The Power Of Songs
Music is more than melody and rhymes; it's the universal language that narrates our collective story. Take a journey with me as I talk to all types of people in the music industry about the power of songs. From the first songs that pulled them into the love of music, to the songs they've encountered along the way that had a powerful impact, we will have great conversations about the power of songs.
The Power Of Songs
Mixing Memories and Mastering Life with Paul Kimsal
In this episode, I had the honor of interviewing my podcast producer and mix engineer maestro Paul Kimsal. We talk about his formative years, from the raw energy of local South Florida shows to his leap into head engineering at 17. This episode takes a deep dive into the alchemical world behind the music, where mixtapes were king and a single microphone was all you needed to capture lightning in a bottle with a Tascam four-track in the garage! Paul still recognizes music's power to bond us across eras and places. From a punk rocker to mixing luminary, he understands a tune isn't just notes on a page - it's the soundtrack of our lives.
I think I heard further into the music kind of when I started getting into those early teen years. You know, like middle school era for me was a big time for music. But in that time I was listening to punk and hardcore and rock and that kind of thing. So for me it was like like under oath. Maybe I'm familiar with some listeners like that kind of style of music, you know is definitely very formidable to me. But it's so funny that you asked this question because as early back as I can remember it's almost like the mix engineer was equally as inspiring to me as the song yeah, and it's so funny too.
Paul Kimsal:Like back in the early days, I would listen to a song and really love how it sounded, and I kept turning the record around or whatever, looking in the liner notes, and it was always the same guy mixing it. And so I started realizing like wow, the mix engineer has a huge role in this. Yeah.
Chris Estes:Welcome to the power of songs podcast, where we explore the powerful connections songs have throughout the journey of life. All right, I got the man, the producer, the man behind the mix, all the dials the other side of the glass got him on this side of the glass, mr Paul Kimsel. Welcome to the podcast man. Thank you.
Paul Kimsal:I thought I was going to stop saying welcome.
Chris Estes:There's too many welcome, no just said it again, there's a habit, yeah. So I'm stoked to have you on, first off, because you're doing an amazing job just on getting this stuff produced and I couldn't imagine doing it with anybody else that's as easy to work with as you are.
Paul Kimsal:Oh man, it's been a blast. I've been honored, truly honored, to work on it.
Chris Estes:So much as I hate my voice. You've made it a little more palatable, so I can always get on the podcast.
Paul Kimsal:I feel the same about my voice. I'm sure I'm going to have a nightmare edit on this. Listen to my voice for an hour. Yeah, you're welcome.
Chris Estes:So I'd like to start with how you got into music. You've done a lot of different things. We'll get into where you are now, but talk me through, like where. What was your intersection with music in your life in the beginning? How'd you get into? Like, okay, I'm going to be doing this as a profession.
Paul Kimsal:Yeah. So, man, it started really really early on. So my dad's always been my biggest inspiration with music and even when I was a little little kid three, four, five years old he and a buddy were out playing bar gigs and stuff.
Chris Estes:Really, what were they doing Like? What kind of songs were they doing?
Paul Kimsal:Just, acoustic covers man.
Chris Estes:Really.
Paul Kimsal:Yeah, Like Jimmy Buffett, you know.
Chris Estes:Van Morris, jimmy Buffett, yeah.
Paul Kimsal:Like just the fun downtown bar cover gigs. You know Nice Him and another guy just doing acoustic stuff.
Chris Estes:And so you guys would just tack along and see what was going on.
Paul Kimsal:Well, yeah, we were too young really to go to some of the environments that he was playing in, but we would always listen to his tapes, like he would record some of the sets, and then he and another guy came out with like a little demo cassette, you know and we also had a little recording studio in our garage too from like a very young age.
Chris Estes:So that right there, you know, sold me on it. Was that like multi-track days, or what was the studio like on the garage?
Paul Kimsal:He had a four-track tasking imported studio I think it was the model and you could just load a cassette in there and just go to town. Four different channels and you would bounce the channels down to one channel.
Chris Estes:That was big time, bro, yeah.
Paul Kimsal:That was big time.
Chris Estes:Yeah.
Paul Kimsal:And I'll get to it later. But, like later in life, he ended up giving that to me and that's kind of how I started cutting my teeth on. Actually, recording.
Chris Estes:So, yeah, it's kind of cool. So what year would that have been? Like, what were we talking?
Paul Kimsal:about. So this would have been mid-90s, like 94, 95, something like that.
Paul Kimsal:And so I would go out to a studio sometimes and just like mess with the knobs and just look at the get like I didn't know what any of it did, but it was also fascinating to me and early on, like I would say around seven, eight years old, something like that, he made a Beatles tape for me of all of like hit the songs he thought I would like like Beatles tunes and just put it together for me, left out like some of the ones that had promiscuous, like lines in a minute.
Chris Estes:But, man.
Paul Kimsal:I feel like that's when I truly fell in love with music was just early Beatles hits you know I'm going to hold your hand. She loves you. All those old classics, and yeah, man, I just remember like really grabbing ahold of those and just sensing something beyond music.
Chris Estes:It was there's more depth to it, you know, and so you ever learned how to work the home, the garage, studio stuff?
Paul Kimsal:No, it wasn't until gosh I was probably 11 or 12 when I first started actually taking the Porta Studio. He ended up just letting me have it to play on. He gave me one microphone in the Porta Studio and uh well and he didn't really even know what to do. He didn't even teach me.
Paul Kimsal:I kind of learned from him a little bit over the years but, he gave me a couple of like home recording books that I just kind of thumbed through and learned a few things on, but really it was just trial by error.
Chris Estes:Did you have like two turntables on a microphone?
Paul Kimsal:No man, I didn't even know about that stuff till later on.
Chris Estes:But that's a whole new door that opened. Bro. What did you do with one microphone Like what was your?
Paul Kimsal:Oh it would be like. So I learned how to overdub. And for listeners who don't know what that is back in the day like, overdub now is just going to the studio and recording a vocal on top of a music bed. You know, back then you would actually have to take you know you were limited to four tracks on the machine and you would have to take four of the three of those and bounce them down to one track so that you could have three more open. And so I learned just how to do that. With one microphone I would record a guitar part, a vocal part, bounce those two down together, put it in front of a drum kit, play the drum kit, bounce those tracks down, you know, to keep going and until you had like a full record just with four tracks.
Paul Kimsal:That's amazing.
Chris Estes:And, by the way, if you ever want to see one of the greatest keynotes from South by Southwest, dave Rohl did one. Oh nice, I think it was back circa. It may have been 2016-ish, 17-ish, it could be 15 or 14. Just Google Dave Rohl, south by Southwest keynote and he talks about that very thing. He's like he had the task cam four track. He's like we bounce it down. He's like and he just kind of and he does a visual with it and it is amazing. But he talks about that very process, like we just keep bouncing it down.
Paul Kimsal:So we have more tracks open. It was magic to me, like truly magic, and I fell in love with it. And a few years later my dad and I, our whole family, we actually moved to Kentucky where he started seminary training to be a music pastor. So after about eight, nine years old, my dad's kind of, up until the last 10 years or so, been a music pastor for most of my life. So with that came all the abandon gear from the church that they when they upgraded so he would just let me play with that stuff. And just over the years I just learned trial by error, like just learning, how to use everything.
Chris Estes:And did you pick up instruments along the way? Did you learn how to play? I did, yeah.
Paul Kimsal:So even early on, like the first church my dad was a music pastor at. I was playing drums and I was 11, 12 years old just back there it was like one of those little electric kits the early days of the electric kits and with the hard not the skin feel of the drum head.
Chris Estes:No, it was the oh yeah and it was actually it's called a cat drum I don't know if you've heard of it.
Paul Kimsal:It's like it's the oddest looking thing. It's just like a rectangle shape with five pads on it, so it didn't even look like they didn't even attempt to make it look like a drum, so it was just a pad. But yeah, I kind of learned how to do everything on that Typical music ministry family situation though.
