Jacknife Lee, Phil DeTolve, and Brian Riordan are key members of the sound team that mixed the music, dialogue, and everything else you heard in Disney’s Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming with David Letterman. For their terrific work on the documentary, the three gentlemen received Emmy nominations. In discussing their work on the show, we talk about the chaos that U2 thrives on, and the remarkably disarming effect Ireland had on David Letterman, as well as that brilliant sound edit of “Invisible” that seamlessly takes the viewer from a posh auditorium to a local pub without missing a beat, a note, or more importantly, a single emotion.
Awards Daily: Jacknife, I know that you’ve had a long relationship with U2, but Brian and Phil I discovered that you had worked on a project for David Letterman before as well. Did you find that familiarity with those projects helpful here?
Brian Riordan: For me, the familiarity is not so much of working with David, but I grew up with David Letterman in my household every single night, and I grew up listening to U2 since their first album came out. So there’s personal familiarity more than professional. That’s my own personal experience that may be different from Jacknife’s.
Jacknife Lee: I’ve been working with U2 for nearly twenty years. I guess I matured in the last ten years, before then I was way outta my depth producing them. It’s utter chaos. They thrive in chaos. I had just been touring with Bono for a few months on the book show, and then Edge hadn’t played live for years because of the pandemic. So when I got back off tour, I went straight to Edge’s place where we started preparation for this. He was properly terrified. They’d played together by themselves, without Larry and Adam, but this is the first time they were going to do something that was kind of exposing their songwriting. So he was very nervous. We did a lot of prep. The thing about U2 is that preparation is for the chaos that will ensue. Because that’s what they get off on. They like a script and then go off it. We had things sorted out and we were doing takes on the day in the bar and at the venue and nothing went according to plan.
I don’t know who, but I think it was the director (Morgan Neville) that said “can we have them in the pub playing but using no microphones?” He wanted it to look like a pub and that it wasn’t set up like hey, I just happened upon a pub and here’s Dave. So then they thought we’d have everybody record the session on iPhones. So everyone had their iPhones on the table and then we figured out a way to hide the microphones because they didn’t want booms either. There was a lot of tactical stuff, and then they wouldn’t do retakes in the live place. The band like it loud so the PA was set up in the round with lots of people, and we had some real problems. I am not a good mixer at all. I actually do get frightened when I have to mix for people who are mixers because they’re going to see what I’ve done wrong. I’m used to the chaos, but I wasn’t used to the technical bit afterwards. That was where I struggled. So it was pretty daunting even though I’m used to the band, and obviously David Letterman is a legend. I’d always seen him as a kind of very funny dry guy, which he was in the show, but he seemed totally disarmed by Ireland too, which was lovely to see. It was a side of him I hadn’t seen before where he was just not humbled, but he was kind of shocked at how much he was chilled, I guess.
Brian Riordan: I think in general, Dave has really evolved since he retired from his talk show. There’s a vulnerability and a sensitivity to him that he probably always had but kept a little bit shielded behind this comedic wall. I feel like we’re seeing that a lot with him, and I agree, that was so magical. You could really feel his connection to the country as well as to the band. It really came across instead of just being there for light humor, he added a heart to it and a soul to it that I thought was such an added bonus.
Jacknife Lee: It was great at the end when he went to the Forty Foot, which is bitingly cold all year round. I swam in it and he didn’t swim in it the first time. He actually went back to Dublin for the final shot as a challenge to himself. But yeah, it was really nice to see. And I think the band and him, they’re like proper mega stars. As Brian said, you kind of grow up with seeing them everywhere and in your home. So to see the three of them have this kind of warmth was lovely. That’s nothing to do with the tactical thing, but I guess it was lovely to see that show.
Phil DeTolve: So, what Jacknife was saying about the challenges of the mic’ing and the chaos that happens, we get a lot of that in some of the work that we do with a lot of docuseries where it’s just recording and what happens, happens, right? The challenge in doing the back and forth between the Ambassador to the pub, was finding the right tonalities and the width and all of the technical parts. By the way, the mixes were great. As far as the technical and audio side of things, what I really enjoy is the ability to clean things up and really make them shine. I didn’t hear any of the prep work of how they wanted to go in and do that so that’s kind of eye-opening. Brian and I did a lot of bouncing back and forth and making sure that the pub sounded as big as the Ambassador performance and that it flowed really well.
Awards Daily: Well, I was going to save this question for later, but now you’ve forced my hand. One of my favorite sound edits I’ve ever heard was going from the performance footage of “Invisible” into the pub performance of the song. The seamlessness of that edit and matching the tonality of one space to the other was just astonishing.
