Franklin-Tennessee-based band The FBR (named after Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat”) released their debut album, Ghost, on January 19th. It builds on many years of songwriting separately and together, but also reflects a big leap forward when Malarie McConaha (lead vocals, electric guitar) and Tim Hunter (acoustic guitar, harmonica) realized that bringing their live band into the studio would invigorate the process. While recorded mostly live, the focused feel to the songwriting and orchestration suggests a creative breakthrough for The FBR.
That continued to be their experience when they worked with Grammy-winning producer Jim Scott (Tom Petty, Dixie Chicks, Tedeschi Trucks Band) for the mixing of the album, transferring the files from digital to analog tape and bolstering the sound. I spoke with Malarie McConaha and Tim Hunter about their discoveries taking the bull by the horns and becoming self-motivated as the driving force behind Ghosts, maintaining creative control over their work while opening themselves up to new and exciting collaborative experiences.
Hannah Means-Shannon: With a debut album, I know that the songwriting often goes back across a longer period of time. Is there a mix of writing periods on Ghost?
Malarie McConaha: A couple of them, like “Set the Anchors” and “Empty Room” popped up in the past couple of years, that we co-wrote, but there are songs on the album going back eight years.
Tim Hunter: If you listen to “Before I Drown”, I wrote probably eight or nine years ago. “Independence Day” is older. I have at least a hundred plus songs that I’ve never recorded that pretty much fit what we’re doing and she and I have been writing together that elevates what we’re doing. This album is definitely a labor of love. We’re really excited about our next album, the second one, too, and we’ve already got it listed out. It’s got a theme for it, and though we love the first album, the second album’s going to blow the first one away!
I think there’s a lot that’s difficult about a debut album, and one of those things is that there’s so much choice to make, usually, about what to include. It can be a lot of ground-breaking to decide what it’s going to be. But once you’ve established all these working methods, I can see that paving the way for a second album more easily.
Malarie: Absolutely. If anything, this was a really good learning experience for us. Both of us have worked in music but never together bringing a project to life. A lot of that is discovering what works for us, as a process. Our band was absolutely instrumental in getting this done. Our first couple songs took years because we were bringing in musicians and piecing them together. That model was just taking too long. We finally found a great core group of guys who were playing live with us, and when we were rehearsing, we said to each other, “Why don’t we just take these guys into the studio and cut this live?” We just overdubbed vocals, and it changed the game. The band got the sound.
Tim: Once we got into the studio, they knew the songs. Since they knew the songs, we had some ideas of what we wanted to do from a Production standpoint, and we could push them because of our relationship. All of our musicians are also creative, and work on other projects, so they could bring that in as well. Also, all of them have ownership of the project with us, and they want to see it succeed and be great. That was a really cool thing!
I appreciate you sharing that, because there’s so much choice out there about how to set up a project that others can learn from your decisions here. It’s certainly a big deal to find those relationships. But also, it’s impressive that this album was recorded live because it feels very intentional and focused.
Malarie: We had a couple of the members, like the drummer Mike, who were able to do rehearsals with us, but he only had a couple before he came into the studio. He’s a big advocate of the band, so that enthusiasm helped. Three of the musicians are actually still in our band, Evan, Mike, and Brandon. The bass player we had couldn’t make it to the studio, so we pulled a friend in. We all had three rehearsals and that creative, collaborative process started. We Produced the rest of the album, too. Our good friend Kevin Willard engineered and he helped us step into that role as Producers with the band. That really changed the game, too. Instead of us sitting at the back of the room at the board with the Producer telling people what to do, with us feeling like kids who shouldn’t touch anything, instead we were immersed in our songs. We were in there making it happen. Now everybody’s so excited for future recording.
Tim: If you have the right group of people, you can make your ideas come to life. I’ve recorded some in Nashville in the past, and not really had any control. What came out was completely different than what I had in mind, but that’s the Nashville process. This is different. It’s having musicians with you who are willing to push the envelope.
Malarie: It’s also about having musicians who are willing to push you, too. If someone says, “I think we should try this”, it’s about being able to say, “Okay, let’s try it.” That’s one thing that we always want to retain in the studio. We don’t feel that our ideas are the top-dog ideas, and we want to be approachable with our band. I think that really shines through on the tracks.
I notice that you all don’t always use typical song structure, but feel more experimental, trusting the audience to follow where you’re going. I think that adds to the drama of the stories that you’re telling.
Malarie: That’s one thing that I’ve always loved about Tim’s songwriting and it’s pushed me, as a writer. When I moved to Nashville, I didn’t know I was going to be in a band, so I’m learning. Even Tim’s writing with time signatures, there are these weird beats, like in “Before I Drown.” When we were recording that, we were saying, “That’s not technically correct. But rules in music were made to be broken.”