Chris Estes:Just the kids come in. You're on drums like the dad, just putting the whole thing together. The mom.
Paul Kimsal:Totally, totally. Yeah, I mean man, like I said earlier at the beginning, like my dad's, one of my biggest inspirations, because he really just let me flourish with that stuff. I'm sure I was just awful, you know, but he just fostered that and like make a joyful noise. Paul, exactly, yeah, he fostered it and he a little bit later on in my like early teens about 13, 14, my parents bought me my first like computer tower and first like proper set of microphones and interface and all that.
Chris Estes:So it wasn't just one microphone then. But were you doing like garage bands at that time or are you just, like I'm going to be producing a production like we're already down that path?
Paul Kimsal:Yeah. So a few years after I started playing with the Porta Studio, the little tape machine, we found that like kind of an old abandoned laptop at the church and I loaded a program on there called Cakewalk Home Studio. So this was like, I think, the previous version. You can only create like sheet music with like orchestral sheet music. So I didn't even like record like audio files. So this was like a very early stage of that software.
Chris Estes:This back when programs were on CDs, or was it like floppy disks?
Paul Kimsal:I think you had to install it by like yeah.
Chris Estes:CD-OM.
Paul Kimsal:It was a compact disk, but yeah. So me and a bunch of buddies you know I've been in band since I was, you know, 12, 13 and me and a bunch of buddies just hopped up into the youth room at the church one day and plugged in the laptop and put a little mixer into it and really we were just trying stuff out Like I didn't really know what I was doing, but we mic'd up the drum kit and the guitar and the bass and did like a live tracking session for our first EP.
Paul Kimsal:And actually turned out really good. Like people around this we were living in South Florida at the time Some of the bands in the local area were like hey, where'd you record? And I was like I just I just figured it, did it and figured it out, and so that's how I actually started recording bands. People just heard that first thing I did.
Chris Estes:Yeah, and that was like how did they hear that? Were you passed around CDs, like how would they get into it?
Paul Kimsal:Yeah, I guess. So it would have been like CDs we sold at, like you know, church basement shows and stuff just like early days of like, like rock and hardcore.
Paul Kimsal:We was like hardcore and punk bands that I was in and so there was a really tight knit community down there in South Florida. So if you were a band playing at any of those little church venues or whatever, like everybody knew who you were in the local scene. So people heard the EP and needed a place to record. So I recorded several bands out of that era but yeah, it was, it was a ton of fun and that's really like I feel like that was an invaluable set of years for me. Like, instead of going to school, a lot of people go to school to kind of learn how to record in that process. I think it was crucial for me and my learning style to you know from an early age, just like getting in there and just throw all the spaghetti on the wall, see what sticks and now just see how it works.
Chris Estes:And it really helps. What better genre than punk and rock and stuff to do it with Right and I'm like yeah, like for all.
Paul Kimsal:I could just have one mic up, you know, in the middle of the room, and people would have loved it.
Chris Estes:But that is so wild man. Do you still have some of that old stuff?
Paul Kimsal:Dude, there's a text thread between me. I got two friends in South Florida and we've been best friends for a long time and, like every few years, we'll pop the CD in our computer like, rip it and put it in the text thread just to remind each other that, like this, is the first thing we did together. It's still out there somewhere.
Chris Estes:That's funny man. So all right, so you're doing that as a teenager and then later teenage years, that continues to grow Like where did you go from there, from like that, doing it with the local scene? So what was the next step for you?
Paul Kimsal:Yeah, so fast forward into my late teens. We were now living in Gulf Breeze, florida, so kind of near where we're recording the podcast right now, making your way to Fairhope?
Chris Estes:Yeah, exactly.
Paul Kimsal:And I had a buddy who wanted to record his band, wanted to record at the church that my dad was working at at the time. So set everything up, recorded their band, and he loved it. And he actually had this wild idea the following year to open his own studio in downtown Pensacola and he had some funding come in that he could. You know. He basically was like hey, what gear do you want? Pick out whatever gear you want, we're going to get it.
Chris Estes:And he gave me the keys to the front door and he's like you're the head engineer, just out of that. How old were you then? 17, maybe, yeah. Totally ridiculous, like you know looking back on it's like, son, we're taking you out of the garage with one microphone. Now here's the keys, exactly.
Paul Kimsal:Way more responsibility than I should have had. Shout out to Johnny Rocco. He was the studio owner. He let me get away with so much stuff Like he was probably upset with me like half the time I was there. But so that that kind of evolved into. You know, we had a real console, a real mixer in there and like actual tracking space and all that.
Chris Estes:So we still learning like I mean this to listeners that don't know like those consoles. Have you ever seen the picture of artists in studios with all the knobs, all the levers, like massive desks? Yeah, were you still learning that on your own?
Paul Kimsal:Just like, yeah 100%, because I mean, if you look at that little port of studio that I had, that had the four channels, you're basically just multiplying those four channels. It's just exponentially, exponentially, yeah. So the cool thing is, once you master those few channels, then you, then you know how to run the whole desk.
Chris Estes:Yeah.
Paul Kimsal:Like you said, it just multiply. So so really, though for me it was kind of faking it till I made it Like I told Johnny like yeah, I know how to, I know how to use that console, I know how to run Pro Tools, yeah, you know. And then, as soon as they get off the phone with them, I'm scrambling to like that's no J Pro Tools, yeah, yeah. And this was. You know, I think I was using, still using Cakewalk, maybe at the time that first year.
Paul Kimsal:Yeah, so I was. I hadn't evolved yet, you know.
Chris Estes:And so, man, I really hope Cakewalk is still out there so I can link to it in the show now. Hey guys, here's Cakewalk, you can probably find a screenshot of it somewhere.
Paul Kimsal:It looks like Windows Paint or Microsoft Paint. Yeah, just the graphics were so bad. Yeah, so, yeah, so fast forward to those studio days, and that was when a lot of local bands in Pensacola were starting to record me.
Chris Estes:So these are like legit bands coming in now with budgets and like they want real, real stuff, totally.
Paul Kimsal:And I even had and of course I was still doing a lot of like rock and metal, because that's kind of what I cut my teeth on earlier or early on. So I actually had a couple of bands that flew in from around the country on different like rock labels and stuff that came to that studio to record.
Paul Kimsal:And I'm still learning as I'm recording, you know, but I guess I'm doing some stuff right because people are still coming to check it out and at some point I entertained the idea of going to Belmont University in Nashville because I kind of knew what my limits were in Pensacola and I knew that I needed to kind of, you know, excel past that and I ended up I kind of went through a rough dating relationship at that time so and things ended and I ended up not going to Belmont.
Paul Kimsal:But a few years later I ended up moving to Nashville. And I had a buddy in Destin, Florida, who I was working with a lot, who knew a producer up there that he was like hey, this producer needs an intern, you know.
Chris Estes:So how old were you at that point, when you were?
Paul Kimsal:So that I was probably 20 years old. Yeah, yeah, about 21, 22, something like that. Well, ballpark, that kind of age. Yeah, but so I moved up to Nashville with like 800 bucks maybe and like I had saved up in this coffee can just cash and started working for this producer. Shout out to Alan Salmon. He was the producer that I worked with up in.
Paul Kimsal:Nashville. Alan had a ton of experience already and he really poured good habits and organization into my workflow. Like that's when I moved to Nashville and then I really learned how to work for someone else and do things the right way, because I did build some bad habits in those years that I was doing everything on my own. I mean.
Paul Kimsal:Cakewalk will do that to you, bro. Oh man, dude, I haven't talked about Cakewalk in so long, but yeah, he was awesome and just completely instrumental and rewiring my brain on like what being a good engineer meant and what a good producer meant how was his?
Chris Estes:so you walked in the ad studio. You're coming out of Pensacola. I mean, did he have did the gear level?
Paul Kimsal:go up for you.
