'Into the Deep' with Music Icon Jan Fairchild, Exploring His Journey and Iconic Collaborations in the Industry
- Tadhi Coulter
- 3 days ago
- 17 min read
Updated: 20 hours ago
Tadhi Coulter (TC): What have been some of your most memorable and iconic experiences either as a Producer, Recording or Mixing Engineer, or Artist?
Jan Fairchild: I’ve been playing music since I was seven years old. My dad handed me an accordion, and he’s like, ‘Look, you’re gonna learn this.’ So, it’s not like I have anything specific, other than wanting to work on music and produce records, and things like that. As far as The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps goes, it was just one of those things. They needed an extra song for the soundtrack. I forgot about Do You Remember (Once Upon A Time), the Montell Jordan song on the soundtrack. I met him through Def Jam. I was doing a lot of work through the label back then. We recorded the vocal on that song, and he liked what I did so much that he said, “Dude, I want you to mix this,” but nobody told me. I’m waiting for him to come to the studio, and I’m two hours into the time, so I finally called JoJo Brim, the A&R guy, and said, “Hey JoJo, where’s Montell, man? I’m waiting for him to show up.” He goes, “Dude, you’re mixing the song. You don’t need him there. I’m like, “Oh! Ok! So, we got to go into mix mode, just one of those things that happened.
TC: How would you describe the level of iconic success you've achieved "Behind the Music"?
Jan Fairchild: The thing about everything that’s happened in my career, for me, very rarely has it been planned. The best things usually happen as a result of something else, you know, which is why whenever I talk to younger people about being in the business and whatever, I say: You need to be improving yourself, constantly; you have to love it, first of all. You have to love the fact that you are involved in music on whatever level it is. As a result of putting the effort in, putting the time in, things happen. You know, they happen as a result of the energy and the attitude and everything that you put out, and somehow in the universe those things just kind of start working together, and you’re blessed with just great situations.
TC: You've worked with some heavy-hitting, iconic producers, including Tim Kelley & Bob Robinson (Tim & Bob). What was it like working with them on Case's Missing You, most notably the backing vocals of WPMG artist and partner Gromyko Collins?
Jan Fairchild: I met Tim & Bob through working with Sisqó on Thong song ‘cause I was working with Dru Hill, working through that and with Sisqo on his solo album. Tim & Bob produced Thong song. I met them as a result of recording everything on that song. And we got to working together on other projects. Case was one of the projects that came up. Originally, they had done Missing You for Joe; they had produced it and were going to give it to Joe, who sang it, but then they decided not to use it. So, Tim said to me, "Got this guy on Def Jam!" because I was doing a lot of work with Def Jam back then, too. "We got this guy, Case. We got to do a vocal." I said, “Sure, let’s do it!” So we were at The Record Plant. Case came in and did two takes.
You know, most people don’t realize but at the end of the song Case sings, “I can’t sing no more/I can’t sing no more.” That’s because he couldn’t sing anymore. He was sick. He had done two takes through, and by then his voice was shredded. It was shot. He was literally looking at me, saying, “I can’t sing no more! I can’t sing no more!” Anyway, we finished the vocal and JoJo Brim, who was the A&R guy at Def Jam at the time, happened to be at the session. Tim looked at him and said, “Dude, I think we should just mix the song now.” So, we literally started mixing it at either eight or nine o’clock at night. We ended up working all night, mixing it all night. The next day, we probably finished it at eight or nine o’clock in the morning, and that was my birthday [April 27]. So, to me, it was like the universe was like, 'Happy Birthday! Here you go!' So now the song is finished. The mix is done! Everybody’s happy. And then, I get this panic phone call. It must’ve been about noon or one o’clock, and I’m not even really up yet. Tim’s freaking out because they didn’t get clearance from Joe to use his vocals because we kept Joe’s background vocals in the song. I said, “Look, dude, don’t worry! I printed stems.” He goes, “What are stems!” because back then, we’re talking early 2000s, mixed stems were still a really new concept in the audio world; you know, most people were still doing analog. We did an analog combo with ProTools, but I printed the mixed stems in ProTools. I printed the