How the Role of the Record Producer Has Evolved w/ Finneas

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0:31Finneas:This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18+. This episode is brought to you by Prime. What if you had one more chance with the one that got away? Sam, you came home.

1:03Based on the best-selling novel from Carly Fortune. Every Year After follows childhood friends Sam and Percy as they reunite in the dreamy, nostalgic lakeside town of Berries Bay. Love can be hard to find. So if you're lucky enough to find that person, never let go. A second chance at first love. Every Year After, now streaming only on Prime. The record producer. It's easily one of the most important creative roles in music, but it's also the one that has changed drastically with the technology of its day. From recording to tape with a limited number of tracks at a pricey studio to today's production setup allowing any creative hopeful to make limitless tracks on their computers from home for cheap.

1:44The modernization of the recording process means that the work George Martin went through to record The Beatles or Quincy Jones did to record Michael Jackson are now very different from what a current producer, like today's guest, Phineas, might do when he's recording his sister, Billie Eilish. So on this special episode of On the Record, we're going to dive deep with the one and only Phineas O 'Connell to talk through his personal process, how production has changed over time, and what that means for songs that become hits.

2:18Welcome back to On the Record, a music business podcast from Billboard and Sick Bird Productions. I'm your host, Kristen Robinson, and today I'm joined by Phineas to talk through the evolution of the record producer. I must admit that this has been a dream episode of mine for a very long time. Back in 2022, I had the honor to speak to the legendary Niall Rogers for a written story that I did about production, and he told me all about how the role has changed since his early days recording Chic in Sister Sledge to today working with Beyonce and Daft Punk, among others. It got me thinking that this is an area I'd love to dive deeper on into someday on this show.

2:52And since I captured the perspective of a longtime production legend already in that previous story, I thought that today we could have on a production great of today to come on and speak to the same topic. And truly, who better to do this with than Phineas? Phineas is one of today's most sought-after record producers, originally coming up with Billy and expanding his role from there to produce his own music and work with other talents like Justin Bieber. As I said before, the recording technology of today has changed a lot. In the earliest days of sound recording, producers recorded artists' live performances to tape, cramming all of the instruments and the vocal onto one track and calling it a day.

3:29But as time went on, the technology opened up new doors for creative record producers looking to push recorded music beyond the simple capturing of a live performance and into a separate art form in its own right. Pioneers like Les Paul, George Martin, Phil Spector, and more dreamed of sonic worlds that weren't even conceivable a few years before they were making them a reality. Fast forward to now, and Phineas is the product of the digital music generation, a time when barriers to entry for producers have lowered, allowing any creative person a shot at developing the skill which used to require mentorship at a fancy and expensive studio.

4:05I can't wait to nerd out with Phineas about this, so let's go ahead and throw it to my conversation with him. Please welcome to the show, Phineas. All right, Phineas, welcome to On The Record. Thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me today. Okay, so I'm really excited to have you on because this is one of those episodes I've been dying to do forever, and that is talking about the evolution of what it means to be a record producer. And so I wanted to get started before we kind of get into the history of record production and how it's changed. I just wanted to ask, like when you were growing up and you were starting to tinker with production yourself, were there any North Stars for you?

4:41Any producers that you were really looking up to? Yeah, I would say that on a contemporary level growing up, starting when I was like 11, 12, 13, very enamored with Butch Vig, who produced Nevermind and Siamese Dream. and then produced the album 21st Century Breakdown by Green Day, which came out when I was like 11, which was big news for me. Rob Cavallo, who did a bunch of Green Day records as well, also did my favorite My Chemical Romance records, also did Brand New Eyes by Paramore. Those were important contemporary producers to me. And then, you know, my sort of, you know, talking to my dad about music production was like Brian Eno, also important, actually did a lot of great Coldplay records that were still coming out when I was that age.

