Creative Sitters Interview: Andrew Camp, Musician & Producer

This interview in our Creative Sitters Series features musician and producer, Andrew Camp. He and his spouse, Kristen, form the musical duo known as The January Lanterns.

I’m not accustomed to public tears at our local One Million Cups events, but there I was, watering up as Kristen and Andrew told the origin story of their indie folk duo. I’m including that story below in Kristen’s words. You can also watch their presentation here and get the full effect. Just be sure to have some tissues at hand.

The backstory of The January Lanterns as told by Kristen Camp:

“We got married when we were really just still babies. We were so young, still in college. We got married in the month of January and then had four kids within four years. We had gone through so much. Our marriage had completely tanked and we were ready to get a divorce. One evening I turned to Andrew and said, ‘What do you want from me? I have nothing left to give.’ I expected him to list off all the things that I could do better, ‘You could do this, this, and this.’ But instead, he said, ‘I want to get up with you tomorrow morning, and I want to have coffee together on our deck.’ And that completely shocked me.

So at 5 am every morning for a year we got up before our babies and we had coffee on our deck. Through those early mornings, which were often hard, painful, but also beautiful, we found our way back to each other through our music. And so we started writing songs together to tell our story. We used music to fall back in love. We feel like we were two lanterns that were really far apart and music helped us to slowly come back together to warm a cold month, to warm a cold marriage. And that’s where the name comes from. Our mission is now to tell the stories that need to be told.”

Kristen and Andrew had been experimenting with a Soul Seat in their home studio, Secret Pasture Sound for a couple of weeks when I dropped by to have the following conversation with Andrew.

Pack: How would you describe yourself in a sentence or two?

Andrew: I am a singer-songwriter, producer, composer, learner, etc. I went to school for vocal performance so I’m a singer first, and then everything else, production-wise and making music, developed after that.

Pack: Are you self-taught on the music production side?

Andrew: Yeah, I’m self-taught. I had wanted to go to Berkley College of Music. But they were so expensive and because of my mom’s connection to MU (University of Missouri), she had a pretty good tuition discount. So it made sense to stick to home. And Kristen and I had also started dating. 

January Lanterns keeps us pretty busy and we work with a lot of college students helping them get their personal projects going. Kristen and I are also doing some writing for film and TV, collaborating with folks around the US. 

Back in 2017 when Kristen’s dad and I were building this studio, we had written a lot of music for other folks. We took a hard look at where our focus was and asked, what are we doing? Let’s get back to square one and find each other. We decided to focus on writing our own music together, which was so therapeutic for our marriage. It was a great time for us to come together creatively and not care what other people were thinking. We had spent most of our lives obsessing about what other people thought about us. That’s where we’re at now. People do truly change over time.

Pack: We can really drift off our purpose to where life needs to be renegotiated.

Andrew: That’s true! And it’s not perfect even now. Anyone who makes their lives look perfect is probably not showing the full picture.

Pack: It must be a challenge for both of you to balance two artist careers in one household.

Andrew: It’s a real struggle when you own something creative with your spouse. It’s often about letting go of things when you may not want to. There needs to be an equal balance of feedback.  I’m pretty bad at balancing feedback. I have a pretty perfectionistic mindset, so it’s really hard for me to let it go. Particularly for the quality and excellence aspect of the production process. Likely calling something done for me is a completely different thing than for Kristen. There are a lot of pros and cons there. For example, I’ll spend an hour tweaking a reverb on a vocal track and she’ll say, “It’s good, what are you doing?” And I’ll say, “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

Pack: It’s so easy to forget that the listener isn’t bringing the same level of critique to the moment as you the creator.

Tell me about what it’s been like having a Soul Seat in your studio.

Andrew: It’s the best! It’s so high quality. I found that I actually fidget in a good way much more than I thought I would. I’d be listening back to a track and I’ll be spinning around until Kristen pointed it out I didn’t even know I was spinning. The options to move have helped my brain not get stuck in a static mindset. The movement keeps your brain dynamically evolving.

Pack: And I see that there are no chair arms bumping into your workstation.

Andrew: Yup. It’s great. I scoot right up to the desk, and 90 percent of the time I’m squatting like this (one foot up on the butterfly cushion). The great thing is that I’ve got my pedal board (a collection of special effects) over here and the free leg down can reach it even as I’ve got my other leg tucked under. There’s not an arm of the chair getting in the way. 

And it sounds like such a small detail, but I don’t have to reach as far or make a big change in position to reach another one of my tools. During hours of recording, mixing, and mastering, that adds up.

Pack: I’m seeing that you’ve got access to both your guitar, your recording equipment, the mic, and your effects and looping pedals are all within reach.

(Andrew spins around and grabs one of several guitars waiting on a specialized rack.)

Andrew: Honestly, I think that this is just great for recording guitars. Perching on the Soul Seat puts me right in the zone where I don’t have to move into another room to capture a good track.

Pack: We describe one of the perks of the Soul Seat as giving you the benefits of floor sitting without having to make major alterations to your current setup. You’ve put a lot into the design and construction of this studio. We like to think the Soul Seat is the least disruptive alternative to floor sitting. So you’ve brought floor sitting into your space, but I don’t see anything different other than this chair.

Andrew: Yes, and I can pull out my keyboard here. How often do pianists sit like this? Yes, it’s all the same.