instrumental… I printed the backgrounds… I printed the lead vocal… all separately. I mean, now people get into much more detailed mixed stems, but back then, it was like instrumental, background, lead vocal! We’re good! So I said to Tim, “I have mixed stems.” He said, “What’s that?” I said, “I’ve got the instrumental. I’ve got the background. I’ve got the lead vocal instrumental—All separate. So, all we need to do is bring somebody in to resing the background vocals.” He said, “So, who can we get?” I said, “I know this guy from working with Warryn Campbell named Gromyko Collins. I said “ He’s a great singer. He’s a great guy, really easy to work with. Let me see if he’s available. Call Gromyko..... He’s available... He comes over to The Record plant. Put his vocals down.... It’s me and him in the studio… I get it done! I literally hand-delivered it to Tina Davis, who at the time was Head of A&R for Def Jam. She happened to be in L.A. The main reason, there was a deadline for The Nutty Professor II: the Klumps soundtrack. So, literally, there was no time to spare, which is why I drove it over to her. “Tina, here it is… we’re good!” I delivered. And, one year later, to the day, Missing You went number one, beyond blessing doesn’t cover it.
TC: What was it about Gromyko that made you think he was the right fit to record the Missing You backing vocals?
Jan Fairchild: When Tim called me and said we need somebody, Gromyko was like the first person I thought of because I worked with him briefly with Warryn Campbell; I knew Warryn had worked with him a lot, and I was with Warryn a lot back then. I knew how good he was. I knew he had a great attitude. I knew his vibe was cool, and it was also going to be a great opportunity for him. Even though they’re background vocals, it’s the chorus. I mean, he’s singing the chorus. Case is singing it, but the majority of the voices in that chorus are Gromyko. So, for me, again, it was a multi-level thing. I needed somebody I could trust. That I knew could do it quickly, you know, and that would have the right attitude. And, you know, Gromyko checked off all of those boxes.
TC: I’m glad he did, and I hope something comes out of this. Thinking of yourself as a producer, audio engineer, mixer, artist... do you see yourself as an icon?
Jan Fairchild: Again, the foundation is music, the way I look at it. As a musician, I grew up playing music. I went to college as a music major. The foundation of everything that I do is music. The technical aspect of it always intrigued me, but I didn’t study it. I was just in bands. We had albums. Had record deals. But I was never happy with the way the album sounded. So I decided to start learning how to be an engineer, how to record things. And I worked with [R&B/Hip Hop icon] Jimmy "The Senator" Douglas, who actually produced one of the rock bands I was in, Timbaland’s guy forever. He gave me co-production credit on this one album we did because I worked really closely with him. He also taught me a lot, you know. It’s something where you just need to be able to focus and compartmentalize the way you look at things.
When I’m an audio engineer, I have to focus on the technical aspects more than anything else. If I’m producing something and recording, which I do a lot, then I’m both thinking about the performances and the artistic aspect of [the recording]. The mixing is a whole other thing because, I know you know, you take all the elements and you have to make it make sense. I saw the quote you put up, which is why I said it’s about relationships, and it is. It’s like life! Life is about relationships and how you interact with and get along with people. It’s the same thing with music. How do the different instruments relate to each other? How do the vocals relate to the instrumentation? And it’s something that requires a certain perspective. There are a lot of great audio engineers, but they can’t mix because, for whatever reason, they don’t have the perspective. For me, it’s always been something I’ve been interested in. I’ve been fortunate that these opportunities were presented to me early on in my engineering work, and that just helped me, you know, do more and more things like that, and build my reputation and stuff.
As far as [being iconic or being an icon], I think it's overused, like you said before, but it’s also very subjective. I mean, you can say something’s iconic, and, yes, in a certain context it could be. As far as the work I’ve done, I think some of the artists I’ve worked with are iconic. Yasiin Bey [formerly known as Mos Def] is an iconic rapper, no question about it. Al Jareau was an iconic singer. Al Green is an iconic singer. Stevie Wonder… he’s in a different universe.
