You Follow Me - Recording and Production

Recording and Production

Despite being released the year after On Leaving, You Follow Me was in fact the first of these two albums to be recorded. Nastasia and White first discussed the possibility of recording a collaborative album while the pair were touring Russia with violinist Dylan Willemsa in support of Run to Ruin; the intention being to record an entire album where Nastasia's voice and acoustic guitar would be supported throughout solely by White's drumming.

Prior to work officially commencing with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio Studios, White and Nastasia, along with her longtime companion Kennan Gudjonsson, rented a rehearsal space where they quickly recorded multiple takes of each song. Gudjonsson and White would then both return to their home editing stations to subject each recorded track to an arduous process of selection and editing, in effect creating a rough demo of a song by piecing together individual sections of different takes. This process would need to be repeated several times, however, as Nastasia explained, "Jim would play around with different things. He's a very intuitive player, and he could interpret the song differently every time. He sometimes went by the dynamics in the guitar, other times he'd instigate the dynamic change. And he wanted it to be very precise, very specific. He didn't want to improvise." These demo's were later used as guide tracks when recording started with Steve Albini.

"Our Discussion" was originally recorded with Boom Bip for his 2005 album Blue-Eyed In The Red Room, where it appeared under its original title of "The Matter (Of Our Discussion)." Nastasia commented that her original collaboration with Boom Bip " ended up not really working as intended. He sent me some songs and was saying, "Why don't you write lyrics over them?" And even though it was beautiful music, I couldn't figure out what to do with any of it. And I didn't have time to figure it out. I already had "Our Discussion" finished so I just sent him that. He did his version of the instrumental — he remixed it — and I really liked it, but we had played it before and Jim and I record it ."

Nastasia later expressed some dissatisfaction with the album, stating that "some of those songs I felt like I really wanted to hear how they would have sounded on record with a full band. I mean, I like how they turned out, but I've played some of those songs with a full band since, and I just... I don't like to re-record a song. I just feel like I should write another one."