February 2026
Mark Howard’s name appears in the credits of a lot of records you probably own. He’s worked as a recording and mixing engineer on albums by Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Marianne Faithfull, Rickie Lee Jones, Chris Whitley, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris . . . and the list continues. On many of those albums, he was working with producer Daniel Lanois. He was the engineer on a couple of Lanois’s own albums as well.
Mark Howard in Los Angeles at his current home
Howard has also produced quite a few recordings himself, including some by the artists listed above. He produced Faithfull’s Vagabond Ways (1999), Jones’s The Other Side of Desire (2015), and Whitley’s Terra Incognita (1997). He even produced the Tragically Hip’s fourth album, Day for Night (1993). The dark themes explored on that album are captured in the sound Howard crafted for it. Two of the Hip’s best songs, “Grace, Too” and “Fire in the Hole,” are on Day for Night and were staples in their live shows for the rest of the band’s career.
Lanois liked working with Howard in the studio because Howard knew recording technology and could set up gear quickly. Over the years, Howard developed portable studio setups that he could assemble in comfortable spaces that helped put musicians at ease. He wrote a book about some of the sessions he’d set up in unique spots: Recording Icons / Creative Spaces: The Creative World of Mark Howard (2022) contains descriptions of the spaces he created and includes a generous selection of photos of the sessions and venues.
He has also written a book about his work with various musicians, entitled Listen Up!: Recording Music with Bob Dylan, Neil Young, U2, R.E.M., The Tragically Hip, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tom Waits . . . (2019).
In recent years, Howard has been helping talented but unsigned musicians make good recordings with the intention of bringing them to a larger audience. One of those is C/O The Brain by Martin Verrall, a visual artist and musician based in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, Howard’s hometown. The album, which came out on January 15, is the inaugural release on SoundStage! Recordings.
Martin Verrall with a copy of C/O The Brain
SoundStage! founder and publisher Doug Schneider called me in November to tell me about working with Howard to release C/O The Brain under the SoundStage! Recordings label. Doug was clearly excited about the album, which is to be the first of several Mark Howard projects the label will release.
Doug put me in touch with Howard, who gave me a generous amount of time for an interview about his life and work.
Joseph Taylor: How did you meet Doug Schneider?
Mark Howard: He sent me an email asking me whether I’d be interested in doing something with SoundStage! He wanted to have a high-quality record made that he could use at conventions. It turned out I had two records that I’d just finished that didn’t have homes, and I said maybe we could use those. Now he’s gonna have vinyl made of them.
JT: You were born in Manchester, England. How did you end up in Canada?
MH: My family immigrated to Canada in 1967. They had a trade thing in Canada where they needed tradesmen, and my dad was an electrician. They had this program where they’d fly you to Canada and put you up for two years, and if you stayed you wouldn’t have to pay it back. The choice was either Canada or Australia. My parents knew somebody in Canada, so they decided to go there. [Laughing] I would have hoped they would have gone to Australia! Canada is magical, though.
We ended up in Hamilton, Ontario. My father was a featherweight champion boxer in England, and when he came to Canada, he changed his athletic career to wrestling. He ended up taking the Canadian wrestling team to the Olympics. He was heavily into sports, and I was heavily into music and girls.
JT: Did you play an instrument?
MH: I’m a drummer.
Listen Up! and C/O The Brain
JT: Did your father’s background in electronics have an influence on what you’ve done, or was it just music that brought you to an interest in recording?
MH: For whatever reason, I am good at electronics. I was just good at that stuff when I was growing up.
I think when I was 14, I started playing drums. My brother answered the phone one day and called up the stairs, “Hey, Mark, do you wanna play an instrument?” I said, “Well, yeah.” “Which one?” he said, and I said, “Drums.” It was the Ontario Conservatory of Music. They were calling homes to see if kids wanted to study music. They brought over an accordion and asked me to play it, and when I did, they said, “Oh, yeah. He’s musically inclined.”
