Hey Ross,
I was going to start posting soon, honest!
That record was crazy to make, most of it was written in the studio pretty much on the fly. We were at the White Room in Detroit which was in downtown Detroit and my hotel was about 5 blocks from the studio. One night at about 3 a.m I offered to walk home and everyone said "That's not going to happen, anyone walking around here at this time of night will be dead within 3 blocks". There are a lot of crazy stories from those sessions, the band setting up a 5 person hot tub in studio b, an 'exotic dancer' girl trying to smash down the studio door at 4 a.m one night etc etc. But I'm guessing are you wanting to know more about recording process right?
Going in to the record we had already decided that there were no rules, we were all fans of "Paul's boutique" and a wide range of classic recordings and wanted to use the band members in the way hip-hip producers used old records. On most of the songs there are only a few mics on the drums, one was just one PZM mic stuck to the wall.
The white room had two main studios but a couple of good rooms connected to the main room, so we set up three drum kits with completely different micing techniques in each room. One room had two 221's on the kit, another had the Glynn John's three mic thing going etc. We also had three different bass rigs and several guitar set-ups. As we started putting together a song we would decide which drum, bass or guitar vibe would fit that song and proceed from there as if it was something we were sampling from a record.
The record was actually mainly recorded to 2 inch though with programming done on an old mpc60 and it was only about 6 weeks in that we started using protools. So when people ask me about the programming on cowboy like the harmonica or the jaw harp, they don't realize that that was all played live to a 2 inch and wasn't sampled at all.
Similarly a lot of the drums on the record were a hybrid of samples recorded with a drummer playing that were then programmed in the mpc and actual live drums that were not cut up at all.
Ok my first post and thanks Ross for calling me out, I owe you one.