Nothing Deep To Say S2E2 - Raybody Breaks Down Her Lush Chamber Pop Single “Puddle”
Katy Rea breaks down her new song "Puddle", her debut under the stage name Raybody
The Texan-born musician Katy Rea makes gorgeously written and produced music under the name Raybody. Her latest song, “Puddle”, is out today, her first under the new stage name. She says about the song:
I don't write a ton of love songs, but this is essentially a love song. This is so cheesy, but my partner at the time was showing me this recording (“Peace on Earth” by John Coltrane), and we were sitting in traffic, and it just moved him so much that he started crying. It was such a beautiful moment. But our surroundings were so chaotic, and people were honking everywhere. It’s like everything slows down when you're listening to something that’s that beautiful, even when you're in the midst of something totally crazy, which is this bigger metaphor for living in New York.
Her current band is made up of jazz-trained musicians, and the song appropriately sounds more lush than anything she’s done previously, with extreme wide-panning and doubled/tripled vocal melodies. Katy Rea runs Black Lodge Recording in Brooklyn with Andrew Forman and Vishal Nayak, and you can hear that experience in the song itself.
There are woodwinds, strings, and dissonant harmonies, not quite cacophonic but complementing the eye-of-the-storm narrative of finding beauty in chaos. Like Weyes Blood and Aldous Harding, it’s indebted to 70s production, but certain production flourishes we go into give the track a modern edge.
Obviously, I’m sympathetic to anyone who changes their stage name to better reflect their identity (as someone starting the process of getting her actual name changed today!), but it’s the song that caught my ear, and the song we’re here to talk about today. Read on and learn more about Rea's journey into production.
Can you talk about ditching Katy Rea for Raybody?
I was totally fine with Katy Rea. I think as I grew older and became more myself, I felt like Katy Rea just fit like my young personality, and I wanted something with a little more power and strength to it. It's a little bit cheesy, but I get very nervous when I perform. And I've had to push through it. There's something about reminding myself to be in my body and feel a little bit stronger and on the earth that helps me.
With musicians where the stage name is different from the name they go by in everyday life, there's a character they get to play. I like that you’re saying the opposite, that it kind of helps you be more you.
I never really liked playing a character on stage, but there's something I need in finding, like the strongest part of myself, which sometimes I forget about because I'm so nervous, so I revert back to a younger part of myself that’s less grounded, a little more feminine and girly? And “Katy Rea” feels so Southern – I still go by that with my friends, obviously, but I just needed something to propel me into the next stage of making things and being less scared to make things.
How did you get into engineering and production?
I got into mixing and engineering during lockdown. Not that long ago, I made my first album, The Urge That Saves You at Figure 8 Recording. Like many musicians, I just showed up and played, and we did the thing live, and all the boys were back there in the room talking about the engineering and mixing choices. I just wanted to know more. I'm a bit of a control freak, and I wanted to know at least what's going into making these choices.” So I took on mixing that project. The pandemic hit right after we recorded it, and I decided I wanted to mix it; I ended up mixing it with a good friend of mine, Spencer Murphy, who knew what he was doing, so I could learn during the process of it. It took forever to mix, because I was really learning how to do it, and we were all working together.
Can you talk about Black Lodge?
Andrew Forman and I were really lucky to know Vishal, who also works at Figure 8, but he's a bit older, and he saved up all this gear, so it's like 95% his gear. Nate Mendelsohn (of Market) recorded that first record and did an awesome job.
Was this mixed in the box or did you use the gear at Black Lodge?
I started with a lot of outboard stuff, just running the drums through some outboard gear and into a tape machine. The very first studio I recorded out of was Philip Weinrobe’s [Hannah edit: hey, he mixed the Gordi song I just covered!], and I was in contact with him a lot. I took his class at School of Song, and this was the first song where I approached it in a more fun way, instead of trying to be technical.
I feel like if you’re new to mixing, you have to prove yourself and prove you can be nerdy, especially if you’re also a woman.
I was trying so hard to make super smart, correct choices, which is super boring and I couldn’t get into it. I still go “I want this kick to sound good, I want to carve out these frequencies”, but I’d rather look at it from a storytelling perspective, which Phil does, and it helped me to find myself and my process.
I didn’t realize there was a School of Song class for mixing! Have you done any other ones for songwriting?
I haven’t. I would like to, but I’m very protective of that. I know it can only make you better, but I still have a wall up about it. I feel like with songwriting, I want to learn everything myself.
Can you talk more about that?
Lyrics are my favorite thing ever. I think the reason I got into music at all is just because I like writing words. There's mixing and there's production, but I would die happy if somebody took that all away and was like, all you can do is just write words down. I would sing them acapella. I don't care. That's why it's really important to me that, over everything else, like, the lyrics are clear. I'm like a grandma. I like to hear the words. I grew up listening to poet folk-rock, it’s cliche but I really do like Dylan and Leonard Cohen. The first time I heard Weyes Blood I was really inspired because I felt like she was creating this world of her own, and that’s why I’m inspired to mix as well, because you can do a lot in that area.
