These new adventures in instrumentation were encouraged by Berlin, who came aboard to share Power's producer's chair along with The Hip and longtime band engineer Mark Vreeken. There comes a time when you have to stop building the ship after you've road-tested songs and you know what you've got on tape. We wanted to get someone who wasn't an engineer to focus on the musical standpoint as opposed to the sonic standpoint of things. If we were left to do it on our own, it would've been a lot more difficult. It was a good way to keep the band both off-guard and fresh at the same time.
Recording has to continually be a learning process.
Berlin's main strength as producer came in showing The Hip new ways to arrange their material-opening up their Power window, you might say. They were very open to my suggestions, and the beauty of it all was that they could instantly hear the results from song to song. It was a pleasurable experience for them to hear sounds they were unfamiliar hearing coming from themselves. The symmetry of Phantom Power spilled over into Fay's discovery of the device that adorns the album's cover. I'm interested in unorthodox gear, as I believe everything has a sound in it I can somehow use.