Phil DeTolve: A lot of it is starting with the Ambassador performance because we wanted to keep that as intact as we could. In our world gathering production mics and booms and iPhones, we’ve seen it all. We’ve seen the whole range of different sources, and I think through time you get used to certain tools that help. I would say the Ambassador was really nice and clean and polished and mixed and great. And so contrasting that to the pub, we had to use tools to make sure that those transitions were seamless. There’s noise, there’s hiss, there’s all kinds of frequencies that you gotta EQ out and match and it just takes time. You loop a section here and there, you level match, sometimes you have to use reverb. I can’t remember exactly in this instance what we did, but it comes down to just throwing all the tools you got at it to match it. It’s kind of similar to ADR or other things where we have to make it so that the viewer, the audience member, isn’t feeling a jump or an edit or a shift. It just comes down to doing it a million times.
Brian Riordan: A lot of it is performance based. They’re to the exact tempo. They were completely in tune with the Ambassador performance. It musically allowed us to make it flow. That specific edit that you’re talking about also, we kind of really worked in the walla and bustle of the pub in a way that it doesn’t come in really hard. It is more of a smooth transition where we’re pre-lapping and post-lapping those sort of cross fades to get it in. The idea of that cut came from Morgan and the edit team. It was just our job to polish it and make it better, but that was their vision. It was great.
Awards Daily: “Invisible” is one of my favorite U2 songs, and I feel like the documentary sort of rescued it from a certain level of obscurity. It ended up being the high point of the show when it’s a song that maybe people don’t know. Was that surprising to you?
Jacknife Lee: It was a little. The thing about Bono and Edge, they know when they have a good song. I’ve been working on one since February most days. I’ve worked on another song for six months and sometimes we get it right, sometimes we don’t get it finished. Like we know there’s something good in here, but we haven’t discovered it yet. “Every Breaking Wave” is another one that we didn’t use from the Ambassador session. There’s a version where he’s in the studio and then there’s a version from the Ambassador. Morgan wanted the studio version just because of the narrative and what it did to the story. “Invisible” was not as it should be, but it was closer. I never think of the studio recording as the ultimate or the definitive version of a song, especially in the age of things like Tiny Desk Concerts and shows on YouTube or whatever. When I listen to music, sometimes I’ll go to the Tiny Desk concert as opposed to the record. The idea of the film was to expose the songwriting and the people behind it. The amazing thing that it did, and I think “Invisible” epitomized it, was even though I know the guys from U2, people never get to see the part, like Brian was saying about with Dave, there’s a vulnerability and they are normal people that do extraordinary things.
There is a danger when you start taking away the mythology of artists that the extraordinariness also goes. But I think what happened here was that it was heightened for the three people involved. Dave is funny under pressure and his humor comes out through his willingness to show his vulnerability and the same thing for U2. So stripping all the gimmicky stuff that I do in production in a studio and reducing “Invisible” to its basics shows what the song was capable of. I wasn’t surprised that the song revealed something that it hadn’t before, but I was really happy that it did. Even when we were in the Ambassador working on the arrangement, I invited all these school kids that U2 had sponsored from the school of music education, which I think similarly in the States is under pressure because of the public funding. So the kids from that came and sat on the stage and they played. It just started to turn into this bigger thing. Then we started inviting people that were going to be in the pub just to drop by. So the song became something else, and it really happened a few minutes before it was played at the Ambassador. Then when we got to the pub, the pub show was just organized the day before, and talking about prep, technical, who was going to show up, and how we’re going to film and record this skin of our teeth kind of thing. The fact that it matched each other was kind of miraculous. One was sober, the other one there was a lot of drink taken from the performers. So, amazing work from Brian and Phil on the matching. I was really thrilled when I saw it. But I think a lot of the songs turn into something else, including things like “Vertigo”. That is based on the energy of four people counting to four and playing something. And when you take that away from a rock and roll song, chances are it won’t work. But it did. So the whole thing was a pleasant surprise.
Brian Riordan: I agree. And “Invisible” being used in that way was a surprise to me. A pleasant one, as Jacknife said, but also It sort of really falls in line with the entire film. The film is very unique in a lot of ways for a rock and roll documentary. It’s a travel show. It’s a humorous thing. It’s a heartfelt thing. It’s a rock and roll thing. It’s a history lesson. And it succeeds in all of those, which is mind blowingly difficult to do, but from a dynamics and a pacing perspective, it’s also very different. Most rock and roll bands on the magnitude of U2, if there even are many, when they do a documentary, it’s start out with a bang, hit ’em over the head. It’s very cutty, it’s huge and you’re captivating people. This thing starts with the ticking clock, you know what I mean? It has its moments where it’s breathing, it gets a little bit bigger, it gets a little bit quieter, it gets more introspective, it gets funny. It really takes you through a range of emotions, whether that was always the vision or whether that was the amazing outcome that just sort of happened. But I think it’s brilliant. And it’s something that never gets old. It’s one of those few things that you can watch over and over and just pick up something new or feel something new. There’s a fresh diamond in there.
