Making a good impression is really important.
After spending time around Charlie Peacock as an assistant, Shane got his first engineering credit by being entrusted with the overdubs for a record after the label made a budgetary mistake.
The first record was a producer by the name of Charlie Peacock who did The Civil Wars and all kinds of great stuff. The first record that he did at his new studio, called The Art House, was Tom Laune engineering and me assisting. We ended up doing a couple of records there for Charlie as that team. Charlie liked how I would do anything, whatever needed to be done I’d do.
The next record that was made by that first artist came up and the label pushed Charlie to use a big name engineer. So we ended up hiring a guy by the name of Elliot Shiner to engineer the next record. Elliott had done Steely Dan and Donald Fagan's solo stuff. The Eagles had gotten back together and then did a live record called “Hell Freezes Over” because they had said they'd never get back together unless hell froze over. So Elliot came in as the tracking first engineer on that, and most of the budget was shot hiring the big name guy. The label pushed for the hiring of a big recording studio engineer but didn't necessarily adjust the numbers so a lot of Charlie's budget was gone.
So he pulled me aside and asked would I be interested in being the overdub guy on this record. Sure! So he didn't pay me much more than what my assistant fee would have been, but I got to be a first recording engineer on a good bulk of this record. Thus began a multi-year relationship working for Charlie as kind of his first call guy. Eventually that moved into mixing some stuff that wasn't necessarily the stuff that he had to use somebody else to mix on. He ended up starting a small label and I was around during that so I got to work on some of the records for that.
Switchfoot was one of the signings to that label, that's when they got started. I got to do their very first record when the bass player was still in high school, Jon was 18, and Chad was in college. So that was part of that relationship, and then that label got sold and eventually I moved on to other things because a couple of records that I got to do for Charlie, although they weren't commercial successes, some people liked how they sounded. Eventually I started getting called to mix for other people and the recording engineer for other people and ended up going down a mix path because of it.