Stereo Blast

APPLES IN STEREO's Robert Schneider talks about his new psychedelic pop tour de force, New Magnetic Wonder

To say that Robert Schneider is excited about the new record by The Apples in Stereo, entitled New Magnetic Wonder, is an understatement. The CD is an impeccable pop-meets-psychedelic rock recording, filled with track after track of upbeat but compelling music. However, the band's first recording in five years didn't come easy for Schneider.

Before the noted composer-lyricist-producer seized on the ideas that would become the recording, he went through a long selfsearching process where he questioned and then re-invented his signature style, sound and production techniques. First, Schneider grew tired with the ornate production style he was known for. He started listening to classic R&B and realized that the songs were half or more about the vocal, not the production. Then he rejected lyrics that were too poppy, oblique or lacked feeling. He also questioned his approach of considering vocals as equal to other instruments in the mix, instead of being the primary element that people hear, relate to and remember.

"I had always gone with the approach in recording that the lead vocal was another instrument mixed in with the other instruments," he says. "But I came to the realization listening to old R&B recordings that most people only hear the vocal melody and the way it's sung, and that's what people relate to. I felt I had neglected that when you listen to a record, you are listening to another human being, singing to you or singing for you."

Schneider took his less-is-more approach literally into a garageturned- studio and made a CD with another of his bands, Ulysses, which he describes as "pure emotion, stripped down and satisfying." But then he had another musical crisis. "Brian Wilson put out the record Smile and I heard some bootlegs of it and saw it performed live. It blew my mind, as to how much further you can go with this baroque instrumentation. This is a really deep beautiful thing. It is the most beautiful psychedelic record ever."

"So when I heard Smile, I had gone through this period of disillusionment and seeking purity and learning about the importance of singing and the lyrics, and so on," he says, "and then I got a copy of the Electric Light Orchestra's Greatest Hits and started listening to it intensely. That blew my mind too. It is pure top 40, but ornate and elaborate.

"Everything that I had grown up doing and listening to, everything I had done making records and producing other people had been fragmented and pulled apart – it came back together in this implosion," he says. "Suddenly, I had a completely different perspective. I had these new lessons. I had the old skills I always had. I just woke up and said I have to make the essential Apples record."

Schneider's epiphanies became New Magnetic Wonder. He realized the music could be baroque or even psychedelic, but at most it would only be half the production. The other half would be sparser, more visceral vocals. He asked musical friends to join his band in the studio to add parts, and focused on live recordings with fewer takes. And he penned lyrics that reflected his lifelong interest in physics and math, in essence focusing on the sun, light, energy and radiation as vehicles conveying moods, changes and optimism.

"This record is about getting older. I wanted the record to be reassuring," he says. "It's about getting all your musical friends together and doing something special, getting your old friends together with your new friends. That was the kind of experimentation and collaboration that we never had on Apples records before."

Schneider, as driven as ever, also wanted to create a recording as an experience.

"I wanted to make a record that was extremely elaborate. At the same time, being extremely elaborate was only supposed to be 50 percent of it. Fifty percent is the vocal. Fifty percent of it is the production, even if it is an acoustic guitar or 100 tracks. So, for instance, you have a song like "Seven Stars," that has this synthesizer atmosphere landscape of a production, but then the vocal is super loud and I recorded it through an old Ampex mic pre-amp that is really distorted. It has this really smooth backing track and this really raw lead vocal."

Schneider says he had a new appreciation for juxtaposing contrasting elements, but always keeping vocals in their proper place. "On the tracks that were more elaborate, I tried to make the vocal track be more human and raw and pure and have more fire to balance it out," he says. "On the less-elaborate songs, the vocals could be smoother."

And like his musical muses, he wanted a recording that transported listeners. "You want something colorful that's out of the ordinary, that's strange, to capture your ear and take you beyond just a rock band into a production," he says. "You are giving somebody a different world to go into in a song, and you want to make that world a little different."

— Steven Rosenfeld


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