TC: For me, as the editor of my uncle Randel A. Horton’s book, No Stranger to Work in the Wheel of Change: A Poetic Memoir, there are certain things he says, and I’m like, ‘I gotta be sure to capture that’ in the book and make sure that’s clear. I would imagine, and tell me if I’m wrong, that sort of thing happens in the mixing process, where you know someone so well, that there’s a certain phrase or expression, a punctuation if you will, that makes you wanna capture it?
Jan Fairchild: Well, it’s like when Yasiin was mixing the “True Magic” album, at first he had somebody else starting to mix it. And they put me in the studio with him to do some vocals on something, and he literally looked at his manager and said, “Jan’s gonna end up mixing this record. We gotta do this now.” You know, and the reason was that I just knew how to get his voice to sound a certain way. Like, as soon as I had his vocal up and he did the take, there was something, for him, that triggered him like, ‘This is what my voice is supposed to sound like. This guy gets it. I forgot that he gets it because we didn’t do a lot of work before, but I’m hearing it now. So we’re gonna do this next album.’ He literally fired the mixer and had me come in, and we ended up spending like six weeks on that record. So, yeah, there are definitely things like that that come up where you know what the artist wants. You know what you want. It just all gels and comes together.
One funny thing! I’m with Yasiin in the studio. We’re mixing “The Esctatic.” He’s got people coming in to see him all the time. I mean, he’s Yasiin Bey! Most of the time people would come in to see him. They look at me. They look at him. And they didn’t get it. You know, it’s like there’s this older white dude, and then there’s the iconic rapper. It’s like… he picked up on the vibe, right, actually. So, these are literally his exact words to his friends. He goes, “Dude, man, who would ever think I’d be doing some of my best work with a white dude.
TC: That’s how it should be, right, all smiles! After all, music is the universal language!
Jan Fairchild: But to have someone like him articulate it like that, you know. Again, it was one of those [iconic] life moments for me that I’ll never forget. It was also him validating me in front of his people, saying look ‘While I’m here with this guy, there’s a good reason, you know. And, I’m doing my best work.
TC: Yes, what it means to be iconic is fairly subjective, especially if the terms and criteria for making such a judgment call of who gets recognized and seen as iconic are either unclear or unwarranted. You mentioned the importance of compositional relationships in your Follow Your Dream interview with Robert Miller. I was wondering, however, how working with such an icon as Yasiin Bey beyond his lyricism, for example, has impacted the interpretation or perspective of the sound?
Jan Fairchild: If I’m working on just one song for an artist, I don’t get into it really that deep because there’s no time. But with Yasiin, I mean, we did two albums together. I mixed two songs on “The New Danger.” I mixed all of “True Magic.” I mixed all of “The Ecstatic.” Plus, I recorded almost everything on “The Ecstatic.” And part of that experience was just us in the studio for hours and hours and hours, trying things, seeing what might work. But, yes, with him especially, knowing where his vibe is coming from… again, we’re both from New York. He grew up in Brooklyn. I grew up in Staten Island. So, it’s like the first time I worked with him as an engineer, we clicked. We didn’t know why. It was one of these things with Def Jam because I was doing a lot of work with them. They said: ‘We’ll put you in the studio with this guy. I said, “Great! Let’s see what happens!” So it was one of those things where we worked together a little bit. Then, when we got into “True Magic” and especially with “The Esctatic,” it was really about me listening to him because some days we’d be in the studio, and he'd just talk. He wouldn’t even rap that night.
He’d just be in a zone of whatever was going on in the world he wanted to talk about, or whatever was on his mind. And it was that kind of freedom, you know as far as the environment goes, that helped create “The Ecstatic” [album]. I knew people liked it, but I just recently went back and read different reviews and what people think about it. It’s considered a pretty iconic album. Again, it’s his interpretation of what he wants to say, which obviously is what most artists do. He just has a way like nobody else, which is why most rappers cite him as an inspiration. There’s one song on the album [“The Esctatic”] called ‘Casa Bey,’ which was nominated for Best Rap Solo Performance at the 2010 Grammys. He should’ve won! But to show you how challenging one track that he picked was, I invited Bryan West—a friend of mine who’s produced Nelly Furtado, Maroon 5, Sia, a bunch of people, Ziggy Marley—to the studio one day, and he says, “Dude, I don’t know how he’s rapping off of this. It’s like such an intricate beat, and he wanted to have “Black Thought” and “Jay Electronica” on the song with him, but they couldn’t catch the flow… You know they’re really good rappers!
