[Photo of Pavement in New York City, 1997, by James Smolka]
Pavement — along with the people at Matador — are once again on the reissue train. With the expanded edition of 1997’s Brighten The Corners being released yesterday (the fourth Pavement record, and fourth of eventually five reissues by Matador), our friends at FADER posted this Q&A with original engineer Mitch Easter.
Easter, who engineered Brighten the Corners at the studio he had in his Athens, Georgia home at the time, ironically states that he was unaware of the reissue prior to the interview [excerpt below]. You can read the full interview here, and when you’re done, you can find out what kind of Pavement person you are.
Have you seen what’s going to be on the reissue?
I don’t know anything about it. The first I’ve heard about it is this interview. It’s funny because I felt kind of weird about the fact that I didn’t really work on that record on any kind of huge capacity, but I think when it came out, my name floated around for a little bit. Nobody really heard of me much around that time, but at the same time, there were still people that remembered me from a few years before and I got all this press for the record. And I didn’t deserve it. It’s Bryce’s baby. I felt kind of embarrassed about that. I think the New Yorker magazine mentioned me and said that I produced it, which is just wrong. I don’t remember what the credits are, but that was a very much band-produced record, if not a co-production between them and Bryce. That was an example of how beloved they were. They really did get people’s attention and it definitely did get people to start calling me again about recording them.
