Mr. Hewitt
One of the sad cliches of recording engineers is that they’re over-weight and three-times divorced. You seem real healthy and you’re about to get married.
You have to be healthy. You have to be happy. You have to have a partner who supports you unquestioningly and who knows what you’re about and what she’s getting into with you. When Sarah and I started dating I didn’t have any work for about a month and a half and we spent every day together. Ironically, the phone call I got from Jerry Finn to do the Blink-182 record was the day after I met Sarah, and she was actually sitting on my lap while I took the phone call. I don’t think she had any clue at that time that I work as much as I do, because we spent every day for a month together and then all of a sudden I had to leave town to do the Blink record. I was gone Monday through Friday for four months. We had very honest conversations about things where I said, “This is what I do,†and, “Yes, this is how much I work. I will work sixteen, twenty hours in a day and come home at five in the morning and then go back out at ten the next day.†I’ve been working those hours since I was 13, going on the road with my father. It’s totally normal to me, but I don’t like working weeks on end of sixteen-hour days, and fortunately I work with artists who don’t like doing that all the time either. If I work with a new band, I’ll tell them, “I’m not doing that anymore unless it’s like we need to absolutely fucking do this right now.†I can’t do that anymore. It’s not worth it for the project. It’s not worth it for my health, for our relationship. It took a long time and many subsequent conversations for us to really iron out that situation, but things still come up, because I still love what I do! When Sarah graduates law school she’s going to be working a lot. It’s going to get more hectic for a few years while she establishes herself in the law field, just like I am right now in the engineering field. A lot of people don’t realize that part of life – the give and take, the unconditional support.
It seems like you got a lot of your early jobs by being the guy who says, “Yeah, I’ll do it. I’ll stay till four in the morning!â€I sacrificed a lot of my life to my career in the beginning, but it was the only way to get ahead and reach the goals that I set for myself. I wanted more than anything to be making the records that I was listening to on the radio. As far as the fitness thing – as long as you have some kind of physical activity other than pushing your chair from the console to the outboard rack, you’ll be okay. I try to go to the gym a couple of times a week, walk or run whenever I can. My drivers license shows me extremely tan from when I first moved to LA. People look at the picture and then look at me all pasty now and can’t believe it’s the same person. I used to go to beach every weekend when I first moved here and ride my bike twenty, thirty miles. I’m getting back into that these days. I think it’s good to work hard, play hard, to keep yourself in shape, to just be well and remember to breathe! It’s very important to eat well. When I work with John I lose ten pounds in a week because we eat so well and work so hard. He eats fish, meat, vegetables. There’s no sugar in the house. There’s no candy. I come to the studio here and they find out I like a certain candy bar, so they buy a whole pile. I quit sugar and bread recently and lost the ten pounds I gained from the candy and feel great! I quit caffeine a year ago. Now I can stay up all night, no problem!
http://www.jdmanagement.com/ryanhewitt
www.ryanhewitt.com
