After recording two records in the Bahamas with producer Terry Manning, Widespread Panic returned to Athens, Ga. to work on its 11th studio album, Dirty Side Down. Recorded in a residential neighborhood with longtime friend and producer John Keane, Dirty Side Down offers a mix of new Widespread Panic material and road-tested songs the band has never released on an official album.

Relix magazine’s Amy Jacques caught up with John Keane this February to discuss the band’s time in Athens, the death of Vic Chesnutt and why Dirty Side Down is a “return to the old Panic way of doing things.”

When did Panic first approach you about producing the upcoming record?

Last summer they contacted me and said that they wanted to come back in and do another album.

What’s it been like working in your Athens studio with the guys again for the first time since 2003’s Ball?

It’s been great. I really enjoy working with these guys. We’re good friends and we’ve done a lot of recording together. So I’m always looking forward to coming back in the studio. I’m also pretty excited about working with Jimmy Herring, their new guitar player.

If I am correct, this is the first Panic record you produced that features Jimmy Herring. Can you talk about working with him in the studio?

Working with Jimmy’s been great. He’s definitely one of the better guitar players on the planet in my book. I’ve always wanted to work with him in the studio. I’m used to working around the limitations of the musicians I’m working with. But Jimmy doesn’t seem to have any limitations. He’s capable of playing some really gorgeous guitar solos and I mainly just wanted to bring that out and showcase him in these songs as much as possible. And also, he’s been writing songs with [the band], so some of the new songs really reflect his style and his input.

What percentage of songs on the album were written before the recording sessions?

Most of the songs were written before they came in. There is one song that actually still doesn’t have a title. We’re calling it “Drop D” because the guitar players drop their E strings down to a D to get a special tuning. That’s the only one that they wrote or put together in the studio. There’s an older song of JoJo Hermann’s called “Visiting Day” that they’ve been doing for a while. They came in and completely reworked that around a guitar riff that Jimmy came up with and sort of adapted “Visiting Day” to that guitar riff. So, it’s a new version of an older song and it’s totally different, especially in the verses.

What percentage have been performed or road-tested before the sessions?

50 percent of the songs that they are doing are songs that they’ve performed live in the past. And about half of the songs are new material that has not previously been played live. And the other songs are some songs, there’s a song called “Clinic Cynic” that drummer Todd Nance sings and that song’s been around for a while but it’s never actually made it onto a studio album. And they’re doing a song that Jerry Joseph wrote called “North” that’s been one of my favorites for a long time but that one’s never actually made it onto an album either.

In 2006 you toured with the band before Jimmy Herring joined. How did that experience shape your role as a producer and the studio dynamic with the guys?

It didn’t change my relationship with the band that much because I’ve been working with the guys since 1986, but it did give me a chance to get to know Jimmy well. And I was touring with them when he first started playing with them. The first show we did was at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, so I got to spend a lot of time hanging out with Jimmy and we were teaching each other Widespread Panic songs. We were both trying to learn as many Widespread Panic songs as we could while we were on the road. And I thoroughly enjoyed that part of the experience and so when they came into the studio, Jimmy and I already had a pretty good rapport.

Going on the road with those guys, for me, was kind of like running away and joining the circus. I’m sure all this running around the country on a big bus is an old hat to those guys, but for me, it was like a vacation because I’d never done anything like that – and not at that level. So, I had a great time being a tourist in all these different cities and getting play amazing venues like Red Rocks and Radio City Music Hall.

Are you playing on the album as well – I know you often sit in on pedal steel, and have filled in on guitar in past interim periods?

Yeah, I usually end up putting little bits and pieces here and there on studio albums – steel guitar mainly. I play steel guitar on a few songs – maybe a background vocal here or there. That’s part of the fun of making records with these guys. I’ve been known to add little bits and pieces on the quieter songs.

They’ve got a new song called “When You Comin’ Home” – it’s a really beautiful, quiet little ballad and I put some steel guitar on that. And we also brought in Anne Richmond Boston to sing some backups on that. She’s a singer who lives here in town and she’s performed on some of the other Widespread records and she’s probably the only guest musician other than myself that will be appearing on the album.

This album was only a few days into recording when your friend and longtime Panic associate Vic Chesnutt passed away. Are there any tributes to him on the album?

Yeah. We’re doing a song called “This Cruel Thing,” which is a song that Vic [who passed away on December 25, 2009] cut in my studio in the mid-‘90s as a demo and it was during the sessions for About to Choke, one of his albums on Capital Records, but it never made it on the album. And as far as I know, he didn’t put it on any of his albums. But the guys came in and were saying that they would like to do a Vic song, so I pulled this one out and played it for them and they really liked it, so we decided to record a version of it.

Most Relix readers know you as a producer. Did you always know you wanted to have a career in music production?

My dad worked in a radio station and when I was a little boy and we always had tape recorders around so it has always been a hobby of mine. When I started playing guitar it was only natural for me to want to record myself and listen back to it. I was about 13 or 14 when The Allman Brothers’ Eat a Peach album came out and that was around the same time when I was trying to figure out how to play lead guitar – and I became sort of obsessed with that record for a couple of years. I played it so much that I wore it out and I had to go buy another one. And I was now trying to figure out the guitar solos and figure out which part Duane Allman played and which part Dickey Betts played. I’d try to play both into a tape recorder and overdub one over the other – probably my first experience with overdubbing was bouncing guitar parts from one tape recorder to another.

