Josh Collins Profile: STL - LA
Josh Collins is an audio engineer at Atlantic Studios in Los Angeles, but before that he was another scene kid from St. Louis tearing it up in bands such as Adelaide and Natalie Would. I got to talk to him about his roots in St. Louis, the intense transition from here to home of grammy-nominated artists the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Los Angeles, and life as an engineer.
BIASED: Your start in St. Louis music was with mid-to-late aughts screamo outfit Adelaide which got a good amount of notoriety at that time. In your opinion, what was the general atmosphere like around the music back then?
JC: I mean as far as playing shows I feel like we came up right in the midst of the pay to play era. It felt like a lot of the bands before us (Novella, Westcott, Adair, etc.) were backed by solid promoters that actually promoted the shows. We always had to sell a certain amount of tickets to get the best showtime. If you didn’t sell your quota you'd get bumped to an opening slot. This one time when I played in a band called Natalie Would (Before Adelaide) we were on one of those hometown showcases where like a million fucking bands play and we sold like 20 tickets of our 50 so we ended up playing before the doors even opened. In their defense there’s like a million shitty bands and they have to pay the venue somehow. And I guess on the bright side I basically learned how to promote myself at a young age...
As far as the music SCENE it felt like a lot of people who didn’t know each other uniting a few nights every month to let loose and hang out. Kinda like an AA meeting but maybe not so grim, and with loud music. I really feel like I got lucky with Adelaide cause we all went to different High Schools and all had different friend groups so its like you get his huge group of people who don't really know each other but are all like “oh yeah my homie is in that band too!” And then everyone gets super stoked cause they’re meeting new people and friends of their friends and checking out new music so everyone wins. When we first started playing shows we used to always go to IHOP after and invite the crowd right after we finished out set. We’d end up with these like 20 person tables and everyones like yelling and laughing eating pancakes. I’m sure the staff at IHOP hated us but honestly there was nothing better.
I have to imagine you were all pretty young at that time. How was it playing to wider audiences that early on?
Yeah I was probably like 16 or 17 at the time. It was pretty crazy. I was so young and naive. One of our first shows we played at POP’s in East St. Louis and I feel like I didn't tell my parents where it was ‘cause I didn't want them to like forbid me from going (laughs).
So what made you go from that to diving into the production aspect of things?
Well I was always kinda interested in the whole production side of things... Like how a recording is made and like how the sounds you hear on a record end up sounding the way they do. A really good friend of mine Aaron McBaker gave me Cubase and Fruity Loops when I was 16 and I remember feeling like a kid in a candy shop. The Postal Service was a huge influence to me at that time and I wanted to try and make electronic-esque music too. Honestly though The best part about it is that YOU ARE the band. You don’t have to fight with other people about how you want things to sound. You can just make it happen. If Aaron hadn't ever given me Cubase and Fruity Loops I probably would have never got into production like that.
Just for a quick shout Aaron recorded all of Adelaide and about 98% of my music at that time, dude has an AMAZING ear. I would definitely recommend him to any bands getting started or looking for somewhere affordable to record.
I can’t imagine the transition from playing music in STL to working in LA was a simple one. What happened to make you take that leap?
It’s kind of a long story... Towards the end of my Senior year in High School I got into some heavy drugs and pretty much stopped caring about anything besides getting high. I was failing out of High School, drifting from my friends and family and things got pretty unbearable for me and I ended up attempting suicide in May of 2010 which landed me in the hospital for 3 days. My parents and the doctor gave me the option of going to a wilderness rehab. They said that I didn’t have to go, but if it happened again there was a good chance I wouldn't make it.
I left the next week. I ended up spending the next three months in the desert of Utah hiking around with some like 10 other people that were in similar situations. We all just didn't know how to deal with living in our own skin. So fast forward like a year. I’m out of rehab. I’m working in a kitchen as a morning chef cooking omelets and what have you as well as going to college for Digital Media at Utah Valley University. This guy Andy Ford that was friends with Jon (the guitarist in Adelaide) hits me up via facebook jokingly saying, “Hey dude! Come move to Hollywood! My roommate bailed and I need someone to take over his lease. At this point in my life I was feelin’ pretttttty stagnant, Digital Media was not my jam. It is so very tedious and is more like math than art to me. Cooking in a kitchen is cool but I felt like I needed to do something crazy, I’m young, I’m starting to rebuild my life and I definitely didn't wanna do that in the middle of Happy Valley Utah. So I took him up on it. I put in my two weeks notice, dropped out of college rented a car and drove out there. No GPS or anything just went west and followed the LA signs.
Was there any culture or atmosphere shock in the transition from going from a band kid in St. Louis to the new life?
