“AT THIS STAGE IN YOUR LIFE, YOU GIVE UP YOUR DREAMS OF IMMORTALITY…”
A FEW years ago, Gunnar Olsen found himself taking a mysterious trip out to New Jersey. The drummer, who has played on records by Miley Cyrus and John Legend, was invited to attend a recording session out in the rural depths of the Garden State. No further information was given. “My first thought was, ‘I have to rent a car? What’s going on?’” Nevertheless, Olsen agreed and made the hour-plus drive from his home in New York to a 300-acre ranch just outside a town called Colt’s Neck — which should have tipped him off immediately. This is Springsteen country.
“I showed up and it was just my friend Ross Petersen, who’s an engineer, and the producer Ron Aniello,” recalls Olsen. “They explained they had these songs and they wanted to try out some drum ideas.” He spent the day at Stone Hill Studio – an airy facility with a closet full of microphones and a small arsenal of synths and pianos and guitars. Numerous windows look out over the adjoining fields, making the space open and bright. It’s a perfectly bucolic setting, isolated except for a few workers on the grounds.
It wasn’t your typical session, and Olsen didn’t expect any of his experiments would end up on an album – or even that a Springsteen LP was in the works. “I was just going to give them some options and ideas, but Bruce randomly showed up that day,” Olsen says. “I don’t think they were expecting him to be there, which is why they called me in. But… surprise!”
Springsteen has a reputation for being very exacting in the studio – there are tales of him slaving for months to get the right drum sound for Darkness On The Edge Of Town. But Toby Scott, who worked with Springsteen for decades, describes a very different Boss: “He’s very easygoing. Doesn’t get mad. Doesn’t get frustrated or upset. You make a mistake and he’s like, ‘OK, let’s do it again.’ Just very casual.”
It became swiftly apparent that the music Olsen contributed to was already highly developed. “The stuff I was playing was stuff they’d been working on for a little while. It had a direction already. It wasn’t like starting from scratch.” The session ended, Olsen was thanked warmly for his time, that was that.
“I guess he liked what I was doing, so they kept calling me back. I did four or five days over the course of a couple of months. Some days it would be a few songs and some days it was only
