Hooked: Stephen Brodsky on Led Zeppelin's "Communication Breakdown"

Ask Andrew Watt about the most important moment of any session and he’ll tell you it’s the first playback. The artist—and it could be the Rolling Stones, Pearl Jam, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Lady Gaga—tracks something, anything, the first thing they put down that day, and then everyone walks back into the control room, and somebody presses play. “That’s when you’re either granted the keys to the kingdom,” Watt says, “or it sounds like shit and everyone wants to kill you.” It is, as Watt says, a results-based business. So if the band comes back in and hears the drums slamming and the guitars loud and separated on each side and the rhythm section sounding strong, they know everything’s safe. All they have to do is play.

Watt is 35 years old and at this point he has made enough records with enough of the people who taught the rest of us how rock and roll is supposed to sound—Mick and Keith, Ozzy, Iggy, Eddie Vedder, and now Paul McCartney—that the first playback is something close to a working philosophy. What he’s after isn’t accuracy, but rather the thing happening in the room, the push and pull between musicians listening to each other in real time. The run of rock records he’s produced in the past several years—Ozzy’s Ordinary Man and Patient Number 9, Vedder’s Earthling, Iggy Pop’s Every Loser, Pearl Jam’s Dark Matter, the Rolling Stones’ Hackney Diamonds, and now the new Stones album, Foreign Tongues, and McCartney’s The Boys of Dungeon Lane—sound the way they sound for the same reasons. They were tracked live, by musicians playing as musicians. They are not made to a click. They are not polished to within an inch of their lives. They preserve the human imperfection that gets compressed and quantized out of most modern records—the speeding up and slowing down, the moments where one player is following another, the unexpected slips or sounds between phrases.