Butch Walker On Recording Green Day Album
Butch Walker is a very rare animal in the musical world; a multi-instrumentalist with his own expansive discography of solo albums and a production plus co-writing resume that includes some of the biggest pop stars in the world and a host of rock names. He's unique, and he knows a lot of about getting results with musicians – especially when tracking guitars.
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00:00Yeah, it actually was pretty easy because my manager manages them, and he just started
00:12managing them on this album cycle.
00:16But not easy to get the gig, obviously, like Billy Joe's very particular, and he's produced
00:20his own records for the last ten years, and he's really good at getting that sound and
00:24knows what he wants.
00:26But I think he was looking to venture out, finally, of his comfort zone and have somebody
00:31tell him what to do a little bit.
00:32And also, he was bringing in songs and song ideas and recordings that were a little left
00:42of center for them and didn't sound like typical Green Day.
00:45And I love that.
00:47I'm a huge Green Day fan and always will be, but I also love any band that's been around
00:52for 20, 30 years who wants to keep kind of pushing the envelope and doing something different.
00:58So that was the thing, when we got on the phone to talk, Billy and I, we were talking
01:02about records, and our childhood record collections were identical.
01:06Same records.
01:07He liked metal, he liked power pop, he liked punk, he liked everything, and those were
01:12my records growing up.
01:13That was my three genres that I dove head first into, and pop.
01:18So I liked it all, you know?
01:21And so did he.
01:22We were able to bond on a lot of levels, and it just was organic.
01:25He sent me a couple ideas.
01:26He said, why don't you mess around with these at your studio?
01:30So I would do stuff, play stuff on them, you know?
01:35Not typical behavior for what you would do for starting a record with a band, but I think
01:40it was just he wanted to see what was in my mind and what was in his mind.
01:46And so I would send him stuff back, and he'd get excited and be like, that's great!
01:50That's great!
01:51Let's do more now!
01:52Let's move this here, let's move that there, let's add this here, and add that there.
01:57And it just all led to pretty much after like two or three or four songs, I was like, are
02:02we making a record?
02:03You know?
02:04And I called my manager, I was like, am I making the new Green Day record?
02:07And he goes, I think you're just making the new Green Day record now.
02:10So we just kept going, and then got Trey in, and Mike in, and then everybody, you know,
02:15it just became a collaborative effort, all the way from using tracks that Billy had recorded
02:21on his own with his engineer, Chris Dugan, who's a genius and I love, he's an amazing
02:26producer, engineer, mixer in his own right.
02:29So a lot of the record is a combination of everybody doing everything.
02:33Okay, cool.
02:34So you were saying, when we mentioned this earlier on, you were kind of like, oh yeah,
02:41that's the stuff Billy would send over to you, those tracks, did you have to kind of
02:48do anything differently, or work to kind of make stuff fit with those tracks that he had
02:52recorded himself, or was it just a big kind of melting pot?
02:55Well, what it was, was I was like, okay, you want me to do a thing that you don't do.
03:00So if you want me to do a thing that you don't do, then we don't necessarily want you to,
03:05I don't want you to just send me already recorded bass drums and guitar and vocals,
03:11and then what am I going to do to that, and it's already inherently going to sound like
03:15Green Day because it's being done by them.
03:19But I said, I think the key is, let's recut some of the drums, let's recut some of the bass,
03:25let's use some of my gear, let's use some of my instruments, my techniques, and marry them
03:32with yours, and we'll get something a little different.
03:36And that's what we did.
03:37And we definitely got something that's different from anything they've put out so far.
03:41Yeah, that was going to be my next question.
03:43I've not heard the album yet, but from what I've heard and what I've been told, it's like,
03:48yeah, expect it not to sound like what you expect it to sound like.
03:51Yeah, no, no, early Green Day fans hate my guts.
03:55They're like, fuck you, you ruined my band.
03:57I'm like, well, not really.
03:59I was like, Billy actually came in with the vision.
04:02Don't shoot the messenger, but at the same time, yeah, I helped them do what they wanted,
04:07which was venture out of their comfort zone and do stuff that explored their other roots.
04:12How did that manifest itself?
04:14In which kind of way did you go?
04:18We just wanted to go, we were like, let's take their punk rock influences,
04:24like The Clash, obviously, it's always The Clash at the bottom line.
04:29And then some of their power pop favorite things, like whoever, like ELO, Sweet, you name it.
04:42I mean, like lots of cool British rock.
04:45And we would emulate a lot of that going in just to be like,
04:49okay, let's get this drum sound that's on this T-Rex record that we both love.
04:55And let's get this bass sound that we really love on this Clash tune that we love or whatever.
05:01And the guitars, let's go.
05:03And that was the one thing on guitars, too, is like, I think Billy was excited about it,
05:06is I would come in and we would pepper some interesting counter guitar parts on there
05:12that he wouldn't normally do, usually me doing it.
05:18And he wouldn't want to redo it, he would just be like, that sounds great, let's keep it.
05:22So there was no rules about who had to play what or anything like that.
05:26So that was fun.
05:28That's cool. Did you introduce a lot of new instrumentation and stuff, or was there anything like that?
05:33Yeah, they were wanting to explore some of that, so it was like,
05:36sometimes we would channel, we would do some Pet Sounds things,
05:40and marimbas and glockenspiels and whatever, like timpanis and things like that
05:46that were on records like Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper's and things like that.
05:51And that was fun to implement into some of the songs,
05:56as well as just the big guitar rock record as well,
06:01like all the guitar sounds being like that big Green Day thing that they do.
06:05Did Billy use different guitars?
06:08I mean, he's normally either his Fernandez Strat or his Les Paul.
06:15He brought in about four guitars that were worth more than my house,
06:21and the rest of them were all my guitars, which were beaters.
06:26But yeah, he had a 50s Nocaster, he had a 59 Burst, he had a 60 Goldtop, right?
06:38And he had like, yeah, and his 58 Junior, of course.
06:42And it was just like, that right there was like the quadruplex of awesome.
06:48And it was just, yeah, it was great.
06:50We would plug those in and be done.
06:51But he also would use my Explorer, and he'd be like,
06:54I'm going to get one of these.
06:55Next day he ends up with the most amazing Explorer I've ever seen.
06:58I'm like, that's that fuck you money.
07:01You know?
07:02Mine was just like a 09, you know?
07:05But it was awesome, and we would use it.
07:08Sometimes we would use, oh, he used a Rickenbacker,
07:11he had like a reissue Rickenbacker 360.
07:14Great.
07:15Like, no rules.
07:16Used his, let's see, we used his divided by 13 37 amp head,
07:22we used his Park, an old Park, heavily modded, high gain Park amp head,
07:31and then we used my 65 Princeton.
07:36So we used my 65 Princeton on a lot of stuff for the cleaner, chimier shit,
07:40and then we also used my good cell, which is like an AC30 type amp,
07:45a good cell black dog.
07:48Pretty cool.