Recently I was interviewing Converge’s Kurt Ballou [a storied producer in his own right] and he was telling me about a friend of his who’s a slave to the major labels and is on the phone with them every day talking about songs. And that friend is you.
Right, well, that’s one man’s perspective. It’s funny because he was at my studio in Maryland the day Panic! went Gold, and he just saw me on the phone and heard one of the conversations and it couldn’t have been further from the truth. I was doing Boys Like Girls at the time and the people who were involved in that record, we were all obsessed with it and it was more like discussions and positive communication than slave labor. I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve had to make music that sucked because somebody told me to.

And you’ve never felt like you’re compromising your own integrity or the integrity of the band?
I mean, I can’t think of one. It’s possible, I’m sure. I’m sure it’s possible in the situations that I’m in for me to get bullied, I just never let it happen. It’s just about reading the situations. It’s about knowing when to say yes, and knowing when to say no. I’ve never said no to someone and had them be like, “No, you’re going to do it my way.” I guess I’m the producer so they kind of inherently trust that I know what I’m talking about. So, every time I’ve put my foot down I’ve won, it would be heartbreaking to lose one of those, so I’ll let you know how that feels.

I wonder if that would change your perspective on working with so many people.
I’m sure it would. The funny thing is, I talk about how it’s a big team and how I need to make more people happy, but at the end of the day, everybody just wants the band to be happy, myself included. If the band is feeling it, and as long as it’s not totally off the center and totally inconsistent with the label’s vision, I find that things usually really click. I know with Panic, we were all just workin’ our asses off trying to help the band realize their vision. If you listen to the record, there’s two sides to the record, it travels, there’s a lot of different dimensions to it. They thought about that. The band is brilliant. We talked about that a lot during preproduction, trying to figure out – a) how are we going to do this? b) how are we going to pull it off for little or no money? and c) how are we going to pull it off on time? They were going on tour with Fall Out Boy and if we had missed our mastering date or pushed it back even a day we would have missed our released date and not had the record out for that tour. There was a lot of pressure on those 17, 18-year-old kids, but at the end of the day, they just wanted the record to be a certain way and we pulled it off…it was hairy, but we pulled it off.

Most of your releases have been within a certain genre. Do you see yourself branching out at all in the future?
It’s tough because I’m doing really well in this genre and I love this genre. It’s the music that I grew up playing. At the same time though, I don’t know how long that kind of lasts and there’s a lot of different kinds of music that I’m into, a lot of electronic stuff and singer/songwriter stuff. I’ve been talking to my manager about that a lot. It’s a good time, since I’m sort of making money off of royalties, it’s a good time for me to discover somebody and reach out and find new talent. So, it’s on my brain in terms of, how am I going to surpass this genre and not fade away with it? But it’s also tough because I’m getting great opportunities to do great records within the genre. I’ve only been doing this for four and a half years and it’s been an interesting road, and it’s all been kind of quick, so, I don’t know where that’ll take me. 

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