We recently connected with Elie Bashkow and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Elie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

As a child, my parents gave me a lot of space just to play. They weren’t concerned with teaching me to read as soon as I could speak, they weren’t worried about correcting me if I explained to them that the moon was God’s fingernail, they never asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and told me I was allowed to answer that question in whatever way I wanted when it invariably came from other adults. I remember telling my aunt I wanted to be a bird. In other words, my parents weren’t worried about turning me into a productive member of society as quickly as possible. Instead, they were fine with just letting me have fun running around outside with my friends, making “music” (noise), and drawing airplanes all day. They also didn’t give me a lot of access to media as a young child. I remember when I did get to watch TV, I was captivated and glued to it…it was so exciting. But that was rare and most of the time, I had to figure out how to create that excitement for myself. I was unhappy about my lack of exposure to TV, movies, videogames, etc. at the time but I think it’s something I’m really grateful for now, looking back. Lord knows I get enough of my life sucked up by social media now to make up for those moments of presence I had. as a kid! Obviously, my childhood wasn’t all just a utopia of playtime but fundamentally, I was given the space to be a kid when I was a kid.

This meant that I was able to explore art, music, storytelling, etc. with my weird little child brain and develop my own relationship with all of this stuff outside of pressure to “do” anything with it; my parents were never very future focused when I was little, trusting me to find a good path for myself when the time was right (they’ve been very supportive as I’ve dove into the music industry). And as I’ve grown up, I’ve really started to see how those early experiences that at the time just felt like play grew into things that are central to who I am today. I try to consciously bring that childlike perspective attitude of play into every session and I work to help the artists I’m working with find it as well. There’s something so creatively powerful about approaching even a technical task with such an open and flexible mind. I’m really grateful I got to have those experiences when I was young to lay the foundation upon which I’m now building my music career.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I always start by just saying, I make music. Because that’s really the most accurate thing to say! For more detail, I’m a record producer, songwriter, audio engineer, and multi-instrumentalist. Most of my time these days is spent on the records and production side of things.

I started playing bluegrass violin when I was six years old, eventually moving to classical, then jazz, then rock, then everything else. I discovered improvisation by putting on T.I. songs and just playing my violin along with them when I was in 7th grade and fell in love with the idea of expressing myself in the moment through music. As I went, I began to play more and more instruments, starting with mandolin, then guitar, then bass, then piano, and more recently drums.

After high school, I took a gap year before starting college to work and play music and ended up in a band called Orion and the Melted Crayons which was my real intro to the world of professional live music. We played a ton of shows and even did some tours around the East Coast and that was when I began to think “I wanna be making music forever”. I was a fair bit younger than my bandmates and it was such an amazing learning experience, I actually still play with them from time to time!

I started college at the University of Virginia in my hometown of Charlottesville but during my first year, the pandemic hit and all the gigs dried up. Six months into college, I was back in my childhood bedroom with nothing to do. So I opened up a DAW (digital audio workstation, software that music is made with) and got to learning. I had been doing studio session work on violin and guitar for a while and I always had these ideas of what I wanted for the song but the person bringing the song from vision to sound wave was the “Producer”. I remember thinking “I wanna do that” so this was my chance. I spent hours a day working on learning about mixing and recording and eventually began approaching friends offering to produce them for free. It took off from there and now it’s a full time gig! Still finishing school though … almost done!

I think what I bring to the table as a producer is a very holistic and humanistic attitude towards making music. What I mean by that is I’m not just trying to get it and leave. I spend a ton of time with each artist and we dig into stuff that goes far beyond music. As a producer, my job is to align my vision with theirs and then collaboratively facilitate the process of making that something tangible and moving. That means meeting everyone involved where they’re at as people and creating the environment and interactions with the process that leads to an organic creation of something truly powerful and unique. I always say “the music follows the people”. The challenge is balancing all that with the highest level of technical knowledge and performance, never settling for something sub par and always pushing the envelope.

With many of my projects I’m involved at the writing stage, manage the arrangement and planning, budget the project, book the studios if we need to do it somewhere other than my home studio, hire the players for whatever parts we can’t do ourselves, record it, play on it, mix it, and more. I never master my own mixes though, that I always send off for. I’ll even be involved with things like music videos and promotion.

I really like to have close relationships with the artists I’m working with because our interactions are so important, deep, and unique. I don’t know of many other analogous types of situations. I’m at once a friend, a therapist, a consultant, a specialist, a critic, and sharer of voice… that’s pretty wild.

I work across all genres, doing indie folk, garage rock, underground rap, trap, soul, pop, and everything between. The process of making music is like a fundamental form of expressing inner states and making meaning from them so working with different genres is just about tweaking the sounds those feelings are expressed through.

I also still play live in a few bands and also have my own artist project I’m working on. I also do freelance mixing and consulting work on the side. I work my face off and I’m so excited every single day to get up and get cracking on whatever I’ve got going on. I’m so happy to have found this path in music and that’s something I really don’t take for granted.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I think the biggest one would probably have to be when the pandemic hit and I had to pivot from live performance with bands to producing records and being on the studio side of the business.

As I said, I was in the middle of my 2nd semester of college when Covid hit. I didn’t own any music production software at the time because I really wasn’t doing any music production but because of an unrelated class, the school let me borrow a computer that happened to have Logic Pro X on it. Logic is a digital audio workstation and I now use it everyday.

7 months into college and 2 years into regular gigging, I was back in my childhood bedroom thinking “well I can’t play shows, I guess I gotta learn to produce because I have no idea when this is gonna be over and I need to make some music” and so I started trying to make these little songs. I didn’t know what I was doing at all… I have a memory of looking at an EQ (an audio tool) and simply having no idea whatsoever of where to start with it.

It was so frustrating because I felt really proficient at music before that…I was really comfortable playing a fair number of instruments, but this was a task I was absolutely novice at and had to start from scratch. I remember on my first mixing job for another artist, still just doing it for free for practice, listening to my reference mix of Motion Sickness by Phoebe Bridgers and then listening to my mix and crying because I was like “how the f*ck am I gonna get this there”. I had similar experiences my first time being in the studio with a band. It was a bunch of musicians I respected and we just couldn’t find the right thing to do for this one section and everyone was looking at me and I had no idea what to do…I felt like a toddler.

There were so many moments where I wanted to just drop it and stick to playing violin and guitar but I’m so glad I stuck with it. The craziest part is that wasn’t even three years ago and now I’m doing this all day. The pivot is scary but boy can it also rock.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

My mom and sister gave me the book “A Giacometti Portrait” by James Lord and it is brilliant. I think it says a ton about the creative process. Really special. Don’t wanna give away much but I highly recommend. Kinda slow start but then it pays off.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://linktr.ee/ElieBashkow
• Instagram: @elie.bashkow

Image Credits
Elliot Crotteau, Sophie Brande, Ashley Park