Chris Stamey is a singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer based in Chapel Hill, who performs solo and as a co-leader of the legendary power pop group the dB’s with Peter Holsapple. Chris’s latest record, Anything is Possible, is out now on Label 51 Recordings
Brian and Michael D’Addario are the New York-based rock band The Lemon Twigs; Chris Stamey is a singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer based in Chapel Hill, who performs solo and as a co-leader of the legendary power pop group the dB’s with Peter Holsapple. Chris’s latest record, Anything is Possible, just came out last week on Label 51 Recordings. The Twigs feature on the track “I’d Be Lost Without,” so to celebrate the release, Brian and Michael got on a Zoom call with Chris to catch up about it.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Brian D’Addario: I was thinking about how you always put those string arrangements together for your records, and I was curious how you got into doing that, and if that was something you learned on your own or if you ever got any sort of formal training with that?
Chris Stamey: I did. I mean, you’re a cellist, right?
Brian: Well, no, I’m not really a cellist.
Chris: You’re a cello player.
Michael D’Addario: He’s a poor cellist.
Brian: Yeah, actually—
Michael: He’s been great on records before, but it takes forever.
Chris: It takes me forever, too. I played upright bass in high school and moved to cello in college, but I was a very poor student. I was in the musical composition program at University of North Carolina, so I did get cello fundamentals. And it was a time of madness at the university — you know, somebody would have a new piece and it would involve pouring milk in a piano. So I came out of it with a kind of spotty musical education. But I did have music theory in high school. We had a choice of shop or music theory, and sadly — because I have no shop skills now — I went for music theory for two years. And it was incredible.
Brian: That’s cool. I learned a little bit of stuff in high school — I took a music theory class then. But that’s not my strength at all.
Chris: I think your voicing is really solid. It’s super musical. I think you’re too modest.
Michael: Do you do it on the computer? Do you use a program? Because Brian uses a program. Brian would do it in a crazy slow way where he’d be dragging notes and stuff like that on — what program were you using?
Brian: It was that free program, MuseScore.
Michael: Until we finally got a program where he could use a keyboard and do it in a more intuitive way. But forever, he was doing it like that.
Brian: Yeah, just dragging the note values onto the staff.
Chris: Oh, yeah, it can take forever. There are key commands you can learn in Sibelius, which is more of a pro program that make it a little faster. But it depends. I was writing on airplanes a lot — I would be flying in the morning and I would think, We want to play this tonight… So those are kind of cobbled together just by copying and pasting. Sometimes I sit at the piano and figure it out. But working with Carl Marsh, who did the Big Star things, really changed the way I try to think about it, because instead of writing a lot of long notes, a lot of pads, or just “yellow marker” where you underline a lyric that you think is important, Carl would write surgical hits of actual little melodies or little lines. And it might not be very much music, but it would really make a difference. He was more putting in riffs, kind of the way that Nelson Riddle would do for Frank Sinatra. Sometimes, if you guys have recorded a great track and it seems almost there, you can add just a few long string lines and it might finish it up. But the idea of adding a surprise in the strings is what has been interesting to me.
Brian: Yeah. When it comes to string arrangements, thinking about it, I was always in a mode of, OK, well, I want a quartet. So I’d have my quartet, and then I would be listening to how the strings sounded together by themselves, and that always ended up being too busy of an arrangement. Because what sounds boring when you’re just listening to the strings is so different from when you put it on onto your track. Sometimes, you know, less is more.
Chris: There was a guy named Tony Bongiovi in New York, at Power Station — he was Jon Bon Jovi’s uncle, I think. But he had the studio Power Station, had worked at Motown as a kid, and said he could mix anything in two hours no matter what. Because he had all these Motown rules, you know? And one of the rules was, cut off the violas! Because “Nobody wants to hear that.” Which is insane. [Laughs.] But it is true that the violas were often right around the vocal. So a lot of times, if you leave an arrangement hollow, it’s really the stuff above the guitars or below the guitars that are going to really matter.
