Today I also listened to an interesting podcast by TapeOp with an interview with Michael Beinhorn, the producer of Herbie Hancock’s Future Shock album (featuring Rockit) and Soundgarden’s seminal album Superunknown. The interview centred around the importance of preproduction, detailing the lack of proper preparation that most artists experience before going into a studio to record an album. It was fascinating to hear how Beinhorn pushed Chris Cornell to work harder and break through his stagnated song writing. Cornell was limiting his imagination to what he thought the band Soundgarden’s style was.
I’m thinking a lot about preproduction these days as I write new songs and dig through my archive to weed out the best compositions to focus on recording. It makes me think that I’d like to have someone to use as a sounding board much like how Michael Beinhorn vetted Soundgarden’s song sketches and only the best were tunes that they collaboratively arranged and structured.
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