I started on drums, playing in basement bands. Now that I look back on it, it’s kind of crazy. I took over the family basement and turned it into a club, with a Ping Pong table that I made into a drum riser. I had some amps and stuff like that, with a couch and some posters. I’d jam down there with my friends and we’d have parties. So it was a scene there, in my teens. And it launched into working for a PA and lighting company. I did tours in Ontario and other parts of Canada.
JT: I think I read that the company you worked for was called the Guitar Clinic, in Hamilton.
MH: Yep. I worked for this guy Lou, and he set me up with a van with lights and a PA, and I would mix the band. I did that until I was 20 and got into a motorcycle accident on a weekend while I was home. I wasn’t able to go back on the road, and that’s how I got the job at Grant Avenue Studio. I just went in there and said I know about consoles and stuff like that.
They took me on, and I was their tea boy or coffee boy and I would hang out in the studio; and then after a few months I was doing sessions. The owners wanted to work in the daytime, so I’d do all the night sessions with bands in the area. I got my chops there.
Within six months this guy comes through the door called Daniel Lanois, and I had no idea who he was. I was assigned his session. I think he had just finished U2’s The Joshua Tree and Peter Gabriel’s So. He was working on a solo record and came into Grant Avenue to start that.
Grant Avenue Studio in January 2026
He’d try to stump me. He’d say, “Plug my guitar into track seven,” and I’d tell him it was already there. He asked me how I knew to do that, and I said, “I heard you say you wanted to do a guitar part, so I plugged it in there so you could do it right away.” I impressed him with how fast I was in the studio—and I got those chops from being on the road. It’s a show. You gotta be ready. I always anticipate what people are wanting to do.
Lanois really liked that I could do that. After a couple of weeks he called and said, “Hey, would you want to come to New Orleans to help me make a record with this band called the Neville Brothers?” I said, “Yeah.” The owner of Grant Avenue said my job probably wouldn’t be there if I came back, but I took the chance.
I misunderstood him [Lanois] and told my friends I was making a record with the Everly Brothers! I didn’t really know who the Neville Brothers were, so it was an education in musical rhythm and style. When I got there, he told me he was going to England to work with Brian Eno and told me he wanted me to gather all the equipment to make this record with the Neville Brothers. “Aren’t we gonna get a truck, to record it?” I asked him. “No. Get all the gear, find a location; we’re gonna make it in that location.”
I’m 20 years old, no cell phones, and no computers. I got a phone book and some notes he gave me of people to call. He wanted a tape recorder from Canada and a console from England. There was other gear from New York. He wanted me to have it set up in a month, when he’d be back. I had to find the place to do it, so I was like a real-estate agent. I learned a lot about importing by getting the stuff to New Orleans from Canada and England.
We did the recording on the second floor of an apartment building. That’s how I got started with him. It was big gear. The tape recorder was the size of a refrigerator; the console was the size of a huge dining-room table. That’s where I got the idea of developing a road-ready studio.
We had completed the recording with the Neville Brothers, and soon after Bono was talking to Dylan about us—and next thing we know we get invited to this Dylan show in New Orleans. We meet Dylan after the show, and he goes, “What are you guys doing here?” We told him we had been doing a record with the Neville Brothers, and they had done a couple of his songs. “Why don’t you come by the studio and check it out?”
He came by the next day, and that’s how we ended up making Oh Mercy with him. I’m 21 and making a record with Bob Dylan. Within one year I had made records with the Neville Brothers and Dylan. And I thought, “That’s it. I’ll probably go back to Canada,” but Lanois bought a house in New Orleans that he named “Kingsway.” My six months of work turned into 30 years of work.
JT: You’ve worked with other producers too, including Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, his wife and producer. Do you have a different approach with someone other than Lanois? In other words, does your approach to recording direct things, or does a producer have a hand in the final product?