The other thing that took me a while to learn was that violinists really can play all those notes way up above all the ledger line notes. They can go way up there. When we were doing the theremin on “Good Vibrations” the other night, my feeling was it didn’t really matter how loud I was, there’s nothing that high and it was going to torture a dog in the back of the room no matter what. And strings are like that too — if you keep them up above the staff, they’re going to fit in.
Michael: What about just arranging a four-piece rock band? Have you tended in the past to be the type who knows exactly what you want the arrangement to be? Or do you let it take shape organically with the musicians that you’re playing with?
Chris: I think I’m like the bizarro Lemon Twigs, because I struggle with rhythm guitar parts. I struggle with getting the guitars right. Bass and drums — we might be on a similar page about that. I mean, you guys are amazing drummers, but I wish you guys could play guitars on all my records. I always had Mitch Easter or Peter Holsapple to help me out, and when I don’t…
Michael: Did you work on guitar interplay with Sneakers [Chris’s band with Mitch Easter] and with the dB’s? Because with Brian and I, we like something that sounds really simple, and it sometimes feels like, “I can’t believe how long it takes us to get to that place.”
Brian: Yeah, we try every other more, quote-unquote, “creative idea” that we might have before the obvious thing, which just might sound so much better.
Chris: Well, however you do it, it’s working. I use capos a lot of time, getting the different voices in. But if you guys are playing so much music, it’s hard to fool with that in a live set.
Brian: Did you work it out in the studio with a group, or did you do more layering on this new record?
Chris: I took a couple of months and would go over every week down in the music building on campus and play with some of the guys on the faculty there, who cut most of the record. And then we went in and in, like, seven hours, did 11 songs. I used about six of those on the final record. So those were performances with five people playing. But some of the things that were the best were a click and a keyboard and built up from there. I think all of the ones you guys played on were that way, actually. But I would write a tempo map in — it wouldn’t just be a click all the way through.
What are you doing? What’s the most typical scenario?
Michael: The most typical scenario is that one of us plays drums and the other one plays some kind of rhythm instrument, which will either end up being a guide or final, and then that kind of serves as an anchor. We pretty much never use a click. So then if we do it where Brian’s playing drums and I’m playing something, or vice versa, it just helps to have the other guy playing something. Sometimes it sounds a little wonky if we just do it alone. I mean, Brian doesn’t play drums in the band live, but he did in the past.
Chris: Oh, I heard him.
Michael: Yeah. And he ends up playing most of the drums on the records, and he can do it without anybody playing. I mean, he can do it like Roy Wood or Paul McCartney, just laying it down. I think it takes a certain not-questioning-yourself and blind confidence to lay down. I feel like when I’m on the drums doing it alone — I play much better with people. I play much more in time with other people. Playing alone, I just don’t have that feeling of an internal metronome. I overthink it.
Chris: Oh, absolutely. I think it’s super tricky. And for most people, they can’t do it like you guys do it, really lock down tracks. We’ve played some of the Big Star songs before, and people talk about elements of them, but they often miss the fact that they always speed up. “Thirteen,” “September Gurls,” “I Am the Cosmos” — if you put the needle down on the beginning and you put it down on the end, it’s way… I mean, they don’t always, and obviously I’m not blaming Jody [Stephens]. It’s a band playing together. But it’s really natural. Once the ‘90s hit and everything had to be on a click, the only way to go with a chorus was louder. But normally, it’d be a little faster.
Michael: Yeah. Something that I want to get into more with recording is — because we do it just the two of us, we kind of will play into the sound in the headphones, but a lot of the time that means you’re playing a little bit softer. And on those Big Star records, I would say I can hear that this guy is beating the shit out of the drums. And a lot of that has to do with playing with a couple of people, and then the engineer is just getting the best sound he can get the way that the guy plays. And when you have somebody as good as John Fry, you get an amazing sound. So I would like to do that, because I feel like with Reza [Matin, Lemon Twigs’ live drummer], I love the bombast in his playing. I think that’s similar to Bev Bevan and Jody — they kind of go a little bit faster on the chorus. And Brian is more like Ringo. You know what I mean? I would like to capture that on a record, and it’s hard to do it. You have to be in a real studio. Or, you don’t have to, but I think it’s better.
