Seattle's Most Historically Significant Music Studio Enters A New Era
Though I grew up 90 minutes north, and more recently spent eight years three hours south in Portland, I've never lived in Seattle. I have, however, spent a ton of time there on childhood trips and adulthood visits to see friends. Over the years, I've found myself most drawn to the North Seattle neighborhoods of Ballard and Fremont, and while walking around that charming region, I've often clocked a strange, windowless, triangular building that seems out of place on a main thoroughfare.
The Hall Of Justice, as it's been called for the past quarter-century, first opened as a studio in the mid-'70s. Operated by a revolving door of producers and engineers, it has amassed a discography that towers over every other studio in the region. It was literally ground zero for grunge, playing host to Green River and Soundgarden in 1987, then Screaming Trees, Tad, Mudhoney, and Nirvana in the ensuing years before the Nevermind boom of '91. But that's just the start. It's where Built To Spill did their debut album, Unwound laid down the bulk of their '90s material, Sleater Kinney did Dig Me Out, and Harvey Danger did the album with "Flagpole Sitta" on it.
In 2000, Death Cab For Cutie guitarist/songwriter/producer Chris Walla moved into the building and gave it its current name. He initially used it as a rehearsal space, but after recording a couple of Death Cab's breakout albums there, Walla turned The Hall into a hub for a new generation of mostly local bands looking to lay down their first "professional" recordings. Carrisa's Wierd, Hot Hot Heat, The Decemberists, Tegan and Sara, Nada Surf, and plenty of others all made their breakout albums in that tiny triangular room.
Walla has maintained a presence at the Hall Of Justice, but in more recent years, he started to cede duties to a pair of younger engineer/producers: Mike Vernon Davis and Sam Rosson. In the mid-2010s, Walla moved to Norway, and between periodic visits back to Seattle, he largely left control of the studio in the hands of Davis and Rosson, who have built up an impressive discography of their own with a younger generation of artists.
On October 1, Walla is fully handing the studio over to Davis, Rosson, and their friends/collaborators/business partners, Mikey Ferrario and James Kasinger. I was excited to learn about Walla's torch-pass to his heirs apparent, doubly so because I grew up with Mikey and Sam. I'm basically smack-dab between them in age—Mikey played in a band with my childhood friend's older brother, whose shows are the first I remember attending; Sam's mom was my Sunday School teacher, and their older brother and I worked together at the local movie theater. I've been delighted to keep up with Mikey and Sam's more recent musical endeavors, so I jumped at the chance to tell their story.
Below, I've edited and condensed interviews with all five into something resembling a linear explanation of The Hall Of Justice's recent history and its new operators' vision for the future.
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Chris Walla: For years, The Hall Of Justice was wherever I said that it was—it was just whatever house [Death Cab] were living in, or whatever rehearsal space we had. [I chose the name] with the idea that, well, whatever happens here is good and just and unimpeachable. [Former operator] John Goodmanson sold us the console and the tape machine, and let us borrow a bunch of equipment, which has a lot of symmetry with what I'm doing with Mike, Mikey, Sam and James.
Mike Vernon Davis: I was interning and getting into audio out of high school. I played in a rock band called SEACATS. Mikey played in the band with me, and we started becoming friends that way. But I just cold emailed Chris after a couple years of interning and getting my feet wet with different producers and engineers. I went up there and hung out with Chris for a day, and we got on pretty well, and I've been there ever since.
Walla: Mike pretty much showed on my doorstep like a golden retriever. Just like, 'Hey! What can what can I do? How can I do it?' I happened to be in the middle of a project that I was kind of drowning in, so I was like, 'Actually, I need you to set up some sessions for me.' I really just needed somebody to do like, mouse clicks. So I sent him a template full of stuff, and he got these sessions wrapped. In all honesty, he did it pretty badly, but he did it pretty badly with a lot of spirit, and I was really grateful for his not-great work.
But I just really enjoyed Mike, and I enjoyed being around him, and I enjoyed where he was in his trajectory when we met. He was really young, and he had a little bit of practical knowledge, but he was asking all the right questions, and it was clear that he was leading with an emotional connection to whatever was coming through the speakers. It's something that some people have, something that you can water and fertilize and nurture, and if they don't have it, they remain good engineers, but they can't see the big, sweeping cinematic arcs and aren't able to zoom out and see how [an album] is gonna fit into somebody's life who has been going through a breakup or having a huge life change. And Mike's made of that stuff. He's just a naturally empathic record producer.
