Alan Yates Band

“The first valuable lesson I learned about recording -- and which is just as valuable today -- is that no good recording can be done unless you first write good songs and then try to leave them alone,” says Atlanta-based songwriter/producer Alan Yates of the Alan Yates Band.

This lesson has served Yates well as he exhibits on the immediate, melodic pop of Red (Tripolar Records), the follow-up to 2003’s Mint Condition. But while he may encapsulate as much emotional resonance as he does production detail in three-minute nuggets, much more went in to Red than recording time.

Named after Yates’ father -- a musician himself who passed away in 2004 -- Red is first and foremost a tribute to the music present in the younger Yates’ life from a very early age. Born and bred in the Jonesboro/Stockbridge area of Georgia, just south of Atlanta, Yates gravitated early towards the songs that were always around him. His father played country music from the era of George Jones and Merle Haggard, and he would often go to see him play at honkytonks and fish fries. Yates’ first experience performing was singing with his father at neighborhood gatherings at the early age of 10.

These early experiences -- coupled with a love of the three-minute pop of Elvis and the Beatles sparked by watching their films with older siblings -- encouraged Yates to continue in music, playing in cover bands with neighborhood kids. He also began hanging out at Stockbridge’s Real to Reel Studios, where he met Ed Roland and Will Turpin of friends-to-this-day Collective Soul (for whom Yates assisted in engineering on the band’s fifth release, Blender, and ecstatically opened up for when Collective Soul played with the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra at the Woodruff Arts Center in late April 2005). After a point, however, Yates wanted to record his own material, which led him to explore learning production.

“Producing came out of a necessity, as I didn’t want to have to rely on others and to staying on someone else’s clock when doing my music,” says Yates. “I felt the quickest way to developing was to be able to spend whatever time I needed; to cut out time and money limitations so I could learn how not to sell my own work short.”