Paul Kimsal:I mean it was a bit of a trade off on some of the gear. But what I would say is like the facility in general was just a big, like they had a big tracking room, they had a couple of like ISO booths and the vibe was definitely way better. Like when I walked in there the first time, I was like, oh okay, this is like a studio studio. It just felt like it was just more comfortable to work in and everything. And of course, like his clientele list before that, you know it made me super nervous to like work with him. But just that alone was like, you know, enough for me to be like okay, I can learn a lot from this guy.
Paul Kimsal:You know, but yeah, those few years that I worked with Alan it was probably about three or four years he just had me doing a ton of like organization for him studio organization, like prepping all of his sessions for him to mix, and so I learned a lot of the backdoor processes for somebody who was like a true professional you know, and that that helped me kind of cut my teeth on what would be like a long term life long you know career for me, so yeah, yeah and it was.
Paul Kimsal:It was hard knocks. Man Like I learned a lot of bad habits that had created over the years. You know. I had to reverse a lot of things and there were some instances where I thought he was like grumpy for no reason or like frustrated for no reason, but it was really because I, you know he's dealing with this kid that's coming in that like doesn't actually know what he's doing, you know what would those like, what would this habit spend with him?
Paul Kimsal:just like the way you organize files or capture stuff, yeah like little things that, yeah, so file organization, like thinking that I had all that together until I worked with him and I was like, oh wow, he's got everything backed up in four different places all the time, like you know, things like that were like.
Paul Kimsal:I always assumed was overboard, but then realized the true professional is doing that kind of stuff, you know, and every little thing, color coding, every little track, naming things intentionally so that so that if you weren't around tomorrow, somebody who was working on somebody else from a label was working on the project they could open up the session and know exactly what they were looking at, like they had no questions, you know. And so just just the good habits that I picked up from him and just how to interact with clients and like what was what I thought would be professional versus what was actually professional, like even like studio etiquette, or like you know how to follow a good timeline in the studio and there's always a season for like hanging out in the studio where there's a season to like get work done and based off the bands and stuff that I was working on before. Like it was a lot of cutting up and stuff, you know, but when you get in that real and professional environment.
Paul Kimsal:There's definitely time to cut up, but like a lot of time it's boots on the ground and you're like getting a lot of work done and you're working a lot of hours, like I did a lot of overnighters there, you know yeah, that's a norm.
Chris Estes:I heard a great interview with Rick Rubin talking about working with ACDC and he said those guys would sit there, smoke cigarettes and drink coffee for hours and they would do three takes. But he's like they were so good that they knew they just had three good takes, but the rest of the time was goofing off.
Paul Kimsal:Yeah Well, it is crucial to. I mean, you know, there's no better person to hang out with in the studio than a good hang. Like if I had, you know, a producer or a mix engineer to work with on a project, like I would almost always take the good hang over somebody who's maybe a little bit more talented. That's not a good hang, because it just kills the whole vibe of the project. So yeah so I learned a lot of that stuff from Alan.
Chris Estes:But yeah, that was three year internship there.
Paul Kimsal:Well, yeah, I mean it was kind of an internship that blossomed into after about three years. He gave me keys to one of the rooms in there and he's like hey, this is your space now. And really like, honestly, it was a storage closet that was cleaned out, I think so like I felt like I was on the top of the world but really it was like a tiny little room.
Chris Estes:Yeah, like am I back in the garage.
Paul Kimsal:now, Right right, and I started bringing bands in there and I'll never forget, alongside of interning with Alan, I was also valing in Nashville which is like a big industry because there's a ton of hotels and hospitals and stuff. Yep, I was making decent cash doing that. But I'll never forget I think it was 2013 was my last day valing and I signed a contract with an artist to get kind of, get me through a month, you know.
Chris Estes:Yeah.
Paul Kimsal:And I walked off the lot. I was done valing and that's when I first did like the full time and clear switch and that was like a big, monumental time for me. Wow, how old were you at that point? So I would have been 20, about 24, I think at that time.
Chris Estes:So at that point you've put in well over 10,000 hours through Cakewalk Pro Tools Internage.
Paul Kimsal:Oh yeah, I don't know if the Cakewalk hours counted those hours counted those hours like pre-hours yeah. No, I mean, if we're talking time, I had a ton of time already and then Hard Knocks with Alan, you know just a few years. It's crazy.
Chris Estes:Who was the artist that you jumped in with?
Paul Kimsal:So the valet jot like when I ended the valet job his name is Zach Michael. He doesn't actually do anything with music anymore, sadly. We need to get back in the studio and write together.
Chris Estes:Yeah, yeah, Shout out to Zach Michael. Hey, Zach hit us up.
Paul Kimsal:Yeah, zach Cronung, we worked on a great project together. It was like a five song EP, and I had one of the best weeks in my life in the studio because I was just free of my other commitments and I was really like elated that I could do this full time now, you know, yeah, so that was a really memorable, fun project, wow. After that I met a guy by the name of Lewis Johnson and he actually worked valet with me too.
Paul Kimsal:He had moved to Nashville and just needed some cash, I think at the beginning, and he worked valet with me too.
Paul Kimsal:But he was in this show on MTV called my Life is Liz, I think, and he was like the one of the I don't want to butcher this, but I think he was one of the love interests and also a guy in like the cafe on this show that was playing like acoustic.
Paul Kimsal:He was like the you know, the stereotypical acoustic guy in the cafe, and so he had had a little bit of a career with that. And then he started a band called St Augustine with someone else and he let me come and work on one of their sessions and we worked, I think, at a studio in Brentwood and turned out like Keith Urban had just recorded there like the day before, and you know I was still early to Nashville. So I was like, oh my gosh, this is the coolest thing ever. Yeah, but Louis, I owe a lot to Louis too because, you know, after he and I both quit valet, his music career kind of blew up and he ended up starting that band, switched to the name St the St Johns, and my brother actually ended up joining that band too.
Chris Estes:Yeah.
Paul Kimsal:A little bit later they played David Letterman and all kinds of really cool opportunities, and the St Johns are still doing music now. But Lou got me in a ton of different sessions and got a bunch of clients in front of me that were crucial to my development, so I owe a ton to him.
Chris Estes:That's crazy. So did you stay on that course of producing studio work throughout Nashville and now you're in fair help with me at Three Circle Church, which is awesome.
Paul Kimsal:Yeah.
Chris Estes:It's amazing the talent that this has been attracted and has come here. So how did that trend? Like what fill in the gap there? Like, where did you?
Paul Kimsal:Yeah Well, so fast forward from some of those days with Louis Johnson I ended up getting kicked out of the studio that I was in In Germantown with Alan. Alan had already moved out and another guy took the place. But if you know anything about Nashville, like buildings are getting repurposed all the time and businesses are closing down. So sadly, like a lot of other studios, that one kind of dissolved and I think actually the juice bar company bought it yeah.
Paul Kimsal:And it was like one of their offices, which was cool, but like also we were out of a studio, so I had to move to another studio in Berry Hill called Playground.
Chris Estes:Wow, and I did it. That was back when Berry Hill was not a thing, right? Well, it was, I think.
Paul Kimsal:It wasn't as widely known as it is now, but it's still had a. There's secretive studios, because it all looks like a bunch of houses but really a lot of them are studios. So it's kind of you know, driving by you wouldn't be able to tell, but we were actually right behind Blackbird, if you're familiar with Blackbird.
Paul Kimsal:So we shared us like almost like a parking lot, kind of diagonally from one another, and that was the last studio that I worked out of and in that studio I ended up making the transition from producing to just mixing full time, yeah, and how was that? What did that feel?
Chris Estes:like.
Paul Kimsal:Well, so my wife and I, we got married and had our first kiddo and it was one of those things where I was in the studio a ton of hours and I just wasn't making time for family like I should have been, you know, and I could start to see like a habit or a direction that I was going in where I was like, okay, I need to pick like a music career that could also fulfill, like my family time and whatnot. So, and just over the years, to like developmentally, I realized that I enjoyed mixing versus producing. Like I love being with clients and stuff, but I'm like an extreme introvert. So the idea that I could be by myself for hours and hours at a time just perfecting a record was, like so enticing to me.
