John Hiatt's Race Car Garage Studio

John Hiatt has turned his race-car garage into a recording studio. There's a wonderful article in the Alabama Scene Blog that captures Hiatt's humour in discussing his recording process and in his friendship with Lyle Lovett:

The great thing about having a recording studio at his house, John Hiatt says, is he gets to work at his own pace. And on his own time.

"You can get up at nine o'clock in the morning and go out in your underwear and fiddle around with the mix that you left up," the journeyman singer-songwriter says from his home outside Nashville. "It doesn't matter. It's your place. I guess the down side is you can get overindulgent, I suppose, but so what?"

Although he's gotten rid of his race cars, the recording studio has given the 55-year-old Hiatt a new toy to putter around with.

"The one thing that keeps me honest in this particular situation is that my recording medium here is only eight tracks," he says. "It's a digital recording machine, so you can do a lot with the eight tracks. You can bounce them around without any loss of sound, but still it's functionally only an eight-track machine.

"So it's kind of like old-school recording in a way, where you have to make decisions and combine things early on in the process much like you had to do in the early '60s. I like that. I like that approach."

Hiatt's pretty cool and the Muse is with him...

Technorati : Songwriting, Studio