CA&E: The industry now grooms talent in a different way.
MF: There's a reason why Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Neil Young, Crosby Stills and Nash, and others still tour and fill out 20,000 seats. And there's a reason that some of these bands get incredible exposure on TV for a short period of time - they have one huge hit album, and they're gone and can't even get arrested, which is very sad. It's a waste of potentially really cool talent. What needs to happen is to get back to a sense of nurturing, of cradling talent and letting people know that you're not just gonna be with them for one album, but you're gonna try to build a career. Do that and the business will start making sense. Because you have 10, 12 albums that people like to buy year after year - that's how these big record companies became so powerful. Because their talent was mostly long-term. Fleetwood Mac, nowadays - I think we would've been thrown off the label.CA&E: What's your opinion about the sound quality of CDs? For instance, Rick Rubin's talked about how sometimes vinyl will sound better than CDs.
MF: My basic sense is that I don't think there's anything we can do about it. But I actually do agree. The mathematics of digital recording, years ago when it came out, the whole digital format - people like Ry Cooder were making direct-to-digital recordings. I didn't like it and I think people are learning to control and make digital sound like analog.
CA&E: How about your studio album?
MF: We do a bit of both. We sometimes record 16-track analog. We've been using a Sony digital machine, no ProTooling yet. Maybe some in the mixing, but we do stuff until we get it right, which is time consuming. Rather than do it and say, hey, it's out of tune, let's fix it later - we don't do that. If we do, it's minimal, during the mixing. If we've missed something we will obviously go in and correct it with ProTools. So we're pretty old-fashioned in the way we approach something. We just keep playing it until we get a great drum track that feels good; a lot of people don't understand that anymore. With the sound, we take a lot of care with mic placement, and room sounds. A lot of people say, that's fine, we'll put a sound on it later. That being said, we're open to new things. I think it's all how you use it. But I agree, there's a warm-ness, I think there's a dynamic in analog and transferring to vinyl. There is a sound that's very musical, that can for sure get lost in digital recording and CDs.
CA&E: Do you think the music industry has deliberately tried to overly compress music so it will sound more pumped up on the radio?
MF: Oh yeah, that's very common. And The Beatles used to do it, but they used to do it in a friendly way. [laughs] It was just different. Again, there's always a good reason for some of these things. And we do that ourselves. But the trouble is if you do it then the radio companies do it - by the time it comes out of your speakers in the car, the thing is slamming. And there are no dynamics.