Artists don’t always know how to articulate themselves.

Shane recounts the making of a visionary long play album that didn’t click for him until the mix.

There was one particular record in that canon, there was a record called “A Collision” which for me was kind of the apex, of that time. I know Crowder's doing great stuff now but for the David Crowder Band time that was kind of the apex. It was a really weird thing to record because Crowder in his way of doing things was like, “okay so today we're going to record the guy coming down the stairs, and then later we're going to record the guy going up the stairs.” 

Then he would talk about something else and I'd be like, “Hey, I'm sorry man, what?”

“You know so the guy's going to go up, and then you know something,” and then we'd go on to something else. 

What I realized after the mix was that the whole record, which was a long play, for iTunes they ended up dividing it, I think into four records, but in his head it was a long play...that was in his head from conception, and he was never very good at sitting me down and going, “Okay dullard, here's what I'm saying. The record's going to start with this song, and it's going to end with this song. At some point you're going to hear the guy walking up the stairs, and then the hoedown is going to be happening upstairs when he gets to the top of the stairs, and then we're going to open the filter up.” That was all in his head, but it never actually made it out of his mouth for me to understand what we were doing, until the mix. Then I was like, oh dude, all you had to say was this and I would have totally known what we were doing.

It was collaborative, in that we all weighed in on sounds. But those records were really special because they were already done in his head.

You tracked it as well as mixed it? 

The early stuff I did. The first record was co-produced by a guy named Brent Milligan, “Can You Hear Us.” Then the next one they mostly self-produced and then from then on they mostly self-produced.