MH: Since I’m the engineer, I get all the sounds and get things working so we can record. With Waits and Brennan, he was in the studio with me. She was more like an editor: “You can say this, but maybe move this around,” and so on. That record [Real Gone, 2004] was particularly strange for me. I was always up for making strange sounds, but that record really pushed it. The sounds in there are probably things I would never have done, or thought of being able to do.
I had a mike in the bathroom to do some overdubs or something, and at one point someone goes in there to take a piss. Tom heard it and said, “What’s that sound?” I said, “It’s someone taking a piss.” After the person finishes, the bathroom door slams. He asks again, “What’s that sound?” “Someone slamming the bathroom door.” He said, “Get someone to slam that door and then hit the wall with a piece of wood or something.” So, I had Brain [drummer for Primus and the Waits sessions] slam the door and hit the wall, and that was the rhythm for “Shake It,” with a kick drum played against it. That’s how Tom hears stuff.
JT: Does that kind of experience give you ideas when you’re on another session? Does it become part of your arsenal of tools?
MH: Oh, totally, totally. I’ve done other sessions where I had the drummer do things like chains on the drums, stuff like that. I’m always trying to break new ground in sounds and production. When I look back on the records I love, like Pink Floyd, when I listen to them it’s not the reverb or whatever, it’s more the arrangement and the part-playing that is strange. I always thought it was crazy sounds and weird reverb, but they were kind of normal but with stranger arrangements. I picked up on that.
On a lot of records, people trim the fat. My whole thing is about making interesting intros. People start strumming and singing, and I would come up with weird sound intros that would lead into that. U2’s records had that, and on my productions I always want to have cool intros and unusual arrangements.
When I worked with Dylan, he’d say, “Who needs a bridge?” Meanwhile, he’s reinvented the bridge. You pick up things working with all these artists. You’re building with each record, wherever you’re going. The room adds to the sound. The people you’re working with have stuff they want to do, and you help direct them.
It was a different thing with each artist, but at the end of the day most of the records I made all have a particular sound to them. A lot of people thought it was Daniel Lanois with that sound, but it was really me.
JT: I read somewhere that when you started out, you were about 20, but you looked even younger.
MH: Yeah, when I was 20, I probably looked like I was 12. I’m moving gear and I’m buying gear. I’d know the right terms and numbers and I’d be talking on the phone doing orders, and when people would finally meet me, they’d say, “I’m looking for Mark Howard. Have you seen him around?” I’d say, “I’m Mark Howard.” They’d say, “How can you be Mark Howard and have that much knowledge? You’re just a kid.”
Dan sent me to New York to an auction to buy a Neve console and gave me a limit of $100,000. There was an equipment broker there, Dan Alexander, who we bought stuff from, and he and I ended up bidding against each other and people are looking at me like, “Who’s this 12-year-old kid bidding $90,000 on this console?”
Dan bid up to $120,000 and got the console, but we ended up buying a console from him when the Record Plant moved. Real estate prices in New York had gotten so high. There was an API console that Jimi Hendrix had done Electric Ladyland on, and we bought it from Dan Alexander. I went to New York to disassemble it and put it back together in New Orleans.
JT: I feel obligated to ask if you have any interesting Dylan stories.
MH: When we made Oh Mercy I found a beautiful house in uptown New Orleans. We ended up doing the record in the kitchen and dining room. I set up the parlor room with a glass drum booth and piano and other instruments. I had a microphone placed in front of Dylan, and there was a floor wedge [monitor] in front of him. He wouldn’t wear headphones, and he’d listen to the floor wedge live.
He’d start singing, but he turned away from the microphone. I’d move the microphone stand over to where he’s singing and he’d turn away again. So I figured, If you’re gonna play this game, I’m not gonna move. I’m gonna sit at your feet and move the microphone to wherever you’re singing. We didn’t know him and he didn’t know us, so we didn’t know what to expect. I ended up being friends with him because he likes motorcycles and so do I.
Mark preparing for an interview about SoundStage! Recordings
JT: You produced the Tragically Hip’s fourth LP, Day for Night. Was that your first production on your own?
