Recording Mitski at Home, Part 1

Nashville, TN (May 5, 2026)—These days, when someone talks about their home studio, as often as not it turns out to be a professionally designed, constructed and outfitted space on par with the average commercial facility. Not Patrick Hyland’s home studio in Nashville.

“It’s just my house,” he says. “I don’t have a treated space.”

Hyland is the engineer and producer behind all but the first of Mitski’s eight studio albums, as well as her touring guitarist and the band’s musical director since 2014. The basic tracks for her latest full-length project—Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, released at the end of February through Dead Oceans—were recorded almost entirely at Hyland’s house. Strings and horns, arranged and conducted by Drew Erickson, were overdubbed at Sunset Sound and TTG Studios in Los Angeles and engineered by Michael Harris. The album was mastered by Bob Weston.

Every Mitski album that Hyland has worked on was at least partially done in his house. “It’s how we’ve always worked,” he says. “It used to be very overdubbed. We’ve been trying to incorporate more live musicianship on the last two albums, because it’s always better when there’s a live band, but in the beginning, we just didn’t have the resources, and I was playing all the instruments.”

Mitski typically has the songs fully written when she arrives, Hyland reports: “She comes in with chord charts and the vocal melody, and if there’s a featured instrumental part, that’ll be written. Then I do my best to not mess it up. She’s obviously a very talented songwriter and composer and has very little mind for production, so I get the privilege of working on these brilliant songs. I wouldn’t say I have carte blanche, but I have quite a lot of leeway, sonically.”

For instance, he says, “I’ll fill out a lot of background textures and percussion and stuff. I used to play a lot of drums. I don’t so much anymore, but I think about percussion in a way that she doesn’t. Sometimes she’ll say, ‘I’m hearing a rock thing,’ and maybe she’ll play a few tracks that were inspirational, but often she says, ‘How do you think people should hear it?’ Having worked together so much, she has a level of trust that I won’t ruin it.”

• Mixing Mitski’s Ever-Expanding Tour

On this project, as on Mitski’s previous album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, the bass and drums were tracked together, with Hyland at the DAW. “I’m engineering and producing those sessions, so I don’t want to also be playing guitar. Then I’ll take ages and ages to do my guitars on my own, and experiment with amps and guitars and bits and bobs.”

The new Mitski album is the first time he has recorded her current rhythm section, drummer Bruno Esrubilsky and bass player Jeni Magaña, despite them all having toured together since 2018.

“I’ve been playing with Bruno longer than any other drummer I’ve ever played with,” he says, “so it was a bit insane that we’d never made a record together. The same is true of Jeni. It was overdue.” Esrubilsky had already flown home to Los Angeles when it was decided to put drums on two of the songs. “So we got Marlon Patton, who’s a fantastic drummer based here in Nashville, to come in and button those two up.”

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Tracking sessions at the house can turn Hyland’s life upside down. “I had to take the dining room table out to get the drums in there. I had to eat at my desk for months because there was no dining room table.”

COME BACK TOMORROW FOR PART TWO!