Awards Daily: Sometimes it’s just Bono and the Edge playing. But then other times it’s expanded out to what I like to think of as a Van Morrison’s band and street choir kind of thing. Mixing in these other musicians who had to learn this music and had to play on strings and acoustically and all of that. Was that challenging to merge that with what we think of as this big U2 sound?
Jacknife Lee: Yes.
{everyone laughs}
Jacknife Lee: It was very difficult. Technically, I’m not a great mixer.
Brian Riordan: Jacknife, you keep saying that, but no one on this call believes you.
{laughing}
Jacknife Lee: I’ve done these things where they’re kind of mix-offs where I get a song and then somebody else gets a song, people who are mixers as opposed to me. I produce and I write. I generally lose on the mix-offs because of a punch and a sheen that I just don’t know how to do. And because I’m there at the beginning of the gestation of the song, to do the sonic cuts for a mix to sound good is very difficult for me because I feel like I’m cutting out girth and things like that. So I really struggle, because there’s a shine and a clarity that I can’t achieve a lot. I was mixing this purely for audio so it worked as a record. Luckily my taste is in alignment with the guys who aren’t that into the big shiny stuff and they like flaws and they like the bits that are wrong. My mixing style highlights some of that irregularity and anomalies. Some people fix things and I don’t. Getting frequencies like a cello to go with Bono’s voice and have them clear took a lot of head scratching and trying to figure it out because I didn’t know how to do it. I had to figure it out. I’ve never put off something because I don’t know how to do it. I think I can bring something fresh to it because I don’t have a shortcut.
I think a lot of that, especially with U2, works in their favor where everyone kind of knows how to deal with them. And knowing that Brian and Phil would make it all right and cohesive was a wonderful safety net. I wouldn’t be employed to do this if we didn’t have somebody making sure it was okay. I made a terrible error. The band were doing the song “Bad” which is reliant on this kind of echo. And I had used this echo in post. I hadn’t realized for some reason when it became mono, which I never checked because I’ve not done this before, it lost the echo, So it was just this terrible thing. Somebody said to me you need to check your mono mixes. So now I do. I learned a lesson there. It basically lost the repeating pattern, so it sounded ridiculous. The whole thing for me was difficult, like scooping out frequencies from his vocal and then if he’s speaking with Dave and then we’re going to the pub and they’re walking down the street, his voice can’t sound different in each of those things. It was just stuff like that that I really didn’t ever think about before. I’m usually working on songs, one song going into the next, but stuff like that was a bit not knowing how to do this, but I’ll have to figure it out. We had a great team. I think there were four of us there, another guy named Alistair was part of our team. We worked very well together and we were separate as well. So I think that was interesting that it all became so cohesive.
Awards Daily: One of the interesting things about the Forty Foot is that you go there at the beginning and it would seem to me like with all the waves crashing against the rocks there, that it’d be hard to manage making sure that the voices are heard when Dave’s talking to the swimmers. Then you come back later and have almost no sound except for the new song that’s seeded early on in the movie playing. And you only pick up Dave wailing in this cold water. Can you just talk about how you managed the Forty Foot in both of those instances?
Phil DeTolve: We treated it with backgrounds and actually additive noise to help with the dialogue and then we have tools to help with whatever extraneous sounds we want to remove. So on that side of things, we’re making it fuller. We added some walla and background vocalizations and things like that. And we made sure to pull location specific sounds for backgrounds, or as close as we could. Then on the back end, I think that was just the production mic of Dave with the music under it. I don’t think we treated it.
Brian Riordan: It was an iPhone recording. Him wailing in the water was an ADR line that was super roomy and didn’t sound like he was in the water at all. We had to fake it. But yeah, that was just something funny that got thrown in at the last minute and we just played it really low.
Phil DeTolve: I think in our initial turnover, it was just the song. There was nothing under it.
Brian Riordan: Right. And then there were just decisions and choices stylistically on both the A side and the B side that you’re talking about when we were at the Forty Foot of when to really lean on waves as sort of a character. If it’s just there and crashing, it just sounds like chaos. And it wasn’t really a chaotic moment per se. It was a cold moment. A lot of it is really getting into the emotion and the psychology of what that scene is trying to do and not go any direction heading the wrong way. Those little subtleties do color things and change things and can either enhance them or take away.
Awards Daily: Working with someone like Morgan, who has done a lot of music-based projects and is so skilled and such a veteran, and also talking about the chaos of trying to put this together and going off of script and so forth: having a director like him who’s so attuned with music and documentary in general, did it give you guys confidence that Morgan can fix this if it gets out of control?
