Not everyone has a clear idea of what they want to do for their profession during their formative years, but producer/engineer Drew Long had absolutely no doubt whatsoever where his own passions were rooted while he was growing up.

“I started out by playing instruments while I was just a kid in Knoxville, but I got interested in producing because I also had a fascination with how things came together on records,” Long recalls. “I was so intrigued by the things I was hearing. “I’d go, ‘How did that bass part come together?’ or, ‘How did this piano player think to play that?’ I had to learn everything I could about all those little details.” 

Long’s lifelong sonic obsessions ultimately led him to a burgeoning production career behind the board, one that has found him equally adept at working with both established artists (Judah & the Lion, Houndmouth, Kris Allen) and budding up-and-comers (Betcha, Ry-Lo) alike. Whether it’s taking on a supportive engineering role (as he did for Chris Stapleton’s seminal, career-defining 2015 masterpiece, Traveller) or occupying the lead producer’s chair (something he relished while helming Judah & the Lion’s 2019 alt-bluegrass manifesto, Pep Talks), Long knows what he wants, and he knows how to get it. “I tend to look at the things I produce in a visual sense,” he explains. “Getting a lead vocal to stand out by creating a sense of motion around it like we’re making a movie out of sound — that’s really how I love to do it.”

While studying at the School of Music at Belmont University in Nashville, Long became instant friends with a downhome trio of musicians who became known as the aforementioned Judah & the Lion, a critically acclaimed group he continues to work with to this day. “The producer thing really solidified for me in college when Judah asked me to do their Sweet Tennessee EP [in 2013],” he reports. “We only had a couple of days at Ocean Way Recording to do it. None of us knew exactly what we were doing at the time,” he adds with a laugh, “but we figured out how the EP was going to take shape.”

From there, Long caught the eye and ear of Grammy Award-winning producer Dave Cobb (Brandi Carlile, Jason Isbell, John Prine), who enlisted him to engineer a number of key top-shelf sessions for him, including Judah & the Lion’s first full-length LP, 2014’s Kids These Days. “Working with Dave made me realize how serious a business this was, and how much it needs to be taken seriously,” Long admits. “It’s not a ‘hang,’ because being a producer and an engineer is hard work. I was enamored with technology, so I got to know all the ins and outs firsthand, and really got to understand what goes on in the studio. I worked for Dave for about a year or so, and, in that time, I got to experience being with many different engineers who I looked up to. I also got to learn the many different ways of producing for some artists I really liked and respected.”

After that initial initiation process, Long began spreading his production wings. Working as an engineer on alt-blues rockers Houndmouth’s 2015 release Little Neon Limelight, which featured the No. 1 Adult Alternative track “Sedona,” taught him how to trust his instincts. “That was where I learned a lot about my own craft of making records,” Long explains. “We were cutting that album on analog tape, and it was done live with no headphones in the room. It was just me and the band, and this very chaotic sense of recording. I learned that, hey, this is the definition of controlled chaos — and I loved it! No one had any idea what the songs we were working on were going to amount to or how they were going to turn out, but we just knew to keep hitting the RECORD button because something was going to happen.”

Continues Long, “I don’t make records like that all the time, of course, but I love the mentality of getting into a studio and having everything set up and ready to go once the band’s there. Then it’s, ‘What are we going to do?’ There’s something about setting a stage and having no pre-requisite for the performance. Something about that is just so fascinating to me. It’s a fascinating way to produce the content you hear and visualize in your head.”

When Cobb enlisted Long to join the engineering squad he’d gathered for Chris Stapleton’s Traveller sessions, Long knew fairly quickly they were onto something special. “That was the record where even my parents went, ‘Okay, you’ve got career potential here,’” he recalls with a hearty laugh. “It changed Chris’s career, obviously, and it changed a lot of people’s careers around it, including mine. Everybody involved in that thing — from Dave to the players to the label — was operating at 100, and you don’t see that all the time in the music business. It was just such a special thing.” (For the record, Traveller received Album of the Year honors at the 2015 Country Music Awards and earned a Grammy for Best Country Album in 2016, and it has since been certified as quadruple platinum by the RIAA.)

