Rival Sons’ Scott Holiday on Recording at Muscle Shoals
Rival Sons’ sixth studio album Feral Roots is out today (January 25.) The album was primarily written in a shack in southern Tennessee by lead singer Jay Buchanan and guitarist Scott Holiday, but for some of the recording, the band took to the legendary Studio A at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio.
Holiday recently talked with WMMR’s Markus about what it was like to record at Muscle Shoals, from how productive the band was to its vintage ambiance:
“There is a feeling. The room has a feeling, and some of the greatest tracks have gone down there…And that old building? It looks exactly the same, inside and out. It’s kind of magical just seeing it and going, ‘Oh, my God! No way!’
…Even the little hangout room below [the studio] just looked like where people were like getting into all sorts of nefarious trouble. There’s an old bar. It’s a wooden room, like a basement hangout, and it just reeks of cocaine and whiskey and the ‘70s…They’ve got the same furniture [from the ‘70s] and album walls. It looked exactly the same! It was really far out…
We wrote over eight months or something, me and Jay, but we would record about a week at a time. So, it would be three weeks of work, four weeks of work just me and him back-and-forth-and-back-and-forth, and then go record for a week…The Muscle [Shoals sessions], we only did three of those sessions, so less than three weeks.
The Muscle Shoals sessions were two days, and we cut four songs in those two days. We spent three weeks recording these songs at RCA [Studios], and we spent two days getting a third of the record.”
Feral Roots is now available on multiple platforms here.
This interview can be heard in its entirety below.
Erica Banas is rock/classic rock news blogger that loves the smell of old vinyl in the morning.
