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With producer Rob Cavallo onboard, Paramore looks beyond their power-punk comfort zone with Brand New Eyes
It's an hour before soundcheck at Mountain View's legendary Shoreline Amphitheatre, just a short stretch down Highway 101 from San Francisco, and guitarist Josh Farro is bristling with enthusiasm. You might feel the same way if your band had spent the last month on the road in the coveted opening slot for No Doubt's longawaited reunion tour, but at the moment Farro is trying to describe what it was like to track what he feels is Paramore's best studio album to date in just five weeks. For him, it's about much more than reliving the obvious adrenaline rush of working so quickly; it's the sense of freedom the band encountered in making Brand New Eyes [Fueled By Ramen/Atlantlc] that seems to resonate the loudest.
"On our past two records, it was usually about producers telling us the right way to do things," Farro confides, citing the Tennessee quintet's 2005 hard-rocking debut All We Know Is Falling and the platinumselling follow-up Riot!, "which is cool because I think we needed that at the time. But with this one, we knew exactly what we wanted, so we had to work with a producer who would be really involved but was also willing to lay back and let us do our thing. We ended up recording the first six or seven songs almost all the way through in ten days- we were flying, and we knew we had the right guy to help us do that."
The studio wizard in question is Rob Cavallo, known for the string of hit albums he's notched with Green Day, My Chemical Romance, Dave Matthews Band, and many more. Back in late March, when the band arrived at his tricked-out Pro Tools-based home studio in the Hollywood Hills, Cavallo had already committed to hitting the ground at full speed.
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"We did one day of pre-production, basically to go over the songs they'd worked out in Nashville four or five weeks before," Cavallo recalls. "I just talked to them about what they wanted out of their record and what they wanted to hear, and when they got here, I was like, 'Well, let's just...