Jan Fairchild: Going back to the question, yes, the music has to relate, but then there’s the personal interaction with the artist. Same thing with Al Jarreau. I mixed a whole album All I Got for him, so he would come to the studio every night. It came out in 2002, I think. But again, working with somebody like him... Funny story, he came in one night and wanted to fix a vocal, and he goes, “Jan, do you mind if I go into the booth and sing a little. I’m like, ‘You’re Al Jareau!’ Like geez, you’re asking me if I would like you to go into the booth and listen to you sing live! Well, let me see, let me check my calendar…. But again, that's one of the things that so great about going into mix an entire record. It’s very rare that you get to do that these days because you do connect with the artist on a deeper level. They’re coming into the studio every day, and they’re listening; you’re going back and forth, trying things out. So, it definitely pushes the creativity into a deeper place.
TC: Speaking of another icon in the music business, how has it been working with your dear friend Charlie Midnight?
Jan Fairchild: Talk about iconic stuff! Charlie’s got a list! He’s one of my best friends, a great guy. He co-wrote Living in America for James Brown. He wrote lyrics for Barbra Streisand’s Emmy-nominated ballad Love Will Survive. That’s the level we’re talking about. Yeah, he’s amazing. What it was, Charlie and I have produced a lot of projects together, you know, outside projects. We just started playing and doing music of our own, just for fun. ‘We’re going to do music that we like. We don’t care if anybody else likes it.' So, we ended up pulling in a few songs from projects we did with other artists that never got released. But the majority of it was me and Charlie. It was just fun music! I don’t know how else to put it. We got some great reviews in the U.K., I mean really stellar reviews. We’re in the process now of doing a second album. Again, it’s totally because we just love it. We both love music. Love writing, love producing! So, if we’re not working for somebody else, we’re working with each other. The most recent stuff we’ve come up with, for both of us, is the best stuff we’ve ever done.
TC: Wow, what makes you say that, Jan? Say more!
Jan Fairchild: I can feel it. It’s like when you work on music, you can feel the depth, how far deep the music is going, and you know you can do really good music. But then, something happens where you’re able to go to a deeper place. It’s not something you’re even conscious of. It’s just all of a sudden, you’re working on the music and you’re like, ‘Wow, this is better than anything we’ve done yet.' It’s something! Again, it’s an accumulative thing because you’re working on music all the time. You’re immersing yourself in it, and you love it. You enjoy it, and you have a good time. That’s why we’re able to have that perspective. We’ve gotten confirmation from people about that, but we felt it initially. You know, Randy Jackson is a good friend of mine, “American Idol” Randy Jackson, whom I’ve known for like twenty-five to thirty years. He’s always liked what we’ve done, but I played him this particular new song of Charlie and I, and he goes, "Dude, that song is banging!" So, we’re in the process of finishing up the second record, we’ll see! We’re not sure exactly what we’re going to do with it yet. But that’s my real creative outlet because I get to play and do, you know, whatever I feel I wanna do, and Charlie writes the lyrics he really wants to write, without anybody saying ‘can you try this or that’ which comes with the business, and we love doing that. But in this case, It’s really completely us expressing ourselves. That’s how that all came about.
TC: It sounds to me like you’re saying your best work hasn’t been created yet.
Jan Fairchild: I don’t think it has. The last thing Charlie and I did that was significant was a project, "Oh What A Dream We Had" for Czech artist Michal David, and we brought in Il Divo, Lara Fabian, Noah Cyrus, Richard Marx, Billy Idol, Marcelito Pomoy, a cross-section of artists, legacy artists and some new artists. Tried getting some other people, but scheduling wise it didn’t work. But we had the Czech National Orchestra on it. It’s massive because everybody is singing together. I mean, Lara Fabian’s on it, different really wonderful artists.
