“The current trendy thing is compression. Compression by the ton, especially if it comes from a tube limiter. Wow. It doesn’t matter how awful the recording is, as long as it goes through a tube limiter, somebody will claim it sounds “warm,” or maybe even “punchy.” They might even compare it to the Beatles. I want to find the guy that invented compression and tear his liver out. I hate it. It makes everything sound like a beer commercial.”
-Steve Albini, “The Problem with Music”
I decided not to write about Steve Albini right after his passing on May 7, especially after seeing so many publications and musicians post moving tributes to him. Everyone else from Dave Grohl to Don Pyle of Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, who actually knew Albini, and countless fans and journalists, were ready with thoughts and anecdotes. I didn’t, and was perfectly happy to just appreciate those often touching, funny stories about the preeminent recording engineer (as he preferred to be called) of the underground.
It’s not that I don’t admire his work - he’s produced so many records that have meant so much to me, and his first band, Big Black, was a revelation upon first discovering them in Michael Azerad’s 80’s indie rock bible Our Band Could Be Your Life and realizing they had influenced the whole industrial rock sound I was obsessed with in my teens - but my interaction with his work is mostly based on his work as a producer. I never really cared for his long-running band Shellac, and unfortunately didn’t hear Big Black at the appropriate adolescent age where that kind of misanthropy appealed to me, but he recorded some of the most important albums of my life.
The more I think about it, his influence is all over my life - Nirvana’s In Utero and Bush’s Razorblade Suitcase, two of the first “alternative” records I ever heard were produced by Albini. Two records that blew my mind later on and expanded my musical tastes forever - the eccentric genius harpist Joanna Newsom’s epic Ys, and my favourite record from Montreal’s anarchist post-rock orchestra Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Yanqui U.X.O., were also helmed by Albini. The Pixie’s Surfer Rosa, The Breeders’ Pod, Cloud Nothings’ Attack on Memory… I could go on for a while, but you get the picture - he worked on a lot of people’s favourite records.
Albini put a lot of himself out in the world, and we have to assume it was honest because why would anyone pretend to be so off putting? He was unafraid to be a giant dork in public, as evidenced by his custom strap that fixed his guitar to his hips and has been copied by absolutely no one since. He was, early on, a distasteful edge lord, naming his second band after the Japanese manga Rapeman. He was a pyromaniac who once doused Dave Grohl’s ass in tape cleaner and lit it on fire during Nirvana’s In Utero sessions. He was an iconoclast who joked “why did the producer cross the road? Because The Beatles did it that way, man”, and his screeds against Steely Dan are some of the funniest take downs I’ve ever heard.
He was also a very thoughtful and honest person - writing about corruption in the music industry and famously refusing to take royalties for his work, explaining that music labels pay producers their share by taking from the artist’s royalties. I’ve had a lot of conversations with artist friends who have found work using their talents in the corporate world about being an artist vs being a craftsman. There’s no inherent shame in being a craftsman, someone who in this context uses their artistic abilities in the service of someone else’s vision. It’s different from just making your own art, surely, but there is a value - and a necessity - for this kind of work. Steve Albini was a craftsman. He preferred the term “engineer” to “producer” and considered his role to be completely in service to the artist, not to put his stamp on their work.
“The main thing is to get started. You're going to make mistakes, so make them now, away from attention, among friends who will forgive you. Learn from those mistakes and do better each time. Being frank though, just hearing sound played back after recording it is pretty satisfying the first time you get it right, and that ought to excite you enough to keep going.”
-Steve Albini, giving a young fan advice in a 2020 Reddit AMA
Albini speaks at length in interviews about his philosophy around producing, and a lot of it is nuts-and-bolts stuff about being efficient and managing your time so that costs stay low, which is incredibly important for small bands. He would send bands a general outline of his ideas along with hand drawn diagrams of how he wanted to set up the studio ahead of time. His 1993 article in The Baffler, titled “The Problem with Music” exposed a lot of industry secrets at the time and is still a fascinating read - pointing out very plainly the various ways major labels screw artists.
As Kurt Cobain told it, when Albini heard Nirvana was considering him to record their follow up to Nevermind, the biggest record in the world at that time, he preemptively sent their management a letter with his conditions of employment, including that he be paid “like a plumber”, meaning by the hour and not through royalties. I believed that for decades, but it turns out, as Albini clarified in an interview with Conan O’Brien on the 30th anniversary of In Utero, he had actually been in secret talks with Cobain and confirmed he would do the record before he ever sent that letter. This makes more sense to me, and tracks with both Albini’s respect for the artists he worked with, and Cobain’s known flair for a good story.
It’s this moral clarity that makes Steve Albini so fascinating to me - he was fierce in his criticism of whoever he deemed a bad actor in the industry and chose to model the correct behaviour by making a career of helping other artists achieve their vision while being careful to follow his pro-artist, anti-business ethos.
According to various accounts, Albini was an amazing chef and loved to cook gourmet meals for anyone recording at his home studio. What starts to materialize the more I read about him is this perception of a person who had a reputation for being a misanthropic crank, but in private liked to host and cook delicious food for other people. Likewise, he kept his little corner of the music industry as ethical and supportive as possible, while giving the finger to the industry itself. It’s quite the legacy, and he will be missed.
Steve Albini, RIP.