Shortly afterward, Davis brought Sam Rosson in to assist with recording and engineering. Together, they've worked on albums by Lo Moon, Great Grandpa, Pool Kids, Ratboys, Pedro The Lion, and others. During this time Walla moved to Norway and started to take a diminished role in The Hall's day-to-day operations.
Sam Rosson: Over the better part of the decade or so that Mike and I have been working there, every couple years we would get an email from Chris being like, ‘I'm reevaluating how much it makes sense for me to still be running the studio.' So the workflow has been like, Chris manages everything over email, and any work that needs to be done in-person is what Mike and I do for the space. Chris will come back to town a couple times a year, either to work on a record or just to take stock of the space and do whatever physical repairs or work he wanted to do, or just hang out and see the condition of things.
Walla: Mike and I have been talking about [me handing over the studio to him] for five or six years, because my wife and I want to stay in Norway. And like so many other people for so many different reasons, the pandemic was really brutal for business. And even at the best of times, I never really advertised or promoted [the studio].
Rosson: I think [Walla] just got to a place in this last year where he was like, ‘Okay, for real this time, I don't think it makes much sense for me to be doing this anymore.’ When this had happened in the past, Mike and I would talk about it, and we would just be like, ‘There's no fucking way we can run a recording studio right now.’ Like five years ago, we were 24 years old. How are we gonna do that, you know?
Walla: Earlier this year, a whole bunch of things happened at once that just made me feel like, 'Wow, now is really the time.' It's been really emotional and heart-wrenching for me, because I love that space so much. It's such a tangible and physical extension of my person and my personality, and I feel that every time I'm in there—it still makes so much sense to me. The idea of doing a hard shutdown felt really bad. The last thing I want is for it to turn into an artisanal gelato shop, and that's exactly what would happen.
So I called Mike like, 'Dude, it's time. I know you're not really in a position to do it, but I want to be out by October 1, and if you want to try to cook up a plan, I have to give 90 days' notice by the end of June. The first couple of conversations I had with him were like, 'I just can't do it. There's no way.' So we were starting to look at a hard crash out—I'm emptying out the building, and here comes the gelato shop.
And he called me back like, 'Dude, I can't do it. I have to figure it out. I'm gonna figure it out. I have to do this.' I was like, 'Okay! Let me know if I can help. These are the parameters, and if you can put something together, and if I can help with equipment and logistics and the handover, like I'm absolutely happy to do that. I just need to not be on the lease anymore.'
Rosson: July is when we started talking pretty seriously about it. The main motivation and goal is that we don't want the space to go away. There's not a ton of people in Seattle trying to buy recording studios right now. It would not only just be a bummer, but it would make Mike and I's careers a lot more difficult as freelance producer engineers if the space wasn't around. That's where we learned how to record, and got good, and where we've both done the majority of our projects.
It also just feels like we’re the right people to do it. We've been working there for so long already. We have an extremely invested interest in the culture and history of the space, and keeping that moving forward, and it also just felt like the right time for us to try and do it. Getting Mikey and James into the fold was the very necessary piece of the puzzle that was missing before, on top of us just feeling more prepared to do this sort of thing.
James Kasinger: When Covid rolled around, I know that Mike and Mikey had been spending a lot of time together, working on [their group] Michael The Band in The Hall. I joined them during part of that process and then I started spending a lot more time in The Hall. To this day, we've done so much recording there. I think Covid really brought this whole cohort together.
Mikey Ferrario: It feels so good to make stuff in there, and Mike and I have worked together in countless studios through the Northwest and West Coast. I think a huge part of that is Chris himself. He's curated it all and he has a really comforting spirit, a very inviting energy. It’s sort of like he’s curated this living room of making stuff, and it feels really, really good. So when I heard that [The Hall] was possibly going to be done, I was like, ‘Hell no dude, we have to keep this place going, and more people need to know and need to experience the space.’
Walla: Over the last four or five months, we've just been hammering out this plan, and the thing that they've got cooked up is, like, it might actually work. It still feels a little crazy to me, but it's not nuts. Our deal feels pretty good to me, and I think it feels pretty good to them, and I'm really hopeful and optimistic that it's actually going to fly.
