Meet Lij Shaw | Music Producer / Podcast Host

We had the good fortune of connecting with Lij Shaw and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Lij, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
I have always loved making music and was technically minded. So becoming a music producer made a lot of sense for me. I loved my experiences of being in various bands and learning how to engineer and produce records gave me the ability to essentially join many different bands while helping them record in the studio.

After a couple of decades of recording music, I got interested in podcasting. So in 2015, I decided to launch a show that would allow me to interview other music producers and engineers to talk about our shared love of making records. I called my show Recording Studio Rockstars because it reflects the feelings of the music producers and engineers who make so many great records but don’t often get the credit they deserve for their work. Now the podcast has reached almost 3 million downloads with over 450 interviews. Rather than spending all my effort trying to make one great record and hoping that thousands will listen to it, I have been able to reach many thousands of listeners who are out there making records all over the world.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I am very interested in pushing my creative boundaries and my favorite activity is to make music with my friends in the studio. For me, the scary part of making music has been lyric songwriting and becoming the singer on the mic (I’ve always been more of a background musician).

So my goal now is to learn the art of songwriting. One of the ways that I have been able to do more of this is through a writing exercise we call Poetry Scores where my friend Chris King shares a poem he wrote and then I take that poem and turn it into a song that I get to sing. It has allowed me to make a lot of new records recently and even get my other friends to do the same and start singing as well. As a result, we now have a small record label with many new records cued up for release and I am inspired to write my own lyrics too, and book new live shows. I’m having a blast!

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
There are many great places to go see live music here in Music City Nashville TN. I would take them downtown to Broadway to visit Roberts Western Wear for some old-school two-stepping western swing music. Then I would head over to East Nashville and Madison to hit The Cobra, Five Spot, East Room, Underdog, and Dees Lounge for some great local bands. Of course, my friends are interested in recording music so we would spend lots of time in my studio TheToyBoxStudio.com, and go visit some other great studios like Blackbird Studios, RCA B, Sterling Sound, and The Quonset Hut. Nashville also has a bunch of great museums and one of my favorites is totally free, The Tennessee State Museum where you can go learn all the history of music in TN and hear the one-of-a-kind natural echo delay in the upstairs rotunda. Finally, we would go eat in many of my favorite Mexican restaurants like El Jalisience, Andrea, Mas Tacos, and La Hacienda. I’m vegan too so of course I would have to take them to The Be Hive, Graze, and Sunflower Cafe in Berry Hill.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I want to thank my mentors Robin Eaton and Brad Jones who gave me my first professional recording studio job, Alex The Great. They taught me how what making a real record looked and sounded like. Years later I met the successful producer/engineer/mixer Glenn Rosenstein (Ziggy Marley, Talking Heads, Fame Studios) who showed me how to be serious about the business of making music. Glenn inspired me to connect with the companies that make the tools we use in the recording studio and to understand that we need to think outside the box of our career to understand things like financial investing for our future as well.

Website: TheToyBoxStudio.com RecordingStudioRockstars.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rsrockstars/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rsrockstars/

Twitter: https://x.com/rsrockstars

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RecordingStudioRockstars/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/RecordingStudioRockstars

Other: https://solo.to/lijshawmusic

Image Credits
Anthony Matula