As producers, John Leventhal, Pete Kennedy, and John Jennings all answer to this job description, and though you may not know their names, their behind-the-scenes work for such artists as Shawn Colvin, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Nanci Griffith has made a real impact on the sound of today's singer-songwriters on record and on stage. Each does very different work, yet they share a passion for the guitar, a fascination with the studio, and a respect for great writing. There's a lot that happens on the way from a basic guitar-and-vocal arrangement of a new song to its full-band realization on CD. What follows is a guitarists'-eye view of what that transformation involves.

FROM GUITARIST TO PRODUCER

Backstage at the Bottom Line in New York, Pete Kennedy is giving an animated interview between sets. While John Wesley Harding tears it up on the other side of the wall, Kennedy holds forth on a subject near and dear to his heart - how to play guitar for the song. "As guitarists, we grew up listening to records and focusing on the guitar part of the record. We don't realize that no one else does that - only guitarists do that. The rest of the audience focuses on the vocal. Once you realize that, it puts everything into perspective right away."

Such perspective made Kennedy one of the top-call guitarists in Washington, D.C., for years. Eventually he made the transition from local club hero to nationally touring sideman, working for Kate Wolf, Nanci Griffith, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. About ten years ago he began producing his own records, averaging an album a year ever since; his latest is Shearwater, an all-instrumental outing on the Guitar Artistry label that includes guest appearances by Tony Rice and Jerry Douglas. Kennedy has recorded with such artists as Nanci Griffith and Mike Auldridge and is now touring with his wife, Maura, as a duo called the Kennedys; their latest Green Linnet recording, Life Is Large, was produced by Pete Kennedy and features a host of guest artists, including Roger McGuinn, Steve Earle, Nils Lofgren, and the Dixie Hummingbirds.

Jennings must be fairly successful at this mission. In between touring and recording with Carpenter, he has produced artists as diverse as John Gorka and Janis Ian. He has also just released his first solo album, Buddy, on Vanguard, with Bob Dawson as coproducer. For this debut, Jennings sang, wrote all the songs, played a bunch of guitars, and finally got to have his name, he says, "on the front of a record." "The point for me, with any record, is to not get the artist fired from the label," Jennings says. "So that's my aim with myself, too: to get to the next one, and the one after that."

John Leventhal, a native New Yorker, also backed into his first producing job. He was doing live gigs and cowriting with Shawn Colvin in the early '80s, and when she got signed, he was the one to produce what became 1989's Steady On. Getting a Grammy for the first thing you produce tends to make the phone ring, and Leventhal has gone on to produce records by his wife Rosanne Cash, Mark Cohn, Patty Larkin, and Jim Lauderdale, among others, and he recently reunited with Colvin to produce A Few Small Repairs.

Leventhal has long been intrigued by both guitar playing and record production, and in a conversation at his East Village studio he reflects on the need for balance between the two. "Too much clever playing just kind of clutters it up," he says. "Cool guitar playing is less important to me now than it was ten years ago." Leventhal is one of those rare musicians whose encyclopedic knowledge of all things guitaristic - which is a big part of what he brings to the table as a producer - has not prevented him from developing a voice of his own on the instrument. "There are certain roles the acoustic guitar has played in pop music, and all those styles are firmly embedded in my head - it's like a little library I can draw upon. But what I try to do is sort of mix and match styles so it's not just derivative."

THE PRODUCER'S ANGLE

Pete Kennedy's first concern lies with reaching the listener without the essential components of a live show - the spontaneity, the chemistry among the artists on stage and between the artists and the audience. When he's producing a record, his question is: What's going to make up for all of that? "When someone's listening to a record, they're either in their car on their way to work on the freeway, or else they've bought the record and they're home at the end of the day, and they sit down and put it in the CD player. They're not in a club with 200 other people who are all excited about what's going to happen tonight; they're sitting in their house. [The record] needs a different kind of energy level. They can't see you interacting. You have to replace that [live energy] with a big, full sound."

Holding the reins of a project may seem like a lofty position, but John Jennings infuses the job with selflessness. Vanishing into the work, he feels, is preferable to leaving his musical fingerprints on a project. "I really like to help," he says. "There are certain producers that you can hear and go, 'This is most undeniably X.' I would rather people not be able to do that with records that I work on, and there are days when I fear that they can. I would rather they say, 'Boy, that's a great record,' or 'Boy, [that artist] is really good,' rather than 'Boy, Jennings did a great job."' For Jennings, the more he's capable of musically, the better he can do his job, and that's what chops, versatility, and multi-instrumental abilities are for. "I certainly like the idea of making some sort of sonic statement. It's wonderful fun. But I want to be an enabler. I want to be a recording Swiss army knife."