5:34But obviously the U2 stuff that he and Daniel Lenoit did. And then the Beatles guy, George Martin. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I want to get into him. I had to catch myself there because the author of Game of Thrones is also George R.R. Martin. I was like, what am I? Yeah. No, fair enough. Well, OK, I guess like before we get further into the conversation, most of the listeners of the show are in the music industry in some form or fashion, whether they're a songwriter or a record executive or whatever. So most everyone knows what a record producer is. But just like in basic terms, describe exactly what that means for you.

6:07I would describe a record producer as not limited to, but maybe most sort of accurately depicted as the person who is sort of shepherding the artist from zero to a finished song, you know? and so you can also as a record producer be a recording engineer you could also be an instrumentalist you don't have to be those things i am both of those things my idols are both of those things but i think a record producer is a person you know reacting to the piece of music that the artist is making and giving feedback and saying i think this is good i think you need to lean into this more um no no to keep the ending don't don't don't peter out on the ending um That's feeling really good.

7:02Yeah, I think the drums, I think we need to have the drums come in a little bit earlier. I think that to me is a, you know, how I would describe a record producer. And now it is, you know, I think lots of people that do one of the things think of themselves as a record producer. And I'm in favor of that. But I do think that like at its core, that is what I consider a record producer is a kind of a person. Totally. Judging the actual product as a whole and trying to find ways to make it better. Yeah. Okay. Well, this kind of goes along with there's this Quincy Jones quote. Okay. He's a record producer.

7:40He is a record producer. Famously, he's a record producer. One of the best ones to do it. I think of him as a record producer. Yes. Well, Quincy Jones once said that the producer of a record is the director of a film. Do you feel like that is accurate? I feel like that was accurate during Quincy's time, at least. Yeah, I think of that as the same. Yeah. I kind of think that also the artist should be the other director of the film. You know what I mean? Totally. I think that maybe there are cases, maybe there are artists that are really put together by a committee and they are given songs that they haven't written.

8:21They're put in outfits that they didn't choose. And maybe that's a different thing. because I would make that analogous to like a movie star. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good point. But I think of, you know, when I work with an artist, I sort of let them be a director over, if I'm a director, they're like the superior director because it's my job to sort of go like, yeah, I don't know about, you know, between those two, I like this one better. But at the end of the day, they're going to go off and play the song every day for 20 years. So I want them to like it even more than I like it, you know?

8:56Yeah. I mean, is it challenging? Sometimes I imagine, especially with younger artists, because they don't have production savvy in a lot of cases, there are some artists who produce themselves. Sure. There's a lot now. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But I do imagine there are some artists who kind of don't know how to articulate what they're looking for. So you're kind of left guessing of like, okay, how do I make it sound like you said something's off with the drums, but you can't tell me what's wrong. There are pros and cons to the lack of sort of technical vernacular. And I've said this to Billie a lot lately because Billie, over the course of the three albums we've made, I've hipped her to more and more of her own vocal engineering because she's got a great ear.

9:41And it just makes her life 20 seconds faster all the time, right? So if I'm sitting at the keyboard and I'm pressing record and I'm pressing pause, she's having to over communicate. She's having to go do that again. No, not that word. Start over here. You know what I mean? Because she's while she's recording. I still sometimes I'm like, no, no, I think you can get that line better. But again, she's really driving that and she does the comp herself. And every step of that, you know, if she goes, oh, I want this to have like a delay at the end of it. I go like, OK, cool. Open the plug in Echo Boy.

