Live From The Casita

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News, updates, and behind the scenes

May 31, 2026Craft & Production

What the Second Verse Owes You

The single hardest sixteen bars in popular songwriting, and what it asks of the writer who tries to fake it.

May 30, 2026History & Stories

What Robert Johnson Did Facing the Wall

Robert Johnson recorded twenty-nine songs facing the wall — and what his producer chose not to do is the lesson.

May 29, 2026Business & Strategy

What You Sign at Twenty-Two

What a young songwriter is really giving away when they sign a publishing deal — and why the song's life is almost always longer than theirs.

May 28, 2026History & Stories

Three Hours in Alabama

Aretha Franklin's first session at FAME Studios in 1967 cut a single song before everything fell apart — and that song started her reign.

May 27, 2026Performance & Artist Development

What to Do with Your Hands

Stage presence is not performance — it is the difference between a song being on stage and a person being on stage with the song.

May 26, 2026Craft & Production

When the Second Voice Comes In

Why blood harmony has almost nothing to do with blood, and almost everything to do with how completely one singer can disappear into another.

May 25, 2026Gear & Environment

What the Room Was Allowed to Do

In a Berlin hall in 1977, Tony Visconti set three microphones in a line for David Bowie — and quietly made the case that the room is not a fact but a variable the engineer decides, line by line, to let speak.

May 24, 2026Craft & Production

Where the Floor Is

The bass is not the bottom of the music — it is the gravity, and the great players know that placement matters more than pitch.

May 23, 2026Emerging & Adjacent Topics

What Bakersfield Kept

The Bakersfield Sound as evidence that place is not a setting for music — it is an ingredient, and the artists who lasted refused to translate it out.

May 22, 2026Business & Strategy

When the Bedroom Stops Telling You the Truth

There is a moment in every artist’s career when the home studio that made the last record cannot make the next one — and the cost of not noticing is invisible.

May 21, 2026History & Stories

The Warehouse on State Street

How twelve days in a Bristol hat warehouse in 1927 — and a producer who came to listen, not to shape — became the founding lesson of the recording studio.

May 20, 2026Performance & Artist Development

Where the Second Song Goes

A setlist is not a memory aid — it is a map of an hour you have not yet lived, and the second song is where the night is actually decided.

May 19, 2026Business & Strategy

Thirty-Seven Years to Number One

How a 1985 Kate Bush song returned to number one in 2022 because of a Netflix scene — and what it reveals about sync licensing as the most undertaught tool in an independent artist's career.

May 18, 2026Craft & Production

The Second Songwriting

Cohen wrote "Hallelujah," but it was John Cale's arrangement that gave the song the shape we know — a case for treating arrangement as the second writing of a song.

May 17, 2026Gear & Environment

What the Tape Was Doing for You

Tape was never really a sound — it was a behavior, doing work for you in the background that now has to be earned by hand.

May 16, 2026Craft & Production

What the Comp Is Really For

The composite vocal is not a lie — it is the singer's best self, found across a hundred small moments and stitched into a single line.

May 15, 2026Performance & Artist Development

What the Engineer Knows About You

The artist and the producer get the credit. The artist and the engineer do the work.

May 14, 2026Emerging & Adjacent Topics

What You Refuse to Hand Off

In an era when the machine can do almost any part of the work, the craft is knowing which part you will not let it touch.

May 13, 2026Performance & Artist Development

Singing Past Ninety

Tony Bennett sang into his nineties. Sinatra did not. The difference between those two careers is the whole education of the voice.

May 12, 2026Gear & Environment

What an Upright Piano Remembers

The instruments on great records are almost never the most pristine — they are the ones that have been lived with.

May 11, 2026Business & Strategy

The Part of the Song You Can't Hear

Most artists understand masters — but publishing is the invisible half of ownership, and it's often the half worth the most.

May 10, 2026History & Stories

The Song That Came from a Highway

How a glimpse of a man on a telephone pole became one of the most perfect songs in the American canon.

May 9, 2026Craft & Production

The Last Person to Hear It Clearly

By the time a song reaches the mastering engineer, everyone else involved has gone partially deaf — not literally, but emotionally.

May 8, 2026History & Stories

Six Years on a Gravel Road

The making of Lucinda Williams' Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is a story about the dangerous, necessary refusal to settle for less than what you hear in your head.

May 7, 2026History & Stories

Letting Someone Wreck Your Sound

When Emmylou Harris handed the keys to Daniel Lanois, she traded everything familiar for something she couldn't yet name.

May 6, 2026History & Stories

The Shorthand That Unlocked Nashville

How the Nashville Number System turned session musicians into conversationalists and reshaped an entire city's recording culture.

May 5, 2026History & Stories

The Demo That Refused to Be Replaced

How Bruce Springsteen's bedroom cassette recordings for Nebraska became the album itself — and what that says about the relationship between fidelity and truth.

May 4, 2026Craft & Production

The Stranger in Your Song

Co-writing asks you to be wrong out loud, in real time, with a witness — and when the chemistry is right, the song becomes something neither writer could have found alone.

