Featured Conversation: Chris Walla

Published on Dec 19, 2024

“It’s like, I don’t want to listen to Death Cab For Cutie. Please stop recommending it to me. I don’t want to listen to the Postal Service. Please stop recommending it to me. And you know, I love all of that music. I loved working on those records and I love those guys, you know, they’re great. But when it was that raw and that new, it was just like, can’t do it.”

I talked to Chris Walla - accomplished producer, guitarist, and record collector - about buying records, listening to music with his young son, and streaming.

So tell me a little about yourself and your collection.

I grew up with vinyl, as I think a lot of people did. I guess I’ve been collecting records for most of my life, and I kind of never really stopped buying vinyl, through the CD boom, or through the early iTunes years. So I just buy records, kind of all the time. I don’t actually know exactly how many I’ve got, but it’s somewhere in the three to 4000 range. It’s a lot, and one of the things that I really enjoy as a record producer and a recording engineer, I’m kind of interested in just about any sort of pop or rock-leaning piece of vinyl, particularly old records, and particularly records that are pop records from the ‘80s that are not especially cool, or have been sort of forgotten or lost to time. 

There’s something about even the (records) that nobody cares about very much, are records that a whole bunch of people put a lot of time and care and energy into. And there’s something about when you find a pressing of an old record, you know, in a…I mean, there aren’t any dollar bins anymore, but when you find one for like, four or $5 someplace, it’s the experience of putting it on that’s really interesting, because it’s kind of the only remaining way to interface with those recordings as a listener, in the way that the label or the producer, the artist initially made or envision them. So I’m really into that. 

So much of my collection is ‘80s R&B records. I have such a huge soft spot for so much of that music. And luckily in Norway, those records are people that kind of can’t get rid of in their record collections fast enough. The Norwegians are ruthlessly practical, and they have kind of just ditched vinyl, they will forever be buying Pink Floyd reissues as (is) kind of the case everywhere. And they still go nuts for a Dire Straits box or whatever. But, yeah, you can just pick up Alexander O’Neill records, or DeBarge records, or any of that stuff from the ‘80s. It’s just, really, they’re kind of a dime a dozen. So I have really fleshed out that corner of my collection since living in Norway, which I think is so fun and kind of interesting. 

When you have an idea of what it is you want to collect, as opposed to just records, if you have a little niche that you’re looking for, it’s fun to go collecting and looking for these things.

There’s only a handful of record stores in Heim, and one of them’s, like, pretty. I mean, they really lean into the rock reissue thing. And there’s not a lot there that I get super excited about. But the other one is a record store called All Good Clean Records. (It) has a pretty good selection of stuff, and it seems like they’ll buy any collection and sort of cherry-pick it and get it all on the shelves. 

That’s a great way to buy records from people who buy collections. I go to a regular record store, any used record store, I’m not getting those big finds. It’s just basic stuff people are getting rid of. I’ve been looking on, like, Facebook Marketplace for people getting rid of their collections. I got a lot of CDs that way.

Yeah? Well, I saw you got that big haul of CDs, like 100 CDs or something a month or two ago, yeah? And that’s just so awesome. I have not gotten rid of my CDs. They’re still kicking around, and I’m really grateful now that I didn’t ditch them like 15 years ago or whatever. It’s a physical medium that still serves such a purpose. 

So I’ll talk about one record for a second. I have a copy of Green. The REM record is a record that I bought when it was new, when I was 13, from the Columbia House Record and Tape Club. Oh yeah, it was one of the 13 records for a penny, the sign-up contract thing.

I think that as the years have worn on, the idea of actually taking a journey through life with a single copy of a record is really fascinating and really interesting, because that record’s been remastered several times. It’s been reissued. It’s kind of one of the beloved records in that band’s discography, and and all this stuff happens with your experience of the music in a digital, streaming environment where every time you put it on, it sounds a little different, or the interface that you’re listening to it on looks different and feels different, or it’s been it’s been remastered. Sometimes the remasters are really good. Sometimes they’re pretty aggressive and not actually suited for what the music can support. And so having this one record that is the record that I remember, and having it as just a fixed marker, like a stake in the ground, a point in time that has not meaningfully changed. It has degraded a little bit like it got played a lot, but it is still exactly the experience that I remember from that point in my life. 

