Steve Albini’s favourite song he ever worked on
Legendary recording engineer (he never liked the title ‘producer’) Steve Albini‘s untimely passing in May was a monumental loss to alternative music. Maintaining a fiercely independent ethos since his days setting firecrackers on stage as part of Chicago noise-punks Big Black’s provocative antics in the early 1980s, Albini forged a towering reputation for himself as the ‘go-to’ for any band, from Nirvana to Whitehouse, pursuing a sonically rawer direction handled by a practitioner with the utmost respect for the creative process.
He was infamously known for his excoriating takes on the music industry and scathing critiques of artists he didn’t think cut the mustard. His reputation for curmudgeonly button-pushing had dogged him all his career. This perception wasn’t unfounded, Albini’s ire targeted at Lollapalooza’s supposedly inauthentic alternative credentials, calling Smashing Pumpkins a “joke band” in the Chicago scene before their mainstream explosion, and even professing to care little for Nevermind and the Seattle grunge dam that broke with its success.
Tearing apart alternative music’s sacred cows while disgruntling those on the receiving end of his sharp tongue also firmly planted Albini as an authority in music you could trust, garnering deep respect within the community. When Albini spoke, you listened.
With this reputation, his meticulous recording knowledge, and his innovative approach to capturing an artist’s performance, an incredibly diverse array of musicians headed to Electrical Audio, his own purpose-built studio in Chicago. While hundreds of underground punk bands have passed through Electrical Audio’s doors, Albini’s scrupulous sonic attention has pulled in artists seeking the minutia and detail of ambience captured in all its fidelity from Joanna Newsom’s intricate harp plucks on 2006’s Ys, or the gargantuan sheets of doom metal that storm thunderously on Sunn O)))’s Life Metal.
When listing his 20 favourite songs in a social post back in 2023, the only track he included from his lengthy recording history was country-folk singer Nina Nastasia’s ‘This Is What It Is’ from her 2002 sophomore album The Blackened Air. When listening to her signature, spartan atmospheres and haunting string arrangements, it’s easy to see why Nastasia had sought Albini’s recording chops across the majority of her back catalogue. The respect was certainly mutual, with Albini remarking: “I’ve posted a few bands I’ve worked with, partly because that’s how I hear a lot of music, but also when you see somebody work you get an idea how deep their thing is. Nobody’s thing is deeper than Nina Nastasia’s.”
The disquieting tension that fuels ‘This Is What It Is’ serves as an exemplary showcase of Albini’s masterful invisibility, capturing the artist’s core character in all its naked, aural honesty. The strings wind and twist like creeping ivy around Nastasia’s nimble guitar, picking exquisitely and with a grounded organicness, and her vocals are crooned with an intimidating intimacy. It’s the percussion that truly propels the song’s dramatic intensity. Having long been known for his comprehensive grasp of drum recording and the exhaustive list of microphones and their subtle placements to achieve rich audible textures, it’s hard to imagine anyone else grasping the song’s eerie beat with such finesse.
Forever associated with the punk-subterranean, and for good reason, Albini’s selection of ‘This Is What It Is’ is a perfect demonstration that underneath his history of acerbic commentary (including a much-needed mea culpa for racist remarks made in misguided jest in previous years) and being a noise aficionado, his fundamental creative values were always the pursuit of honesty, whatever its form.