Chris: Come to North Carolina! Mitch Easter has a world class studio — come do a track down here.
Michael: In our little place in New York, it’s just awful. Even overdubbing is awful.
Brian: Well, you know, “awful” is a strong word…
Michael: We’re lucky to have any space at all. That’s true. But it is very tough.
Brian: It’s hard for Reza, because he’s of a taller persuasion.
Chris: But you were in the Music Building before, on 38th Street?
Brian: Yes!
Chris: I used to sleep in that building and take showers in the… Yeah, it was horrible. But I know it well. Or, I knew it well.
Brian: It hasn’t gotten any better, I don’t think.
Chris: I don’t know if this is public knowledge, but there’s a dB’s record called Like This, and it’s because the guy who ran the building — this is obscene, I can’t say it — well, OK — he came in, and he was carrying replacement toilet paper and talking about his date, and he held up the two rolls of toilet paper and said, “She was like this and like this.” And, you know, us Southern boys were like, “What?” [Laughs.]
Brian: [Laughs.] I don’t know that I quite understand it, but I don’t need you to spell it out.
Chris: I don’t want to visualize it over Zoom, they might be recording…
Michael: Just send us a photo.
Brian: How long was your stint in New York?
Chris: I think 13 years.
Michael: Wow, that’s awesome.
Chris: It was great. I love New York. I really feel like my life is a tale of two cities, and that’s one of them.
Michael: Yeah, it’s awesome. I don’t know if there’s as much community… Well, I have some friends in bands and stuff that I love, but I never get the urge to go and grab different musicians and play with them. I only really have a few. Most of the musicians that I know that I would want to play with around our age are in Los Angeles.
Brian: There’s some here, but also when we’re close friends with people, we really let them just do whatever they want. We have problems telling people what to do. I mean, that’s the great thing about the band that we have now with Reza and Danny [Ayala] — they’re very easy to work with, and they genuinely want our input. It’s always so much easier when someone’s welcoming your input rather than you having to sort of mold them, you know?
Chris: I think for me, because I’ve produced a lot of things, it’s tied into budget. You want to be in a place where you’re invisible, but if you’ve got to finish a record in three days, sometimes you… I mean, Todd Rundgren is famous for not being invisible, and he’s not always gone on to do a second record, but sometimes the one record he’s done has been the career-building one. If I have a friend in, I usually don’t say much, and then if it’s not going somewhere I just say, “Let’s do this and you’re out of here.”
Michael: Yeah, totally. We were just talking about how on those session tapes of Brian Wilson working with the Wrecking Crew, he’s such a good leader.
Chris: He’s in there showing them what to do and motivating them.
Michael: Yeah. And he’s also pretty supportive. He’s kind of complimenting people — “Wow, that’s just a gas to watch you play!” That kind of stuff.
Chris: The way those things were recorded, in a modular fashion where they would maybe record 16 bars and they’d stop, and then they’d do another section and maybe reference a metronome for tempos or try to match it up, but also they would have big tempo shifts — I mean, you guys were rolling tape on analog. Do you ever do that? Do you ever cut a verse and then cut a chorus?
Michael: I mean, we’ve spliced together takes and stuff like that, but I don’t know if we’ve done that exact thing…
Brian: I don’t think we have. We’ve talked about it a lot. But when it comes down to it, we’re always trying to get down as many songs as we can, and it just seems like a real difficult way of of working.
Michael: Unless you’re really good at splicing, and you don’t have to think about it. But for Brian and I, we’re just lazy that way. It would be like, we’re just recording one song and then we’re kind of referencing it and recording another song. I mean, when you’re working mono like that, splicing together two whole pieces sounds not as crazy, because with stereo you’d have to match up the stereo image, you know?
Chris: Well, I’m talking about cutting the multitrack.
Michael: Oh, yeah. Multitrack would be alright.
