You hope to catch the band on a good night and you hope that it sounds good when you hear the tapes back, and you hope that when you mix it you still have the feeling that you had when you were onstage, but it seems like it never quite works out that way!

My favorite artists are able to take things to the edge or just over the edge. Miles Davis and Duane Allman, for example. It's about not playing too many notes. Those guys had lots of phases to their careers, but they always played with economy and intelligence.

I felt like for it to really turn into something, you have to jump in with both feet. And it always turns out a little different than you imagined it, but that's kind of the beauty of it, when you feel musically confident enough to just kind of follow where it goes.

George Alessandro in New Jersey builds these great amplifiers. He was working on my Super Reverbs for years and he's kind of a vintage Marshall specialist. He built this amp and it's kind of a cross between a Dumble and a Super Reverb but a little juiced up with a little more power.

But every so often we'll get to this place where everyone in the room is fully focused on what's happening. You see it happens in sports sometimes, when there's a really important moment. It's a great thing when you can get to those places, when you look up you don't see a bunch of phones out.

A lot of the gear came out of some of the old studios here in New York City. We picked up a lot of old microphones, reverb tanks, tape machines, so yeah, we try to record the old way, which takes more time and energy, but it certainly feels better when you're getting to the end of the process of making a record.

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