Not only that, Long observes, but “the success of Traveller taught me how to dream as big as I can, and be as committed to the art as I can. The rest will take care of itself if you commit to pursuing that level of excellence in anything you do, every time.”

After that exhilarating in-studio experience, Long wanted to move beyond Nashville to test his skills by interning for a year at the infamous Electric Lady Studios in New York City, but not before being enlisted to produce a key track for Judah & the Lion — namely, to conjure up a more radio-friendly version of “Take It All Back,” one of the more elegiac cuts from the band’s 2016 sophomore effort Folk Hop N’ Roll, for inclusion alongside three other revamped tracks for the Deluxe Edition of the album released a full year later in 2017.

“I went in, pulled up the file, and just started editing the session,” Long details. “They cut it live with no click track, so I brought a bunch of elements to it for what I felt was making an impact on the radio at the time. Just getting things like the live banjo and mandolin to work with a whole new arrangement of drums and synthesizers was a challenge that I really hadn’t had before.”

Adding to the updated track’s unique flavor was a layer of background vocals that weren’t highlighted in the original mix. “The band had actually taken iPhones to one of their shows in the middle of making that record, a show where they got the crowd to sing along,” Long clarifies. “I had a lot of awesome material to work with, but I have to chalk it up to serendipity. I used all the techniques I learned from Dave Cobb, but I also added my own spin to it.” Clearly, Long’s instincts were quite well-received by both the band and their fans, as his version of “Take It All Back” became a No. 1 hit on the Billboard Alternative Songs chart in January 2017. Another one of the tracks he did for this specially named Folk Hop N’ Roll Going to Mars Collection, “Suit and Jacket,” made it to No. 4 on the same chart.

Working with Cobb as intently as he did prepared Long for how he approaches taking the lead in the producer’s chair for the artists he works with today, now that he’s once again based in Nashville. “That’s probably the main takeaway from my time with Dave,” he agrees. “It’s all in how you make the artist feel comfortable. It’s not about the producer telling them what to do, but telling them what excites them about what they’re doing. That way, when the artist comes into the control room, they don’t hate the playback.”

One of Long’s production techniques centers around the level of care he takes with presenting lead vocals. “I learned how to make records with what we call ‘no fat,’” he explains. “For me, the vocal must be the principal quality in a mix. The vocal is super-loud, and right there in front. Some people have said to me, ‘If it’s Adele’s name on the cover, it has to sell Adele.’ That’s so true. Even with Judah & the Lion, it’s Judah’s name first, so you have to have that interesting, specific balance when you make those records. You need the balance between the banjo, the mandolin, and the vocal.”

As noted earlier, Long likes to take what he calls a visual approach to his productions. “The way that everything flows is like a movie,” he points out. “Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois are massive inspirations for me, and I feel that’s what they do as well. A lot of times, music should pair visually to the listener. Yes, you should hear things, but the music should also invoke vision in your mind. That’s a big thing for me, and for the records I work on. I want you to not only hear it, but to see something with it as well. I have a certain sound in my head and there are a lot of details involved, so a lot of these records become labors of love, even if it’s a single I’m producing. I’m trying to make something that sounds like more than ‘just’ a song.”

While Long has already worked with a number of big names over the course of his burgeoning career, he is most interested in helping new artists make their marks — and, in turn, make a name for himself as being a producer who can take people to the next level. “I have a lot of passion for helping artists get started and develop their sound and their visual presentation,” he believes. “I’ve gotten so much joy from assisting people get inspired to create something that is otherworldly.”

No matter what, Long remains steadfast in his in-studio pursuits behind the board. “My main goal as a producer is to take the listener on a journey of sound,” he concludes. “I like shaping records that feel like you can’t predict what will be happening next. But whatever does happen next, it makes you feel like it was meant to be there the whole time.” One thing we can predict, however — Drew Long’s impressive sonic C.V. shows just how poised he is to be a visionary producer for many an artist for many years to come.

Bio by Mike Mettler