Leventhal observes, "There's a tradition of how people approach producing solo artists, which is basically telling the artist to 'do what you do solo, and we're going to put a bass player and a drummer with you and we'll make it work.' And that's legitimate, particularly if you have a good bass player and a good drummer. But I think people tend to come to me when they want to do something other than that. They want to make a record that hopefully retains the integrity of who they are as artists and who they may be as solo performers, but sort of expands their palette. The challenge for me is to retain the essence of who they are, not overwhelm them with all this production stuff; I try to make the stuff expand [the music], make it deeper. Sometimes I probably don't succeed, but that's the fun of it - the challenge of it, anyway."

Kennedy, too, expresses the need to achieve a balance between the sound of the artist and the sound the producer creates or gravitates toward. The sound that he gets on his own records with Maura is a big part of what he brings to the table as a producer. "If you hear our records and you could imagine yourself with that kind of framework around you," he says, "maybe Maura doing backup vocals and me doing guitar stuff and arranging, then the whole package fits together."

STARTING POINTS

One thing Kennedy keeps in mind is the difference between a songwriter's point of view and a producer's. "Songwriters never think about perfection," he says. "They think about songs. And when they go in the studio, suddenly they have to go into this completely different mode of singing everything completely in tune and phrasing with the rhythm section." Reflecting on the immense changes taking place in recording technology all the time, he's optimistic about how advances in digital editing could take the pressure of perfection off of performers, freeing them up to give more musical takes since they'd know that the little mistakes could be worked with. "I think it would be great if we got to the point where they didn't have to think like that, and the producer could take care of all that cool stuff," he says.

As the Nashville truism goes, "It all begins with a song." Still, for these producers' clients, it often also begins with a guitar part. "A lot of the people that I work with are really good guitar players," says Leventhal. "Shawn Colvin is a really good guitar player, Patty Larkin is a really good guitar player, Mark Cohn is actually a really good guitar player. When I say good, I mean they have really focused, defined styles. They may not be great session players or whatever, but their playing is definitely part of what makes their writing unique and different and evocative. So when those kinds of writers come up with stuff, I try to make it the integral thing."

Jennings shares this approach. "There's always something in Chapin's songs, and in most people's songs, that will give you a direction," he says. "That to me is the idea: to take that basic thing that someone comes in with and keep it intact. You can put as many instruments on it as you want, but keep their part complete within it."

DEVELOPING THE SONG

Kennedy, Leventhal, and Jennings all honed their chops through years of live local gigs, and honed their attitudes on playing a supporting role by working as sidemen and second guitarists. "It's great to try to be a guitar hero," observes Jennings without irony. "It's really fun and all of that, but since I couldn't be one, the more practical consideration for me was to say, 'Well, how can I play songs well?' Sometimes it's a line, sometimes it's reinforcing something that's there, sometimes it's a part that's more percussive ... I mean, it can be so many things. Sometimes the best way to do it is not to play at all."

Leventhal sees much of his studio role as giving the artist a unique or different environment for their songs than they may have had previously, while preserving that essential focus on the vocals and the lyrics. As a result, he says, "Even having my bag of tricks, I find that I'm continually trying to force myself not to rely on them, to look for new, interesting, and evocative ways to reinforce that fundamental part, and also to try not to have it sound like everybody else. That's a really important thing to me: I try to make sure that my records don't sound like everybody else's."

Toward that end, Leventhal has a wide variety of approaches to everything from how to come up with his parts and where to place them in the context of the song, to which instruments to record them with and how to record them. "Tunings are a big part of what I do," he says. "I try to find ways to voice chords and play things that aren't like everybody else, and one of the easiest and most effective ways for me to do that is with tunings. And I love'em."

Kennedy agrees, noting the practicality of using altered tunings in the studio. "When we play live, I always play in standard tuning," he says. "And that's because, in terms of the pacing of the show, we never like to stop between songs and find our way around different tunings." Recording, however, is another story. "You can create really cool colors in the studio when you're only laying one track [at a time]. You can tune your guitar just for that overdub by tuning to whatever the main chord is- especially if it's something weird like a seventh chord, and you can put the ninth right in the tuning. You do that and just play a lot of open strings and harmonics and stuff like that"

Jennings says he tries to keep an open mind about what might be the right tool for a given job. When it's time to find a distinctive sound, anything goes. "I spent 20 years of guitar playing fighting against instruments that I had, trying to get them to do things they didn't want to do. And once I stopped doing that, my life was much better. 'Oh, this is what this does. This might not be useful here, but it will be useful somewhere else.'" As an example, he cites the Martin Backpacker guitar, which of course does not sound or record quite like a vintage D-28. For that reason, he says, "Some people hate them. I love them, because they sound so distinctive." Jennings used one on Carpenter's A Place in the World, as well as in other sessions.