10:13And then we're going to change the mix on this and we're going to increase it. I try to sort of like an open kitchen, you know, explain how to do it all. And one of the things I said to her like a year ago was I was like, one of the challenges with the more you know is the less you imagine, I think. So what I kind of want is for an artist to just be purely imaginative. You know, if Billy goes, I want it to sound like the vocal is falling apart. that's such a kind of a metaphoric way to put that and then I get to interpret it and I get to be like okay what would I do to achieve that and then I play it for her and then she goes like yeah but I want it to I want it to start earlier I want it to feel you know more broken and then I interpret that I think I love the interpretive quality of being a producer and so I think sometimes like the more educated you are the more you're like throw some delay on that and i'm like yeah but that's that's less um exciting it's less open-ended yeah exactly so i think that like that sometimes when i work with artists who like know nothing about instruments even it can be kind of a gift because you're like cool like i'll play by i'll play by your interesting description that i would never think of you know yeah i mean that kind of reminds me of i've heard so many musicians say before like there's a way to sometimes over educate yourself like if you go to music school and then you you study for four years it kind of just strips out the open-ended nature when I first was learning piano I was learning like major minor chords and now I've tried very hard to know the names of all chords but like if you learn major minor chords and then you play piano you're playing sevenths and accidentals and you know suspended chords and whatever you just don't know that you're just playing what sounds good from from this chord to that chord and i remember growing up like somebody being like well that's an accidental and i remember being like okay and i like it okay well okay so i want to take it back so obviously today we have so many methods of production that are digital things that make it so you can record at your house in the comfort of your bedroom if you want to um which have really changed the game for record producers but to take it all the way back to like the days of tape um can you kind of describe some of the limitations that people were working with like george martin recording the beatles um on a four track or an eight track yeah yeah i mean you know first of all i've never done it so i'm speaking as a real ignoramus i've not ever recorded anything to tape really um yeah okay no i mean you know i sure love records that were recorded to tape i just am not sure that i love them because they were recorded to tape you know um there's a romance in it i actually a few years ago when i was making a i made this album with my friend ash uh under a band name called the favors and i said to a friend of mine andrew who's a great record producer who does work to tape i said like yeah we're going to do the whole thing to tape.

13:20I remember him being like, don't do that. Like I remember him being like, you're going to spend like a million dollars. He was like, it's, it's expensive. He was like, you're going to want to go back and rerecord something. You're going to want to, you know, use a different drum pass from the, like he was, he, I think, and I appreciated that because again, he said it as a person who is good at it. He was like, don't do it. But I do think that limitation is beautiful. And I think that, you know, yes it's true that in logic you could record like a virtually limitless number of things and a limitless number of takes and i low-key have but i do think sometimes i'm like no no this song should be like three instruments yeah and creating these little rules and these little guidelines helps me make something that i feel like more connected to yeah yeah i think the interesting thing about production's role is that it's so tied to the technology of a time yeah so i mean going all the way back to someone like a frank sinatra and like a big band era you have maybe two takes or like two tracks to record all of these instruments and the vocal yeah it's you know fascinating i've seen some of those like old documentaries where they kind of show how they would do that recording where you have to put certain instruments that are louder towards the back and you just have to kind of arrange people in a room i imagine that's just such a different art form in a way yeah so i mean and it sure sounded great and i assume also that the the the the difference there is that those musicians are you know like if I to give an example of like a thing I was working on the other day I'm like writing a song as I'm writing the song I'm recording it so I don't forget it like that's part of the right I'm like okay let me you know and I'm not recording a take that I'm worried about being perfect but it might be the final thing that comes out if I if I don't think I could do a better one then I'm writing it then I go okay let me get some drums on this then I'm playing this little drum part I'm bombing the drum part right I'm playing it terribly sometimes when I bomb a drum part I'm like it's kind of kind of swaggy it's kind of cool sometimes it's really bad and it's hard for a singer to sing to whatever so then I might quantize my little drum part and then I'm like okay let me play a bass line and then I'm like plunking around on the bass and I'm making a mistake and I'm just punching in a couple notes and then I'm playing a different part I'm punching it and then I'm going like clip clip and I'm looping it.

15:41And again, it's like, if you're going back to like the amazing Sinatra orchestrations and, you know, performances and recordings, like those are so beautiful. I assume for the orchestral members, those are all notated and written out. Like there's a, they're pretty meditated and they're incredible and they're played by virtuosic players. I wouldn't get into that orchestra on any of these instruments. I wouldn't get in as a pianist. I wouldn't get in as a bass guitar player, you know, I would barely get in as a singer. My sight reading is iffy. So I think of it as like I have such a kind of an admiration and I'm so inspired by it.

