It may be biologically impossible for Keith Jenkins, Jason Dziak, Mark Kovitya and Tim Minneci to know exactly what it feels like to carry a child to term. But after entering a recording studio, the four musicians who make up The Stepford Five could probably hazard a pretty good guess.
Making an album, like having a baby, has taken the band nine months and demanded a massive amount of time, energy and money. While it's happening, it's all you think about, and when it's finally over, you have to let your little one out to face the world on its own.
The Stepford Five re-teamed with producer Neal Schmitt and returned to Workbook Studio last December to begin work on the follow-up to their 2000 debut album Mesh. The band also gave Columbus Alive a peek at the man behind the curtain, to help demystify the recording process and see just what it takes to get the songs bouncing around local venues and rehearsal spaces onto little silver platters and into listeners' hands.
It's a drizzly Saturday morning in January, and many throughout Columbus, like people around the country, are talking about President Bush's inauguration, scheduled for later that afternoon. The subject even creeps into the back room of Workbook Studio, where Stepford Five drummer Mark Kovitya is having a brunch of Arby's roast beef sandwiches and bassist Tim Minneci eats a more traditional doughnut while they wait for their bandmates to arrive.Neal Schmitt, whose day job as co-proprietor of Workbook Studio doesn't stray too far from his night job as drummer for local power pop outfit Pretty Mighty Mighty, hovers above the massive mixing board, talking to Stepford Five frontman Keith Jenkins, who is on the other side of the foam-covered, soundproof door, singing "If you feel like you're ever getting lonely" over and over into different microphones in an attempt to choose the perfect one.
Soon, guitarist Jason Dziak enters with his recording notes and plops down on the big leather couch, and Schmitt plays back bits of the song Expectations for them to hear. Talk of Bush's rainy day inauguration quickly dissolves in favor of more pressing topics-like the first note of Minneci's bass attack and Jenkins' pronunciation of "without you." "I can hear the spit in your mouth," Schmitt says excitedly into the console.
"That's not spit," Jenkins says flatly into the mic. "It's Jack Daniels."
"That sounds good," Schmitt says, spinning on his wheeled chair to face the other Stepford Fivers, who, after laying down their respective tracks earlier, are hanging out to listen to Jenkins' vocals. "You can hear the spit in his mouth, I love it. It's like Tim says, we want this track to be really personal.""Not that personal!" Minneci objects with a laugh.
Schmitt spins back around and speaks into the board again: "Let's play around with it a bit." Over the next eight months, Schmitt and The Stepford Five would spend a lot of time together in the campus area house-turned-studio, decorated with old arcade games, Derek Hess prints, and some stray Star Wars paraphernalia, playing around a bit with the 10 songs that will be released as The Stepford Five and the Art of Self Defense this fall. All of this meticulous playing around adds up to a lot of work, but it's necessary to make a self-produced, self-released album that the four self-confessed music geeks can be happy with.
It's the sort of work the quartet would do all the time if they could.
Though their first album was released only 18 months ago, and they still have plenty of copies of Mesh to sell (of the 1,000 discs pressed, they've sold about 200 on top of the approximately 450 that were sent to clubs, radio stations, record stores and magazines for review), they all felt like it was high time to head back into the studio.
"You have to go in and make your best effort," Dziak explains, "and make it a stake in the ground to move forward from." Returning to Workbook proved a no-brainer for the band, as they had such a positive experience recording Mesh there. Back in 1999, when Dziak, Jenkins and Minneci first came to Columbus from Bowling Green (and added Kovitya to the rhythm section), they knew they had to head into a professional studio if they wanted to make a decent album, and they chose Workbook because they liked what the studio had done with other young and hungry local bands like Templeton and The Velveteens.
"We wanted to work with musicians," Minneci explained of choosing the studio run by Pretty Mighty Mighty's Jon Chinn and Schmitt. The pair proved so invaluable that Schmitt was given credit as producer, and Chinn lent his vocal talents to a track.
It would have been a disaster if we would have gone to a studio where they just turned the mics on," Dziak said. "Jon and Neal saved us from ourselves a lot."
There're a lot of chances to screw up, given the amount of time spent recording, and the stakes can be high, given the price tag involved.
If time is money, The Stepford Five spent a fortune on their albums even before factoring in the actual cost in dollars. Mesh ran about $5,000 (with $3,000 going toward recording, $200 for mastering, and $1,200 to press the CDs). They're on target to spend about the same for Art of Self Defense, though if that seems high, it's about average for a good album, says Workbook's Chinn.
"It costs about $2,000 to $6,000 to make a pretty tasty record," Chinn said. "It costs money, and it costs time which costs money."
"It's not one huge chunk," Minneci says of the expense. "It's 50 bucks here, 100 bucks there, 50 bucks there. You don't really notice it while you're spending it."
The Stepford Five could have saved money with more of DIY approach, but they wouldn't have been happy with the results. "We're not really a lo-fi, Guided By Voices kind of band," Kovitya said. "Our sound is pretty high end." And they could have easily spent a lot more money by going to a more expensive studio, but even then they may not have been happy. "You could pay $350 an hour and still sound like shit," Kovitya said.
So Workbook became a kind of weekend home for the band, and Schmitt a sort of unofficial band member, as they laid down track after track, then convened behind Schmitt in the back room to listen to playback, tap their pens on their notebooks, throw out suggestions, shoot bad ideas down, give the good ones a try, and take the many necessary baby steps to put an album together.
Kovitya has the most reason to dislike the recording process. He was the one who spent a couple of 10-hour days banging the hell out of his kit. If the amount of time one spends recording determines how much one likes it, then that should explain why Minneci loves it.
He plays the least by far, and thus spends the most time planning out the process and thinking up possible sonic tangents to suggest to the others. "Tim will throw out 100 ideas," Dziak said, "and we'll use like two of them."
For Dziak and Jenkins, the meticulous attention spent on every aspect of recording is a welcome way to focus on what they're doing and how to improve. Obsessing over how "what you" sounds like when sung will do that.
"I get a lot of gratification just out of creating something from nothing," Dziak says of the process. "Like, there was a blank tape there, and now something that we created is on this piece of plastic forever."
Creating something from nothing, and getting that something recorded, may be something of a Herculean labor in itself, but even that process is just the first step in turning songs into CDs.
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