Chris: Some of my happiest memories in recording studios are working when no one’s there, and there’s all these pieces of analog tape draped over my neck. I love tape editing. I really, really miss it, because I’m recording all in a computer these days. Tape editing was magic. And the thing about how the edit might sound really not good, but then the next day, it sounds better because you’re dealing with magnetic particles so they kind of ooze together…
I think the modular thing can be — I mean, I remember talking to Steve Lillywhite a long time ago, and he was an engineer on the Yes records. They would go in and they would record 30 seconds, and they would fully finish it — overdubs, all this stuff — and then they would sit around saying, “What the hell do we do next?” And they would do another, like, 20-minute thing, but clearly, “Good Vibrations” — total tempo shift. I mean, all those pieces were cut differently. “Don’t Talk Put Your Head On My Shoulder” — clearly the strings could have been done months before at a different time in that middle section, and just spliced in. But if you guys are going to stay on analog, it would be a cool way to have these more dramatic shifts.
Michael: Well, splicing the multitrack — I’ve done it before, but it’s usually early in the process. I’ll splice together the drum take and a couple guitars and stuff like that. And I’ll have done two takes straight, and spliced together two takes. But I guess splicing the multitrack, if I didn’t overdub exactly that same way with the guitars on these tracks and the same sounds and stuff, then everything would shift, too, and I’d have to change the board around.
Chris: That’s part of the sound, though.
Michael: That would be cool. I do want to.
Chris: We’re talking about all this and and it’s instructive to us, but if I’m reading this, I wonder if I would be thinking, Why make this music? What’s in it for us? I have some answers from my end, but you guys — you know, it’s a lot of work. Where do you find the joy in it?
Brian: Well, I don’t know. I like being able to look back at something I did a year ago or two years ago and put it on and forget certain aspects of it. I definitely like the cycle of recording, and then doing those songs live and the music changing in front of people and with different players, and then listening back to the original recording of the song and actually having something to feel good about. And we’ve made records before that, after a year or two, we can’t listen to the songs on it. At this point, I think we have two records that I feel like I could listen to any song on it. I don’t, really, but I could listen to any song on it and feel OK about it. So that’s kind of an addictive thing to me.
Chris: To have the end of the process be saying, “Yeah, we did it right.”
Brian: Yeah. But then actually writing songs, being inspired by someone else’s music and then feeling this urge to write something, that happens all the time with me, and I think with Michael, too. So the writing songs is probably the biggest pull.
Chris: That’s exactly it. Stumbling into that zone where it feels like it’s flowing. And with me, sometimes I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of days, and it happened to be a moment in the early morning or whatever, and then you’re pulled into the music and it seems so easy… That’s definitely a drug. That’s dopamine, or whatever’s going on.
The other thing that is marvelous to me is walking into a room with a new song and four or five musicians, and give them some parts or show them some things, then hearing that is really incredible.
Michael: That’s why I want to get more into recording with other people, because it’s such immediate gratification. You tell them, “You should kind of do this,” then they play it and then you hear it — it’s a quicker process than overdubbing.
I also just find the process of building a track and stacking the vocals with Brian, and just the way it makes my ears feel when I’m listening to it back — and I tend to kill myself with treble ‘til my ears hurt. [Laughs.] But that sensation is so fun. I imagine it’s like somebody who’s good at baking or something like that. It’s just so fun to make something that sounds perfect to you.
Chris: Yeah. When you’re first recording it and you’re first hearing it back, it’s very attractive to hear that little voice saying, I’m the greatest ever. I’ve finally written a great song. All the rest of them are crap, but this is it! And then that goes away, and it’s not true. But that brings a lot of joy for that fleeting moment of high treble playback.
Michael: Right. It’s similar to when you play a song live for the first time, and then immediately after one time playing it, it loses all of its shine.
Chris: Well, I used to not record second takes, but then I got into trouble about that. Third take might be pretty good… The thing Nick Lowe would do making records — and maybe still does, I don’t know — he would perfect the way he wanted to sing it and perfect his guitar part, and then walk in with the musicians and make them do it in one take. So he would be excellent and they would not have time to think.