So because that’s true, my perceptions of how it’s different, I can recognize my perceptions of how the record is different as my own perceptions, and not have to question whether or not the audio has changed. Like, is it the record? Is this different? Is it the same? I feel all the time in streaming and in digital, I mean the digital renderings of all things like reformatting TV shows to from 43 to 69 or kind of brighter or more colorful, or louder or more aggressive than you remember it and, and so this is something that, because I am, I’m just so sensitive to the way that we change as we age, the way our ears change, our hearing changes, and the way that everything around us changes and affects the way that we consume and and react to the music that we love, like I just love having physical media like that around. It’s just so important to me and I’m not a casual music listener. I’m pretty invested in everything I’m doing. And, I know that not everybody’s like that. But I think that in a world where so many things change so quickly, it’s just really nice to have something that’s just a finished, complete, unalterable document.

My prized possession is a copy of Aztec Camera’s, High Land, Hard Rain. It’s my favorite record of all time. And this is the record I got in 1983 when it came out, when I was working at Record World, and the guy I had a crush on bought me the record when I was sick. That record means the world to me because it’s of the moment and I’ve carried it with me. Well, I’ve gotten rid of so many other records. I’ve carried it with me through moves and everything, because it’s part of my life. Yeah, it’s not just a record.

I really relate to that. I mean, that makes so much sense to me. (T)here’s a bunch of this through my collection, we’ve got another one at some point in the ‘50s. I think it was like the 1950s… [‘53 or ‘54]. My uncle, my dad’s brother, won a contest from a Seattle radio station. It was a call-in contest or a write-in. I forget the story of the contest, but KJR was the station, and anyone that won the contest won a stack of 45s. It’s as tall as you are.

So I grew up with this pretty ragtag stack of 45s that were mostly not hit records, and a lot of stuff that was pretty corny and not really my thing. But there were a handful of records in there that I loved as a kid and have carried forward with me. And one of them is this [45], there’s six songs on the 45, there’s three songs aside. So it just sounds horrible. Oh God, but the first song, and the first side is, “Don’t You Just Know It” by Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns, and that song, and that recording of that song, and that particular 45 is just etched in my memory, and at some point or another in the last year, I decided, as our as our son has been getting into music and picking records off the shelves. I sort of felt like, Oh, dude, we should put this on, I think you’re going to like this. And I put it on, and he completely reacted to it. He absolutely loved it. So we are routinely listening to this 75-year-old copy of this pretty bad-sounding “Don’t You Just Know It.” But, yeah, that’s the song that I mean. This is the version of the song that he knows and that he has fallen in love with “Don’t You Just Know It.” He asked for gooba gooba. It’s there, yeah, an indelible piece of music. That’s now such a huge part of my and our family history. I mean, just this happenstance kind of, you know, my uncle wanted to win the contest. And now, 75 years later, there’s this [record]. So there’s a lot of that kind of thing in our record collection. There’s a handful of fussy audiophile records, and then there’s a whole bunch of stuff that we kind of listen to every day, and there’s some reissues, and there’s some old records, there’s some really rare stuff, there’s some really just pedestrian, everyday stuff. And it’s all just like the record collection it’s, it’s how we consume music at home, kind of every day, right? 

You mentioned to me that you let your son pick out the records you listen to.

It’s really fun. We just made a decision at some point that we just, you know, we just want him to just feel like he has some agency and some ownership and…he can just be a part of the house and, do things and make decisions about stuff and and the thing is, it’s like, I tend to get trapped in listening patterns where I’ll reach for the same thing kind of over and over. And I think that’s pretty common. And having our son upend that completely and just reach for records that are, you know, things that I actually haven’t pulled out in a lot of years, or things that, actually, I kind of decided that maybe I don’t really enjoy that much or there’s just stuff you buy or pick up along the way that just, it doesn’t really make the cut. Like, you listen to it a few times, and then it kind of goes back on the shelf he’s really pulled out. A bunch of those are, there’s a handful of things in the letter E, which is at eye-level for him. So there’s a bunch of E records that he grabs for. Much to my dismay, he’s gotten really into Juan Garcia Esquivel and that stuff is… they’re kind of amazing records, but they’re just so campy. And I kind of it’s always a little heartbreaking when he pulls out one of the Esquivel records, and he likes one of them because it’s clear blue vinyl, and he’s just very into it. and so we put it on, and I just, kind of suffer through it. I roll my eyes through the whole thing. But, you know, we put it on, it’s fine. He’s having a good time. 