Brian Riordan: One of the many amazing things about working with Morgan is he really puts a lot of creative trust in his team. He knows what he wants, but I wouldn’t call him a micromanaging director, at least on the post-audio side. He had his moments where he wanted to put input in, but largely he let us do what we do. We’re adding what we feel like we can add and hopefully taking a great thing and making it even better. So I don’t think he felt like he was in damage control mode on the audio side. I think he thought the music mixes were brilliant, as did we. When he came in to do a final watch, I think he started from a place of being very satisfied and then it was okay, let’s make minor tweaks.
Phil DeTolve: Brian actually did most of the interaction with Morgan, but on the multiple projects we have done with Morgan, our ability to be creative is a pleasant place to be in our profession, to be able to bring it to the table.
Awards Daily: Considering the pandemic and U2 kind of being away from the world for a while, this could have easily turned into a commercial for new product. I imagine for all of you, it’s really satisfying to have worked on something that was at a much higher level than that. Can you tell me how you feel now about the work that you’ve done now that it’s out in the world?
Phil DeTolve: I’ll say even now looking back on this project, it’s weird to think of my 13-year-old self, when I first heard U2 as a teenager, and I am now working on something that they are in. It’s still kind of shocking. I can’t believe that bridge between those two things, you know? And I’m humbled to be with this company, and working with these people. It’s really a special project to be a part of.
Brian Riordan: For me, I wouldn’t say I’m a perfectionist. I’m not. I like mistakes. If they’re mistakes that I like, then I like them, if that makes any sense. So usually when I walk away from a project, there’s never enough time, right? None of us ever have enough time. We could always use another day or another week or whatever it is. But this one, I walked away going man, you know, I’m really satisfied with the work we did on this. I really think it plays well. And then when I had the good fortune to watch it screen with Bono and Dave and Morgan, and hear it played theatrically in this really large theater downtown in LA, it made me realize that any of the mistakes that I might wish I could go back in and fix, were perfect the way they were. I don’t always feel that way. I’m not saying it’s a perfect mix, I’m just saying I think it’s perfect the way it is and I’m happy. How about you, Jacknife?
Jacknife Lee: I saw it a few times just in rough cuts and things weren’t finished, but the first time I saw it finished was on the TV. When I do a job that’s difficult, and I’m watching it and it works, I kind of forget every problem that I’ve had. This was purely enjoyable. It was so good I didn’t kind of believe I was involved with it. I think Morgan and the editor pulled something off that I didn’t think was going to be possible. A few things: I’m Irish, so I thought Americans coming to Ireland could be very weird, you know? A lot of times there’s a caricature of Irishness, and I was nervous about the pub stuff and I was nervous about this kind of leprechaun-y kind of thing. I was nervous that the band would be overexposed and that it wouldn’t be funny, but all my fears were gone immediately from watching it. It just looked great. I mean, it looked really beautiful. The Ambassador was so beautifully lit. Even though I was there when it was being done and I thought this is nice, you just never can tell. It sounded fantastic. I was really proud of it. And the story was great. It was just a really heartening depiction of friendship, and it was just very, as I said earlier, disarming and wonderful. So I was thrilled. I’m still excited by it. I think Morgan just did a brilliant, brilliant job. I feel honored to be involved in it.
Awards Daily: I’ve been following the band for ages and they’re the most important band in my life. It’s no joke to say that when I was in my twenties, Achtung Baby saved my life. I was making people watch it who wouldn’t necessarily be interested in it, and then watching them go “Jesus, this is great.”
Jacknife Lee: I think for fans it’s a great show, because you kind of know certain things that’s shown in this thing. Like yes, they’re rock stars and all that, but there’s something different about U2. They’re so unique in that they’re still together. Just things like their relationships. Their best friends are still their best friends from when they were four and five. They’re very tight and through the film you can kind of see how unique the story is. It’s not quite like a desperate lifeboat group, but there’s something strong about them that you can feel. And they’re aware of the feeling of community that they have with their fans and how important that relationship is. So it’s an interaction and I think this show has been really important and will be, looking at the whole U2 story in the future. This is something that we haven’t seen before. And it’s done very skillfully in a way that I just didn’t think was manageable. So it’s profound, but it’s also for people who don’t like U2 and have found them annoying. And Bono can be. He’s everywhere and he’s got a big mouth. And for that you can see there’s an explanation as to why he does what he does and how difficult that can be for slightly more normal people like Larry or Adam, who don’t want him talking to Jesse Helms or something like that. (Laughs). But all that stuff is explained and it’s amazing to do in an hour and a bit. That’s the kind of weird balance that’s achieved in this show that yes, it could have been an advertisement for new songs, but it’s also this explanation, apology, and revelation. It’s a real magic trick that the whole team pulled off under Morgan’s direction. It is a miraculous film.
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