Chris Estes:Yeah.
Paul Kimsal:So I ended up leaving that studio and moved into a little shed at our house and kind of insulated. That made it like a little mix studio for me. So I worked from home for the last few years before we moved to Nashville and really just focused my career solely on mixing. And if you know anything about Nashville as well, it's very expensive. And so my wife and I, after kiddo number two, we were like we should maybe think about moving close to family down here in down here in Alabama.
Paul Kimsal:My brother is already down here and it was just kind of a natural. You know I could I could work with anybody around the world mixing at this point, as long as I had a space to do it. And so we just bit the bullet and came down to Fairhope and to be closer to some of my family. We've loved it, man. Fairhope's been been incredible it's. It's such a nice slow pace compared to Nashville, it's. We live in loxie, which is like a little suburb outside of Fairhope, and it's Quite a bit cheaper to live there and and to sustain life there. So and we haven't a third kid now too so it's just been a good pace for us with family and we definitely miss Nashville. But you know, being able to be down here in Fairhope and still mix and still do music for a living, but in an environment that we're really comfortable in, has been a game changer for us.
Chris Estes:I feel like mixers have always been the remote secret weapon. Like you know, everybody kind of work works remote. Now there's there's a home studio environments, but for I think for a long time I mean, you always have these, these big mixing houses we can go and do you know, live mix and stuff like that. But yeah, a lot of great mix engineers are remote and they happen for years. Man yeah just doing their thing, you know yeah, there's a couple mastering guys.
Paul Kimsal:Even that. I, when I was up in Nashville I was like, hey, man, let's go grab coffee sometime. He's like, well, you could if you wanted to come down to Louisiana. I live in Louisiana. I'm like really, I just assumed all the guys I was working with it lived up there and that that actually was the first idea that I was like wait, I don't even need to be up here.
Chris Estes:Yeah, I love the.
Paul Kimsal:D so yeah it's. It's cool man. I love where technologies brought our industry. You know, I can work with people from, from Czech, and I was working with somebody from Austria the other day. We had a FaceTime, like a little FaceTime thing, and it's a country band in Austria that I was working with.
Chris Estes:And you can even do what's the the live mix thing. You can do this. Is it sound cat? What's it called?
Paul Kimsal:Oh, I can't remember the name. I haven't actually used that.
Chris Estes:Yeah, well, I'll find the name. Yeah, show notes, but it was yeah, I've used it before too where you actually work with the mix engineer and it's live and you give them notes and it's like a live session.
Paul Kimsal:Yeah, I'd used that one time actually at that studio that I worked at Pensacola I did a short run of food network narration stuff there and there's a show on there called food impossible.
Paul Kimsal:I think Robert Irvine was the host and he came to that little studio in Pensacola and we would do some narration for his TV show and his producer Like he and I talked to that that app, but it was like the really early days of that app and it would drop out all the time was super frustrating. Obviously it's a lot better now, but yeah.
Chris Estes:So how do you do? We'll get in some some questions here that we normally do on this show, but Talk to me about the transition from From you're still doing mixing, but you're an amazing front of house guy. Like front of house mix, live mix guy, you've taken the three circle live mix stream mix. All that is is that all seamless to you, does it like it's just a mix, like you either doing live or online, or yeah, yeah, that's actually good point because it plays a lot into the story of us being down here.
Paul Kimsal:Yeah, so we moved down here to Fairhope, alabama, in 2019 and if you are anybody who lives on planet earth, you know, in 2020.
Paul Kimsal:We had a COVID hit and the church that we're both a part of now three circle. They didn't have the best broadcast experience with audio, yeah, so I found a nice little niche there where I could jump in and fill that spot. You know for for them to have a good quality broadcast audio mix. I didn't even entertain the idea of doing their front of house at all, like that wasn't even on on my radar. Yeah, I was like, hey, I'd love to help out with your broadcast and started volunteering doing that and ended up bringing a lot of my mix rig that was at home to your circle and that eventually evolved into me working out of three circle, like doing my own projects and stuff for three circle.
Paul Kimsal:And then they, they kind of revamped a musical arm of three circle called a three circle music and yeah we ended up working on some stuff together with that and we still are.
Paul Kimsal:It's an awesome Branch of our church that's. That's doing really cool things. But our tech director, adam, came to me one day and he was like hey, what do you think about running front of house? For you know, it was I think it was a special event or something and I had done front of house stuff in Nashville and and really throughout. You know my career in audio. I do enjoy doing front of house, but studio was kind of definitely my house for listeners.
Chris Estes:I don't know, it's the live. Yeah, sorry that, yeah, we're sitting in front of like. Some people may not know what that means, but whenever you hear music live, there's a front of house mix guy which is usually not in the front of the house, in the back of the house. Yeah, yeah kind of midway, but you'll see someone usually center Midpoint or back with a huge mixing board and they're responsible for how the live sound exactly exactly.
Paul Kimsal:I should highlight this Doing that and doing studio work is entirely different. Yeah, it's totally different field to work like musicians. Yeah, totally. You have variables in a live environment that you don't have in the studio, and vice versa you know, so got babies crying.
Paul Kimsal:Oh man, yeah. So I hadn't even entertained the idea of doing front of house, doing doing the live mixing thing yet. But our tech director, adam, came up to me one day and he was, you know, like hey, what do you think about running front of house for this? And you know I had had some traumatic experiences from doing live sound and in Nashville Ampens Kola, just because, like you know, people screw you out of money and like I just had like a bad experience is doing front of house, but I was like, oh, this is at a church, this could be fun.
Paul Kimsal:You know, like I don't have all the worries that I had with, like you know, just a regular business doing this. So so I tried it out a few times and really enjoyed it and kind of fell back in love with doing the live thing and Then ended up getting a full-time position here doing front of house. So I do, I do front of house every week now, every Sunday.
Paul Kimsal:Yeah and I really fell in love with it, like I really. It actually helped me hone my studio craft a little bit more to you, because I learned how to build a mix like incredibly fast.
Chris Estes:Yeah, so you do have to, and you have to do the mix live like on the fly, on the fly. Yeah.
Paul Kimsal:So now, now, even when I started mixing the studio, now I'm getting to it a lot quicker than. I did before, because I have more of that live sound.
Chris Estes:That's that yeah, that is very true like a live mix, is that you have to, yeah, make real time. I mean, I have adjustments, yeah, I have 30 minutes and a rehearsal to get everything Sounded you know, and in the studio.
Paul Kimsal:I could have like half a day to get everything feeling.
Chris Estes:And then you have like when the depending on what service it is and the amount of people that that affects, the live totally yeah and and one thing that I you know, especially in a house of worship, that I hadn't considered like that was another variable.
Paul Kimsal:When I started, you know, doing a few of the events like rehearsals sounded great and then when the room filled up with people it sounds totally different. And learning to navigate that right and like how. How do you change your mix To not sound as great in rehearsal? But you know it's gonna sound good when people aren't there. You know, like training your brain to get used to those things. So yeah, wow.
Chris Estes:So here we are. Here You're the front house live mix guy. You've totally dialed in the web webcast. Broad broadcast yeah.
Chris Estes:You still mix for other, a lot of different genres and artists and stuff. Shout out to Paul, for if you need a good mix, he's the guy I'd love to take on your project. Um, so, man, I'd love to we've. Your story is great, I love. I love stories along because I think everybody works in the industry or is involved in music and some former fashion have have that journey. That usually starts in the teenage years and.