And you’re making memories for him.

So yeah, exactly. He’s really fallen in love with it. The Ex Hex record, the first Ex Hex record from 2013? I guess it was like 2013 or 14 (ed note, it was 2014) Um, yeah. And that was a record that I bought because I just love Mary Timony, kind of everything she does, I’m pretty on board with it and so we bought the record and I enjoyed it, but it didn’t stay on the turntable. We played it five or six or eight times or something, and then it kind of got filed away. And it’s come out a couple times here and there over the years, but [my son] loves that record. He’s so into it. And I’ve kind of fallen back in love with it too, especially since it’s really fun to listen to, and next to Mary’s record from this year (Untame the TIger), which is so good. It’s so excellent, so highly recommended. So records are just a part of the thing at the house, and the way we develop records or relationships with records, with a kid around, there’s just so many ways. Like for a while there was only one record that he would fall asleep to, and it was Tender Buttons by Broadcast. It was just the sound of us trying to get him to sleep for almost a year, it was the only record that we could put on that he would like.

My son would fall asleep to Offspring’s Smash. He’d ask for “keep them separated” and then I’d have to put that on, and he’d sing it, and he’d go to bed. 

So good, yeah. I mean, these days our dude is really into, I mean, (Jeff Rosenstock’s) Hell Mode  is one of the records that he pulls out…really falls asleep too, which is pretty…yeah. but he’s out by the time we get to “Future is Dumb,” which is just…God bless you. 

You mentioned that you don’t really stream at all.

Almost none.

Was this a conscious decision you made, not to stream?

Not exactly (laughs). Let me explain to you why I don’t why ever get into streaming. It has everything to do with having been in a band that the algorithm wanted to recommend to me all the time. By the time I left Death Cab For Cutie, it was like 2014. It was about 10 years ago. And it was right when Spotify was really ascendant and, and I was already starting to get kind of burned out on the iTunes thing at that point. But the algorithms were also really pretty primitive at that point. And there were a lot of downvote options, right? And the process of leaving my band was very sad. It was very difficult. It was really tough and a lot of mixed feelings, like just some real grief and real anger, just a lot of things. I mean the difference with a breakup like that is that there was, in streaming terms, if I wanted to engage with music on the platform that, increasingly, everybody else in the world was using, I sort of was gonna have to take that. I was just gonna have to deal with that head on, and I was not ready for it. I couldn’t do it and I didn’t have enough control or agency over my experience with the platform to be able to essentially blacklist my own band.

It’s like, I don’t want to listen to Death Cab For Cutie. Please stop recommending it to me. I don’t want to listen to the Postal Service. Please stop recommending it to me. And you know, I love all of that music. I loved working on those records and I love those guys, you know, they’re great. But when it was that raw and that new, it was just like, can’t do it.

You didn’t want that jumping out at you all the time.

Yeah, so that’s, that’s why I never really bought into the streaming thing. It’s kind of petty I mean, I know I’m not literally the only person who’s had this experience, but it’s the most common reason to not be into streaming, I’m not opposed to streaming. Conceptually, I think that Spotify kind of sucks, but I really do believe that there’s a good way to do it, but yeah that’s why I’m not a streaming guy.

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Chris Walla is a musician, record producer, recording engineer, songwriter, and studio owner, perhaps best known as a founding member of Death Cab for Cutie, the band he was in for 17 years. Chris recorded and produced the first seven DCfC albums and mixed the first six. He has also made records with Tegan and Sara, The Decemberists, Lo Moon, Gord Downie, Nada Surf, The Thermals, S, William Fitzsimmons, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Your Heart Breaks, Telekinesis, Foxing, Ratboys, and many others. In the studio he is happiest capturing the sound of a live band, managing a mess of tape loops, or tying sequencers and drum machines together. He really, really loves coffee.