16:19But I also am aware of like I think the thing that the thing that I have to offer is the idea itself and not necessarily the technical ability to match it. So whatever I can do to support my idea is what I'm trying to do. All right. Here's my good bass guitar idea. damn, I fucked it up again. Okay, let me try that again. Let me play. Okay. All right. And then I've kind of Frankensteined myself a good take to support my hopefully, you know, acceptable idea. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's just crazy. Yeah. The amount of attention to detail, having to write every single thing down, because there's probably not the ability to just do quick takes of recording to get down your idea.

16:58Right. But yeah, I'm kind of curious, like what you think about uh kind of the rick rubin style of production where he's kind of like i'm here to provide my taste yeah and it's less about technical ability um what do you think of that idea as a as a producer in the room i have a lot of i am i find him sometimes incredibly inspiring like he has said some stuff that i'm like oh i love that i saw a thing very recently where he said something like he's a he's a lazy workaholic or something and i love that description and i agree with that i love to work i love to finish things and the day of when i wake up i think oh i don't want to go do that today and then i just kind of have to go do it and i think that that's i don't know i have friends who are like just didn't feel right and i'm like it never feels right like you just kind of go show up and then once you're once you're on the you know surfboard in the ocean you're like I'm gonna I'm gonna catch this wave um so I love that I sure have loved you know he did a strokes record back in 2020 that's like my favorite strokes record in in 15 years it's a good one he's you know I he's made work that I'm really inspired by I'm a little confused by his kind of um he swears that he knows like nothing at all about like music and it's like just google like Rick Rubin Johnny Cash there's like many videos of him like setting up the mics and putting on headphones like you know he doesn't know nothing you know what I mean yeah um I think what I assume he means by that and I respect this is like similarly to what I'm saying like man there are a lot of people that know a lot more than I do I don't I don't know the most yeah you know what I mean but I don't know nothing you know yeah when you get when you get in a room with somebody else who's like you know what I mean like somebody else is like what like the first time your friend puts on headphones and hears their voice through a microphone they like it flips them out you know what i mean this is sort of a sliding scale here yeah i kind of have you ever heard of like the dunning kruger effect yeah yeah like i kind of feel like maybe he's underestimating himself a little bit because he certainly does know a lot but he's probably around people who are so technically proficient that he feels he can't say that or i think it's an effective I think I try to do the same thing, which is I don't want to make people feel like it isn't achievable.

19:28You know what I mean? I think that you don't want to intimidate somebody out of trying to make something by way of like, I have my 10 ,000 hours. I know so much. You'll never know as much as I do. So I like that about that. You know, and I also think that the other thing that he really does, and I'm sure he is happy to talk about this, is he provides this environment. And I think that that environment is incredibly important to me. You know, I sometimes do think that, similarly to him, I'm like, I kind of think the best thing I can offer some people, you know, if they ask for more, I can offer them more.

20:08But sometimes all somebody needs from me is for me to come in and hear their five songs and maybe light a nice candle and it smells good in there and put them in a room with some daylight and go like, I like this song because I, what you're singing about feels really truthful here. And this song is fine, but it feels like a costume. It feels like you're wearing a costume. Good luck and leave, you know? And that's a Rick Rubin special, you know? And I sort of think that that, I am inspired by that kind of like, he provides his beautiful white space in Malibu and you go there and you hopefully find some peace and you feel inspired.

20:49And maybe he's not even in the building that day. So, you know, that's fun to think about. Yeah, it's interesting you're talking about environment setting for artists. I mean, obviously, because you came up with Billy and you guys are siblings, so you know each other so well, there's instant comfort there. Yes. She'll trust you to make any changes, but, I mean, you can always change them back. Of course, I'm sure there's, you know, creative differences here and there, but you guys have a bond already so that you trust each other the moment you enter the studio. You have produced for several other people at this point now.

