Dan Wilson`s first solo album features the production wizardry of uber-producer Rick Rubin. He can thank Sheryl Crow for the introduction.
“It was one of those friend of a friend things. He e-mailed me one day out of the blue,: Dan tells Undercover News. “My friend Sheryl Crow e-mailed me out of the blue and said “Rick Rubin wants to talk to you, do you mind if I give him your e-mail address?” and I said “Yeah, of course!” He told me that she had played him a few demos in her car that he really dug and I guess he just thought “This is really great, I want to talk to him,” so the next time I came to LA we talked for like an hour, and for the whole time we talked about the book ‘Shakey’ because we had both just finished reading it”.Rubin has an interesting way with working with acts. Sometimes he isn’t even in the studio. Sometimes he isn’t even in the same city. “Well it was sort of a combination for me and from what I’ve heard I got comparatively a lot of attention according to some, but he knew from the start that I was going to do a lot of the band recording in Minneapolis, and we knew that he wasn’t going to come to Minneapolis, but a couple of times I went to LA for a week and we did some simple tracking. He’s really into research and development, so he’s really into cutting a different version of a song that you might never use, but you just get a different perspective on the song”.
The result is the album ‘Free Life’, Dan’s first solo album outside Semisonic.
Dan will be in Australia next week for shows in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
