Weezer’s “Blue Album”: A Listening Experience with Legendary Engineer Chris Shaw
On Sunday, May 15, 2022, our team at Same Sky Productions held our first big event since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. And you know what… It was pretty cool.
It was a first for us. A “Listening Experience” as we dubbed it at the time, but we'll have to come up with something snappy going forward, because yes, we will definitely be doing it again.
The inspiration for the event came from the Welcome to 1979 Recording Summit, an annual event hosted at Welcome to 1979 recording studio in Nashville, TN. We were inspired by their concept of a weekend-long event of panels, in-studio recording, listening, Q&As and networking with fellow engineers and music lovers, and thought it would be fun to bring a similar event to our Austin, TX community. (We were also inspired by the speakers. A pair of Focal SM9s had been purchased before we even left Nashville.) So we decided to give the format a shot, albeit, on a slightly smaller scale.
We reached out to “friend-of-the-studio’ and legendary engineer, Chris Shaw and asked if he’d be interested in being our guest of honor. If you don’t already know Chris Shaw, you probably know at least one of the records that he’s worked on. He’s got 6 of Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Records of All Time” on his discography including Public Enemy’s “It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” Bob Dylan’s “Love and Theft,” and A Tribe Called Quest’s “The Low End Theory.” — We’re still shocked he takes our calls — ANYWAY, we settled on a little listening event centered around a seminal classic, Weezer’s “Blue Album.”
After a bit of a mixer with all of our guests, we brought everyone into our acoustically treated cut room and listened to the record from top to bottom on the aforementioned monitors. Do you realize how odd it is to gather a large group of strangers and just sit quietly in a room listening to a record? It’s actually pretty freaking cool. Music is kind of awesome.
Chris Shaw took the stage after the record and explained how he got the gig after hanging up on Ric Ocasek because he thought it was a prank and regaled us with stories of slacker assistant engineers and one very important game of Risk.
It was a pleasure getting to meet with such a great group of engineers and general music lovers over a record that means so much to so many. We look forward to replicating this experience with other records and engineers going forward, so stay tune for more info!
Check out photos from the event below.