Davis: The goal is to build the business off of what it is now, so keep it a freelance studio that anybody can book. That's the biggest thing that Sam and I are after. There's not many studios left in Seattle that are affordable enough to go in with a rock band that's not on a major label, that doesn't have a ton of budget, and maybe doesn’t even own that many instruments, and just go in and make something that sounds really good. That's our number one plan with it: just to keep the books full, try to do some promotion. There hasn't been a ton of advertisement with the studio thus far.
Ferrario: That's a big goal of ours, to branch out, reach out to other people and different groups of people, types of people that haven't been in there in the past. Affiliating with other spaces that cater to different styles of music is big for me. It’s pretty much been all indie music in there, so I’d really like to branch that out.
Davis: Chris has so much lore and weight around his whole world that he hasn't really had to promote it that much beyond that. And we're definitely trying to take the current plan and just grow it and let more people know that it's a studio that you can book for $350 a day, which is pretty cheap for Seattle studios. We're also introducing this thing called the Hall of Justice Recording Class that's gonna be a six-week, once-a-week course that anybody can take and learn how to use the studio. That's going to be a part of being able to keep it cheap, is having this supplementary income coming from the recording classes.
Ferrario: [James and I] are less on the tech side of things, more of operating the business side. We're in it to collect community equipment so we can have more access to recording music of our own. But both of us are planning on learning engineering stuff too. We're gonna take the class ourselves, and then we're gonna try to be recording music ourselves.
Walla: The place that they're in right now—the world is their oyster, it's full of possibility, and it's full of a big, bright future. At the end of the day, they're gonna have to make whatever decisions they need to make to keep the lights on, and I'm not far enough inside their plan and what they plan to do, outreach-wise, to get people that haven't been in there before. But I don't doubt that there is a plan.
Over the years, Walla has amassed a formidable array of house equipment and instruments that live in The Hall Of Justice. He's taking his favorites with him, but he's leaving the rest in the studio. This remaining collection was recently appraised at $650,000. It's an incredibly generous inheritance to The Hall's new tenants.
Ferrario: Chris handing it over in the way that he's doing it is the nicest way of possibly transacting that. He's essentially doing us the biggest favor on Earth by letting us live our dream. It is so inaccessibly expensive to buy equipment [like this]. He's allowing us to, over time, purchase it with no interest, no official agreement other than, like, ‘We want to buy it and you want to sell it.’ We're going to buy it once we can. And he's like, ‘Use this space to generate the capital to do that.’
It couldn't have happened without a stand-up dude that has the best intentions in mind with this whole thing. I just want to shout out to that. Like, it's fucking awesome. Every fucking rock star we've ever met sucks balls. He actually has a good heart, and he's acting on that, and he's following through with that.
Kasinger: [Walla]'s definitely the elder statesman of indie rock, or at least one of them, and he’s paving the way for us and for future generations to continue doing music in the way that he saw it and the way that he experienced it. He's paying it forward, right? This is like, the handoff, and the push, because he's really pushing us to move on to the next thing and create great things. That's a really beautiful part of the story.
The Hall has remained intact for close to 50 years because of transitions like this.
Rosson: The studio has changed hands like, five or six times from when it was converted to a studio til now. Every time that's happened, it's gone from somebody who had been there for a while and maybe feels like they've outgrown the space or is ready to move on for one reason or another, to someone a little younger who’s at a place where they're able to make it work for the first time, in terms of running a recording space.
That's kept the identity of the music that has been brought in there and made there, within a certain pocket of what's happening in Seattle. The things that have been done there have never felt like they've been out of touch, or handled without care. Every time a transition like this has happened, it's birthed a new generation of really important music in Seattle. That seems to be what is happening now, with Chris having had such a large impact on the Seattle music scene, coming to us, who are a generation younger, and we're super fucking eager to have our imprint on the music that's been done here. And that's always the way it's gone. So it just feels right.
Walla: I think spaces are really special. The more I do this, the more I feel like—you can move equipment around, you make a run at making a studio—and some of them turn out to be great places, some of them flounder. But there is something that comes from generations of people working and doing the same job in the same space, that is just priceless.
It's not unique to recording studios, but when you lose that space and lose a whole way of record-making, there's a whole philosophy that goes away when the space does. That's something I was mourning and wrestling with when it was starting to feel like I was gonna have to hand the keys back and just liquidate everything. So I'm so grateful for those guys for putting a lot on the line. It's really admirable and really important for the community.
Check out The Hall Of Justice's website here.
BOI (Best Of Inbox) #40
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Olivia O. - "Hole"
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All Inbox Infinity picks are available in playlist form via Apple Music and Spotify.