21:23So I'm wondering how that shift was for you when you started working with other people and you realized, OK, we're starting from square one here. I maybe barely know this person. Maybe it's the first time I'm meeting them. Yeah. And I'm trying to make them comfortable and feel like they have the space to create their best record with me. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if I'll ever feel as comfortable around another writer artist as I do around Billy. I don't know that I should even try, you know? But that doesn't mean I haven't loved working with other artists and made stuff I'm really proud of. I think that, you know, that's like anything, right?

22:03It's like you start hopefully in a family that's very accepting and supportive of you and you feel like, you know, incredibly yourself. And then, you know, hopefully you get into some relationship in your life and that person also is accepting of you and supportive and you feel incredibly yourself. And outside of those, you know, sort of singular things, you have lots of interactions and relationships with people that you work with and are friends with. And it's just a different thing, you know. And I also shout out, like I, artists often have found a way to pour as much of themselves into a conversation as they can every time.

22:49You know, the amount of artists I've worked with where I, I, uh, they, I'm meeting them. And within an hour and a half, I've heard truly, you know, intimate, um, vulnerable things and, and what a gift they're giving me. Right. You know, and also sometimes it's, you know, much like, much like going to a good therapist. It's not, it's not their job to say, you know what happened to me last week, right? They're listening to you and whatever. So I think that that is what I shoot for with other artists, especially. And when I'm working with Billie, I also am trying to. I'm trying to not get in the way of writing the best song with her for her album by being like, guess what I was up to yesterday?

23:33You know, that's for that's for later. That's for our day where we're not making music. Yeah. But yeah, with an artist that I'm not close with, I have been really wowed by artists coming in and being like. Here's here is so much of myself laid bare. you know, emotionally. That's a real, that's a real gift. Yeah. I kind of wonder, I mean, based on you saying that that's a common occurrence for you, do you think that that is kind of what separates the great artists or the people who just have the ability to go in and just lay it all out there? I don't, I don't know. I mean, it's certainly, I have had, I've had unproductive writing experiences with people more often that are, that are walled up, you know, where we're sitting there and maybe we come up with a good melody, we come up with a cool chord thing, maybe we even come up with a good song title.

24:21But I'm like, what are you, what's going on with you? What do you want to say? You know, and then if I make a lyric suggestion and they go like, yeah, I'm not crazy about that, I go like, sure, but then you gotta show me what we are talking about. So yeah, I mean, sometimes I've worked with artists where it's my job to do everything else. You know, they're really gonna write the lyrics and I might help with melody, but they're going to tell me a story. And so then it doesn't really matter how much I know if they really only want me to do the other stuff. But certainly if they want my help on lyrics, I do feel like, well, you got to tell me what's up.

25:00Yeah, yeah. I just find the act of artist development to be so fascinating. Agreed. Because there's some artists that I've now been following for five to seven. Well, Chapel Rhone is a good example. uh she's around my age lived in LA I mean I just kind of knew of her for a really long time yeah and I have to admit I wasn't totally sure like what was going to happen with her or not and um

25:23Finneas:then there was just kind of a flip yeah where it felt like everything locked into place she found exactly who she was she wrote hit after hit after hit that one album had like maybe four hit songs on it um rise and fall of midwest princess yeah and she just took off like a rocket and i just find artist development to be so beautiful and also such a mystery to me i'm clearly not supposed to be an a &r or a producer because i think that maybe people can spot that kind of stuff better than i can um but i that's actually something i wanted to ask you about uh i feel like in this day and age because artists are waiting to sign record deals later and later um a &rs are not quite as much of a process of building and developing the artists as they used to be.

26:10You mentioned earlier about building an artist by committee where there's a bunch of people who have different things that they want to say about the artist and they're kind of a product. That doesn't happen quite as much anymore. I'm kind of wondering if you feel like the producer almost fills that role of artist development if you work with an artist very early on to try to help them develop into who they're supposed to be. It should definitely assist it. You know what I mean? I think that that is your if you're making somebody's whole album or a majority of it. Yeah, I think it's a you know, you're not doing you're not doing your job if you're if you're not thinking of it as a whole and thinking of it as part of the story of the you know what the artist is doing, you know, to to sort of make an example out of my relationship to Billy's music.