May 3, 2026Craft & Production

The Score That Knows Its Place

Scoring for picture teaches the one lesson most musicians resist: sometimes the most powerful thing your music can do is get out of the way.

May 2, 2026History & Stories

One Microphone in a Church

How the Cowboy Junkies recorded an entire album with a single mic in a Toronto church — and proved that commitment matters more than production value.

May 1, 2026Performance & Artist Development

The Fear That Means You're Ready

The shaking hands before a performance aren't a warning — they're a signal that you care enough to be great.

April 30, 2026Craft & Production

Mixing Is Just Deciding What Matters Most

A mix is not an arrangement of sounds at comfortable levels — it's a hierarchy of decisions about what the listener should feel.

April 29, 2026Recording

The First Take Is Already Talking

The first take carries the weight of discovery — and if you're not listening from the start, you might miss the best thing that happens all session.

April 28, 2026Emerging & Adjacent Topics

The Grief of the Finished Thing

Finishing a record almost never feels like crossing a finish line — it feels like setting something down you're not sure you're ready to stop carrying.

April 27, 2026Gear & Environment

The Room Is Listening

The psychological architecture of a recording space shapes what gets played in ways that have almost nothing to do with acoustics.

April 26, 2026Performance & Artist Development

Rehearsal Should Make You Dangerous

On why the point of rehearsal isn't to eliminate risk — it's to build the fluency required to take risks onstage.

April 25, 2026Craft & Production

The Order Changes Everything

On album sequencing — the last creative act before a record leaves your hands, and the one most people never think about.

April 24, 2026History & Stories

The Session That Almost Didn't Survive the Night

On Aretha Franklin's first Muscle Shoals session, the night that nearly destroyed it, and what survives when the room falls apart around the music.

April 23, 2026Business & Strategy

The Song That Pays the Rent

On sync licensing, the hidden value of your catalog, and why the throwaway song from a Tuesday afternoon might be the one that keeps your lights on.

April 22, 2026Craft & Production

The Take You Almost Threw Away

On comping vocals, the counterintuitive work of choosing the imperfect take — and why the best records are full of moments that almost got erased.

April 21, 2026Emerging & Adjacent Topics

What a Line Cook Knows About the Downbeat

A cook I know once told me that the secret to a great dinner service isn't what happens when the tickets start printing. It's what happens at two in the afternoon, when no one's watching...

April 20, 2026Performance & Artist Development

The Conversation Before the Conversation

There's a moment that happens before the red light goes on, before anyone picks up an instrument or pulls up a session file, that determines almost everything about what a record will become...

April 19, 2026Gear & Environment

The Guitar That Writes the Song

There's a Martin D-28 from 1954 that lives in a studio I know. It's been refretted twice, the top is cracked and sealed with hide glue, and the neck has a slight twist that most players would call a flaw. But every songwriter who picks it up writes something different...

April 18, 2026Craft & Production

The Rough Mix Knows Something You Don't

There's a moment at the end of a tracking day when someone pulls up the faders, balances things just enough to feel the song, and hits export. Nobody thinks about it too hard. But everyone drives home listening to it on repeat...

April 17, 2026History & Stories

What Bobbie Gentry Refused to Explain

In the summer of 1967, a twenty-three-year-old woman from Chickasaw County, Mississippi walked into Capitol Studios in Los Angeles with a song that broke every rule Nashville had spent a decade perfecting...

April 16, 2026Emerging & Adjacent Topics

The Room Where Nobody's Driving

Two writers walk into a room with a guitar and a half-idea. One of them has a verse. The other has a feeling. Neither of them knows what the song is yet...

April 15, 2026Business & Strategy

The Catalog You Don't Know You Own

A songwriter once told me she had forty songs on her laptop and no idea what any of them were worth. Not in dollars. In weight. She couldn't tell you which one was the one...

April 14, 2026Performance & Artist Development

Nerves Are Data

Ten minutes before the set, your hands go cold. Your mouth turns to chalk. You feel your pulse behind your eyes and wonder, briefly, if you've forgotten every song you've ever written...

April 13, 2026Craft & Production

The Line That Unlocks the Room

You can sit with a song for three hours and have nothing but scaffolding. Chords that work. A melody that moves in the right direction. Then a single line arrives — six or seven words you didn't plan — and the whole thing cracks open...

April 12, 2026Gear & Environment

The First Five Minutes

Nobody talks about the walk-in. The artist shows up, sets down a bag, looks around the room. Maybe they touch the piano. Maybe they stand in the live room and don't say anything for a second...

April 11, 2026History & Stories

The Take That Almost Got Erased

Somewhere around two in the morning during the Wrecking Ball sessions, Neil Young told his engineer to rewind the tape. He wanted to try the song again...

April 2026Announcements

Welcome to Live From The Casita

Something special is happening. We're building an intimate space where music comes alive — no frills, no filters, just raw talent in a room that feels like home.