With the release of the Apples in Stereo’s fifth full-length studio album, New Magnetic Wonder, singer/songwriter/guitarist/producer Robert Schneider has a lot to be excited about. Harmonium caught up with Schneider, prepared with a list of 10-15 questions for the allotted 30-minute interview. However, 45 minutes and only six or seven questions later, Schneider managed to give answers to the questions asked as well as those yet to be asked. Here is part of that interview.

Harmonium: What excites you about New Magnetic Wonder?

Schneider: On all of our records there have always been things that I felt like…were really satisfying and like I had maybe carried out the program. And then there are other things where I finished the record and I felt like, you know. And usually these things stood out more to me, the things where I either tried something and didn’t pull it off or I didn’t get to do the thing I really wanted to do.

Harmonium: What album would that be?

Schneider: Every album. Everything I’ve ever recorded. There were always things that, at the end of it, that I would listen to it, be like, “Aww.” There’s a song…“Tin Pan Alley” is a song on Tone Soul Evolution, and the song had a lead whistling part. One of the main melodies of the song was a whistling part, and the song is in fact about somebody who’s sitting around, writing songs, whistling. It wasn’t until the record was mastered and I heard it, but I remembered that I had left the part off. I was just so — I had so many different things going on at the time and the whistling part, I just kept putting it off and putting it off, and finally the record was mixed and mastered, and I was like, “Damn!” And that’s a more extreme example where actually a main part was left off. Because the song is still a good song and stuff, but it doesn’t make as much sense because it doesn’t have the whistling part that the song is about. But, it’s cool, it’s cool.

In general, there will be things where, like, I want the drum sound to sound better. There have always been things I’ve been dissatisfied with. Fun Trick Noisemaker, I got an eight-track, and I moved from recording on four-track to eight-track. And I felt like in all of the submixes and stuff, a lot of the drums and the initial band tracks got lost in a kind of mush of overdubs. And on that record, what I wanted was for it to be a sea of overdubs where you had all these little waves peaking up that you could see, and fish jumping out and sparkles coming up the water and stuff. And then in the end, I felt like maybe it was like a little pond or puddle that was maybe very deep. You know, like it didn’t quite have the same quality that I wanted. And so that was one thing that I wanted for this record: I wanted that vision. I wanted it to be this sea of overdubs where everything’s jumping out and sparkling and there’s the sunlight reflecting…and you know, there’s the horizon over there, but it just seems to go on forever, and I wanted to get a feeling like that.

There have been records where I felt like, like Tone Soul Evolution, the vocal tracks are just more relaxed than they should have been. When we went into that record…I thought we were going to record a hard rock record like Led Zeppelin II or something. And it ended up coming out at the other end like a soft rock record really. And I’m happy with the record and the arrangements and stuff, but the production and just overall I feel like I just overworked it a little bit. I went from recording on a four-track to recording on an eight-track by myself to recording all these overdubs and stuff.

I went and recorded Tone Soul Evolution, a lot of it we recorded at the studio on 24-track, and I felt like I might just have overworked some of the overdubs a little bit and it lost some of the sparkle that originally was there. Like the band tracks were raw. If you listen to just the band, we were totally rocking out. We recorded all the songs live in the studio with two guitars, bass and drums all crammed together in a little area. But then like, the overdubs I worked on over six months or something, and I felt like, especially in the vocal tracks, like some of the fire or soul was lost…I just over-overdubbed them, or like, maybe I put too many vocals. Like I have triple-tracked vocals, or whatever, and it kind of smooths out a lot of the emotion

So on New Magnetic Wonder, most of the songs don’t have double-tracked vocals, which is a first for the Apples. I hadn’t really thought about it until right now. But I guess, on most of the songs there’s just a vocal track, a lead vocal track…almost every Apples song that I’ve ever done before, I always doubled the vocals at least, where you sing it twice, or more times, you know, and you use all of them. And I like that effect, but for this record, I was really going for the soulful. I really wanted, you know, I sang the songs very purely and with a lot of feeling, and I felt like the lyrics had a lot of, had strong content or whatever, and I wanted to get that across and I didn’t want it to just get lost in the wash of the production. I wanted there to be this big, smooth, washy production, but also I wanted the vocals to leap out like an R&B record or something. And it wasn’t on purpose. I never was like, “I don’t want to double-track vocals.” But I ended up in the end not double-tracking all the vocals, and I didn’t really think about it until talking about it right now. But that was a change.

Harmonium: I noticed that…I can’t think of which song it is offhand right now, but in one song on the new record, the verse you’re singing, I think there is some kind of delay or something, and then when you get to the chorus, the delay drops out and the voice kind of jumps out a bit more. Is that what you’re talking about?

Schneider: It’s on “Energy.” I love that. Yeah, that’s exactly, that’s exactly it. Now, even then though, that’s the other thing about this record is I use more vocal effects. On previous records, I’d always felt turned off by the effects, like by echoes and flangers and stuff, and that’s mainly because those effects don’t come off as well when you use double-tracked vocals. And I made the production choice that I like double-tracked vocals better than vocals through a delay or whatever —a tape delay. And I’ve used effects in the past, but not very often. Really my vocal tracks have always been, besides compression…I would always achieve the effects by double-tracking and stuff. Even on “Strawberryfire,” which is a very psychedelic song, I got a very psychedelic vocal sound by double-tracking it very closely, singing it very closely…on “Energy,” we use a tape delay. I think it was a Roland Space Echo. And then Bryce, the engineer, he pulled it out on the chorus…it blew mind when we were mixing, actually, because the effect was that the vocals jumped out at you, almost like in a forward-backward kind of way. And I was really impressed by that. That was pretty cool. Like if you listen with headphones or right between the speakers, the vocal…there’s an actual sense of movement as if it were from left to right, like the way you can pan stuff. It felt like that same sort of movement, but from front to back. And in the studio, the final mastered CD, with it being compressed and stuff, the effect is slightly more subtle. But when we were mixing it in the studio, it literally felt like there actually something jumping out at you like a 3-D movie…that’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about, like I wanted the chorus to sound like the Plastic Ono Band or something. To be really pure. And so he got that by putting an echo on the verse and then, on the chorus, pulling it off. And it sounded — I was really happy with that.

Harmonium: What’s your favorite chord on the piano?

Schneider: My favorite chord on the piano? Hmm… You know what chord I like is B flat major…and you put your thumb on the F note and your middle finger on the B flat…and then your little finger, your pinkie on the…D, and, like, it has a really strong sound, and if, instead of D, you put your little finger on the C, it gives you this ninth chord, and I think that that’s my favorite chord. I think I like that chord. I’m not sure: I like a lot of chords. On the piano, there’s so many interesting chords you can get just by throwing your hands around randomly. But, it’s hard to say, but I think I like that chord the best.

Harmonium: What’s your favorite cookie, since Casper and the Cookies are opening for you?

Schneider: They are such a great band. Um…my favorite kind of cookie…I really like sweets…let me think about that one for a little bit: my favorite kind of cookie. I really like cookies, and I eat a lot of sugar when I’m recording and stuff. I interviewed Brian Wilson like two years ago, and it was the most nerve-racking fucking experience in my life, interviewing Brian Wilson. But, one of my questions was that I wondered what kind of candy he ate in the studio, because I figured he probably did. And he ate dark chocolate, which I was surprised by because I like milk chocolate myself. As far as cookies go, I’d have to say I like a peanut butter cookie. That’s my favorite kind of cookie.

Interview Excerpt (MP3):
On the differences between Tone Soul Evolution and New Magnetic Wonder

-- Seán O’Donnell

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