Leventhal, too, considers this open-minded approach one of his recording secrets. "I have a bunch of instruments," he says, including "my 25-year old Univox [acoustic] that has the same strings on it as the day it was born. That guitar has a great sound, and it doesn't sound like everything else." Using new strings for every new track has as much of an effect on the sound as anything else, and so, he explains, "I don't do that. I think I did that when I first started, 'cause it was almost like you were supposed to do it, but I don't do it anymore. If I want that sound - the really crystalline, great high end and all that really pure, crystalline articulation - I'll do it. If I want something that sounds a little meatier or warmer, I don't do it."

FROM RECORD TO STAGE

What happens to all of these guitar parts when it comes to playing live? The question of the relationship between the fully produced record and the live performance of the songs that ensues gets back to the initial discussion of the role of the producer. Kennedy reiterates his belief in the different energies at work on record and in front of a live audience: "To me, live [performances] and records are really different things. Other people make a record and then go out and play, doing the exact same sound that's on the record. But to me, playing live is all about chemistry and energy. It's about the chemistry between the people playing, in our case me and Maura as a duo, and the energy that the audience gets from that. So we don't need to sound exactly like the record to create [that energy]."

Leventhal is in complete agreement. "A record is a record," he avers. "When I go out and play, I'm not invested in duplicating what's on the record. I'm invested in duplicating the spirit and intent of the record, but I don't care about the specifics. I just want it to be really musical and feel good and show the artist off to the best advantage."

When Pete and Maura Kennedy begin the process of laying out and arranging already recorded tunes for duo performance, they go back to the songs' origins. "When we sit down in a motel room with two guitars," Pete says, "Maura will be playing something that has the bass line in it, and I'll be playing a part that's got chords but also has this jangly, open-string high E and B." Those parts get broken apart for recording purposes, because, for example, "You know you want the Rickenbacker to play the jangly high E strings and you want the bass to play the bass part." And so, he says, "It starts like that with the two acoustics, then we cut the record, then we go out and play, usually with two acoustics. So we go back to the composite parts that we started with when we first wrote the songs."

Mary Chapin Carpenter is able to go out and tour with her recording band, a band in which Jennings has been as much of an anchor for the last 14 years as he has been in the studio. "We have three guitarists now with Chapin's band. We have Chapin and Duke Levine - he's really fine, it's pretty scary," Jennings says with a laugh. "I had to start practicing again when he joined. So as far as the layering of parts goes, with that lineup it's not difficult."

FRONTMAN VS. SIDEMAN

Now that Jennings has completed his first solo recording, Buddy, he faces the same dilemma as any other "new" singer-songwriter with a fully produced record - what to do when he hits the road solo. "I'm certain that I'll do some solo things, maybe do some openers for people," he says. "Maybe I'll do some in stores and some radio stuff if it can be worked out." But unlike Kennedy, who now considers the Kennedys his full-time musical home, Jennings intends to keep producing various artists and touring with Carpenter too, while getting his solo life off the ground. "It's a parallel thing. They're all parallel to me. Mary Chapin Carpenter is not a 24-hour-a-day job. It is in certain parts of the year, but it's not all the time. I have plenty of time to do other things. Plus, at the moment there's no reason for me to go tour [solo] for nine months. I don't have to go play to make the record work, and that's not my main source of income."

Ask Kennedy why he made the move from backing up artists like Nanci Griffith at venues like Carnegie Hall, to recording for an independent label and returning to touring clubs and coffee-houses, and he states plainly, "I felt like I'd been to the mountain as a sideman. Look at the cast on [Griffith's] Other Voices, Other Rooms. When I first started being a sideman, I thought if I ever played on a cut with Dylan or Emmylou that I would retire from being a sideman. Because what else are you going to do after that?"

To date, Leventhal is the only one of the three with no release under his own name as an "artist." Is there a possible Leventhal solo record in the works? "It seems like I'm getting asked this question a lot," he says. "Yeah, I can imagine it. I don't think it would be a John Leventhal record; for one thing I sing like a frog. But I have this idea that I've been toying with, to have a band that might include a lot of the people I've worked with, sort of this cooperative effort. You know, I'd write a song with X and have Y sing it or write a song with A and have D sing it, just try to have this weird, uncategorizeable record. And I might do it. It just seems like a lot of work!"