
David Greenbaum
Behind The Board: Producer-Engineer David Greenbaum On His Musical Beginnings & Capturing Happy Accidents
Producer-engineer David Greenbaum cleaned up at the 57th and 61st GRAMMY Awards thanks to his work with one artist—the imitable Beck Hansen. His production on 2014's atmospheric Morning Phase and 2017's radiant Colors netted him Album Of The Year, Best Rock Album and Best Engineered Album for Morning Phase, and Best Alternative Music Album and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical for Colors. This year, for the 63rd GRAMMYs Awards Show, he’s nominated for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical for 2019’s Hyperspace.
Now, for the latest episode of Behind The Board, Greenbaum details the path that led him here.
"I played in bands originally, and then it sort of became an obsession, you know?" he muses from his music-stuffed space. "My bedroom, I converted into basically something very similar to this." As Greenbaum explains, his interest was so insatiable that he went from recording friends' bands to writing his own material. "I just wanted to be able to do everything," he says with a grin.
Greenbaum is keenly aware that spontaneous imperfections can make a tune transcendent. "Some of my favorite moments in sessions are the experiments and the accidents," he says. "Some of the most magical things have come from when you accidentally loop a thing—it's doing something weird, or the computer screws up—and you're just like 'Wait a minute! What was that? That was amazing!'"
Watch Greenbaum's appearance on Behind The Board above and check out other episodes of the series here.