Three Home-Recorded Records We Love

Going on a decade ago, I made a pilgrimage to the ranch house outside Huntington, New York, where John and Alice Coltrane lived with their children for the last several years of John’s life, and where Alice recorded her early albums as a bandleader in the aftermath of his death. It’s owned by a foundation and will ostensibly become a museum someday, but for years it has sat unmarked and closed to the public, a modest suburban home like any other except for being visibly and eerily empty. It’s hard to square the normie Long Island environs with the mystical atmosphere Alice and her collaborators conjured with Huntington Ashram Monastery, an album named for the house itself.

Later albums feature string sections and batteries of timpanis and chimes, grand arrangements that necessitated working in proper studios. But on Huntington Ashram Monastery, Coltrane played only with bassist Ron Carter, a veteran of Miles Davis’s second quintet, and drummer Rashied Ali, with whom she’d played in her husband’s late bands. The trio’s hushed tones are suggestive of a private ritual, with an air of religious intensity that arises from the deep focus of their interplay rather than orchestral scale. Coltrane plays harp on the first side and piano on the second, a choice that neatly inverts the narrative arc of life and death: First, the music travels the astral plane, then it gets down to the earthly toil of the blues. The recording is verité and relatively lo-fi. When Ali really digs into his bass drum, you can hear the gear struggling to accommodate the bursts of volume. I picture the trio huddled closely in the basement, eyes closed, incense burning. I wonder what the neighbors thought.

The archetypal home-recording musician may be an eccentric or an outsider, plying their craft with little regard for industry or audience, but every once in a while, one of the world’s biggest pop acts gets in on the fun, too. Among the many contradictions of Tusk, the fantastically sprawling and agitated third album by Fleetwood Mac’s classic Buckingham-Nicks lineup: It was the most expensive rock album ever made at the time, and a good number of its songs are either demos or attempts to replicate them.

These were Lindsey Buckingham’s contributions, which he worked out obsessively at home before allowing the other band members to touch them: playing all the instruments, multitracking his own voice, slamming on a Kleenex box in place of a snare drum. The band would then overdub their parts directly onto the demo or go to great lengths to recreate its vibe from scratch, a process that reached its absurd zenith when Buckingham demanded that a replica of his own bathroom be built inside of LA’s Village Recorder studio. (You can see how the sessions got pricey.) On one hand, this unorthodox approach led them to the breathtaking quietude of “Save Me a Place,” a song whose hocketed acoustic strums and clouds of vocal harmony anticipate Animal Collective by a couple of decades; on the other, to the bug-eyed bashing of “Not That Funny,” Buckingham’s idea of a punk song, one of the bitterest and most coked-up recordings ever put to tape. Legend has it that he recorded his vocals to the latter in push-up position, singing into a microphone that was taped to the replica bathroom’s tile floor. Hey—there are worse ways to spend a million bucks.