Record producers particularize obsession, lend nobility to eccentricity and add flesh to ideas that previously existed only as skeletons. Great producers reveal their own obsessions, as did Phil Spector on his 1965 recording of the Ronettes’ “ I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine,” where drums and his ghostly wash of brass and strings shore up singer Veronica Bennett’s flimsy dreams. Other producers work in a less megalomanical way. Brian Eno’s 1976 Another Green World locates the lyrical in the technological, the technological in the lyrical. Nashville producer Mark Nevers works similarly; he gives listeners a sense of the city’s musical history that is by turns warm, disaffected and funny. Where his vision is distinctive, it’s almost always imposed with the utmost of tact, challenging artists while making them feel right at home. His sonic world encompasses the punk rock of the Ramones, Eno’s hanging-garden soundscapes and the drolleries of Nashville’s “countrypolitan” sound. Recent works reflect his love of the sleek, deracinated guitars of bands like Television, and he’s a tireless experimenter whose dislocations always sound genial. Nevers seems to understand excess and mania without succumbing to them; he’s among the most Apollonian of producers. Perhaps best known as a member of Lambchop who also happens to be the architect of that group’s sonic identity, his résumé includes records by Will Oldham, Bobby Bare Sr., Silver Jews and Calexico. Recently he’s produced local pop band Lone Official, soul singer Candi Staton, country rockers Blanche, and post-folkie Imaad Wasif. He’s currently working on a project with legendary country singer and guitarist Charlie Louvin. Nevers records in an unprepossessing bungalow called the Beech House, where he’s surrounded by vintage analog equipment and sophisticated modern technology. Many of his distinctive sounds derive from techniques he learned during extensive apprenticeship engineering at Franklin recording studio The Castle, working on records by artists like Gene Watson and Randy Travis. Other sounds are a result of the acoustics of the house itself, and of his use of an MCI two-inch tape machine and a 1970s-era Sphere Eclipse 28-channel mixing board—equipment that, Nevers says, “a lot of music, from disco to punk rock to Molly Hatchet and Lynyrd Skynyrd, was cut on.” Now 41, Nevers moved to Nashville in 1986 and quickly secured work at The Castle. The son of a Vietnam fighter pilot, he spent a peripatetic childhood before settling in Myrtle Beach, S.C. “I couldn’t afford to go to New York or L.A., so I came here,” Nevers laughs. “I realized it could be very easy to stay in Myrtle Beach and be 40 years old, in a band playing ‘Margaritaville.’ ” He has described the era—the late ’80s and early ’90s—as “the first renaissance of reborn traditionalists,” and working on projects like Travis and George Jones gave him an invaluable perspective on both the music business and the art of making records. “When everybody was making all the money in the early ’90s, those were my dead years,” Nevers says. “But that was really kind of a magical time here, back then—the last of the big studios. They were booked every day. And you were totally hands-on, since a lot of times the engineer’s the producer. The technology was really big and bulky—it sounded great.” Growing increasingly frustrated by the constraints of the “big-studio” world, Nevers, as he puts it, “started disappearing around 1994. They allowed me to do it.” He began traveling around the country recording gospel artists like Memphis singer O’Landa Draper. Making field recordings under less-than-perfect conditions gave Nevers invaluable expertise, and a Lambchop song like Nixon’s “Up With People,” with its handclaps and disturbing youth-camp vocals, reflects his gospel experience. “It was total chaos,” he recalls, “having to deal with a 50-piece choir and the band, in small, cramped spaces, in shady parts of town.” Nevers bought a small house and began using it to make records. “We did a Tony Joe White record—the one that had ‘Jaguar Man’ on it [1993’s The Path of a Decent Groove],” Nevers says. “He didn’t have a record deal at the time. And I was doing all these Springwater and Elliston Square bands, like Anastasia Screamed. The first significant record I did was probably ‘Up With People.’ ” The Lambchop records remain Nevers’ best-known projects, though his work on last year’s acclaimed The Moon Was Blue for Bobby Bare Sr. has raised his profile. “Lambchop copied the countrypolitan sound from Chet Atkins, and then I did a Bare record copying Lambchop copying Chet Atkins,” Nevers says. Still, to peg Lambchop as a rip of the countrypolitan sound of the ’60s is simplistic. The piquant “Christian Rock,” from the Nashville Plays Dallas EP, works off a two-chord vamp and mixes pedal steel with warm electric piano. Aw, C’mon’s “Nothing but a Blur From a Bullet Train” features a string arrangement straight out of a ’70s Bobby Womack recording, while the horn swells on Tools in the Dryer’s “ Love TKO” suggest a kind of ambient soul music undreamed of in Daniel Lanois’ philosophy. Listening to Lambchop records and to The Moon Was Blue, you get the sense that Nevers wants to create an alternate version of pop-music history; his aesthetic, shaped by technology, embraces some of country music’s signature sounds. “Well, a little pedal steel goes a long way,” Nevers says. “When it shows up, I want it to be doing something that isn’t just a lick, so I treat it almost as a theremin.” Nevers’ production aesthetic translates into artistic vision whether he’s working with Bare or indie rockers Lone Official, whose new Tuckassee Take is a distillation of guitar-driven pop. “A cross between Lambchop and Television” is how Nevers describes Tuckassee, which features Matt Button’s mock-heroic lyrics and vocals, all supported by elegantly recorded guitars and pedal steel. “Mark’s setup is like that of an old ’70s country music band,” Button says, “and that sound comes through. Because it was done at his house, it was very comfortable. We did an album before, at a Music Row studio, and it was super dry.” Tuckassee works as a version of the pastoral—“If you should see the bright city lights / Promise me you’ll turn and run away,” Button sings—with a healthy dose of horse racing, betting and urban alienation thrown in. Loopy lyrics gain effectiveness under Nevers’ guidance, and if Button’s “Amelia Earhart” comes off a bit like Pavement, it’s recorded far more effectively, and ends with a gorgeous pedal-steel motif. Nevers displays admirable perfectionism in recording and mixing, and he seems to be a fairly unobtrusive presence in the studio. Staton, who recorded her new His Hands at Beech House, relished the novel experience of recording there (“We’d sit on this old-fashioned swing on the porch, and cut up like musicians do,” she says), and appreciated Nevers’ relatively hands-off methods. “I’d been used to producers sending me back to punch in,” Staton says. “But we just went in and did it, and sometimes I had to tell him I wanted to do a part over.” As for Nevers, he obviously knew when he had gotten something good; as he says, “The Charlie Rich song [‘You Never Really Wanted Me’], which is an amazing vocal performance—that’s all one take, and probably the best thing on the record.” His Hands updates Southern soul music as intelligently as any record in recent memory, while Tuckassee Take uses the building blocks of indie rock to climb into pure obsession. Similarly, Nevers’ spare, shimmering production of Imaad Wasif both conceals and amplifies Wasif’s self-possessed declarations of isolation and paranoia. Wasif, currently both guitarist and opening act for The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, benefits from Nevers’ ambient noises and cunningly layered guitar tones. The result is one of the most mysterious folk-rock records since Skip Spence’s 1969 Nashville-recorded Oar. If record producers breathe life into inert ideas, they can also express the spirit of a place. Nevers’ work gives us a Nashville comfortable with its past: the pop goo that sticks to country music, the individualists who take the stage at the Springwater, the undying passion of a Charlie Louvin, and the country-soul that has always played a part in the city’s musical heritage. Yet Nevers retains an image of the more staid, now vanished town he knew twenty years ago. “The first time I saw the Ramones was at Fisherman’s Wharf, 1987 or 1988,” he says. “They were already way over, but Nashville didn’t know what to do with them. People just sorta went crazy, and started smashing these tables to get them out of the way. The owner got in front of Joey Ramone and was pointing at bouncers to throw people out. It turned into a great riot, for Nashville—rock lives.”