Bringing It All Back Home

A new book by Daniel Topete and Spencer Tweedy explores indie musicians’ home studios.

“It’s not that the recording studio got smaller,” Carrie Brownstein writes in the foreword to Spencer Tweedy’s Mirror Sound. “It’s that the bedroom became bigger.” Tweedy (whose father is Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy) collaborated with designer Lawrence Azerrad and photographer Daniel Topete on the new coffee-table book exploring indie musicians’ homerecording spaces — a timely theme when so much of the music world is stuck in place. “It comes across in how at ease the artists were when we were visiting them,” Tweedy says. “They felt like they were at home, because they literally were.”

THROUGH THE GLASS Sharon Van Etten at the keyboard in her cozy Los Angeles home studio. “I stepped outside for a second,” Topete recalls. “She was lost in a little moment. She was playing the piano by herself, and I shot this from her garden.”

IN THE GARAGE Laetitia Tamko, the former software engineer who records as Vagabon, at the L.A. space where she worked on 2019’s critically acclaimed Vagabon. “This was the second frame that we shot,” Topete says. “It was a good omen. She was very comfortable in her space. She’s very much in command.”

Mirror Sound Prestel, $40