The Nuclear Gopher recording studio started life in the basement at my parent’s house where I spent most of my formative years. We moved into the house when I was 7 and I lived there until I was 19. One particular room in the basement was always “the music room” and contained a drum kit and various instruments that my siblings and I used extensively to learn to play instruments and make and record music. It was, frankly, a great way to grow up.

We started making music in the basement almost immediately after the family moved in. By the time Rhett and I finally purchased a four-track to improve our recordings we had already made the first four Lavone albums on stereo equipment and tape recorders. When we bought the four-track, we decided to call it a Studio and chose the name Nuclear Gopher Original Electronic Stereophonic Recording Studio, a bit of a mouthful but it was still the same old basement room, just with more instruments, microphones, and equipment. That christening was in 1989, almost a decade into our time there and the good old Nuclear Gopher continued to be the place we recorded our albums through the end of The Lavone era, around 2003, giving NG a lifespan of over 20 years. It went through a couple of names. When we decided to start a label we called it Nuclear Gopher Cheese Factory, which was great, but we went online in 1994 and people thought we dealt in dairy products so after a while NGCF became Nuclear Gopher Productions, NGP. But through the name changes and all the rest, it was still Nuclear Gopher. Sadly, all good things come to an end and once all the kids were out living adult lives, the room was reclaimed by parental units for more mundane usages like exercise bikes and storage.

Honestly… It wasn’t a great space. The floor was some sort of 1970’s vinyl tile, the walls were cinder block painted white, the only furniture was an ancient gold couch, but magic happened there and it’s embedded deep in the heart of a lot of my friends.

My adult life in general didn’t present me with obvious ways to record music in my home. I always wanted to but I was a 20-something who was raising a kid and I lived in a series of apartments where setting up a drum kit would have been cause for eviction. This didn’t stop me from trying to make music. I would write on a guitar and set up time to meet up with Rhett and we would go into the Gopher and track new songs, but it was a far cry from the first part of my life when I could make music almost any time I wanted to. I’ve never been great at combining organizational skills and creativity so this time period wasn’t a particularly productive one in terms of musical output. The Lavone went from 1-2 albums of new material per year to a six year hiatus and one final album that we put together in a final spurt of creativity before everything came to a screeching halt with my departure from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the end of the Nuclear Gopher record label and then Rhett’s unbelievably shocking and tragic death.

In 2003, just prior to the big changes, Rhett and I were working on a new Lavone album, untitled, and had two or three songs tracked. I decided one day to setup a little recording rig in my apartment. Not a studio, per se, but a simple recording system with an iMac, a copy of ProTools Free, and a few basics like microphones and a guitar. I didn’t really know what I was doing but I made a little album called The Message Will Be Kept that I didn’t really share with many people. It was more of an experiment than anything.

It was successful enough that I decided to keep working with those simple tools but switched to Garageband and moved down to the unheated garage in my apartment complex where I could at least have a little privacy. Drums were out of the question but I couldn’t play them anyhow so loops would have to do. With that arrangement I made my third solo album, The Context, and the results were pretty good. I released it under a new label, Tasty Rerun Productions, and I started pondering how I could get things a little better while still stuck in an apartment.

I tried a few things. Amp modelers were pretty new technology but they allowed me to record loud guitar parts without playing loud guitars. I picked up an electronic drum kit that let me drum without getting the landlord pissed (although I did manage to get one nasty-gram about a neighbor complaining about the kick drum making pounding noises through their ceiling… oops). With that modest arrangement and a weekend spent at a vacation rental in Duluth to record some of the songs, I managed to finish an album called Songs of Bo Redoubt, which was my first really ambitious solo album. I finished Bo Redoubt in 2006, the same year that Esther and I got married and bought our first house in Apple Valley. We moved into the house in September and by the following February, 2007, I finally had a proper basement studio setup that was at least something like the old Nuclear Gopher. There was a proper drum kit, all my Bo Redoubt gear, a computer setup with a 16-track audio interface, it was really thrilling. With all that power I managed another album in the space of a month with a band I formed called Trumpet Marine. The album was called Louder, Longer, Lobster and I was really happy with the result. Tasty Rerun had three albums in the catalog and for the first time in my adult life I had my very own recording studio.  I called it The Nuclear Gopher Too.

I would love to say that joy and rapture followed but the truth is that the subsequent years were challenging for a number of reasons, none of which really had anything to do with music. There were family struggles and work struggles and Trumpet Marine didn’t turn out how I had hoped, lasting all of two years with only that one album and a handful of gigs played to show for the effort. I made another record in 2008, The Legendary Adventures of Prosciutto Pig, but it wasn’t particularly good and I was disheartened on many fronts.

This was the start of a period in which I wrote some, recorded some, and tried hard to find a groove but failed repeatedly. Music just seemed too hard to do, to be honest. The hours I would spend in the studio would have flashes of the old magic but mostly it was lonely and I was sad. I cobbled together a set of songs I had been working on (and a couple of retreads from earlier albums) into an album called A Man Could Get Tired and Other Songs and released it and in 2012 I recorded a strong album called Blood and Scotch/Valentine, I did a set of mostly Lavone covers called lavoneloveletter but I just couldn’t get the sort of traction I longed for. It felt a lot like it was pointless.

