Spinner: Albert Hammond Jr. Talks Drug Abuse, Recording ‘Angles’ and Who Wrote ‘UCoD’

Spinner’s interview with Albert Hammond Jr. is fantastic. It answers a lot of the tough questions. Some of those are about the recording process, specifically what took so long and why it didn’t work at Avatar Studios. Spinner also got Albert to speak about what changed in recording in up-state New York and the band’s confidence level producing the album on their own.

Why did you record the new album twice?

It didn’t sound good the first time.

Why not?

That’s a question for the ages. The communication between us and the producer [Joe Chicarelli] was not a healthy one and ended up in a bad space. Trying to find someone you can collaborate with is a hard thing in and of itself. I think we tried, because we were coming back and our confidence was low, and so we stuck with it for eight weeks to see what was happening and in the end, nothing was lost. That helped us to discover certain things that we could do ourselves and with our engineer and producer, Gus Oberg. It all kind of lent itself to the next step, which is great, but it was a long and expensive learning process. [Laughs] But sometimes you have to do that.

Did you know how you wanted the album to sound when you recorded it the second time?

We went up to my studio upstate just with the idea of recording the two songs we hadn’t gotten to finish at the other studio in New York, and maybe, just maybe, doing some overdubs as we listened to stuff we had recorded. And then the first song we recorded at my place was a song called ‘Machu Picchu,’ and it was by far the best-sounding thing we had done. And it was like, “Wow, we did this ourselves, up here. That’s a good sign.” Then we slowly redid almost the whole thing, 95 percent of it. If we had gone up saying “we’re going to redo the album” it would have been a little daunting. We had just spent eight weeks and looking back, we were probably a little fried. The excitement of the new stuff upstate kind of rejuvenated us, but we were past spent when we started.

One of the most talked about questions in the comments section of this site after the release of the single has been who wrote Under Cover of Darkness. Albert reveals that…

It really felt like Voltron, like five different pieces making a whole. You can hear it — at least I can hear it — in the record, our single being an example. It had three or four writers on it, but we were kind of getting the best of everyone.

Spinner also, albeit subtly, talks to Albert about his reported substance abuse problems.

To read the full interview, you can go here.