Pack: You mentioned that you were used to waking up with neck pain before the Soul Seat.

Andrew: Yes. I mean, I would have a crick most days when I woke up. Now I can move my neck. It feels like magic. I don’t know how to describe it. But the neck pain is not a problem for me anymore. The crick had gone away and then Kristen borrowed the Soul Seat for the last two days and the crick came back this morning. Now I’ve been in the Soul Seat for two hours and the crick is gone, which blows my mind.   

Pack: There’s a lot of stuff going on in our pelvis and our posture throughout the day that if we don’t address, will cause all sorts of problems. 

What sort of response have you gotten from folks coming into the studio? The way you have things set up, your mixing station is right in the same room with the other musicians instead of behind a glass wall.

Andrew: It is a refreshing change for people coming to this space. They see the chair and realize that in this studio they’re going to have a different experience. Especially if they’ve recorded before.

Pack: Talk a bit about the role that gear like the Soul Seat plays with your other tools.

Andrew: It plays well with the rest of my setup. Sometimes I roll over the mic cords, but that’s a normal chair problem too. Perhaps I should have gotten the bamboo leg version.

Pack: Seeing you spin, you won’t be able to do that on the bamboo Soul Seat. But we can put glides on the one you have.

Andrew: Well that is probably the ideal solution because I rarely roll around. And though the carpet does serve an acoustic dampening purpose, for sound absorption, I very rarely move. I’m now realizing that when the perch is down low, I’ve got more leg leverage to scooch around. But, maybe the glides will work. Rolling over cables with the office chair wheels is one major problem in studios. And we don’t have a cable management system running them under the floor here.

Pack: You mentioned the spinning helped you move your attention away from the screen as you’re listening back to the music tracks. Is there anything else in your creative process that you’ve noticed the Soul Seat supports? Would you say it’s become a piece of essential gear?

Andrew: Being able to just grab the guitar and place it on my knee without navigating arms or the back of a chair is super great. There’s nothing that comes close to this setup. (plays guitar) It’s much like how a classical guitar is supported for playing. If I was in a chair with armrests, reaching over (to adjust the mic), I would not be able to do this. 

(Andrew replaces the Soul Seat with his previous “ergonomic” desk chair to demonstrate how it gets in the way of the workflow trying to record guitar audio with the mic set up). 

I would be hitting everything. And see, I can’t even put my foot down to control the foot pedals. 

(Lots of noise comes through the monitors from the guitar's neck and body bumping against either the chair or the desktop) 

Pack: So awkward! This is what you’ve been putting up with all these years? You figured out some way in the past to make it work. But until you had the Soul Seat here, you didn’t realize what you had been putting up with.

Andrew: With me now back on the Soul Seat, see how my guitar neck is swinging unencumbered above the desktop? (No more clunking noises he’ll have to edit out later) See how often I need to move between setting up the mic, to focusing on the screen? And I’m not having to be extra careful.

Pack: If the Soul Seat had a job in the studio, what job does it fill?

Andrew: If I was doing this sitting in that other chair, and someone else was here, I’d say, “Could you hold this for a sec?” It’s like an extra hand, but you don’t have to hand it anything, it’s just eliminating you from needing to set other stuff down. You know how when you’re carrying stuff and you have to open a door? So now I don’t have to set things down to get through the door. I have enough moments like that in my workflow that can be a distraction. As a detail person, if my equipment is banging on something half the time, it's maddening, and the tape is rolling and you’re trying to problem solve and there’s this really simple thing that’s not being handled. 

Music is solving problems, and so if there’s this one little problem that keeps happening that you can’t do anything about it really puts you in a frustrated state. And anything that can take you out of a frustrated state and put you back in a flow state, is really valuable.

Pack: You’ve obviously spent some significant money on gear. Is there an equivalent piece of gear that has had as much impact as the Soul Seat? Could you put a dollar amount on that?

Andrew: That’s a good question. That’s a really good question. I would have to think about that. I have everything mic'd up. That’s what this Soul Seat is, it’s an efficiency thing and a headache reliever.

Pack: And for you specifically, literally a neck pain reliever!

Andrew: Let me think about what it took to set things up so everything is mic’d up and I don’t have to stop the workflow to move a mic set up from one instrument to another. Drums, piano, vocal, mics, cables, and stands set up so all I have to do is press a button and go, that’s probably over two thousand bucks to have all of that routed and plugged into the interface and ready to go. That’s 12 mics with cables and stands. But that one vocal mic alone is $1500. That puts it over $3000. With the mics set up this way, I don’t have to do so much thinking and can spend most of my time reacting to the moment. 

Until I did this routing stuff with all the mics, I didn’t know how frustrated I was. And I said, “Wow, this is so much better because I can hit record and within a minute I’m ready to do anything I need to do in here. Same thing with the Soul Seat, I didn’t realize what I was missing. The minute I brought the old chair back over and started bumping everything it became so obvious. I didn’t know there was another option. An unconscious extra hand helper.

Pack: Thanks for sharing so much of your creative process with us, we’re delighted to be able to make a contribution with the Soul Seat.

Andrew: There’s just nothing that comes close to this. Being able to support the guitar on my knee while managing all the other recording tasks, there’s just nothing that comes close.

Pack: Seriously?

Andrew: No, truly. It’s super great!