Historically, producers and guitarists have often enjoyed and endured a love/hate relationship. After all, it’s a producer’s role to challenge musicians and question their decision making and that can sometimes lead to creative clashes. Session pro Dann Huff knows all about that first-hand.
In the early 2000s, Capitol Records chief Mike Dungan had earmarked Huff – who’d produced records from acts as diverse as Megadeth and Faith Hill – to supercharge Urban’s third studio effort, Golden Road.
Urban’s previous efforts – The Ranch and his first solo effort proper debut – had some success, but, as Huff notes, “It wasn’t as guitar-oriented as [Capitol Records] thought it would be.”
As such, label chief Dungan felt Huff was perfect for injecting some more electric guitar into the heart of Urban’s sounds, given his talents behind the desk and with a guitar in his hands. But there was a minor problem.
“Keith didn’t want anything to do with it because he’d heard records I produced, and he hated them,” Huff tells Premier Guitar. “It wasn’t his kind of music. He made country records. So basically, he set up a whole scenario to try me out on one song, to see if it worked.”
Urban had given Huff free rein to pick any song slated for the upcoming album for his carefully devised test, with Somebody Like You his pick of the bunch. The rest, from the band to the studio and engineer, was up to Urban. When Huff arrived in the studio, it turned out that they’d already been tracking for several days.
“So I took my Matchless [amp] and my Gretsch, and I got in there,” he says. “I had decent instincts about the song. It was like one of those things where it dropped from the sky. Everything was right.”
Urban’s skepticism was, of course, laid to rest and they became a successful team, but Huff explains the two players were initially like “oil and water”.
“It was never a struggle, but there was intensity about our recordings,” explains Huff. “He had this ridiculous punk rock ethic. I had this whole pedigree of pop music. Music for me was orchestration, so you put these two guys together and you got a confrontation.”
That often resulted in explosive moments, and the guitar solo for Somebody Like You proved to be especially tense.
“He got so pissed off at me,” Huff adds. “Keith is such a physical guitar player, and up to that point, I was more auditory. He was pulling one way, and I was pulling another, but his weakness at that point was settling for something that doesn’t sting as hard as it can sting. I’m listening for those moments – you could play the same five notes 100 times, and they’ll always sound different. I’m waiting for the stars to align.
You could play the same five notes 100 times, and they’ll always sound different. I'm waiting for the stars to align.
Dann Huff
“So I’m waiting this out, enjoying his guitar playing. But I was not reading the room, he was getting angrier with each take and he said, ‘Crikey! What the fuck do you want?!’ I was like, ‘If you’re done, you’re done. I think we might have it.’”
Despite their constant push and pull, there was a magic sweet spot to be found somewhere between their contrasting schools of thought. The pair would go on to work on six albums back-to-back, which produced a litany of number-one singles.
Three Golden Road singles, Somebody Like You, Who Wouldn't Wanna Be Me, and You'll Think of Me all topped the US country charts. Defying Gravity (2009) produced two chart toppers in Sweet Thing and Only You Can Love Me This Way, and its follow-up, Get Closer, saw all four singles reach the summit: Put You in a Song, Without You, Long Hot Summer, and You Gonna Fly.
Despite his long-standing relationship with Fender and the Telecaster, Urban has surprised many by joining the PRS family. His signature guitar, he says, will be a T-style build designed to put up a fight.
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