Russ Long's Early Career :: Russ Long
When it comes to an engineers path in the industry it can be a slow rise. Hear how Russ forged his path in Nashville and had the opportunity to work with such amazing talent!
I was working with a lot of accomplished songwriters on demos and stuff early on when I first got out of school, and I had done… uh well I was in the studio with a band called “Say So” that was a husband and wife duo, ironic enough, it's Jim and Kim Thomas who are my pastors at the Village Chapel now (the place where I go to church). But they were singer-songwriters and in touring band for years before they ever got into that, and Jim was friends with Steve Taylor who is an artist.
Steve was in a band called Chagall Guevara that was a local rock band, and they got signed to MCA and were one of the first rock bands out of Nashville to get signed at that point, and they were looking for a new sound guy because they're old sound guy, who I think was good, but had thrown two or three people through a wall at some point and had police issues… and making things potentially expensive for the band. So they decided they wanted to get somebody that was hopefully as good but definitely wouldn't, and in my case doesn't have the capacity to, throw somebody through a wall.
So I get a call from Steve about doing sound for him, and I was a fan of the band already and had been a fan of Steve as a solo artist before that, and so I go out and we hit it off well and I did a bunch of shows with them over the period of about a year and a half i guess, and that was while i was working at House of David, because I just remember having to work studio hours around going out with them on weekend. And the studio was really great about there were a couple of engineers there so I could always work my schedule out to make it work.
And then the band kind of was taking a break for a while, and Steve got asked... or Steve was co-writing with Peter Furler, who is the drummer, or was the drummer at that point from the Newsboys, who at that point were a band that had done two records, and um the first one i think sold six or seven thousand copies and the second one sold 35 000 copies or something... so they were very small band.
And Steve starts writing with Peter, and they're gonna, they decide the guy from the label asked Steve to co-produce with Peter the two songs for the album, and Steve has already gotten, I've got to know him pretty well from traveling with him in them and he knows that that's what i want to do, and he is not plugged into the studio scene really in nashville... so he says “hey, would you be up for doing these couple of songs?” And I said, “oh yeah I'd love to,” and so we jump in, and originally it's two songs or maybe it was three i can't remember, but all I know is they kept writing and it was going so well and the label was thrilled with the way it was going, and so Steve and Peter ended up co-writing the whole record.
I engineered the whole record. And it's the first label thing I ever worked on, and it ended up being a gold record, and sold, I don't know what it ended up selling, I think 700,000 units.