Oh yeah. I mean add in fresh outta rehab to the equation. And then add lived in Utah, the kindest place on earth, to the equation. Mix that down and then keep in mind the first place I moved was ON Hollywood Blvd. Like I was a block away from the Chinese Theater. It’s a whole new crazy. I mean life in general out here is SO fast. And there are SO many people from every walk of life. And people FREAK me out. Talking to people after I preform was always way more difficult and nerve racking for me than actually performing. I don't think I left my apartment for like 3 weeks. Seriously.
I apologize, but I have to ask, what is the craziest experience you have had in the studio? That you are at liberty to speak on at least. I think the coolest one for me was a few years back. I was working with this artist Toni Iommi (Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath’s Daughter) and she was working with this producer who was so cool. Probably one of the most fun sessions i've done. This guy brought his own rig and gear and just had this super interesting work flow and personality. I didn't realize until like halfway through the 2nd session that the producer was Ben Moody from Evanescence. So I’m sitting in the back of this room trying to hold 15 year old me back from fan boying when he invites me out to dinner with all of them. It's so crazy when you meet someone you like looked up to and they don't see you as a fan but as a colleague. So maybe a more awkward story. A few months after I got hired I was working with this rapper. We were working on song ideas for his next album. So he’s laying down the hook and all he has is 16 straight bars of him dropping the N bomb. He comes out and asks me to turn it up and loop it so he can write some ad-libs or what not in between. I turn the music up and loop the 16 bar hook he's got recorded of N bomb after N bomb. Now the way our rooms were set up at that time, if you're the engineer the artist is behind you on a couch or chair or something and the computer and speakers are up front at a desk and that's where you sit facing the computer. So this hook is looping for a good 15 minutes. And I’m just sitting there letting him write in the back. I turn around and homie is dead asleep. Like he's snoring. And the music is BLASTING. Do I wake him up? Do I just let him sleep? Is it weird that i'm just sitting in here watching him sleep? So I just sit there awkwardly and hope he’ll wake up soon. An hour goes by dude. An hour. In this time I’ve seen all of facebook, been to the bathroom at least 3 times and have basically solved world hunger at this point. So I ended up calling my studio manager and letting him know what was going on so he came and waltzed into the room and real loud which woke up the rapper. It was a strategic studio play, cause I cant be over there poking homie with a stick but I wasn't trying to sit here with the song looping for another hour either…
I have to imagine the outlet for creativity is much broader out there than it is here. What sort of projects have you been involving yourself with outside from your work?
I have a side project with a coworker of mine Paul Bailey called Izzy Scared that I’m super stoked about. We both come from rock backgrounds. Paul grew up in Detroit playing in industrial and metal bands. Working at Atlantic we both got a lot of that pop and urban influence. We try and make stuff that's rock leaning but still has those bangin drums and synths. We like to call it Creepy Pop. It’s all pretty DIY stuff too but it doesn't sound DIY. I mean we do everything ourselves from the writing to the recording to the videography and editing everything is us and a group of our friends we don't have anyone backing us, no sponsors. We just like making music that we wanna hear.
Paul's been there a lot longer than me. I was an intern for a while and he helped train me and teach me different editing techniques and what not. In particular, I can remember when we made our first track were were just hanging out one night at Atlantic. I walked into studio A. Paul was in there jamming some guitar and asked if I wanted to lay something down on his guitar track. I think I programmed some drums and then was laid some vocal stuff down that we both came up with and we just kinda hit it off. Izzy Scared is kind of this like third character we made up. This creepy guy who's stuck in LA.
The video for your song “Madeline Lonely” and the concept are very powerful and tie in perfectly to the melancholy rendition of the song. What is your favorite part about that process? I think the best part is how this song just kinda fell together. We made the track one night just messing around and didn't have any plans for it, but then it all just clicked and we were both like “Let’s do an Eleanor Rigby Cover!” We had been mixing the final songs for our album and wanted to just catch a break from all that so we threw this one together and put it out. I think it took probably about 4 weeks total time for us to put everything out including the video and all which is insane considering we've been working on other stuff for like a year. Sometimes things just fall together. Happy accidents are always my favorite.
Anything else you would like to speak on or that you are excited about for the future?
Well! Izzy Scared is coming out with an Album titled ‘Hex” in a few weeks. We've got 6 songs on there and I’m super excited about all of them. We used a lot of 808’s and trap-esk influence so I hope people dig it as much as I do.
Lastly I just wanna say that if you ever wanna do something, that you should go out and DO IT. There's no such thing as a bad decision as long as you learn from it. If you do something and you don't like it, at least you know you don't like it. Change it. Do something different you might find more than you seek.
Check out Izzy Scared here: https://www.facebook.com/IzzyScared/?fref=ts
And the music video for Madeline Lonely here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5wl5cMI0q4&feature=youtu.be
BSTL