Episode Preview: Required Listening

Host Scott Goldman interviews the top creators in the music industry each week, live from the Clive Davis Theater at the GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles. Here's a preview of our inaugural episode with Imagine Dragons.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Required Listening. I'm your host, Scott Goldman, Executive
director of the Grammy Museum. Every week since two thousand eight,
I've been hosting discussions with artists, songwriters and producers in
front of a live audience at the Clive Davis Theater
inside the Grammy Museum. The discussions are intimate, their personal,
completely unscripted, and we thought, wait, this needs to be

(00:21):
a podcast. So here we are our launch episode, and
to give you an idea of what you'll hear each week,
I want you to listen to a recent conversation I
had with the band Imagined Dragons right around the release
of their latest album Evolved. We were talking about the
concept of minimalism in recording. Now this from a band
that's well known for putting every sound possible on every track.

(00:43):
They were incredibly open, articulate, detailed about why they took
this approach, and that's the kind of information that I
find fascinating. It's why we wanted to bring these programs
to a wider audience, and that's what we're doing with
Required Listening. So now let's go to the Clive Davis
Theater and listen to an excerpt of my conversation with

(01:04):
Imagine Dragons. Oh well, I'd say this record, we really
tried to take a different approach. We tried to be
more minimalistic and selective. Um, you know you you can
easily say we need more and more and more violence,
more string sections, more counter melodies, and so we brought
in producers on this record to say no, you know

(01:25):
this is good, or slap your hand and say no,
you don't need cello on this song. That more cowbell. Ye,
we never did cow bow. We didn't go that low.
But actually we did have We put cow bo. There's
a good amount of cowbell on this record. We did.
There's one song on the record already, already we're having
an argument. You know why we put cow You know
why there's cow bell? Our manager it is actually it's

(01:47):
the one artistic decision. Yeah, on the record that we
had two mixes. This is a true story of this song,
whatever it takes. And one of them had no cow
bell on the chorus and one had cow bell and
he he would not give it, snuck it in more cowbell.
You know your stage. Years years ago, years ago, Neil

(02:08):
Young on his on his ranch used to record in
this barn and he had all this set up in
this amps and speakers or whatever, and he would record
and then he would go out in the lake literally
on a boat. I'm so glad you know the story.
And he would listen back and he would say, and
he would say, if he didn't like it, he's here,
more barns, more barn you this big, massive speakers and

(02:34):
you sit at an exact spot in the lake. You
get the perfect stereo image. Right, is a genius and
he's he's a madman too. Yeah. Well, and we're gonna
we're gonna get to that because because I want to
talk to you about artists that that that you've kind
of idolized over the years. But in terms of evolve, um,
I've heard, you know, words like minimalist, more colorful, and

(02:57):
and the fact that you guys worked with producers. You
it's almost like you were willing to be kind of
reined in. It was kind of like, as producers we
decided we wanted to be produced. You got, you fired
your In fact, you fired yourself. We didn't fire ourselves.
We were still very much hands onto the process, but

(03:17):
we sort of recognized that, um, you know, when we're producing,
we try to say yes to everything. We really try
to get into the studio and if there's an idea
that gets thrown out, we try it and we record
it before we throw it away. And oftentimes, you know,
it's just it's hard to stay focused. So many different
ideas come from so many different angles, especially with us,

(03:38):
from all the different backgrounds that we have musically. Um, yeah,
and I've noticed it's sort of a common theme that
I've sort of learned, and I'm finally getting it because
I'm a little slow. But limitations are actually really good. Boundaries.
Boundaries are amazing without any boundaries, Like I don't know,
like the Beatles recorded most of their stuff on a

(04:00):
two track or a four track to two tracks taped
together basically, and the things that were able to do
with that are amazing because they had these days, you
basically have an unlimited amount of layers you can put
on a song. But back in the day that was
not true. You can record one thing and then another thing.
They have to bounce that to something and then you

(04:20):
can record something else. So it was very limiting. But
like in that limitation, there was freedom and there was creativity,
and so we finally had to learn like, okay, just
because we can do two or fifty six tracks of
cow bell, we didn't do that. We didn't do that,
we didn't do that. So that's your required listening for today.
We'll be here twice a week every week. Find us

(04:43):
wherever fine podcasts are heard. Thanks for listening. Until next time,
I'm Scott Goldman.