27:02right it's like I'm wholly involved in the creation of the music and then I have nothing to do with the other elements of the story which are like I have nothing to do with like what cool outfit she's gonna wear I have nothing to do with like the cool music video she's gonna shoot um I have nothing to do with like um what she's going to convey about that song right maybe we've talked about it maybe we haven't but you know what i mean sometimes yeah yeah i get it even a song i'm like i feel total co-ownership over you know she talks about in an interview and i think like oh i love the way she's explaining what this song means to her adds a layer of it yeah i mean in terms of the kind of label team member thing i think that i think that everybody is gonna change their opinions of themselves and grow and transform I would say the people that I have had the hardest time helping in any in informal capacity or formal capacity are just people that I feel truly don't know themselves.

28:07And you don't have to know everything about yourself. You just have to sort of know your yeses and your no's. You know what I mean? Yeah. I've worked with artists where like some artists are so prolific. I'm prolific. I write a lot of songs. and prolific just means you know uh making lots of things it doesn't mean you're making something great prolific is a is you know malprop a lot is people think it means profound and it just means you make a lot of stuff like i've worked with people where they'll play me like 25 songs and i go like what are your favorite five and they'll be like oh i just love all of them and i'm like you know i understand on one side but i'm not i'm not saying which songs do you hate like i'm saying which ones are which ones can you not live without um and so that's those that's usually a big red flag for me yeah um it's just sort of a lack of ability to delineate between like this is my favorite this one i'm less passionate about even if i disagree even if i go like that's funny you love that one i actually love this one like yeah that's more productive yeah than somebody who doesn't know yeah you just got to commit to the bit i guess so you've mentioned already in this conversation how sometimes when you're writing songs you're already recording parts of it right doesn't have to be perfect but i think that is part of that evolution of the record producer previously that is not really how songs could have been written because studio time was very expensive um there's not much access to that kind of equipment so you know i i feel like that really does change what a producer is and also kind of collapses the roles of producer and songwriter together um i'm just kind of curious your thoughts on that sure yeah i mean to sort of uh give a personal example like growing up because i loved bands i was always in bands with my friends and like once a year one of us or we would pool together enough money to buy like one day of studio time and you'd go into a studio and you'd burn a whole hour on setting up the guitar amps and the drums maybe two hours and then you'd get a couple takes and they'd kind of suck and then sometimes the engineer would offer to do like a like an edit you know to help you help you sort of make a tighter take of stuff sometimes they wouldn't and then you'd have like you know your lead guitar passed and your rhythm guitar passed and your one vocal and your drums and your bass and you'd be like I don't like the way this sounds at all and it's like there are incredible recordings of you know a guitar or two and a bass and drums and vocals you could reference you know Beatles or Stones or whatever there's amazing recordings of that but I am interested in the art of production and that was my reference point and so it's then it's like if you're referencing you know stuff from older records like Fleetwood Mac or Sgt.

30:57Pepper or you're referencing new stuff from you know bands like the All-American Rejects or Green Day or whatever at the time when I was 13 It's like there's a bunch of harmony layers. There's a keyboard layer. There's a synth layer. There's auxiliary percussion. There's shakers and claps and tambourine. There's acoustic guitar layer. There's, you know, on the chorus, you listen to like a My Chemical Romance song or something. There's like eight guitars on that chorus, right? So you're like, you play your one guitar and you're like, why doesn't this sound huge? Yeah. You're like, well, because they're, first of all, they're better guitarists than you and they're playing it on, they're playing it this note and then doing an overdub of like this power chord and they're doing an overdub of a solo and it sounds massive.