Chris Estes:It's. It's fun to see how that grows and develops. So one of the questions we kind of touched on a little bit, but one question I love asking is I Think there's a point where People, when you hear you can listen to music. Music's always around, especially I mean now it's like electricity is always like it's super accessible. Catalogs of music is, you know, just a Search away from, from playing whatever you want to. But there comes a point, I think when you're young and you get you get drawn into music as a passion we're you go from listening to like you're actually hearing, like you're hearing music in a different way, like what songs? You mentioned the Beatles, but were there particular songs that you remember hearing like the first time, like I'm listening, like I'm hearing this, like I love this song, I'm Passionate about it.
Paul Kimsal:Yeah, man, I will say, you know I was young, but I do feel like that that early Beatles stuff really did. Yeah very impressionable.
Paul Kimsal:Oh yeah, but but I think I heard further into the music Kind of when I started getting into those early teen years. You know, like middle school Era for me was a big time for music so but in that time I was listening to punk and hardcore and rock and that kind of thing. So for me it was like like under oath it may be familiar to some listeners like that kind of style of music, you know, was definitely very formidable to me.
Paul Kimsal:But it's so funny that you asked this question because Is early back as I can remember it's almost like the mix engineer was equally as inspiring to me as the song yeah, yeah and it's so funny too, like back in the early days I would listen to a song and really love how it sounded and I kept turning the record around or whatever, looking in the in the liner notes and it was always the same guy mixing it and I, so I started realizing like wow, the mix engineer has a huge role in this. You know, but uh, yeah, I would say like MX PX was a big band for me early on.
Paul Kimsal:Yeah, shout out to under oath. A lot of the metal band I could go into like hundreds of different metal bands and stuff.
Chris Estes:What was the first song you remember buying, like the first music you bought? You know, like I can't think about this.
Paul Kimsal:Okay, so so actually in those early years was a Program came out called Napster, and also. Kaza and Lime Wire. Yeah, that was a very interesting time because I actually I actually have to say I probably Outside of what my parents bought for me. It like as soon as I could start buying things on my own, I was actually ripping music offline. That makes sense.
Chris Estes:So, I.
Paul Kimsal:So I didn't really buy my first record until I was Probably 14, I want to say I was 13 or 14 and it was on a mission trip to Maine. Our youth group was in Maine, we were in Freeport. There was this little underground record store and I bought this. Really, a band I didn't even know about, like my buddy, was like, hey, you should get this record. They were called Alexis on Fire or Alexis on Fire. I can't even remember the name of the band now, but what's so memorable about that was they had, you know when, cds used to have like stickers on them, like all over like a new single you know whatever.
Paul Kimsal:So I bought the CD on a mission trip. I get home to open it up, to play it, and I take off the first sticker and it's covering up an explicitly weird thing. And then I take off another sticker and on the cover of this album was like this girl standing in like a tennis court. So it's kind of a weird graphic. But I was like, okay, cool, I took off the other sticker and she got a knife in her hand. So I'm thinking like, oh, my parents are going to love this.
Paul Kimsal:I don't remember the songs on that, but that was the first record that I like I owned personally, that I paid for, so I could like really dive in and listen to it. I couldn't even tell you the names of the songs in there anymore, but that was the first record where I sat down and I read the lyrics, listened to the music. I probably don't even like that record anymore. I haven't listened to it in a while but that was probably the first time I like actually, you know, really really paid attention to what was going on and it really spoke to me beyond just the music. It was like had some depth to it, you know. But I would say you're asking about a song, right.
Chris Estes:A song.
Paul Kimsal:This is a really, really tough question and listeners at this point I think. I've edited four podcasts and the question always comes up and I feel like it's a hard one.
Chris Estes:It's a tough one, man, it's like let me frame it up a little bit better for you. So you mentioned, you know, the task cam, the four track in the garage, your bounce and stuff down like was there a song? Cause that's a pivotal moment. Was there a song or songs that you were like, oh man, I'm going to try to like kind of pulled you in, Like there's that moment for all of us, just like oh no, we're in the music. We're not just listening to music. Okay.
Paul Kimsal:So there was a band called.
Chris Estes:Further.
Paul Kimsal:Seems Forever Back in that era of when I was listening to like MXPX and Under Oath and some of those like punk or heavier bands right, there was a song called the Sound from them and I probably wore that song out Like just yeah, I don't remember if I had ripped that song first or had it on an album, but that you would probably categorize that song as like an emo genre like emo post-core, I think was the technical and it was like the bands after they were doing hardcore music.
Paul Kimsal:They kind of like settled down a little bit as they're getting older, they're not doing as heavy music but it still has like notes of the heavy stuff, but it was very angsty and very emotional. So, yeah, the Sound from Further Seems Forever was probably like the first song that, like, I had on loop and it really spoke to me Like, really, like you know, pulled all the emotions out of me. You know, of course, I'm 13 or 14, so I've got all this angst and emotion, you know, bubbling up. But I can remember back even before that, like the band Delirious, they were like a worship.
Paul Kimsal:Christian band Delirious. They had a record called Cutting Edge, I think, and it might have been the late 90s, so I would been, like you know, 10, 11, somewhere around there, and there was a song on there called Did you Feel, Did you? Oh man, Did you Hear the Mountains Trimble or Field the Mountains?
Paul Kimsal:Trimble I can't remember the title of it, but that was like a 10 minute song I think, and I wore that song out to you like just all the little drum and guitar parts that were in that, like the emotion and the vocal and the fact that it was a worship song, like it was all really cool that all those combined together to form something you know.
Chris Estes:Did you listen to YouTube before that? Were you in the YouTube? Yeah, it's funny.
Paul Kimsal:My dad was a huge YouTube fan and for whatever, he probably played YouTube in the house growing up, but I didn't really know about YouTube until probably, yeah, high school and I listened to. Was it Joshua Tree record?
Chris Estes:Like that had.
Paul Kimsal:Sunday by Sunday, I think was the first song I heard from them and I was like, yeah, okay if a lot of these bands are kind of copying what they're doing, but rightly so, though, because that YouTube is awesome. But yeah, after that record, I don't know, I'd never really like attached to YouTube. Like I definitely recognize some of their sound, sonic sound, signature and other bands but yeah, like I would say, a good bit of my middle school and high school years were like it's a lot heavier music, you know a lot of metal stuff.
Chris Estes:A lot of metal. Yeah, I mean that's. I think that's pretty common. Yeah, that's that's where you know it's either metal, punk or something like that nature that's like yeah, yeah.
Chris Estes:Yeah, yeah, that's great man. So what songs I mean you've had a lot of experience along the way what songs would you say have impacted you? You just mentioned those in the early days, but as you got into more, like okay, you know, I'm in downtown Pensacola now, like I'm in a studio, I've got like a I'm faking it so I make it type thing like were there songs. At that point You're like, okay, these are. I feel like every mixed guy and producer guys have those reference songs.
Chris Estes:You're like, okay, this is a great reference or this is a new reference, but what songs like in that era for you? What were the ones that really impacted you?
Paul Kimsal:Yeah, so that would have been when I was starting to get out of the harder music a little bit, and so I'll start with the band. So Death Cab for Cutie was a big band for me, really formidable. After the hard music. You know what pulled you in with them, this buddy of mine.
Paul Kimsal:Just let me borrow a Death Cab for Cutie, a documentary DVD actually I didn't know really hardly anything about the band and I took that home and played that over and over and over again. I was obsessed with like just the whole touring culture and like they had a vibe man, they had a vibe, and it was rock music, but it was like it wasn't heavy, but it felt heavy in my soul, though, does that make sense With hardcore?
Paul Kimsal:and metal, you have no other choice but to feel the right. But with Death Cab and that genre of music it pulls the angst out of you a little bit and you start realizing the depth of music. And it's not that music has to force you to feel a certain way. You can get new things out of the lyrics every time you listen to it and it's not just like this wall of sound, but it's like has more depth to it, and the second time you listen to it you hear a lyric you didn't hear the first time, you know. So the album Transatlanticism was the first record I think I heard from them all the way through. What is the name of the song? Title and registration is the name of the song? Yeah, so that record came out in 2003.
