Welcome to Rumble to Rumbel Strip Vermont America Heilman.

Today an interview with songwriter and music producer Jim Rooney.

He and his wife Carol live in an old farmhouse in

Sharon, Vermont. But Jim is still back and forth to Nashville where he spent 30 years

playing music, writing songs, and producing some of my all-time favorite records with artists like John

Prine, Nancy Griffith, Iris DeMent, and Towns Van Zand.

I'm only a little embarrassed to say that I used to sing Iris Dement songs into a

hairbrush in my bathroom when I was a kid. Some of the songs I sang were songs that

Jim produced. Record producers are the people responsible for getting great performances

from singers and session musicians in the weird blank atmosphere of a recording studio. And I've

always wondered how they do that. I sat with Jim at his

kitchen table and we talked about his life in the recording studio. Here are some of the

highlights from that conversation. Welcome.

I picture you as a producer being almost like the host of a party.

You're trying to shape the course of events

or shape the feeling as the evening goes along.

Is that what it feels like? Nashville is a turned out to be the best home for me musically.

It is a recording center and the daily life was organized around that.

The union defines recording session as three hours.

And you get scale for that, you get paid a certain amount of money for a three hour recording session.

And so the day is broken up into three hour segments from 10 to 1, 2 to 5, 6 to 9.

But it never feels like everybody's in a hurry.

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