31:40So I think that that was all sort of informative to me of like, oh, I can't do this if I only, if I write a song and practice it in a garage and then I pay, you know,$500 to rent studio time for one day, like I can't do it. I mean, I run out of time. so that was like part of the the thing that made me want to become a producer was just sort of unlimiting the time even like when I would work with producers like when I was like 17 I spent the money that I was earning on the show Glee to work with a producer and we worked for like two weeks and I was like two weeks that should really get us somewhere and it barely you'd spent an entire day on the drums and it was like still not enough yeah and I remember when we left I was like what band are you doing next and he was like I don't know we'll see and I just was like so jealous of this producer in his lair not having to leave and go back to yeah you know the garage so okay this is actually just kind of a funny question but I mean you're talking about the producer who gets to sit in his lair yeah I often think about producers sitting at a computer in the dark or like in a studio with no windows for a long time does that actually impact your health ever I don't do it I mean I I have you know a space that I've spent a lot of time making feel comfortable and you know inspiring to me there's a lot of daylight again it's got candles burning it smells nice I'm I actually look I've modeled my studio off of mastering engineer studios so I'm actually like normally in like a kind of a standard producer room.

33:24There's like a couch on one side of the room and then there's this kind of like rug in the middle. And then up against a wall is like a producer at their desk with two speakers. And mine is like I'm in the dead center of the room at a desk. And then across the room is a TV screen. So I'm not looking at a screen here. I'm looking I'm looking across the room. Got it. And it just means that I'm in the optimal space for the sound wave. And I think that that also is helpful because if you're right next to a speaker, you have to turn it up even louder to feel it in the way that you're going to feel it if you're actually, you know, where the sound wave is supposed to hit you.

34:03Yeah. So I've been very careful about all that stuff. And the goal really is that I want to create in a room that I don't want to leave, you know. Yeah. I think that it's the same as like working out or something. It's like going down into like a basement gym with fluorescent lights. Like I can't wait to leave. And if I'm on a hike and I'm like sweating and my legs are burning, but I'm like, look at this beautiful view. I'll go another 30 minutes. So it's like that. It's like if I go down, sometimes I'll just go down into the studio for the vibe. And then I'm like, oh, I got an idea. And then I make stuff for an hour.

34:41And then maybe I run out of good ideas. But then I stay in the room because I like it there. And then another good idea hits me like 30 minutes later. And if I were in a little horrible room that I was like, oh, you got to get out of here. Yeah. I would have less ideas in there. Yeah. One of the things I've probably repeated on the show like five times now. So sorry for whoever watches the show every week. But I've repeated a lot that I really do think that whether people realize it or not, a lot of times art and music is shaped by the technology and time that we're in. 100 yes 100 thank you for agreeing with me because like this is like my north star i always talk about it it's like um a perfect example of this for somebody who might not know streaming yeah um allows an artist to release as many songs as they want on an album so an album is no longer confined to how much you can fit on a cd or a vinyl record it could be like drake scorpion which is 30 tracks or uh what was a taylor swift's tortured poets department 37 or something right something crazy yeah yeah yeah because it's limitless why not um you can do it but my question to you is like when you were coming up um this was kind of soundcloud era yeah this was uh splice was becoming a really big part of a lot of producers workflow around that time digital audio workstations or like ableton logic those kind of things were available yeah i'm wondering if you feel like uh some of your early music do you feel like that was shaped by the moment that you were in looking back at it?

36:08Absolutely. I mean, certainly from a, what I was inspired to create, you know, there was this kind of, um, surge of like minimalistic production, sort of synthy, bassy, non-traditional percussion, meaning, you know, not a drum kit, but these kind of like bit-bap things, very vocal forward, very choral artists. I could point to like a wonder Lapsley Aurora those were big inspirations for Billie the other artists that were big inspirations for her like SoundCloud rappers and and a part of that was like not Billie songs but like I was making mediocre stuff for friends of mine and because it was SoundCloud and because it wasn't very popular I would use like I would I'd do weird remixes of songs because that was what they were into.