BEAUTY IN THE BREAKDOWN:
Raybody - Puddle (Mixed by Katy Rea and Jim Campo with additional mixing from Andrew Forman, mastered by Josh Bonati)
DRUMS:
One thing to note is that I didn’t mix it here in my room, I mixed it at the studio, so things are going to sound different. I ended up recording the drums and some of the lead guitar at Jim Campo’s studio in Austin, then I came back and did the rest at his studio. He’s such a good engineer and musician, I think we were just using SM57s and normal shit to record it. The “new drums” track is just the tape bounce I did because I muted or took out all the old drums, and then threw them through the Tascam 48 tape machine and printed them.
I like to reverse drums, I do it too much - honestly, I did it a few times in the last EP I put out too. It’s a quick, easy trick that give you a little pop of something, very studio-as-an-instrument.
Drums, I think, are the hardest part of mixing. I struggle a lot with it, and that's why I don't do anything on my own. For this one I did 90% and then I took it to Andrew and Jim, and we were like, “what else needs to happen here”. I think that's pretty important, because it's easy to lose perspective on your own stuff. I’m using the Acustica Gainstation for distortion on the second verse, which adds a ton of saturation and overall ‘vibe’. I don’t have a control surface, so I’m just doing it by hand. There’s some reverb I’m pulling up too.
WOODWINDS (!):
I always forget I have the bass clarinet, because it was so fast. But it changed the whole song, and honestly it sounds so different without it. Once you spend so much time on something, you kind of black it out afterwards. It’s an intense process of loving what you’re doing, hating what you’re doing, loving what you’re doing, and then you completely just forget everything.
We had the woodwinds going through a pedal at Black Lodge, then we had a tape bounce through the Tascam. We recorded it with a Ribbon mic, maybe the Coles 4038. There’s just some layers going on here, which I think was pretty fun. The one thing I’m doing better these days is labeling. We were working so fast and staying in the moment that I didn’t label things that well.
When I do mix, I don’t want to know what mics I was using, because I don't want to have any sort of bias toward it to be like, Oh, this was the fanciest mic, so I want to pull this mic up. I just want to, like, use my ears, like, Oh, I just like this sound better versus this sound, for sure, and it might be the cheapest sound or the dumbest sound.
STRINGS:
That was a Mellotron moment when I recorded it initially. There’s still a mellotron in here because I liked the mandolin sound, so that’s in there with the real strings. They’re going through an echo and some reverb. I’m sending the strings to a Brauer Motion and it creates this movement that I just love. I sent all the other reverbs to the Brauer Motion, the strings are sort of whirling around you, and should feel pretty wide.
VOCALS:
I doubled the vocals, and then it tripled in some moments which is fun. I’m pro-doubling. I wasn’t before; didn’t have anything against it, but now I think, depending on the song, it can add a lot. The thing is with vocals, I’m really not efficient, and I’m trying to get more efficient. The way I do this shit is just smoke some weed and try a million things, then delete stuff that I don’t like.
For the main vocal, I used the Bock 195, and for the backing vocals, I used the AKAI ADM-5s, and I didn’t have to mix them that much because they already sound kinda fucked up. I love those mics, they’re super affordable. I’m sending it to an echo, and that’s being sent to the Brauer Motion track.
GUITAR:
There's some flange going on, there's saturation, there's an echo. I listen back and I’m like this seems a little harsh for my liking, because it was recorded on a nylon which can be difficult, and we did it pretty quickly, but now I like whenever it has a sound I’m not used to. I would rather have something be strange and not quite fit in than sound like everything else, but I’m still not sure. They’re going to the UAD Galaxy Tape Echo emulation, the Swing Tone preset on EchoBoy, and Capitol Chambers.
The lead guitar line, which I really love, was on the spot by Jim. I think he did it in like one take, maybe two. So it wasn't quite thought out. It was just in the moment he felt good about it, and I liked it too. And then the rest, everything else was thought out a little bit more than that, like the woodwind, it sounded like such an indie rock song before the strings and before the clarinet came in, in a way that was not feeling quite me.
Is that related to why you picked Raybody?
A little bit, I think, in finding what my sound is. I think it'll always be changing. But I've never liked things that just sound like straight indie rock, I like stuff that has a little romantic, Disney-esque drama popping into it. That's in almost everything I've done, but I'm hoping to get deeper in that. I love creating little moments, almost like characters coming in and out of a song.
MIX BUS:
Everything I’m doing on the mix bus is very tiny moves, even though it seems like there’s a lot on here. There’s an “ALL MUSIC” bus and a PRINT bus, everything goes to the All Music bus except the vocals. That’s a pretty cool move that I just learned recently, and I think the first time was on this song.
I turned off the limiter before I sent it to Josh Bonati. I didn't want it to feel like a different song, it just felt louder and beefier – before when I've sent songs to get mastered, I've thought oh, I didn't do that good of a job mixing it because it sounds vastly different. But mixing is one of those things I think where you can't wait to put stuff out to be a great mixer, you just have to keep moving because you only get better on the next song.
Thanks for reading! Be sure to subscribe, we have interviews with Lutalo, Piglet, and more in the pipeline!
