JASON LEHNING

For a young producer, writer and arranger, Jason Lehning has accumulated experience with an uncommonly wide array of different artists. 

A partial list: Bright rock bands such as Guster.  Mythic singers such as George Jones.  Articulate singer-songwriters such as Steve Forbert, Lyle Lovett , Jill Sobule, and David Mead.  Dance-pop maestros such as Erasure,.  Countryesque searchers such as Alison Kraus and Nickel Creek.  Renowned instrumentalists such as Bill Frisell and Jerry Douglas.  More. 

Lehning, 34, a Tennessee native who grew up the oldest of four brothers, relishes this diversity.  "I'm interested in trying to keep my music life undefined," he says.  "Everybody goes around with this weird set of rules that somebody else invented.  Those rules can foster narrowness and stagnation. Often, not a lot of looking into different things occurs."

The studio has been Lehning's natural habitat since he was a kid, attending sessions run by his father, the producer Kyle Lehning.  "Growing up, I had the best seat in the house," Jason Lehning says.   Even before he graduated from Boston's Berklee School of Music, he would work summers as an engineer.  As he has overseen his own sessions, he has continued to work in that capacity, recording and mixing for such storied producers as Peter Asher, Gus Dudgeon, and T-Bone Burnett. 

"Working with that caliber producer," Lehning says, "seeing how each person deals with a particular scenario, you glean a little bit from each experience.  You tailor it to your own personality.  You store it for later use."  In the recording arena, Lehning already has won two Grammy awards.

An elastic sense of music as something of consequence -- and not just of different matters of technical competence -- still guides Lehning in his many but related endeavors as a songwriter, publisher, engineer, arranger, and producer.  It explains why he is quietly determined to "navigate," he puts it, "a broad spectrum of approaches."  He sees things in terms not of "rights and wrongs but options with a whole big bunch of other options connected to them."  It is why -- in addition to everything else,  Lehning is a member of a working band, the Bees.  He founded it in 1999 with the singer-songwrter Daniel Tashian. 

For Lehning, a considered dance of the classic and the non-classic continues to be inform all his work.  He says he has no particular recording creed, isn't someone who applies one set of  predetermined principles to everyone.  "Every new project," he says, "has a different set of needs.  It's like good architecture, where the nature of the structure looks good, but it's also the very thing that holds the building up.  Whatever that is, it's bound to be different for each project.

He says that the unsame quality of everything is why his work stays fresh for him.  "The process of making records is that certain people get in a room together, and out of the ether something happens that can be amazing.  That's what drives my love for it. Every time you start in, you have to do ten different songs, and you get ten different experiences."

Producer Credits:
Alison Krauss - Lonely Runs Both Ways, New Favorite
Maura O'Connell - Don't I Know
Lyle Lovett - My Baby Don't Tolerate
Steve Forbert - Just Like There's Nothing To It
Nickel Creek - This Side
Casey Driessen - 3D
The Bees (U.S.) - High Society, Starry Gazey Pie
The Derailers - Genuine, Here Come The Derailers