Recording - September 2019 - 40

Vagabon
All The Women In Me

You started talking about recording at home and
unplugging the fridge-how do you mask the sounds of
being in an apartment in the city?
It's really difficult recording in New York City. There are so
many sounds that you almost can't get away from, one of the
major ones being the trains. I feel like I'm at the mercy of the
trains around me. If a train ruins a take, then I have to redo
the take. But because I have lived in my apartment for so long,
I kind of know the best times to record and just make it work.
I'll even track in my closet. But occasionally one slips through
and on some of my vocal tracks you can hear the train in the background, but in the context of the full song, it's not really a problem.

Do you stress about those things, or do you just work
through it and focus on the performance?

The alien sounding thing? That's actually a sample from a
friend of mine who makes house beats and samples. He sent
me a sample pack and I took that sample and reversed it. I just
put it in there for texture and again, John pushed it up in the
mix so you can actually hear it.

Another one of my favorite songs is 'Please Don't Leave
The Table'.
[Laetitia laughing]
You're laughing, is there a story behind this song?
Yeah...so, that song is...

I love that song!

I'm strictly a performance person. If the performance is good,
I'll do whatever it takes to make sure the recording works.

Thank you for saying that. I really thought, this is the song
everyone's going to hate, but it would not leave me alone, so I
had to put on the record.

'Water Me Down' is my current favorite song on the album.
Did John add the vocal reverb in the mix?

I love the ambient abstract sounds, the simple drums,
and especially the trumpet. Is that real?

No, 'Water Me Down' was one of the songs that I mixed all
the stems for before giving it to John, but he still really elevated
it in the mix, especially the drums.
He liked my drum parts and the software hi-hat and he brought
them up in the mix. I printed most of the effects and delays, but
he probably added even more reverb if I think about it.

In the first part of the song it's actually a French horn, and
then later there's an MS-20 synth hook, and there's a trumpet
and a French horn playing along with it.

What did you use for the distant, disintegrated vocal part
on the last chorus?
It's the stock tape delay plugin in Logic. It's something that I
use a lot. It's also on 'Please Don't Leave The Table'.

On 'Wits About You', is that real Rhodes?
On 'Wits About You' I'm still using the Minilogue. Most of the
synth tracks on the record are from that. You can do so many
things with the Minilogue, it's kind of insane.

'Wits About You' is very much like a dreamscape,
especially the cool backwards synth washes, so is that
the Minilogue too?
40 RECORDING September 2019

And were those real or were they samples?
The French horn was played by my friend Sasami and the
trumpet was played by Melina, who is in the band Jay Som.

I love the big reverb that blankets the whole song and
then collapses into this dry, up-close drum machine
rhythm.
That drum rhythm was taken from a nine-minute track that
I made using a friend's handmade modular drum synth. I
chopped it up into about 47 drum loops, and then I chose the
ones for this song.
The whole song was a collage piece. I just kept tracking on
it for like a year. Eventually I told myself I had to stop. I knew
I wanted to have vocals on it, and I wanted to have a hornbased hook like Beyoncé used on 'Dangerously in Love'.

Recording - September 2019

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