For the last five years, Fudge Recording Studio has operated on Terpsichore Street in the Lower Garden District. For the decade before that, the space served as the private studio for perennial New Orleans rock band Better Than Ezra.
But owners Tom Drummond of Better Than Ezra, former Neville Brothers guitar player Shane Theriot, and Jack Miele from ‘80s party band the Molly Ringwalds have decided to close Fudge Recording Studio for good.
Jack Miele at Fudge Studios. (Photo Courtesy of Jack Miele)
The decision was not motivated by a lack of clients, but rather new opportunities that have led the trio in different directions.
“Everybody had different opportunities that were coming up,” Miele said. “Shane just got the gig playing with Hall and Oats and also as the music director for Live from Daryl’s House, and one of the prerequisites of the job was that he move to New York. Ezra has a new record deal and a new record, so Tom is going to be on tour for a lot of the year coming up, and there are a lot of opportunities for him.”
For his part, Miele said he will be taking up residence at the Music Shed, moving his board and equipment to that location and operating as a sort of producer in residence.
“Believe me, this didn’t come easy,” he said. “It came after a lot of debate and a lot of contemplation. I’m going to have my own production suite there [at the Music Shed], and it’s going to have all the same gear that Fudge had. It’s basically going to be a really killer overdub studio.”
Out of all the artists he recorded at Fudge, Miele said two really stand out as favorites.
“Personally, my favorites would be the Wood Brothers and One Republic,” he said. “The way that both of those bands worked was so inspiring. To watch the way Ryan Tedder produced, that guy’s mind is incredible the way he can multitask. Boundless energy, and he was somehow able to compartmentalize incredible thoughts.”
Tedder would have five or six people creating melody lines, beats, lyrics, and other components of new songs simultaneously, Miele said, producing 10 new songs from scratch in one night.
“The Wood Brothers, for their album The Muse, they wrote and recorded all of the demos for that record live at the studio,” he said. “I set them up in a circle, and everybody cut everything live. They re-tracked the final record in Nashville, and when it came out, some songs I almost couldn’t tell the difference between the demos and the final tracks.”
While it may be easy to bemoan the closing of Fudge, Miele has taken a different point of view. It’s hard for him to knock a move caused by continuing musical success since the musicality of the owners was what made Fudge special.
“Our motto was ‘A Studio By Musicians For Musicians’” Miele said. “Everybody who owned it or worked there was a really great musician. We weren’t just engineers. We understood how to speak to musicians like a musician would and how to get certain things out of people. There was definitely a production quality to Fudge that was great, and I want to bring that same spirit that we had at Fudge over to the Music Shed.”
