Music and Recording Features

As Price rediscovered her jazz soul, Vilray experienced his own rebirth. "I didn't feel comfortable playing songs that everybody knew, so I played obscurities, the B-sides of '30s and '40s hits, like Fats Waller's 'My Very Good Friend the Milkman,' until Paul McCartney covered it." Immersing himself in classic songcraft, he gradually discovered his own vocabulary. "The plan was to write songs and tell people I'd found a songbook in someone's attic. But my ego got in the way, and I admitted to writing them."

"He showed me a tune he'd written, and I couldn't believe it," Price recalled. "We performed it, and it seemed that every gig after that, he had two or three more."

What most appeals to Vilray about the pop music of the '30s and '40s is that "it's a form for telling stories. 'Here's a story about me sitting at a bar. Here's a story about me driving a car and what I'm thinking while I'm doing it.' It's a limitless bucket to pull from."

He pointedly does not see his songs as appeals to nostalgia. "I don't think of this as a retro thing, I think of it as visiting a space that has certain tenets. There are people who come along and dip into this world and make something of it in their own, original voice. Not to compare myself in any way to Randy Newman, but you can hear his love for this stuff. Tom Waits, similarly. Billy Joel, similarly. I realize I'm talking about a lot of guys from the '70s and '80s, but you also have someone like Rufus Wainwright, and I'm sure there are others, still younger, that I'm not thinking of. "

Vilray has a special fondness for the great wordsmiths. "Lyricists of that era knew how to write a lyric that feels good to sing. Johnny Mercer was a great lyricist who was also a great singer. Peggy Lee is another. She cowrote all the songs on [the 1955 Disney animated movie] Lady and the Tramp, which is an incredible collection of songs. Fats Waller's lyricist of choice, Andy Razaf, had an absolute understanding of Waller. That's the way songwriting worked in the '30s. Most of the time, you weren't writing for a musical, you were writing for a musical artist. Understanding their style, their attitude, their phrasing, is what goes into the mechanics of writing lyrics—and on your best day, the mechanics of writing a melody."

As steeped as he is in the canon, Vilray takes an impish delight in subverting it, in songs like "Hate Is the Basis (of Love)" ("On your first date I advocate / That you focus on the many things that you both hate"), or the R-rated "Let's Make Love on This Plane" ("This cabin's shakin' / Let's start takin' all the blame"), which Vilray introduced at the Carlyle by announcing, "Here's a dirty song for you."

The masters, Vilray pointed out, could be just as roguish. "Take Nat King Cole's 'Gone with the Draft.' There's nothing more impish than saying, 'I've got flat feet, everybody's off in World War Two and I'm cleaning up with the ladies.' I mean, that's insane. So I feel like there's permission out there for songs that are a little rascally."

When he began writing, Vilray worked with a specific '30s, '40s, or '50s singer in mind. "I'd say, 'Okay, I'm gonna write a Billie Holiday song, I'm gonna write a Frank Sinatra song, I'm gonna write an Ella Fitzgerald song,' to feel sure of the authenticity of it. If people came up to me and said, 'Wow, I didn't realize you wrote that,' I felt like I was on the right path. It was a good way to start." "Without a Thought for My Heart," from the first album, was, Vilray said, "me trying to write a Peggy Lee song."

Vilray increasingly tailors his songs to Price's voice and delivery. "Apart from her incredible instrument, she's a great interpreter. Working up a song takes time for Rachael, which is kind of the glorious thing. It's not like I hand her the song and we're there. She finds the theater in it. I think we get to a place, on our best days," Vilray reflected, "where we're performing some sort of theater."

The duo's method for shaping a song has evolved since their earliest days together. In the beginning, Price said, "he'd send me a voice memo of him singing. We'd figure out what key worked for me, I'd learn the song, and that was that. He didn't say much. The longer we've been performing together, the more specific he's gotten with his instructions, about the flavor of the song, the joke of the song, how he thinks a line should be delivered. It's almost like a director and actor." The theater model again.

A song can take years to nail. "I loved the song 'Why Do I?' as soon as I heard it," Price said, "but it kept eluding us. Every time we did it onstage, we'd be like, 'We didn't get the tempo right.' A year or so ago, we played a gig with the great alto saxophonist Steve Wilson. Steve took a solo in rehearsal, a sort of Louis Jordan–style solo, and the solo made Vilray realize how the song is supposed to go. It summons this period when jazz was moving into rock. So when we recorded it recently, Vilray told the sax player to play it like it's a Louis Jordan song, and I was able to sing it perfectly. I knew where the pocket was. It feels good now. It's one of my favorites. That's musicians working together."

I Love a Love Song!—the new album—was produced and engineered by Dan Knobler, who supervised the first album and has worked with Lake Street Dive. Most of the songs feature a medium-sized band: five horns (arranged by reeds player Jacob Zimmerman) and a four-member rhythm section. The ensemble brings to mind the octets and nonets, peopled with the likes of Teddy Wilson, Lester Young, and Jo Jones, that backed Billie Holiday on her late-'30s Columbia singles. The album was recorded over four days in United Recording's hallowed Studio A in Los Angeles. Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night" and many other canonical recordings were made there. It's the sort of big, airy studio room that has all but disappeared.

"We recorded live, with everyone in the room," Knobler said. "We probably made four to six takes per song and comped the best parts of each. We recorded to Pro Tools and mixed everything down to two-track tape. One of the things we got excited about is how the great '50s records feel as if the singer is standing right in front of you and the band is way in the back of the room. I tried to set things up with that sensibility in mind. It's not about reverb or delay or effects or panning, which is how modern recordings create a sense of space. It's literally that the band was recorded in a big room and was minimally miked. The only one who's closely miked, and intensely baffled, is Rachael. The horn section sound is from a single mike positioned above the horns. My drum miking was minimal, and I intentionally put the bass right next to the drums, with no baffling. There was a real sense of 'Let's do it how it used to be done.'

"I'm not a purist in any sense, but there are a lot of ways that modern recording can take the fun out of things. When you get too much in the weeds on edits and fixes and options and perfection, it's easy to lose sight of the things that make the older records that we love so special: the humanity, the flaws, the sense of extremely talented people gracefully walking a tightrope. My job, as I saw it, was trying to capture the music in a way that sounded faithful to our influences but also subtly contemporary—the goal, in other words, is timelessness—and then getting out of the way. It's not hard to record Rachael Price; she's a world-class singer. You'd have to work hard to make her sound bad."

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It's Saturday night at the Café Carlyle, mid-set. Like the late Betty Carter, Rachael Price has a capacious, elastic mouth and enunciation all her own. Price sings with her whole body, including her hands, which are in constant motion. A fluent, astute accompanist, Vilray tosses off chords and short runs; his voice, while less expressive than his partner's, gets the job done.

You can count the number of vocalists today who can get a large crowd on its feet and cast a spell over a room of 90 on the fingers of one hand. Rachael Price is all but in a league of her own.

I asked Price if she's a jazz singer at heart.

"Yes!" she said, and laughed, as if her answer had surprised her. "I'm going to say yes!"

Could she see herself singing this material full-time? "Sure. Life is long, and I love this music more and more. My connection to it feels more authentic every time I sing it."