Mix

Patrick Leonard, producer and co-writer for the likes of Madonna and Bryan Ferry, is nearing the end of sever hours of interviews designed to promote his current Toy Matinee LP, which was written and recorded with partner Kevin Gilbert. As the dinner hour approaches, he’s far from happy.

You see, all of today’s interviewers (including me) can’t seem to avoid the obligatory “Tell-us-about-your-work-with-Madonna” questions, and by now, Leonard has had it with the publicity game. All he had wanted to do was talk about Toy Matinee.

“The main problem I’m running into is that people assume it’s a dance record,” he says. “That’s something that I have to try and figure how to get around. I understand it, though. I’ve been with Madonna for five years, and she’s associated with a lot of dance music.”

The next day, in Leonard’s own Johnny Yuma Recording Studios in Burbank, Calif., the mood is different. After a good night’s sleep, he is fresh and eager to talk about Toy Matinee, an album that has received across-the-board rave reviews and has some in the music industry even calling Leonard & Gilbert the Steely Dan of the ‘90s.

“Shut that thing off!” Leonard shouts to someone in the next room. “I don’t want to hear [Madonna’s] ‘Vogue’ while I’m doing this interview!” He rolls his eyes and cracks up laughing.

What makes Toy Matinee so fresh and exciting is its careful balance of both upbeat and haunting pop songs and its convincing musical performances. For the LP, Leonard and Gilbert formed a band and cut the tracks without the aid of samplers, sequencers or drum machines.

“It’s all real stuff,” Leonard says, “I really don’t do dance records. When you hear a dance mix of a Madonna song, it’s someone else’s thing: That’s the dance mix guy’s [version of the song]. I try to use all real people on my sessions for her. When someone else does a dance mix of one of my songs with Madonna, it has already walked out my front door, and my job is done. And yes, that does bother me a bit.”

“This album is different,” Gilbert adds. “There are no Synclaviers and very few samplers. There is only one sequenced bit on the record. In fact, the only read sampled bit on the album was a Mellotron. You remember Mellotrons, don’t you?

“It wasn’t a conscious effort,” he continues. “It’s just that we didn’t want to make a machine record. It was not appropriate to do that with these songs. The arrangements had been worked out for a band and they sounded good with a band. There was no reason to have a song arranged for a band and then record it with click tracks. To me, that all just sounds very cold and calculated. The one thing we wanted to have going for us on this record was some heart and some soul.”

Those qualities abound on Toy Matinee. From the Yes-flavored single “Last Plane Out,” to the Beatlesque pop exercise “Things She Said” (featuring vocals by none other than Julian Lennon), to the Steely Dan-like epics “The Ballad of Jenny Ledge” and “There Was a Boy [sic],” Leonard and Gilbert have shown they have the writing chops that could eventually put them in the league of the classic rock songsters they so obviously emulate.

Their lyrics are often built around odd stories laced with quirky characters. Musically, Toy Matinee offers a tasteful blend of acoustic and electric instruments played over a solid rhythm section provided by bassist Guy Pratt, guitarist Tim Pierce and drummer Brian McLeod. The album was produced by Bill Bottrell, best known for his work as engineer or co-producer for Thomas Dolby, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Madonna.

Though there is a ten-year-plus spread between Leonard (34) and Gilbert (23), both grew up listening to the same music. Their record company bio is peppered with references to such acts as Gentle Giant, Yes, Pink Floyd and early Genesis, as well as classic pop heroes such as the Beatles and Elton John.

(There is, surprisingly, no mention of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, who’s influence on the duo is undeniable. “We were trying to avoid comparisons to the most frightening band in the world,” admits Gilbert. “They are not somebody I would really like to compete with.”)

It was their mutual love for many of the same acts that brought the two together in the first place. “My friends were listening to the Sex Pistols and Devo,” says Gilbert, “and I was sneaking around behind their backs buying Gentle Giant records in used record stores.”

The two actually came together last year when Leonard served as a judge in a Yamaha Soundcheck battle of the bands contest that Gilbert’s old backing group, Giraffe, entered and eventually won.

“Yeah, our meeting was made for television,” jokes Gilbert. “Patrick was at the show; he was a judge and he came backstage and said, ‘That was neat. What else have you got?’ So I gave him a CD of this project, and I just expected him to throw it away and never hear from him again. Much to my surprise he called and said, ‘I think you should come down here and we should write some things together.’”

Both credit the success of the album to the creative partnership they had with producer Bill Bottrell, which is similar to the Steely Dan team of Fagen, Becker and producer Gary Katz.

According to Leonard, “Hiring Bill Bottrell and the fact that I became a ‘band’ member was essentially saying ‘I want to be on this team over here.’ So when I would have a difference of opinion with the guitar player or Bill or anyone else, it would be coming from the keyboard player and one of the songwriters, and not from anyone else.” Gilbert adds, “Having Bill onboard avoided an internal war going on with one of the writers also being the producer.”

Sonically, Toy Matinee rates as one of the brightest albums of the year. Coming from this team, this is not unusual. However, the fact that it was made in a style of recording that was common in 1975, yet still sounds better than most contemporary releases, is.

“We avoided digital like the plague,” says Gilbert, who formerly ran a 16-track studio in San Francisco. “For my ears, digital is a major step backward. The more hype these dynamic microphones get, the more I dislike them. I think digital mastering, however, is a big boon. The ability to walk home with a CD from your mastering session is a wonderful thing.”

“I’m here trying to make records that make me feel good like the records I grew up with,” says Leonard, “and part of that is tape compression, crosstalk and other analog idiosyncrasies.”

Most of the songs on the album were laid down live with the five-piece band, miked straight through Neve 1071 and 1073 modules, and fed directly into the Studer 800 and 820 multitrack tape machines. With the exception of some light compression, mostly through a dbx 160, everything was recorded as dry as possible.

Leonard says: “I really like the sound of the old Neve stuff. I had the two racks built of Neve 1071 and 1073 modules, and I go right through them and use their mic pres. I had phantom put on them so I can use them directly plugged into the Studer. And that with Dolby SR sounds great. I have Boulder preamps and some API outboard stuff that I use to record, and then I monitor back through a Soundcraft TS 24, but I don’t record through it.”

In all, the album took about eight weeks, far less than the time Leonard has spent making albums for Madonna and Bryan Ferry. With the recording behind them, both Leonard and Gilbert are eager to tell the world about Toy Matinee. There is even talk of a tour in the coming year.

Also in the future for Leonard will be other producing projects and an instrumental solo album produced, in part, by jazz great Chick Corea.

“People who think they know who I am think that Toy Matinee is just a one-off thing,” Leonard says. “It’s not at all. This is far more representative of what I do and what I hope to do in the future. People like to pigeonhole. It’s sort of my mission to show people that I don’t just make dance records.”