Early James

Early James and Easy Eye Sound

Early James recorded his first two Easy Eye Sound albums, Singing For My Supper (2020) and Strange Time To Be Alive (2022), at the studio inside the vaunted label's Nashville headquarters. But for James' third release, Medium Raw, producer and Easy Eye Sound label head Dan Auerbach envisioned something quite different for the Alabama-bred singer-songwriter-guitarist's rawboned, sometimes scarifying music.

The Recording Experience

Day of the first session, I had my GPS routed to Easy Eye, James recalls. We ran into some traffic, and I texted [engineer M.] Allen [Parker] Hey man, sorry, we're gonna be about 15 minutes late. And he said, It's OK, we're still getting set up at the house. And I was like, What house? We're recording at this house, it's really cool. It was news to me! It felt unusual in the moment, which I think makes you play the songs differently. But I'm really happy with and proud of the results.

I wanted to try to find that power of when I first saw him, when it was just him and his guitar, Auerbach explains. After working with him a couple of times in the studio, I felt like I wasn't going to be able to do it in the same kind of way. The comforts and luxuries of the studio, where you're able to hear everything and make adjustments and changes, wasn't right for this project.

Influences and Location

Some of my favorite albums are those Arhoolie records produced by Chris Strachwitz that were recorded in houses, by Fred McDowell and Lightnin' Hopkins. I felt like we might get better results if we did it in a house. The house in question, known as Honky Chateau, was an old Nashville property owned by photographer and artist Buddy Jackson. It's a house with a lot of character, Auerbach says. I've always loved it. I always felt inspired when I was there. I knew it would be a fun place to do something. It's over a hundred years old. It's got the old plaster on the walls, plaster ceilings, old wallpaper. There are big oak floors and an oak stairwell. The first floor has twelve-and-a-half-foot ceilings. It's pretty awesome. But it's not a recording studio by any means.

Setting Up the Space

We had to drag all the gear in there. We set the little mixing console upstairs - this crazy, wild old 50s Universal Audio tube console that I'd just gotten and fixed up, which was built by FAME Studios' Rick Hall for his studio in Memphis - in a spare bedroom, and we ran the wires down the stairs. We set up James and everyone in separate little rooms downstairs. James' little Princeton amp was right behind him, there were no baffles or anything, and so when he was soloing it was all bleeding into his vocal mic. Adrian Marmolejo, James' bassist since the beginning, was in the hallway, peeking around the corner. We had these beautiful microphones sucking up the soul of the house. It sounded fucking amazing. When you have headphones on, you can hear that room. You can even see the room when you close your eyes.

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