When I was in high school, it didn’t really occur to me that there was a career to be had in music production. And I never really thought that I would be able to make a living doing that. So when I graduated from high school, I went to Southern Tech in Marietta, Ga. and took mechanical engineering for a couple years and I got really bored with that and I came home and started playing in bands for a living. Eventually, it became necessary for me to start recording the various bands I was playing in, and that’s when my career sort of started to blossom.

In Athens in the early ‘80s, there were no recording studios. So, if you wanted to record something, you pretty much had to do it yourself – or you had to drive to Atlanta and spend a lot of money. So, I bought a Reel to Reel 4-track and started doing demos for my band and when other bands in town started getting wind of it, they started calling me up and wanted to come in and make demos for their band. And it just sort of snowballed out of that. After about three or four years of doing that, I decided to make recording my full time job – probably in about 1984 or 1985 – and I stopped playing in bands for a living and started recording for a living. And my studio has just sort of slowly evolved since then. And all the money I made from making recordings, I put back in to the studio and bought nicer gear.

Talk a little bit about your studio. It is actually the home you formally lived in, right?

The studio is in an old house in a residential district in Athens. It’s not a purpose-built facility, it’s just sort of a home studio that expanded. It has a very homey feel to it. It’s not like going to a doctor’s office to record – you know, some studios are in industrial complexes and the whole vibe is kind of barren. I think people like recording here because it’s like a house and there’s a kitchen and a front porch with a swing and it’s a nice neighborhood to walk around in – and it’s right in the middle of town.

Panic worked with Terry Manning at Compass Point in the Bahamas for the past two albums. When you initially started talks about this album were there any elements of those recordings that the band wanted to replicate or avoid?

They were very limited in the amount of time that they had making those recordings. So they had to move a lot faster, mainly due to the expense of recording in a foreign country. On the last album, I believe they had to get everything recorded in just three weeks. And then I think [lead singer John Bell] went back to record some vocals after that. But they had to move a lot faster than they normally would during an album project and for this current project they were looking forward to being able to take a little more time and do a little more experimenting.

Did those albums influence your production approach for this record at all?

No, not really. I have my own way of doing things, like every producer. So I followed my normal modus operandi – except, one thing we do differently on this album is we worked on one song at a time instead of working on a lot of songs all at once. It takes a little bit longer to do it that way, but in the end, it’s more fun and it’s better for the songs. We would start working on a song, and we would keep working on it until we got everything except the lead vocals finished and then we’d move on to the next song. Sometimes, we’d go ahead and record the vocals too.

Most of the time, when you’re recording basic tracks, you keep going until you have what we call a basic track which is drums, bass and maybe a guitar or two and then we move on to the next song. It’s a way to save you time in the studio. But it can also have a kind of “assembly-line” effect on the songs. This time we decided to do it a little differently and I think its better for the songs to do it that way – to stay on one song until you get it pretty close to completion. But it does take a lot longer to do it that way, so that’s why I’m still here five to six weeks later still working on the project.

Usually once everybody gets their parts recorded, they sort of leave me to my own devices and let me work on the songs and do the mixes. It’s really boring to sit around the studio all day while somebody pitters around mixing your songs. Right now I’m in the studio all by myself. Everybody else is taking a break, but I’m still working. We started right at the beginning of January – so that’s about six weeks I guess.

Of all the Panic albums that you’ve worked on, which is your personal favorite?

‘Til the Medicine Takes is probably my favorite album because I really love that particular collection of songs.

Describe your relationship with the group members. You’ve got an insider relationship with them that most producers don’t have because you can actually play most of their cannon.

I’m definitely a lot more familiar with the band and their music than most producers would be, having worked on my sixth studio album with them. I’ve also mixed countless live records and DVDs for the band. So, I’m probably more familiar with their music than anyone else and I’ve known them for years. When they first formed as a band and all moved into a house together, it was right down the street from me and I used to go over there and party with them in the mid-‘80s. So, we’ve all been good friends for a really long time.

How do you feel Dirty Side Down will fit into the band’s canon?

This new record is going to be [big] for the guys because there’s a lot of varied, different types of music on there but it all hangs together. And there’s some really interesting tunes. They’ve got one called “Saint Ex” which is sort of a return to the old Panic way of doing things where they would have songs that sort of go through a series of movements with a lot of dynamic meter changes – so it takes you on a little journey rather than being a standard four-minute pop song where everything is basically the same tempo and feel throughout. And that’s something that they haven’t done in a while, so it’s pretty exciting about returning to that way of doing things because it’s something that they are known for and really good at – for example, a song like “Pigeons,” which is a song that goes through a lot of movements and moods and changes. So, they’ve got a few cuts on this album that are kind of reminiscent of that, and to me that’s really interesting because that’s something we haven’t done in a while.

Dirty Side Down is scheduled for release on May 25 via ATO Records. A version of this article appears in the April/May issue of Relix .