How to make music with everything and the kitchen sink

Pop quiz, hotshot. You're in a living room that's been turned into a recording studio. A man and a woman are hard at work laying down some tracks. He knows his way around both the mixing board and all the exotic instruments lying about the place. She has a voice that can sweep from one extreme to another and back again in no time flat. What do you do?

If you're smart, you get the hell out of the way, let them do their work on their own terms, and then appreciate the result. And if your luck holds, what you end up with is as good as the recent efforts of the husband-and-wife team of Fleming and John.

Fleming McWilliams and John Mark Painter (natives of East Prairie, Mo., and Miami, respectively) met while studying at Belmont College in Nashville. They had each been experimenting with music on their own-she as a singer/songwriter, he as a bassist and multi-instrumentalist-before deciding to relocate to the Cayman Islands to play in a band together.

The pair spent a year in the Caribbean, then returned to Nashville to begin performing and publishing music in earnest in 1991. Four years later, they released their debut album, Delusions of Grandeur, on REX Records, a local independent label. The disc attracted the attention of Universal Records, and in 1996, Fleming and John became the first band on that roster.

Their 1999 album, The Way We Are, finds them drawing on their individual strengths to produce a remarkable soundscape. She handled the lyrics and basic melodies, while he built up the instrumental parts to hitch to them-and nearly became a one-man band in the process.

McWilliams said, "There were a lot of them that he didn't know how to play before the album. We would get these ethnic instrument catalogs, go through them, and say, 'That looks like it would sound cool.' We couldn't even pronounce the names, but we would order them; then a big box would show up by Fed Ex the next day. We'd open them up, and there'd be all this foreign newspaper with, like, Arabic writing all over it. There wouldn't any kind of manual or anything."

"For a lot of them, I was able to go on the Internet and find out what the tunings were supposed to be," noted Painter. "Or I might have recordings of people playing them the right way and figure it out from there." The album's 15 songs feature him using some two dozen different instruments (ordinary and otherwise) in unusual and intriguing combinations, forming an ideal backdrop for McWilliams' dizzyingly versatile singing style.

All of the recording and most of the mixing were done at the couple's home studio in Nashville. The end result is a far cry from the sort of sound people normally associate with that city, but the location itself more than makes up for this fact. "It's just a good music center, and there are lots of good recording studios and music stores. And it's cheaper than New York and L.A.," Painter remarked. The ready availability of musical equipment, he pointed out, means that replacing broken parts is no problem.

Working at home allows the group to proceed on their own schedule and to exercise as much control as possible over the finished product, from recording and producing all the way to the packaging. "A really good friend of ours does the artwork. We don't let go of anything; we care about it...I'm a control freak," Painter admitted.

He means it, too. One of the studio's control panels carries the following notice: "They can have my record when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers."

Translating a studio effort such as The Way We Are to the stage without the help of an army of backing musicians may seem a formidable task, but the job gets done. "Our drummer [McWilliams' brother Shawn] does a lot of percussion things while he's playing his drum set, the bass player makes a lot of percussion noises while he's playing, and I'm the same way with the guitar," Painter stated. (When on tour, he sticks mainly to the six-string.)

He continued, "We have a keyboard player to fill in the gaps, and three people singing background vocals-the drummer, the keyboard player, and myself. And I've got horns on stage that I grab and play a little bit every now and then...We don't have to have every sound in every part on the album; we're just trying to get by and do what we can."

A scaled-down lineup put in three appearances during the 1999 Lilith Fair tour, including one at Lakewood Amphitheatre on July 23. McWilliams was eager to share her memories: "She [founder Sarah McLachlan] was very personally involved with it; you'd get to your dressing room and find a little note from her thanking you. She'd leave little presents, handwrite the notes-it was really cool...The festival was so well run and organized, even the catering. There was a juice bar, vegetarian food, everything. I'm really sad that this is the last year."

Even if this does turn out to be the last year for Lilith Fair, she commented, one thing will always stand out for her: the finale, in which the day's performers do a number together on the main stage. (This year's choice was "Put a Little Love in Your Heart.")

"It was just an amazing experience to be onstage with Chrissie Hynde [of the Pretenders], Sarah, the Indigo Girls, Suzanne Vega-Sinead O'Connor made a guest appearance, and she's one of my favorites...So I kind of weaseled my way in between her and Suzanne Vega on a microphone. I was standing there thinking, 'Oh gosh, Sinead O'Connor is singing right in my ear'-it was so cool. It was really probably the highlight of my career so far!" she recalled, laughing.

Fleming and John are presently on the road with Ben Folds Five, with whom they go back quite a bit. The piano-pounding Folds first met the couple not long after he moved to Nashville in 1992 to start on a publishing deal of his own. When he got ready to enter the studio, the memory of a certain live show he had seen came back to him.

"He wanted to record some stuff, and his publisher at the time said, 'Why don't you find somebody to help you produce-somebody that you know in town?' And he immediately thought of John," McWilliams explained. Folds' demo tape (which contained several songs that would end up on BF5's first two albums) impressed them enough to strike up a working relationship that would endure well after his three-year stint in Nashville.

Since that time, Painter has contributed string parts to the BF5 albums Whatever and Ever Amen and The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, as well as horn parts for the latter. Folds returned the favor on The Way We Are, co-writing one track and singing backup on another. Everybody got into the act on his 1998 solo side project, Fear of Pop, Vol. 1, including William Shatner.

That's right, William Shatner. As in Capt. James T. Kirk. As in the guy who did what is probably the all-time worst cover of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Yes, him! "In Love" features him doing a twisted take on the archetypical sensitive man. McWilliams shed light on the way the song came to be and what happened when Folds took the project to the late-night TV circuit.

"Ben wrote the song with Shatner's voice in mind, because he was a big fan of the album The Transformed Man. Shatner just loved it, and when we performed on [Late Night with] Conan O'Brien, he wanted to get together beforehand and really rehearse it; he was wonderful." McWilliams sang backup that night and contributed vocal tracks to the album.

Suffice it to say that the past eight years have certainly been interesting. But would things have been very much different if she and Painter were not married-if they were just two people who happened to be playing in a band together? "I'm sure they would," he reflected. "We'd be more likely to quit, for one thing. But we have a lot more to stick around for now."

Music fans should do the same, considering the strength of The Way We Are. If acts like this came through town every day, the joints would never stop jumping.

Fleming and John will be opening for Ben Folds Five tonight at Alexander Memorial Coliseum. Showtime is 8 p.m. Call 894-9600 or stop by the Student Center Box Office to purchase tickets-but cross your fingers!