Paul Kimsal:So yeah, it would have been right on the right on the curtails of that like being released, and I think that documentary came out around the time.
Paul Kimsal:I want to say around the time the album was coming out. But it's a very simple drum machine type of beat, so obviously very different than like the hard drums that I was used to, you know, and really like Ben Gibbard, the lead singer, his voice is so soft, it's not like this loud, screaming voice, and so I think initially I was surprised that I was even into that on the curtails of like this heavy stuff, and so I was kind of excited that I was like into another genre, you know, and it really like fully immersed myself into that like indie rock scene where things softened up a bit and the lyrics were king.
Paul Kimsal:You know, like the depth of the lyric and like all the different metaphors and similes and stuff like different you know uses of lyrics. But that song, that song did so much for me in how lyrics are conveyed, how there's like poetry in lyricism. That's when I first started realizing like you can be witty with lyrics, like you can have, you can add so much different depths to lyrics instead of just what they are at face value. You know, or you can make, you can get your own meaning out of the song, like. That was the first band that showed me like you don't always have to be spoon fed by what they're saying, like you can just like any good piece of art, right, you can take whatever meaning out of it that you want to. And so that was the first song. I think that really like pulled that out of me and really that really like honestly changed the direction of like how I really listened to music and everything.
Paul Kimsal:And that was yeah, what I was saying earlier in the podcast, when my parents got me that my first like computer and set of microphones and stuff, that was during kind of that era of listening to that record, so a lot of things were kind of on the on the brink of like changing direction for me, you know.
Chris Estes:That's wild. So where did you go from there? Like what that kind of was a gateway into indie rock. What was the next couple of songs or bands that you got into?
Paul Kimsal:Yeah. So, man, I want to say my musical palette and I don't know if it was because of them, but just naturally as I was getting a little older, my musical palette like really opened up. I started getting into everything from like like Beastie Boys to like Keith Urban, to like really like, and before all that I was locked and loaded with hard music Like that was it Like. If it wasn't metal or like hardcore, I wasn't into it. You know, it was lame to me. So after that, after Death Cab, like I really started just embracing different genres. So I really got my feet wet with country and pop country was kind of like the first evolution of country that really spoke to me. So like, yeah, keith Urban and some artists like that, I started really like in like 90s country, like Shania Twain and Garth Brooks and all you know 80s, 90s country, and that was before I even decided to go to Nashville. So that was kind of already paving the way, you know, for me to be used to that working in that environment.
Chris Estes:Was it the songwriting that brought you into that? You think.
Paul Kimsal:Yeah. The storytelling, the songwriting, that man, I have to say so. I should get this out of the way too. I've never been a big lyrics person.
Paul Kimsal:I think that's why the angst of like harder music always resonated with me, because it wasn't. You know, they're screaming 90% of the time, so like you can't even understand what they're saying and it's all about just the emotion you feel, the raw emotion you feel from the music itself without even hearing the lyrics. So whenever I started getting into the indie rock stuff, when I realized that lyrics really played a huge role in how music is perceived and the emotion you can get out of it, I started realizing that in other genres. So with Keith Urban, like I fell in love with his melodies and his guitar playing but really just started appreciating the craft of a good song, like a good song that has a quality verse, a quality chorus. They were put in that order to make sense, going from A to B, and it really opened my eyes to the fact that when I was in middle school and high school those lyrics would have been kind of cheesy to me, you know, because it didn't evoke this like angsty emotion out of me.
Paul Kimsal:But then when I started realizing the depth of like how the song was written and why the formula of the song existed, it made me fall in love with all kinds of genres. So I guess I could say that broadly for any like hip hop. When I started getting into hip hop and all that like, I started realizing the importance of the lyric and why the lyric was in that portion of the song and why it wasn't in a different portion of the song and why that lyric was used over that set of chords, you know, for emotional purposes or whatever. Yeah, Keith Urban opened my eyes to be like. You know, hey, country can be like fun, it can be really well written, it can sound amazing and I could. I gleaned a lot of different mix and production references from it too. So I just kind of was falling in love with a bunch of different genres at that time, nice, nice.
Chris Estes:Do you have a folder of like here's all my references for production and mix stuff?
Paul Kimsal:Yeah, yeah, so, yeah. So I base it off of genre right now. So if an artist is working with me and wants me to mix a song, a lot of times I'll let them send me a reference. But I do have a folder. So if it's like country pop, country stuff, it's like Dan and Shay right now, I think, is like a great reference for that they're. They're a great like. I don't know if you'd consider them to be like Adult contemporary country. They kind of are, because a lot of their stuff's pretty laid back but has a great pop sensibility to it. And then if it's hip-hop, it's like. Kendrick Lamar is my favorite hip-hop artist right now. So I have a few references from him that I have in my folder. Worship Bethel, shout out to Bethel.
Chris Estes:Yeah, yeah, get me up to the day about that, yeah, yeah yeah.
Paul Kimsal:So goodness of God, God of revival, and Raise a hallelujah Great track on there. I just love the overall sonic like palette of that record. It's cool, it's nice and bright and energetic and that's funny that raise a hellelia was the first time they played the song live. That's funny. I think I remember you tell me that I was so crazy.
Chris Estes:I was in Dallas. He hit me up because I was. I worked on that album with Bethel in the day and we were at Dallas at a sold-out conference and the song had just Actually been kind of finished.
Chris Estes:Yeah, it was a later rival to the album. It was gonna be the Hell's Air song and it really just started off as a chorus and some of the singer for Joe Taylor, son Jackson he was struggling for his life in the hospital. It was a whole whole thing that rallied the community, the team, I think Everybody around the world was praying for his little son and they sent that voice recording of the chorus to play over him and that, literally, was a night that he talked about the power of songs like that, that chorus man, just that literally was. They played it over him, prayed over him. The next day, all of a sign started going the right way, wow, yeah he started.
Chris Estes:He started really having the recovery process. So but flash forward to that live recording. We're in Dallas and I'm Ed Cash produced the album. I'm with him in the audience and the first time they played the song was Was that moment. And you know, johnny and Mel, they're just like the Hell's Air, are so pro at those, those kind of things but they, they just crushed it and it was like okay here we go.
Paul Kimsal:Well, it's funny, like with that mindset looking like, because I listened to that song almost weekly, you know, and thinking about how that song starts and how the band is kind of wrestling the one I don't know. It's funny to listen, to think that and listen back to the song now, so good.
Chris Estes:Ed Lee never to me at the end of that song and said I bet I bet the devil poops his pants for morning.
Paul Kimsal:He wakes up and hears that because, well, it's funny talking about like impactful songs. So I don't know if I'm jumping ahead too far, but goodness of God is definitely.
Paul Kimsal:Yeah, that's that's a recent one, for for me and my wife both. So just to backtrack a little bit back to Nashville, like the the last few years of Nashville, like my wife and I, we were really struggling financially. We had to move like outside of Nashville to even be able to Forda house and that's kind of on the cusp of me deciding to become a mix engineer and really trying to make that decision to be like a little bit More family oriented and work from home, you know. But because of that we had some sacrifices with money and whatnot and just that put a really big strain on on my wife and I's Relationship, you know, and it really fell like our years in Nashville were drying up Like we could. We could both sense that and there was a really heavy. It was actually my 30th birthday.
Paul Kimsal:I remember like just collapsing on our kitchen floor, just weeping because all these things were hit me at once.
Paul Kimsal:Like my work life balance was out of control. I had moved home to try to be closer with family but I was always out in the mixed studio working non-stop to try to provide, you know, and we could barely get by. We had two kiddos at this point. It just was a lot on me, you know, and I wasn't taking care of myself mentally or spiritually, you know, and my wife was suffering because of it and our kids ultimately too. And so I just remember this like pivotal moment for us, where I'm just like on the floor and my wife gets on the floor with me and I'm just like weeping and I'm just like I don't know what to do because I'm just lost and I know I'm supposed to have a career and and music and mixing, but I Just didn't know how it was gonna keep going, you know, yeah, and cried out to God and Fast forward a few months, like within this few months period. After that we had gone from, like, you know, my wife especially shout out to Chrissy, my wife, she's awesome.