MH: I had been doing some recordings in New Orleans with some local artists, and I did a record with Chris Whitley. Then Daniel Lanois went on tour after we did his solo album [For the Beauty of Wynona, 1993]. We ended up touring Europe and all over. The Tragically Hip had this festival, Another Roadside Attraction, and they invited Lanois to be part of it. The Tragically Hip headlined and there were other bands, like Midnight Oil, Hothouse Flowers, and Crash Vegas.
The singer in Midnight Oil was protesting cutting down trees in British Columbia, and a number of the singers in the groups decided to record a protest song. We went into a studio in Winnipeg to record it. The Tragically Hip was there and saw how quickly I worked and how great it sounded, and they asked me to make a record with them. Lanois was recording another solo record in Mexico, so I would go back to New Orleans to record the Hip, and I mixed the record in Montreal.
It was one of my first big recordings, for sure. The record company hated it and told them it would be career suicide, but it turned out to be their biggest record. Gord Downie stood up for it.
JT: What didn’t the record company like about it?
MH: It wasn’t meat-and-potatoes rock’n’roll the way the records they had done up to then had been. It was more experimental. I was doing weird treatments with the drums and guitars. Someone had given me a cigarette pack, and it had a speaker in it and you could plug your guitar into it. When it came time to do the guitar solo on “So Hard Done By,” I said, “We’re gonna do it through this.” I put a 58 [Shure SM58 microphone] in front of it, and Rob Baker played through this little cigarette box. That’s why it had this crazy mosquito sound.
JT: It’s clear from your book Recording Icons that one of the things you want to do is create a comfortable place for people to record. You have photographs and descriptions of several different spaces in there. Is that atmosphere something musicians sense right away? Does it help evoke a different kind of performance?
MH: Some spaces, like Kingsway in New Orleans and Teatro [in Oxnard, California] were installations. They were both five-year installations, while others were per-record installations. It turned into me traveling around the world, bringing my gear and setting up in houses, churches, castles. I’ve been to Australia. I made a Sam Roberts record in Australia in an old church in Byron Bay. I’ve made records in Russia; I’ve made them in castles and cathedrals.
It enabled me to make interesting records using the environment I’m recording in. And it was more interesting to the artist because it’s more about the feel of the room and the feel of the place where we’re recording. It’s less studio-like. It’s more comfortable for bringing music out of them so they’re not being intimidated by the recording studio with all the gear in there. It’s more comfortable playing in a living room than in a big soundstage room.
Teatro in January 2026
When I worked with Tom Waits, we recorded in a schoolhouse. He had never worked that way. He had always worked in a normal studio where he’d record something and then go into the control room to listen. If it wasn’t right he’d have to run back out and do it again. This way, in the schoolhouse, I was in the room with him and he’d play something, and if he said, “No. That’s not it. How about this?” he didn’t have to run back and forth. He said, “I like working this way. It’s the best way to work.”
We made Dylan’s records that way. Dan asked him, “What do you think about making records this way?” Dylan said, “We did this in the ’60s with the Band! We were in a house!” We weren’t the first to do it. I’ve carried on that tradition for many years. I still do. There’s no money left, so if I like a band, I’ll rent a house or somewhere cool. A couple of days and I’ll knock it out and then I’ll mix it.
In the past, I’d rent big huge places where everyone could stay and we had chefs, and we’d have the mornings to ourselves and start work at noon. We’d work until dinnertime. It was a comfortable way to make records, and it was cheaper. Each record has a different sound because it’s in a different location. When you work in a studio, you record the drums in the same room all the time and it always sounds that way. If you go to a different place, you get a different drum sound or different vocal sounds by trying things in different rooms. You can come up with inventive sounds in the ways I’ve been traveling as a nomad recordist.
JT: What do you look for in gear so that it can be more mobile?