Tim: That’s why they call it music “theory”.
Malarie: Things don’t have to follow a specific structure. I love a solid structured song, but I think that it makes music more interesting when it is allowed to be completely out-there.
I should mention that there are traditional elements in a lot of your songs, which I appreciate too, but I can see how having a mix of songs with different structures can add to variety on an album, or even in a live show.
Tim: To your point, my Dad is a minister, so a lot of the music that I grew up with was a cappella, and the old Gospel stuff. They wrote everything in “verse, chorus, verse chorus,” in a very structured way. When I first started writing, when I was eight years old, that was the way that I wrote everything. I still write some like that, but as I got older, I got into bridges and repeating. In “Before I Drown”, there’s a non-repeating ending, which was Matt’s idea.
Malarie: That was a collaborative process, where Matt, the Producer on the song, had an idea, that ended up building new things.
Tim: I’ve learned things over the years, like that experimentation. Another thing is that I’ve become more genre-fluid. I’ll write Irish-sounding songs. We’ve got one song like that on the album, “Skies of Donegal Blue,” and we’ve got another one that’s complete Irish that’ll be on the next album.
Malarie: The sound is about whatever the story is telling us. That’s one thing that we really agree on, that we are not going to pigeon-hole ourselves. I think that a lot of artists do that to themselves, then album two, three, and four feel like a chore. I want to keep the experience fresh for us. This is not about finding what works and driving it to death in an industry-like way.
For this album, we didn’t even know the album was going to be called Ghosts, actually. We had all the songs recorded and up on the wall, ready to go to mix with Jim. We had tossed names around, but when I looked at the themes of the songs together, I said, “We need to call this album Ghost because there’s so much haunting.” It just felt right. The way that we’re working on the second album is different because of that. Now we’re asking, “What themes fit with this album and why? What stories are we trying to tell here?”
Tim: I love that she does that. She likes to make a theme out of everything and it helps a lot. If you see the “Empty Room” video, you’ll see that.
I was going to mention that video because you list it as a lyric video, but it really pushes that category to nearly a live video. You do have existing footage used for a lot of it, but because of the way it’s cut together, it’s really thematic.
Tim: Malarie did that all. We shot that video on inspiration drives. We did a little bit of footage in an old church that we found. The smokestacks were something we saw.
Malarie: I wanted everything to feel like isolation throughout. Sometimes lyric videos can turn out kind of cheesy, but I wanted it to feel like even the font was a scribbled letter you might write to somebody, upset. I want people to feel what I’m seeing in my head when I hear the song, so I was grateful I was able to take a shot at making the video. I think we’re going to keep trying to do some of that ourselves.
I meant to ask, how did you decide to do this with Jim Scott, where you took the digital recordings and ran them to analog tape? I think that really affects the sound and I noticed it particularly in a few places.
Malarie: A couple of the things we’d recorded, like the drums on “Rain On”, were done on tape. We were dipping our toes in that because we both love it. It does create a more raw, realistic sound. When we went in the studio with a full band, that naturally captured something different. For most of the songs, we didn’t do it to a click, which was scary at first. We were at a local music watering hole, and we were talking with Ricky Nelson’s son, Matt Nelson, who had heard us play that night, and he said he’d find the right person to mix the album. He said, “His name is Jim Scott. You need to work with him. Here’s his number.” I think I gave it a week or two, and when I looked him up, I was terrified to call him. But I did. We sent him some tracks, and a day later, he texted us and said our work was fresh, brave, and out there, that he would love to mix the album.
We already knew a little bit about his process, of pulling everything onto the Neve [console] and it being like a live performance mix. Once it’s done, it’s done. He told us, “If you want to go back and turn up that acoustic guitar in two weeks, we’d have to start the mix from scratch.” After so much time of working on this album, having too many decisions to make in terms of tweaking things, this was an opportunity for us to just listen and make those final decisions. In seven twelve-hour days, we had an album. We added harmonica and percussion parts. Tim got to record through a Tom Petty mic, which was nuts!
Tim: It was the same one that was used for Wildflowers!
Malarie: Jim just helped us push our boundaries. We would trust him to Produce our next record and we’re strongly considering taking our band out there to work with him. He Produced “Skies of Donegal Blue.”
Tim: In March, we had these files and a hard drive, and we hooked up a 37-foot camper, and we drove to California from Nashville. We took our dog. It was a big road-trip adventure, stopping at landmarks, like the Grand Canyon. Once we got there, we got really focused. It was awesome to work in this incredible creative space.