Paul Kimsal:She is she. She, like it, would never, ever want to move to South Alabama, like she. That was the last thing and I was a little more soft that idea because my brother lived down here and everything and where she grew. Where was she from? Where's Chrissy she? She was born in Virginia.
Chris Estes:Okay.
Paul Kimsal:Yeah, and, yeah and, but she lived a good bit of her life like right outside of Atlanta, in Connors area, so yeah, so she she's familiar with that whole scene over there, but yeah, so those last days in Nashville were just super, super difficult and and she had never, ever considered like moving anywhere else, especially like South Alabama. You know that was never on her radar, but I remember like this one day it was a couple months after that Chrissy came to me and she's like we should look for houses in South Alabama and I was like what this is.
Paul Kimsal:It was undeniably like a god thing, you know, and I was already kind of thinking in that direction. So, you know, within a few months we're already looking at houses down here and everything but fast forward to the song. So. So I was helping our church develop a better broadcast mix, you know. So I was every Sunday I was back in that broadcast audio room just running sound for for the internet stream, you know, and we started introducing goodness of God into our set on Sundays, and I think it was the first time we did this song. Shout out to Dave Den. He's our MD down here. He's super, super talented, great guy. He had just started taking up pedal steel.
Chris Estes:I was gonna say was that when he got the pedal, so yeah, and I didn't know he had just started.
Paul Kimsal:He's so good at everything like I assumed he'd been playing for years already, but he had just started picking it up and he's already great at it. But like it was this a culmination of that song that I had already really loved. A little bit of peace and Nashville and with it, with the pedal steel right. It was like, and this was right right at the end of our Nashville days, right at the beginning of our our fair days, and Just hearing our worship team sing that song with the pedal steel in it and like it just, man, I was back there like a weeping, like a baby and during the mixtreme, because that song just is, is an I'll.
Paul Kimsal:I'll get emotional right now, but that song, like, at face value, if you, if you don't resonate with the song, it's a simple lyric, it's a simple set of chords, it's. It's a worship song, you know. Yeah, but the depth that it had in that moment for me Like cemented that song in my life forever. So, like now, whenever I go back to that song, I'll just always remember how God delivered us out of those like late days of Nashville to you, really, what felt like promised land to us. And in South Alabama we had family, now we could afford to live, got a good job at this church, you know, but I'm able to still also mix records, you know, there's just like this promised land thing for us.
Paul Kimsal:And then hearing that song goodness of God, was just like, dude, I was a baby, I was just weeping in back there, you know so, so that you know that that just Nods the hat to the power of music, you know, and just what, what kind of emotions it can evoke out of you and, yeah, how important those things can be to just sing and speak over your life, you know yeah, that's so true and I think that's what inspired me up about having this podcast and really talking about the power of that connection throughout life because you can take a song like that you've heard before.
Chris Estes:Yeah, but in that moment and that combination, and that you know that, all that coming together in one room where you could sit back in a control room and be by yourself and have them encounter in a moment, I think that's the powerful aspect of the lyric, because it can only it can be a soundtrack to multiple seasons of life.
Chris Estes:It can be. You know, and you can remember it along the way, I had the same experience of Raise the High William and it was, you know, it was a moment in the recording and then I really shared the story publicly. And I'll just mention it now because you're, you know, talking about some some pretty powerful encounters. But that song in particular, when I came back, had a stroke last year, Freak, freak thing that happened in. Nashville. I'm 100% recovered.
Chris Estes:It wasn't one of those things I posted on social media to let everybody know and play for me, but definitely had a close community of friends and and people that were praying for me. But so it was. You know it was one of those things that it was a random and happened, but the, the results of it was it's a cerebellum stroke. So the, the, the coordination. Like most strokes, it hits you on one side of your body. This was a more equilibrium base, so it was. It was going to take about a couple months for it to come back and but immediately felt the impact on the right side, my body. Luckily I was left-handed, but still everything was kind of a little bit slower on the right side. It just wasn't fully back yet and when I got back our first Sunday back home here at Three Circle after coming back from Nashville, we did that song.
Chris Estes:And I just remember in the audience, just being there and worshiping with the family and then literally raising my hands and being able to do both my hands you know and being and know that I was going to be recovering and it was an emotional moment too. Man and I had lived with that song in so many different forms and fashions and you know the origin story of that with Jackson was was very emotional for everybody. But then you know again, it can have that that powerful soundtrack can continue on.
Paul Kimsal:And.
Chris Estes:I had that moment and what so? One question I love asking the guests is what songs and this may be a two-part question that feeds into each other what songs have you had the most fun working on and what songs have you seen the most power? The power on that you could. You could explain, like you just did with with goodness.
Paul Kimsal:Oh man, that is a loaded question man to work on. Okay, so I have a project and I do a project.
Paul Kimsal:This is a set of songs, but I think one of my favorites was so this was a little bit earlier on in Nashville this, that band, the St John's my buddy who worked valet with me. We did a live session at the studio and it was kind of a bunch of my buddies that played on it, including him and this new guy that I had not known. He's not a new guy, he's very well seasoned in Nashville. His name's Derek Wells. Shout out to Derek Wells session musician. He was the first I think he was the first session that I had like a real Nashville session player play on, you know, and just getting to hear like him play on it and like how masterful. He had never heard the songs before but it just came in that day and played them live with the band and sound like he was a part of the band forever.
Paul Kimsal:That was impactful for me, like just in wanting to excel at my craft even more, as just inspirational, you know. But then just getting a group of friends in a studio and really making like being very intentional about what we're doing and making like a real piece of our out of a live project was like probably one of the most fun projects for me to work on. And. But I also had a lot of depth to it too, like I had to do a lot of problem solving because it was a live session. It wasn't a proper studio record so I couldn't do a bunch of overdoves to make it sound fuller, and all that.
Chris Estes:Yeah.
Paul Kimsal:So that was kind of a big memorable project to me and also was the first time Alan let me run the studio like by myself without him there. So yeah, a lot of memories made with that project. So I would say that was probably like the first project that I worked on. That was like really memorable.
Chris Estes:So what are? You know? You've worked on a lot of different genres of songs and artists and musicians along the way. What are some of the favorite, most memorable ones that you've done that you, you can, you can talk about?
Paul Kimsal:Yeah, so the first project that I did in the big full blown facility that I worked in called playground, we had like this huge mixing console that I think came from Dallas, texas. It was like Snoop Dogg's console, something like that, like we had bought it and moved it in there. There's just the artist named McKenna Hydrick. She's like a female country artist. That project was really memorable to me because that was all a list players. Like that was the first project that I was. I had a good budget for and I was able to like hire any session musician from Nashville that I wanted to to be on the project. And when I tell you, like hitting record, like I set up all the mics, we tuned all the instruments, got everything sounding good, right, like individually, when we hit like record on the first track, it was mind blowing how, how much it sounded like a record coming out of those speakers from the very beginning of the session. Because because we had, like I would say, and I got to handpick everybody, so it was like my favorite drummer in Nashville, my favorite bass player, you know all these people and they were literally just reading a chart, like they were reading a number chart, you know, and they had never heard the song before and they played it back to me on the first take, like it was, the record was done. I was like what is going on? It's like finished, yeah, and in my mind I had never heard anything like I got.
Paul Kimsal:You know, I had always worked on records doing one track at a time, or one, you know, one instrument at a time to create a full sound. Right, this was like the whole band playing at me and I was like man, now I understand why they made records like this early on, because you know, being able to hear the entire project at once, you just make so many different decisions that you normally would track by track, you know, yeah, and so that was very impactful to me to be able to like decisively choose projects based off of a full band, like live band sound or, you know, track by track. So, and just getting to work with those people and get inspired by you know how quickly and efficiently they work, and just their professional like mindset and attitude in the session, yeah, that those that that session with McKenna like really just changed the trajectory for me of like how I did things, and so that was very memorable and I guess we can put some of these projects in the show notes.