In 2014 I took a Sunday and setup a micro-studio in the coal room in the basement, tracked half a dozen songs in a single session, and put out an EP called The Coal Room around Christmas time and that, as they say, was that. I had ideas, lots of them. The Coal Room was going to be one of a quartet of EP releases, but the other ones never got off the ground. I started working on different albums with different titles, The Universal Thump and The Wolf Is At The Door, but I just couldn’t manage a coherent piece of work. I have so so so many sessions and songs from that time period sitting on hard drives and backup discs, but none of it ever seemed to feel like I was doing what I wanted to be doing. It was really frustrating.

In order to be doing something with music, I joined a band called Robots From the Future. They had me playing keys, an instrument I could barely play, but I thought it might shake things up a bit and as a bonus I would get better at keys. Plus, it had been a few years since Trumpet Marine and I missed collaborating with other people. But, as it turned out, Robots wasn’t entirely right for me. I struggled with keyboards, I liked the songs but the style of music was such that I couldn’t see any option for contributing creatively with any of my own material, and I left the band after a while. I shortly joined a new band formed by one of the members of Robots and his wife. It was called Fistful of Datas and it was a 90’s cover band. Playing covers every once and a while was fun but playing in a dedicated cover band was something I had sworn I would never do. I shocked myself by saying yes and I had a blast for a couple years. I initially played bass, which is probably my favorite instrument to play, but when the song called for it I also jumped over to keys. I truly hated some of the songs we played but I truly loved some too and it was a great group of people. Still, I had to step away from the band for a couple of months, they had a few gigs and needed a bass player, they brought in the bass player from Robots, and when I returned I was stuck as full-time keyboards again, which was about as much fun for me as a root canal, especially when we played songs I didn’t like. I stuck it out for a bit but then I left. I had enjoyed it for a bit but when I started to dread the thought of playing another show or practicing another song by the Spice Girls, I knew I had to leave and I did.

I told myself that I would now be able to start getting serious about recording my own material again but a funny thing happened. I bought a different house, moved up to a former-farm property in Hugo with a bunch of trees and land and something I never dreamed was possible: out buildings.

I began to dream of a dedicated recording studio, outside of my house but on my property, where I could go late at night and feel completely free to do whatever I wanted to do. Maybe that was what I needed to get my creative life back into a groove. There was only one teensy problem: none of the buildings was suitable in the state I found it. There are four buildings on my property that are not my house. There is a small garage with a root cellar in the back which is detached from the house at the bottom of the hill, a very large barn that has been partially finished inside with several garage stalls on the lower level and a big open second level, there is a large shed (or small building) with around 400 square feet of space that we call the Cedar Cabin, and lastly there is a heated and insulated large garage with four and a half stalls. Where should this studio go?

The obvious choice was the barn. The barn has the most space, it’s close to the house, and there isn’t really any other obvious use for it. The problems with the barn were that it was home to a few barn cats, when they weren’t there it was a target for nocturnal raccoon raids, and it was neither insulated nor heated nor cooled. It seemed like using the barn for a studio would be a massive undertaking.

The big heated garage building was a non-starter. For one thing, it wasn’t sell suited in terms of layout, for another I really wanted to use it as a garage so I could tinker with old cars, do maintenance on the mowers and tractors and the like, and (of course) work on our cars.

The little garage with the root cellar was likewise a non-starter. Too small, not heated, and much more useful for storing gardening equipment or roots than for making music.

This left the Cedar Cabin. It was small enough to heat and cool for not too much money, big enough for a studio, and seemed like a good possibility. There was just one snag… It is on low lying land, things get very wet around here, and it doesn’t have a cement slab floor, it basically has paving stones on dirt. No matter how I sliced it, I couldn’t imagine storing computers or guitars or anything else that would be sensitive to climate in such a building. I started planning to use the space anyhow and came up with quite a few elaborate plans. I was going to build a solar heat box to provide a heating boost in the winter without cost, I bought a small standalone kitchenette, and I brainstormed and brainstormed how to deal with the floor. I came up with a plan that involved pulling up most of the “floor”, installing drain tile around the perimeter, and building a subfloor over the top of it with a moisture barrier and foam panels and sand and the like. It was going to a big project but I thought I could see how to do it if I tried. In 2018, when Scott Homan and his crew came out to the property to film a live video shoot for the movie Witness Underground, we converted the space into a performance space/studio and did, in fact, have pretty good success. Still, I couldn’t use the building year round.

And it wasn’t as if I didn’t have a studio, I still had a basement setup like I had back in Apple Valley.  I guess you could call it Nuclear Gopher 2 1/2?  I could still make music, but I felt really uncomfortable working in the space because it is located directly below the bedroom where Esther and four dogs might have opinions about me making noise at 2:00 AM or even 6:00 AM for that matter.

It felt less like having a studio and more like having a room to store all my gear.  My musical productivity improved exactly 0%.

