TAS: Did you have any idea that Famous Blue Raincoat was going to become an audiophile-grade recording?

Jennifer Warnes: No. I didn’t even know what one was.

TAS: Why do you think it sounds as good as it does?

Jennifer Warnes: Sensitive people whose antennae are up high hear birds differently than people who aren’t really listening—and everything else in life, as well. If you couple that with having grown up inside of orchestras, bands, and choirs, you grow fond of the honest sound. So Roscoe Beck and I made a pact that we’d make a record where the violins sounded like violins and the voices sounded the way you’re listening to me right now. And our chief engineer Billy Youdelman worked on finding the right microphones and rooms that would capture the most honest sound. So the elements we used to create the record started with honesty. If that translated to the audiophile, great.

TAS : How did you come up with the concept of an entire album of Leonard Cohen’s work?

Jennifer Warnes: I responded to his dense lyrics. In 1969 I sang them at the Troubadour before I met him. By the time we hooked up, I was already familiar with his repertoire, and then we did two, three, four tours over fifteen years and I had the opportunity to investigate these songs from the bandstand, which is entirely different from experiencing them from a finished CD. I wondered what would happen if we pulled the players from the band that was on Leonard’s 1979 tour out of their original guitar-based setting and had them luxuriously arranged? Would they hold up? This synergistically happened around the time that George Masssenburg had invented the Flying Faders, and before surround sound, and when digital mixing was still spatial. Plus, we had a lot of friends who were just on the verge of becoming overly famous, and they all wanted to play. We were in the flow.

TAS: Was Cohen present at the sessions?

Jennifer Warnes: Oh yes. Of course, he didn’t think we were going to do it because the pop majors didn’t warm up to him. Then we got an indie label involved. And he started to come around listening. He came by on the day we cut “Joan of Arc,” and sang on it.

TAS: How involved were you in remastering FBR?

Jennifer Warnes: I own the masters, so I’m involved in every tiny piece and every moment.

TAS: How long had it been since you listened to the masters?

Jennifer Warnes: Every five or ten years I’d pull them out and have Bernie clone them, but the clones weren’t as good as the originals. The clones hadn’t held up, which says a lot about the archival process of music from the sixties. Basically, we went back to the originals; we did no passthroughs; this 20th Anniversary Edition is clean.

TAS: Why do you think this album continues to
engage listeners?

Jennifer Warnes: I think people like it because records aren’t made like this anymore. They like it because it’s real good playing, real good singing, and real good writing, and it’s very well sequenced. It’s well edited, so there’s no junk that you have to wade through. It does all the work.

TAS: Where does it rate personally for you?

Jennifer Warnes: For me it was a vindication from a certain sort of incarceration by pop music. In the wake of Linda Ronstadt’s success, [Arista Records President] Clive Davis tried to force me into a very tiny pigeonhole, and if I wouldn’t sing these really plain songs that held no emotion for me I was ridiculed. Finally, they put an injunction on me, so that I couldn’t sing solo for anyone for three years, until my contract ran out. That kind of silencing drove me to background singing. I called Leonard and told him they’d put an injunction on me, so could I please sing backgrounds for him. He said no problem. I said to myself, “I’ll just sing backgrounds and write, and I’ll recover.” That’s when the “Song of Bernadette” was written.

TAS: You’ve seen a very ugly side of the industry.

Jennifer Warnes: No one talks about it, but it’s very real. Someone said to me: “Your greatest gift to the music business is just simple survival.”

TAS: Fortunately, you had the wisdom to own your own masters.

Jennifer Warnes: Thank you. TAS was very significant in the success of FBR in the beginning, and Harry Pearson was the champion of this record long before anyone else was. To hear that the record is still continually pulled out to test audio systems just pleases me so much. Audiophiles represent a segment of the market that I’m very fond of.