Chris Estes:Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
Paul Kimsal:There is. I can fast forward to some of Gail's stuff. I guess artist named Gail that I've had the pleasure of mixing, so this would have been after I stopped producing and I've just mixed you know, and I've been doing mixes for her since I think she was 14 or 15.
Paul Kimsal:The first one I did was maybe 2017 or 18. And that was just good pop music. My buddy shout out to Reed Baron, producer in Nashville. He was throwing me a bunch of projects already and Gail happened to be one of them and you know, we didn't know what some of her songs would end up you know doing. But right around 2020, 2021, we started working a lot more with some of her mixes and then fast forward to I think it was 20, end of 2021, beginning of 2022. We started working on one of these singles that ended up like going viral on TikTok and blew up to the point where, like I think now on this song she has like it's like in the billions of streams on Spotify.
Paul Kimsal:And she got nominated. This song got nominated for a song of the year last year for the Grammys. So, or was it this year? When were the Grammys? The Grammys were this year already.
Chris Estes:Yeah, in February. Yeah, so it was this year.
Paul Kimsal:Which is just crazy, because you know she's super talented and I've always enjoyed mixing for her, but never in a million years would I have ever imagined. Like you know, none of the other artists I've worked with have had a billion streams. So until that happens the first time, it's like you know, you never think it's going to happen and then it does. But just the. I think the overall like evolution of her career has been really memorable for me too.
Paul Kimsal:Like really inspiring, like just from that first single that we worked on and I mixed to what her career is doing now. She just went on tour. She just ended her Ares tour with Taylor Swift. Open it up for Taylor.
Chris Estes:Swift like big time now. It's a good opening spot, bro, oh man none like it, for sure. She's launched. She has launched some careers with that opening spot. Yeah, so you've worked with a lot of songs artists. How have you seen the power that songs have? Through projects you've worked on, through things you've experienced yourself?
Paul Kimsal:So, because I grew up under a Christian household and I'm a believer, I'm a Christian. A lot of what resonates to me on more dimensions than just sonically, right, like spiritually and emotionally, are a lot of times are worship songs. You know and this probably strays a little bit from the answer that you might have wanted, but like when I go to like a big worship environment right when there's thousands of people singing worship to God and it's through one song that maybe 20 people maybe had a hand in, from the tracking stages all the way to the mixing stages, to what you do with A&R and publishing and all that stuff. It's incredible to me that just us, like lowly humans that God has placed in the life of this song, can form something through all of our different talents to create something that, like literally thousands of people and quite honestly millions usually can resonate with and they can draw their own. Whether it's their own experiences with the song or just the simplicity of like what the lyric is, they can all in one room sing the same song to Jesus, or even a secular concert, whatever, like feeling the same emotion. It's amazing to me that, like music, can almost be its own language, you know. So I don't know it's so hard to answer like one song.
Paul Kimsal:You know, when we had Everly, our first kiddo, chrissy found this record. I don't know how she found it. It's called Be Held by Kristie Knuckles. It's honestly, I think it's like a lullaby type record. I think she created it as a lullaby record, but that album we would play like almost every night or really honestly, like on loop movie when we had Everly. That was kind of like our anthem, you know, as like our first, like family album, you know, and the weight that that record has now, so like in its time when we had our first kid, like when we were first listening to it, like it was a good record to me, like I didn't necessarily pick out anything that I was like, oh my gosh, I'm over the moon about this and I guess this speaks into the power of like a longevity of a song. Right, and again, I'll go more to the album than I will the song.
Chris Estes:That's okay.
Paul Kimsal:But that record Just like the song goodness of God, that record I can always put on now be held. I can put that record on now and remember when we brought her home from the hospital. I can remember that first week that we had with her and all the emotions that Chrissy and I went through being first-time parents and just creating our family together. That album will always be our family album and so we put that album on all the time if we're on a road trip or even driving down the road in a car and Chrissy and I will instantly always look at each other and be like, oh man, we just remember it. And the same thing for an artist named Dennis and Whitmer. His solo record we also played during Everly and then our second child, stella's birth.
Paul Kimsal:And I don't know how these records ended up finding us in these times. They always came right on time but they're like these lullaby-ish kind of feeling records where they're just really chill. A lot of them are kind of acoustic or string-led but they hold so much weight because they're like these lullabies to our kids but are really monumental times in our family that we'll always look back on and just remember where we were at in that season of life and then, just like goodness of God, that God will get us through any season we're in. If we're in a difficult season, god's so faithful and He'll always deliver us through what we're going through. He's not going to give us more than we can handle.
Paul Kimsal:It's the power that those records have to be able to go back and listen to and evoke those emotions again and just remind us of God's promise. That, to me, far outweighs any other emotion that I've gotten from music. I've been super excited at shows where you're just on cloud nine. I've even had emotional reactions to heavier rock concerts, just because music itself pulls so many emotions out of you, on a physical realm even, not even a mental realm, but it just pulls all this energy and emotion out of you.
Paul Kimsal:But some of these records I'm talking about now that have specific anchors or milestones in our lives just are so important to us, and to me specifically, and God uses them, quite frankly, to just remind me that He'll be faithful and He'll always guide us on our way and kind of get us where we're supposed to go, even when we lose focus. So they're just good reminders, just like scripture is. To me. That might be an abomination to say, but to me it almost holds similar weight in terms of how it reminds us that God's faithful. I feel like he uses music to do that.
Chris Estes:I don't think it's an abomination. It's very clear in scripture.
Paul Kimsal:I say that lightly, but yeah.
Chris Estes:I mean, but I know what you mean. You feel like some people might get offended by that, but I mean the biggest book in the Bible is a book of songs.
Chris Estes:The song is the biggest group of scripture and contained in a book in the Bible, and I think God's very, very clear in how he used music with the spirits that were tormenting Saul, like there's therapeutic and I think I've mentioned this before in one of the episodes that Tim Keller is a theologian that just passed away this year and he wrote this book called the Songs of Jesus and he is a daily devotional through the Psalms.
Chris Estes:And he said he wanted to write it because Jesus quoted the Psalms more than any other book in the Bible. Because the people he was talking to didn't know the scripture at the time, the Torah, the Pentateuch. They didn't have access to that. But they knew the songs because they had sung them. They knew the songs of David which ultimately would become canonized in the scripture. But Jesus quoted those Psalms because they knew that and it was the truth of God, and it was what was quotable, and I think that's very true.
Chris Estes:man, it's interesting that the soundtrack of our lives can be seasonal and can be from certain points. But then now, with having access to that music anytime you want to like, you probably pull it up and stream it whenever you want. Play it whenever you want to.
Chris Estes:We live in a day and age with music accessibility. That's why we have genres of hits from the 90s or hip hop from the 90s or rock from the 90s. You can go in the sub-genre of maze, but it does bring you back. I think some of the stuff that we get to work on in the Christian music space has even more power because it brings something forward. But, man, this has been great dude. I've loved hearing your story and I love what you've been able to share and how you've grown in music personally. We're fortunate to have you here in Three Circle, man. It's like amazing.
Paul Kimsal:You too, man. We're super fortunate to have you.
Chris Estes:No, dude, you're the one, you're the guy. So we'll put a show notes in, tell people how they can get in touch with you. We'll put notes in there for that. If you need a good mix, he's the guy. You're not really doing front of house mix for anybody else but yeah, I'm locked and loaded with Three Circle on that one.
Paul Kimsal:I'll mix your record, though remotely.
Chris Estes:Dude, thanks for taking time. We're actually in your podcast studio, which is this one's probably going to sound amazing compared to the other ones, but it's been great. It's been fun having you on and thanks for taking time to jump in. Absolutely, man, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. All right, guys. I don't know how to sign off on these things, but I'll see you next week.