I joined a band called Awkward Bodies, and we got a practice space in Minneapolis. With that space I started to think that maybe I just didn’t need the studio I kept planning. If I really wanted to, I could go to the Minneapolis space, bring gear, and record. That didn’t really work though because it’s a building filled with bands practicing. There is usually a lot of bleed of sound from the others. Besides, it is a 30-45 minute drive to Minneapolis from Hugo. Not conducive to impromptu or routine studio work.

And that’s how things stood for the last few years.  I wasn’t making much music on my own but I was having a good time with Awkward Bodies and playing bass and cover songs were few and far between (we played a Flaming Lips set at a bowling alley once but that was just cool). I started to just consider that maybe I would never get the studio setup I had been dreaming of. Which is dumb. I have buildings for god’s sake. I have recording gear. Clearly there must be an option.

This week I finally figured it out. The barn had been the right call all along, I just hadn’t seen it.

The penny dropped for me three days ago or so. I was writing about this and I suddenly asked myself what Rhett and I would have done back in The Lavone times. The answer was blindingly obvious. We never made plans, we didn’t wait for a good option, we just started working with what we had available and we would gradually upgrade and improve things until they got better. When we first wanted to make music, we didn’t have a drum kit so we built one out of ice cream buckets and cardboard. We didn’t have a guitar so we enlisted a friend who had one to join our band. Our earliest recordings were done by putting a tape recorder with a built in microphone in the middle of the room and pressing record. We replaced that with a cheap stereo and when we need a microphone we accidentally discovered that a pair of headphones could be plugged into the microphone input and you could sing into one of the ear pieces and it worked as a microphone. We iterated. We were agile. We did the best we could with what we had and we never let circumstances stop us from making our albums. It is the same DIY “just do it” ethic that made the Witness Underground shoot a success, the same ethic that made all of Nuclear Gopher happen, it’s what I do for a my day job for god’s sake; leading agile, iterative, software engineering teams. My entire experience in life in creating anything ever has been based around the idea that you start doing the work first, you figure out how to do it better by accumulating experience second. If I would just take the agile DIY approach to the recording studio instead of indulging in analysis paralysis and daydreaming, I would likely be in a much better position to get where I want to go.

This train of thought was really triggered by a couple of things. First, I got COVID and I had good reason to believe that I was going to struggle very badly with it. I have a long medical history of severe lung related illnesses and so I have been a virtual hermit for the last two years. As soon as I started returning to “normal life” and going to an office a few times a week I got COVID almost immediately. But, because I avoided it for two years and got all my shots, because I take daily lung meds, and because I was eligible for the new anti-COVID pill, I learned that COVID is something I can handle. After the last two years, surviving COVID felt like a new lease on life. The second thing is photography. A few months back I returned to film photography, something I haven’t done in close to 20 years but also something I greatly enjoyed back in my teens. I decided to learn to develop my own film and then I decided to setup a home dark room. At first I set it up in the bathroom but it was too cramped and unpleasant. My results were poor. But, I figured out a way to black out a few windows in the basement and make a workable darkroom space. After a few sessions down there I started to evolve the setup based on experience, moving things around, figuring things out in response to actually trying to work in the space. The post-COVID high and the fun of solving the problems of learning film photography, developing and darkroom process really made me feel inspired to finally make writing and recording music a part of my regular routine again, not just something I manage to pull of when the stars align.

So, Ryan, the obvious question is: which building is good enough, right now, for you to start working in? The answer was clear. The barn. Right now the ground around the Cedar Cabin is wet, the interior is too damp to consider working there, whereas the barn just needed to be cleaned out and might be too hot or muggy, but if so I have a portable air conditioner and a portable dehumidifier so, it seemed feasible.

I decided to just go out there, bring my work laptop, and spend the day working in the barn off of a hotspot and getting a feel for the place. I cleaned while I was on calls and meetings, which is something I do in the house too, so, no big deal. I can easily attend meetings while tidying up at the same time. It was a bit warm, as I suspected, but the lower level was quite cool so I decided I could just put a fan next to the stairway, pull the cool air up, and survive. It was quite comfortable. There was raccoon shit and some old straw and blankets that the barn cats used to use (they are long gone, I wish them well, haven’t seen a barn cat in years) but on the first day I was able to make half of the upper level of the barn into a usable space.

I was so excited I could barely believe it. I resolved to keep momentum and to bring some musical equipment out the next day. The following morning I grabbed my old cassette four-track, an acoustic guitar, a couple microphones and some cables. I started toying around and before I knew it I had an inkling for a song. An hour or so later and I had a new song, with lyrics, and a tape demo laid down. And it was a good one. And it came to me easily. Songwriting has become a struggle because it’s so hard to get into the right head space for it but when I was finally in a space of my own with the most basic tools of the trade at my disposal, there was a song just waiting.

That was Thursday May 12, 2022, the birthday for my new studio which I’m pretty tempted to call the Nuclear Gopher Hay Factory as a callback to the old Cheese Factory days. I have upgrades and improvements to make, but it’s a usable space as of now. I finally have this studio thing figured out. Hell. Yes.