on the control room's warm, ultra-high-fidelity system.
As the opening plucked bass notes of Interpol's "The New" smother the studio, the business of plugging and unplugging, cueing and adjusting, takes on a kind of rhythm, like a movie montage. This is Espinoza's own mix CD; in addition to Interpol it includes tracks by Swallow, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and My Bloody Valentine. Espinoza is big into '80s shoegazer stuff.
James Sanders
He may not look it, but Tony Espinoza is a musician at
heart.
James Sanders
Espinoza manning the boards.
Related Content
More About
"I'm trying to get my ears turned on. ... There's different kinds of listening. There's listening on an analytic level," he explains, referring to our earlier conversation, "and there's listening on an emotional level."
For the rest of the day, he'll be doing a lot of the latter.
"What's this song about?" Espinoza asks the members of Elephone.
"That's hard to say," responds guitarist Terry Ashkinos.
"That's what every band says," the producer counters. Eventually Espinoza gets it out of them.
"We're trying to break down the routine of the everyday. This is a haunting song," says guitarist/keyboardist Maurie Skinfull.
"Haunting, that helps."
After 20 minutes of conversation, Espinoza sends the band into the studio. He has stuck two pieces of tape on the mixing console in front of him, one with the word "haunting" written on it, the other with the phrase "darkness before the dawn, but the dawn might not come." It takes band and producer seven more hours of subtly tweaking each element, but eventually they get the song right: It sounds urgent, a little desperate, and, yes, haunting.
Before Elephone found its way to Soundworks, the group was working at Plant Studios, but ran out of money and time. When Elephone's drummer, Gavin Haag, an intern at Soundworks, pleaded the band's case to his boss, Espinoza took the fivesome in, offering them his staff, his producing abilities, and the full use of Studio A. This kind of package anywhere else would cost well over $2,000 a day; Elephone booked its day for a couple hundred.
"He's essentially taking major-label culture and using it to finance independent acts," says Skinfull. "[Yesterday] they had Vanessa Carlton in here with Stephan Jenkins [of Third Eye Blind] producing parts of her new record. He's not going to make money off bands that he really values; he's going to make money off bands that are already established, that don't really have a local following."
Adds vocalist Ryan Lambert, imitating someone divvying up a pile of money, "He's kind of doing this: 'Thank you very much, and put it over here.'"
In addition, according to the band members, Espinoza seemed genuinely invested in their music and eager to help them succeed.
"Tony will work with you with the project," Ashkinos says, "whereas the Plant is just about how many hours are you going to work, then pay by the hour. ... When we met Tony and we talked to him, he was instantly inspiring, because he's interested in the songs and the band, not just the recording. He wants to know what the songs are trying to translate. He came to our show when we played live. We got a lot more artistic vision out of him than we got out of the first guy we were working with."
"There's the luxury of, Tony's already made his money," Ashkinos continues. "So he can do it for the sake of the music and the art. Whereas most studios are barely keeping the bills together, and you feel that when you walk in the door."
Is it crazy to imagine a world where the Billboard charts are dominated by bands instead of products? Crazy to imagine that popular music could once again be dominated by albums instead of singles? Perhaps it is, but then again, it was once crazy to imagine the Internet. Espinoza brings to his current endeavor the same blind optimism he had for the Net, an attitude that, as he puts it, "all the stuff that we were building was going to change the world." For there to be a chance in hell of the art and commerce sides of the music biz overcoming their seemingly irreconcilable differences, a similar kind of optimism will have to grow and spread. Espinoza has planted one of the first seeds.
"This isn't really an institution, and this isn't a company," he says. "It's me. The stuff that it represents is what's in my heart. And I'm just trying my best to keep all those things honest and put all those things out there, because I believe that when you put your heart out there, and engage the world with it, that's when shit happens. ... I kind of drank the Kool-Aid pretty early on in terms of believing that dreams come true and people can make things happen. So I've never had any problem with taking those kinds of leaps of faith."