Michael: That’s funny.
Chris: I wish there was one good way of making records, though. I think the main one good way is, if it’s not good enough, stick to it.
Michael: Different people do things well. I mean, we even track vocals differently — Brian likes to work on it for a while and get each piece, and I immediately get so much worse when I start to do pieces.
Brian: Well, Michael and I are different in that I’ll write a song and I’ll kind of sing it under my breath at my apartment, I’ll never really practice singing it. And Michael will write a song and he’ll sing it all the time.
Michael: It feels good to sing!
Brian: Which is great. I think the way you do it is better, because you get a little bit more practice. But I just get scared that I’m going to get sick of the song, so I hold on to it and I know that I have it, but I don’t really play it all that often unless I’m still in the process of writing it. And then when it comes down to recording it, it’s like, I have no idea how to sing it and I’m flat for a long, long time. And then I’m just thinking, Oh, this song isn’t good. The lyrics aren’t good. So I don’t go through that whole process as much as I could and should of testing it out a lot.
Chris: Well, when you’re doing the bedroom version, I find that’s really tricky. And I know with your songs, a lot of times the actual guitar positions are really great in one key, and you can’t just easily move a half-step up or down. But for me, if I’ve have been singing it in the bedroom, it often is too high or too low and will mess with the actual key of the song once I leave the bedroom voice. I mean, a lot of times, if I’m writing at the piano, I’m writing at 7 AM and even the cats aren’t up. So I’m barely whispering. And then I go into record and it’s, like, a fifth higher than it should be.
Brian: That’s when you start pitching down the tape machine if you’re us. That’s why we have, like, four or five songs where we sound like the Chipmunks.
Michael: I think both of you guys have melodies that would be tricky to sing if you weren’t technically, vocally apt.
Chris: You do, too, though. You wrote “Peppermint Roses.”
Michael: Oh, yeah, that’s a song. But Brian sings a lot of stuff on that that’s kind of weird. I guess I just mean that… I wonder if you overworked it, Brian, and you kept singing it over and over again that you might end up with something simpler and duller. Because if you’re talking about, it’s easy to sing or it’s fun to sing, a lot of stuff like Van Dyke Parks or a lot of Beach Boys stuff is difficult to actually do. There’s a lot of movement, and you end up with fun that way.
Do you ever write without a guitar, or without any instrument, and then put chords to it later?
Chris: In New York, I would. The noise of New York was heaven for songwriting. Like how people have the sound of the surf on a machine to fall asleep, I could be on a bus and everybody’s chattering and I would hear this music. But it’s really quiet in North Carolina, and I’ve lost that. Are you able to do that?
Michael: Well, I think some of the cooler changes for me come from: I hear a melody that would work, but if I was by a piano or by guitar, I would be tending to do something more typical. But because I don’t have a real chord in my head of maybe a couple notes or a note that would go under that, then I have to figure out what the chord would do. Or I go to Brian and say, “What chord would go under this if this was the melody here?” And it makes for a way to get an interesting chord change that I would never have done if I had the guitar in my hands. Because if I had the guitar in my hands, I would do something that would be obvious.
Chris: It’s a thing of, the sculptor finds the human form in this big block. It’s there when you dig into it. But the important thing is that melody is already in your head. I’m like a right brain, left brain guy. I just wish I really knew what my right brain — we’re talking about making music, and I kind of remember what happened when I wrote music, but not really. All this is after the fact for me. It’s like you’re kind of gone for a while…
Brian: Sometimes you write a piece of music and you’re gone, and then you never come back. That’s where I’m at.
Chris: [Laughs.] Well, I can’t wait for the new record.
Brian: Thanks, Chris. Your new record is great, and congratulations on it.
Chris: What you guys did on it was so wonderful. I’ve been talking about you in interviews, probably making your ears burn, but it is true. It really meant a lot. I love those parts.
Brian: Thanks, Chris. We were happy to be a part of it.
