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The Sonic Road Podcast
The stuff that doesn't make it to YouTube.
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PART TWO OF TWO
What's up everybody — Beau here.
If you read part one, you know where I came from. The kid who moved around too much, never fit in, and found a home in a bunch of records coming out of Seattle. I left you on a hook — that years later, I'd end up friends with one of the people who actually helped make those records. This is that story. And it's also about the two episodes I've done with him, which are some of my favorites I've ever recorded.
So let me tell you how I found Dave Hillis.
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About six or seven years ago, I was running a different podcast and I was always on the hunt for guests. One night I was digging through liner notes — actual physical liner notes, the kind you used to sit and read front to back while the record played — and I was going through the credits on Pearl Jam's Ten. And there was this name in the engineering credits: Dave Hillis. I started looking into him, and the more I dug, the more I realized this guy was everywhere. Pearl Jam. Alice in Chains. Mother Love Bone. Temple of the Dog. Blind Melon. The Singles soundtrack. He was right there in the room at London Bridge Studios for the birth of the whole thing.
Some more of my albums from Seattle. Dave worked on Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten, among others not pictured here.
So I did what you do. I tracked down the email on his website and I hit him up on Instagram, fully expecting nothing. And to my surprise, Dave was enthusiastic right out of the gate. Generous with his time, genuinely happy to talk. We hit it off, and since then we've done a number of podcasts together and even worked on a music project. He's become one of the cornerstone guests of The Sonic Road, and more than that, a friend.
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I think about this sometimes. If you told my seventeen-year-old self — standing at that Pearl Jam show on my birthday in 1994, less than a month before everything changed — that one day I'd be sitting and talking shop with the guy who engineered that record, I don't think I could have processed it. It still kind of breaks my brain. That's the thing about following your passion long enough. The distance between you and the thing you love has a way of collapsing in on itself if you stick around and keep showing up.
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Here's the thing about Dave that makes him such a special person to talk to. He's the kind of guy who was boots on the ground for some of the most important records ever made, but he doesn't always share in the glory of rock stardom the way the musicians do. The engineers, the producers, the people behind the glass — they're the ones who actually shaped the sound, and most of them never get their flowers. Some of our best conversations have happened off-mic, just talking about the deeper philosophy of making music. Why you do it. What makes a record feel alive. I feel genuinely fortunate to be around people like Dave who love authentic rock and roll for the right reasons and were there in the legendary studios making it happen.
That brings me to the two episodes.