MH: I have moved around those big tape recorders in big trucks. Tom Waits was the first guy ever to help me unload the trucks. After that, like, right now I have five road cases I can go around the world with. The tape recorder I use is called iZ Radar. I don’t use a console anymore. I use a Luna. It enables me to build consoles inside of their platform to create an API console or Neves.
Between using Radar and then using the computer as a monitor, I can mix in there and it’s a small unit. The only thing I have to do is set up microphone stands and cable when I get to the location. It’s an easy way—and a cheap way—to make records.
Mark with his boat-based system
JT: Is this approach all-digital or analog? Do you prefer one over the other?
MH: I did prefer analog, but it’s expensive. Tape right now, you’re lucky to find it, because everyone is trying to go back to tape. The machine I use is the closest thing to analog you’ll find. It really sounds natural. I’ve recorded drums through Pro Tools and I’ve recorded them through Radar, and it’s night and day. In Pro Tools, you gotta EQ and adjust everything to make it sound warmer, where with Radar it’s punchy and sounds good already. It’s less work, and you can make things sound great.
I was really skeptical at first, but now with Luna I’m able to build analog decks and use tube compressors that are digitally formatted and use different effects. I used to have racks and racks of compressors, racks of effects, other stuff that I had to carry around with me, including amps. Now I just have powered speakers and a laptop and all the sound goes through the Radar machine. The combination is amazing. I’ve built myself a nice little system.
JT: I’ve noticed that some solid-state guitar amps now are using computer tech that enables you to get something closer to a vintage tube sound.
MH: Some of this stuff is amazing. In the Luna program, you can have a direct guitar going in and you can choose a 1950s amp-model setting, and it sounds just like a tweed amp. Same with piano. I can choose a Steinway and often get a better sound than I would miking one. But it’s limited, because in the old days you could experiment more naturally rather than using a plugin. I still prefer to have an actual amplifier and speakers.
C/O The Brain has a gatefold jacket with artwork and recording-session photos inside
JT: You did the recording for the Martin Verrall album that is the inaugural release for SoundStage! Recordings. He’s made a couple of albums before this one, including one that goes back to 2005. He’s been around for a while. How did you find out about him?
MH: He’s from Hamilton, and a friend of mine made a record with him a long time ago and he told me I should check this guy out. He’s kind of weird, and I like weirder musicians, like Tom Waits. I talked to Martin for a couple of years. He has no money so I was always trying to fit him in at the end of a record, to come into the studio. I happened to be in Hamilton and I had some time off, and we arranged for me to come in and record the record for free. We asked for favors from Grant Avenue and a couple of other studios. We floated around to these studios and made the album.
I don’t think he was expecting some of the sounds on the album. Stuff like tablas and strange, distorted basses. Some cool sounds on it, for sure. It’s been sitting on a shelf for a couple of years, and when Doug [Schneider] rang me up about doing some records, I told him I had some that I had just finished. They’re my orphans and they have no homes.
He listened to Martin’s album and liked it. Doug likes how my records sound more open and they sound real. The way I mix is different from most music today, which is so compressed and computerized. This is more live, and you feel like you’re in the room with the band. I’ve turned Doug on to a couple of artists, and he’s working with them, making the vinyl for them.
JT: Verrall’s record sounds amazing. I think I read that you’ve been disappointed in some mastering of your work. Did you master this, or is this “as-is”?
MH: Most of the time I cut it flat if it gets mastered. With Martin’s record we tried mastering, but using a flat version we were losing the bottom end and the dynamics. Sometimes just running through whatever equipment a mastering engineer is using can alter the sound. So no mastering on Martin’s record.
JT: Doug said you told him Martin’s album was like an exorcism.
MH: Well, I wrote a quote that it was like an exorcism, pulling it out of him. It’s a unique-sounding record, and I’m so happy Doug liked it and understood it.
. . . Joseph Taylor
josepht@soundstagenetwork.com
Martin Verrall’s C/O The Brain is sold online at The Record Centre.
