‘SOUNDS’ GREAT
Engineer earns Grammy noms for several albums
Chris Martin admits that Coldplay’s latest album could have sounded terrible if it wasn’t for one person — mastering engineer Emily Lazar.
Like the musical magician she is, New Yorker Lazar added her special touch to the band’s eighth album “Everyday Life,” which was released in late 2019 and is now competing for the top prize at the 2021 Grammy Awards.
Martin describes the universal and political album as “a patchwork quilt of opinions and thoughts about life and humans and the planet and how much we love Nigerian music and how much we love gospel [music] and how much we love, like, old-fashioned, northern European church music.”
“All these weird things and sampling from voice memos — in the wrong hands it could have sounded awful.”
Lazar came in to save the day — a role she’s played on thousands of albums and a reason that she’s making history at this year’s Grammy Awards.
For her work on Coldplay’s album, she shares a nomination with Martin and friends for album of the year. Lazar is also the mastering engineer on HAIM’s “Women In Music Pt. III” and Jacob Collier’s “Djesse Vol. 3” — both nominated for album of the year — making Lazar a triple nominee in the Grammys’ biggest category.
“You kind of go into a little bit of shock after the first one. You’re not even focused for the next one because you think, ‘That’s it.’ By the time we got to the third one, I almost had to check myself and say, ‘Why are they listing all the records that I worked on?’ ” Lazar said in a phone interview.
Lazar, 49, made history at the 2019 Grammys when she became the first woman to win best engineered album (non-classical) for her work on Beck’s “Colors.” She was the first female mastering engineer to ever be nominated in the album of the year category for her role on Foo Fighter’s “Wasting Light” and she’s the only female mastering engineer nominated for album of the year this year, though engineer/mixers Laura Sisk and Jasmine Chen are competing for their roles on Taylor Swift’s “folklore” and HAIM’s third album.
“If someone has achieved that in one go, it’s clear proof that they bring something special,” Martin said of Lazar’s record three nods for album of the year.
Like many touring musicians and those behind-the-scenes, Lazar started her career in front of the scene as a rock-pop singer-songwriter. But she grew frustrated in the recording studio, feeling like her voice was being silenced from engineers when she had thoughts about how a song should sound.
“There was a weird invisible fence between engineers and artists, and it wasn’t inviting, especially as a woman, to be asking questions about how to make things sound a particular way. The assumption was that you were just the artist and you’d show up and you’d do stuff and you wouldn’t get to have a say,” she said.
She went on to get her master’s degree in music technology and cut her teeth at a music engineering firm where she “learned a lot about how I didn’t want to run a company.”
The mastering role on most engineer’s albums comes at end of the album-making process, “putting that final audio polish on an album,” as Lazar describes it.
But Lazar, who launched her Manhattan-based company, The Lodge, at age 25, always thought differently, and as a freely creative musician and thinker, she wanted to collaborate with artists while they were making their albums.
Lazar has mastered more than 4,000 albums throughout her career, including releases by Björk, David Bowie, Sia, WuTang Clan, Barbra Streisand, the Chainsmokers, Dolly Parton, Lou Reed, Destiny’s Child, Depeche Mode, Alanis Morissette, Vampire Weekend, Little Big Town, Morrissey, Natalie Merchant and Tiësto.
She reached new heights when she worked as the mastering engineer on The Rolling Stones’ 2020 vinyl reboot of “Goats Head Soup” as well as the 50th-anniversary release in 2019 of the Beatles’ “Abbey Road.”
“You can’t think of anything more important to the rock ‘n’ roll canon than the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” she said.