I started out playing with my jazz heroes. I went out on the road with Freddie Hubbard and Carmen McRae and Joe Henderson. But gradually I got frustrated with the narrowness of that world, as far as the restrictive thinking. Also, the traveling was hard, so I started to do more session work in Los Angeles as a bass player. But I found to a large degree that was frustrating because I had to play on a lot of things that I really didn't have any genuine feeling for, and also - on a lot of things that I did - I would be disappointed when I heard the final product after it had been layered upon and mixed.

So it was a progression of frustration that drove me to producing and songwriting (laughs). I needed to change the configuration of how I was tied into the process of making music. I started experimenting more with production and musical architecture and tried to sort of codify my ideas regarding that. I was part of the generation of musicians that was equally interested in pop music and jazz. So it wasn't that big a switch for me.

Did you have a mentor as a producer?

No, but certainly being a musician and playing on different people's records, I'd been exposed to some really good producers, people who I respected. I learned a lot from working with them. Daniel Lanois, for example. I worked with him on Peter Gabriel's record So and also Robbie Robertson's first record. Then Mutt Lange - obviously in a completely different way. And from the years of working with Joni, I'd say I've learned the most from her about record production. She was never crediting herself as a producer in the early days, but she produced her own records. At a certain point we began collaborating. But she has been an incredible source of inspiration and education.

One thing that she really taught me a lot about was the importance of conscious of spirit on a session, as far as the climate of what was going on in the room. And learning how to say things at the right time. It would come down to two basic categories - timing and spirit.

I think that early on, one of my difficulties was that I had sort of a very typical male way of approaching things in a problem-solver mindset. I would listen to a play-back, and my mind would immediately go to what was not working in the track, what needed to be done, what was faulty in the structure. Many times, that observation would go straight from my mind to my mouth and I would immediately say, "Here's where the problems are." Joni was forcefully clear about saying you have to let the germ of enthusiasm and high-spirited joy of creating be, and you have to feed that. To go straight with what's wrong with something can be really spirit-busting. So I gradually kind of learned this abstruse concept of knowing when and how to say things to artists and musicians. It so profoundly affects what you get out of people and how things come together. The idea of trying to cut to the chase and get something accomplished, if you go straight to the problem, a lot of times you might lose the whole day. Two words can destroy a day. But the right words can create magic and an incredible situation where you get more than ever dreamed of from someone in a performance.

I thought your production work on the soundtrack for "Grace of My Heart" really captured the spirit and sound of Brill Building-era pop.

That was a great project for me to work on, in many ways. It was educational from the standpoint of working with three of my heroes - Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker and Alison Anders. I had a lot of fun putting together combinations of songwriters and figuring out how everything was going to fit together.

Did it involve going back and studying production styles of that time?

I went back and listened very carefully to a lot of records that I had grown up with. I did a lot of studying of how those records were put together, from every angle, including the exact nature of reverbs that were used. In fact, for some of the record, we went back to Capitol studios to mix, so that we could use the actual chambers that were used for reverb on recordings of that specific era that we were trying to recreate. The time chronology was late '50s through late '60s, so different songs obviously connoted different specifics from a technical standpoint. I got into a bit of a fanatical quest in trying to recreate both the compositions and production characteristics. I used a lot of musicians who played on those records from that era and did work at studios that were used during that time.

Do you feel like that project influenced your approach to producing on subsequent albums?

It added to my production vocabulary in certain areas. Anything that you work on where you're compelled to absorb more music in a concentrated way and utilize musicians in a different way is going to affect how you produce records because it adds information to your database and reintroduces things that you loved that maybe you had forgotten about. I had to do so much listening in the process of working on "Grace of My Heart" that I rediscovered a lot of records I had forgotten about. It influenced the way that I worked on a recent project, the Walden Woods benefit, where there were 10 women singing standards with a large orchestra. The first one featured Bjork, Joni, Trisha Yearwood, Shawn Colvin, Stevie Nicks, Paula Cole, Natalie Cole and Sheryl Crow. For that, the guiding principle was modern artists singing standards of the '30s through '50s. So certainly in doing that project, a lot of what I had learned about orchestration and sonics and even songs was affected by "Grace of My Heart".

Your writing on the soundtrack is also outstanding. I especially love "A Boat on the Sea," that you wrote with David Baerwald.

I wrote the music for that, trying to kind of emulate the "For the Roses" period of Joni's piano writing. In the script, the main character has come through this whole gauntlet of frustration and tragedy and withdrawal and trying to be a hired gun songwriter but finding that it wasn't in her heart. The storyline of the film is a fantasy based on certain aspects of reality, in that it paralleled Carole King's path, and there are elements of Joni and Laura Nyro in there - the whole birth of the female singer-songwriter. I used as my point of departure the kind of song that Carole and Joni and Laura might write. The music and melody came first, then I worked with David Baerwald on the lyric.

Let's talk a little about the new Julia Fordham record that you produced. What kind of planning did you do before you went in the studio?

The way if got developed was I got together with her and she played me a group of songs that she had. I took all the songs, and I went out to the desert and sat in a room out there and walked around. I know this sounds a little cinematically romantic (laughs), but this is actually what I did. Then I called Julia from the desert, and I said that I understand what this record should be - I can see exactly how everything needs to tie together.

My idea was that we could make a kind of modern blue-eyed soul record. I basically kind of designed the whole thing musically in my mind out there, and wrote very specific notes on each song and how I perceived each developing, down to which players to use. I immediately thought we had to get Billy Preston to be one of the centerpoints of the record. I've always been such a huge fan of his playing. I consider him to be up there in the genius category, which for me is very rarified territory.

So I very specifically blueprinted the whole thing. Then I came back and sat down with Julia and presented my ideas, and she really loved it. We see things alike in some ways. But she really was in sync with the ideas that I put together, and we went from there. The record pretty much came together the way that I thought it would.

What are your upcoming projects?

I'm going to mix the new Walden Woods project, and I've been writing with a new artist on Warner/Reprise named Jonathan Rice. Then I've been working for a while on a record project of songs I have written with Tonio K., and it's centered around a woman named Hannah Mancini. It's sort of electronic-based sarcastic nihilistic song-writing (laughs). So I'm trying to finish that body of work, and then possibly another record with Julia, and Joni and I have been talking about some things. But right now I'm on input, trying to refuel.

[Klein's AMG Page is here]