Again, that was one of the best things Charlie and I ever did, a lot of reasons for that. But having multiple artists, successful iconic artists obviously helped. It’s one of those things where you just feel it. You just know. You’ll do something musically and you’ll be like, ‘That’s cool! That’s good!’ We know we’ll always do something that’s good. The quality’s always going to be good. But then there are those times when you know it’s more than good. It’s like it goes into a deep… it accesses something in your soul or whatever it is, like ‘OK, I’m being given an opportunity here to express things in a deeper way. There are tools you have to do that. And the tools you have to do that come from the experience, and the experience is doing it for years and years, and loving it.
TC: Has there ever been a point in your career where you’ve felt like giving up or quitting the business of making music? What's kept you going?
Jan Fairchild: Never! There’s always going to be ups and downs, you know in anybody’s career, especially in creative careers, especially when dealing with pop culture because things change and culture changes. I’ll never forget, I’ll tell you a quick story, when I first came to LA [Los Angeles], my background was Rock and Pop. I loved R&B music growing up, but I had no experience playing R&B music. I had no clue. When I’m telling you, when I say clue, I mean clueless. So, my wife and I move out to LA. I had just finished working with Michael Bolton, who had a huge career in the 90s, one of my closest friends. I was instrumental in getting his whole career off the ground. I mean, we did like five albums together, a whole other conversation. So, I moved to Los Angeles and started working at the record plant. And at that time in LA, that was the music. I mean, all of the major studios were booked with Hip Hop acts. So, the first time I’m in the studio working on this Hip Hop project, I hear the bass sound, and it’s got this crackle on it, and I’m telling the assistant, “Dude, you’ve gotta check the patch, man. Something's going on… a short or something… He looks at me and says, “Dude, you obviously haven’t done much Hip Hop because that’s the way it’s supposed to sound. It’s supposed to have the crackle.” You know [he lets out a laugh], I’m like ok! Then I’m working with, I forget which producer, but he’s putting the snare up really loud, and I’m like, 'This is foreign to me!' And then it clicked in, ‘This is like me as a kid playing Rock music.' When we were kids, Rock music was our expression. We played loud! We played with like rawness and stuff, about expressing ourselves. I said, “This is the same thing, only in a different genre.” Once I made that connection, I was into Hip Hop. I mean deep in!
TC: That brings me, quite well actually, to our next talking point. Do you think working in a particular genre, between genres, or multiple genres of music has made your work more iconic than it otherwise would be?
Jan Fairchild: I do. I think working in different genres adds to the iconic aspect because not everybody can move from one genre to another, and I credit that to my being a musician first. I can listen to it [a recording or live performance] from a musical standpoint first, and relate to it. If it’s really good, I don’t have to connect to it completely, but if it’s well done on a musical level, I’ll connect with it, and that’s, I think for me, the benefit of being able to work in multiple genres. Also, working in one genre helps me work in another genre because I bring certain elements and aspects of working in one with me that someone else doesn’t have, and I can somehow filter in a little bite of that. I remember I was working with this Country artist back in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, and on a background vocal, I used a distorted background vocal like we do in Hip Hop, right? And they were like, ‘Wow! What’s that!’ But it worked great because it gave the song another aspect that it normally wouldn’t have, you know.
Also, Going back to Case with Missing You, with that mix, I brought a lot of my Pop experience with that mix, like there are delays going on where your left delay and your right delay are different times—one was a quarter note… one was an eighth note, or something like that, and no one was really doing that because that’s a Pop thing, not an R&B, Rap thing. But that’s also what created, if you listen to the backgrounds… delay going on, there’s repeats going on, and the same with the guitar part, like a repeated delay. I was able to bring elements from my Pop background into that. So, again, like I said, working in multiple genres has given me a bigger toolbox to work with.
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