Shawn Everett, by Jeff Kite

Pitchfork: Adam Granduciel from the War on Drugs was telling me how he got to a point where he was staring at a speaker to see whether a kick drum was too loud. What was it like working with him?

Shawn Everett: He’s obsessed about recording way more than I am [laughs]. He knows every piece of gear, what everything does, like it’s his favorite thing. If you just bring out a piece of gear, it will inspire him so much that he’ll almost think of a whole other section of a song.

Any examples? It sounds like you guys did some kind of pitch-shifting on the vocal on “Holding On.”

Oh yeah! That’s weirdly what I was going to bring up. Several years ago, I was doing a record with Julian Casablancas. He’d said he wanted the record to be like a cassette tape from the ’80s in a gutter in New York, but found in the future. We had a recording space above the Strand Book Store in New York, and one night Peter Hook, the bass player for Joy Division, was down there doing a reading. I saw it and started reading his book, and there was all this stuff about that producer Martin Hannett. He would use insane techniques, like putting the band on the roof, and he was at the forefront all the digital equipment that you could use creatively. So I got kind of obsessed with this delay he was using. I found a guy in Manhattan who had one and he sold it to me.

Finally I was doing the War on Drugs record. Adam has so much gear and we were working in the best studios all over L.A. I don’t even have that much gear, but we’d come to my studio specifically so we could play with that delay. One day he wanted to do something different with his vocal at the end of that song. He had this melody that dropped down, and we figured out instead of him singing all those drops, he could just sing one note, and then I could program each drop with the delay. So it sounds like a futuristic effect, but it could easily have been done on a ’70s record, because that’s when the delay came from.

You worked with Grizzly Bear on their new album. Chris Taylor, who’s in the band and produced the record, also seems to think like an engineer.