SFist Interviews: Ian Brennan
by Amy Crocker
In the city of eliminating plastic grocery bags and library cards made of recycled corn, Ian Brennan’s music career has been, not surprisingly, organically grown.
Brennan, born in Oakland and raised in Pleasant Hill, began by playing small live shows of his own music. This transitioned smoothly into putting together gigs for other bands, which turned into producing larger shows for charities and then to producing records. As a producer, Brennan was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Traditional Folk Album category for Ramblin' Jack Elliot's “I Stand Alone” in 2007 and again in 2008 for Peter Case’s “Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John.”
He is most recently the producer of the debut solo record of Kyp Malone of the indie rock band TV on the Radio. Malone’s album, “Rain Machine,” which was recorded in a Berkeley studio, will be released September 22 on Anti-records. SFist spoke with Brennan about recording “Rain Machine” in San Francisco, why a Grammy is no big deal, and why San Francisco’s music scene may be no more inspiring than Oklahoma’s.
SFist: How did you come to work with Kyp Malone?
Ian Brennan: Disney Hall in Los Angeles had a big event with luminaries of the indie rock world. It was a lot of people; they even took an intermission. Somewhere around three and a half or four hours in, Kyp had to play last. Some people had left at that point; everyone was tired. Kyp went up there with two songs and played one of the best performances I’ve ever seen musically. The next day I started the process of trying to get in contact with him, assuming there must a be solo act in the works, and convincing him that he should do it.
In a lot of cases, especially solo artists, they need a third party to give them support. They don’t have the other people in the band to give that ambition, competition and rivalry.
SF: So how did you help with the creative process?
IB: Some situations call for more direction than others. What happens with a lot of artists is they tend to be their own worst enemy. They disown the things that make them most unique and embrace things that aren’t as good as they think. More than getting them to do something, it’s getting them to not do something.
SF: Why did you and Malone decide to record in Berkeley?
IB: He had personal history in San Francisco; he had lived here in late nineties. He actually recorded on a couple of locations. We went to Sutro Baths and went to one of the tunnels in the park. One of the songs was written using a sample of what we recorded in San Francisco. You can literally hear the winds of the Sutro Baths on the record.
SF: How did the back-to-back Grammy nominations affect your approach to the music business?
IB: I don’t know that it changed things all that much. I’m sure that maybe winning versus being nominated might have a certain impact. Certainly it’s a nice thing. But at the end of the day not everybody that gets nominated for a record is good and certainly scores of great record never gets nominated.
SF: When you started in the music business, was becoming a producer one of your goals?
IB: I started playing music when I was about five years old and was pretty committed to the idea that that’s what I was going to do. I didn’t really have any interest in being famous I just wanted to produce something that was really good. It was not that important whether it was me or someone else [playing].
SF: Do you think San Francisco’s distance from the big studios of Los Angeles makes for a more edgy music scene?
IB: Any band that comes to America that’s doing anything slightly progressive is always going to play San Francisco […] San Francisco and the Bay Area have this unreciprocated rivalry with Los Angeles. [People in Los Angeles] generally like San Francisco. But San Francisco wants to distance itself from Los Angeles, which is so tied to some of the bad aspects of show business as well as the good. Los Angeles has some great neighborhoods but overall it’s not the most creative or culturally inspiring place.
SF: Does good music have to come from inspiring places?
IB: Everything is colored by your experiences and some of those are geographic and some of those have nothing to do with where you are. The bay area has a fairly big music scene but that doesn’t necessarily produce good music. And there are a lot of amazingly smart and creative people in Los Angeles and that kind of proves that it’s not where you live. So much of the best music of the past years has come out of nowhere. [For example,] The Flaming Lips are from Oklahoma.
SF: How has the San Francisco music scene changed in your lifetime?
IB: Being in one place for the same time gives you the opportunity to see the cycles of things.
With the bay area music scene, there are so many more people that come and get involved and then they leave. There’s a level of tourism to it and a level of strangeness when you’re from here, you are in a sense not from here. Your hometown doesn’t really belong to you it belongs to the world.