Off Route 28, on top of a mountain overlooking the Ashokan Reservoir in Boiceville lies Sun Mountain Studios, the recording studio and home of record producer, film composer, musician, arranger, and engineer David Baron, who is quietly producing some of the biggest hits in music right now in the Hudson Valley. Baron’s clientele includes top artists in the world: The Lumineers, Shania Twain, Jade Bird, Noah Kahan, Shawn Mendes, Vance Joy, Meghan Trainor, Lenny Kravitz, Donna Lewis, Matt Maeson, Lana Del Rey, Keith Urban, and Jason Mraz. He has also worked with local legends like The Felice Brothers and Simi Stone.
Born in Boiceville, Baron grew up in the music business and was an avid lover of creating sounds. His father, Aaron Baron, was an engineer who pioneered on-site recording of live performance with his “Location Recorders,” a mobile studio where the elder Baron recorded his most notable work including the legendary Live at the Fillmore East album by the Allman Brothers and BB King’s Live in Cook County Jail.
After studying classical piano and technology at Oberlin Conservatory, the younger Baron founded Baron and Baron, an audio production and original music house with his father where the two composed music for a variety of television networks like ABC, Sony, Nickelodeon, Discovery and many more. Baron also created jingles and scores for many advertisements including Verizon, Pepsi, and Disney. After Baron and Baron dissolved in 2000, the younger Baron partnered with Lenny Kravitz and Henry Hirsch in a hybrid vintage analog tape and Pro Tools recording studio called Edison Studios at the Hotel Edison in Manhattan. After 9/11, Baron decided to move back to the Hudson Valley, and in 2004, he built what would become Sun Mountain Studios.
The Hudson Valley has changed drastically since Baron’s return. “In the 20 years I’ve been back here, it’s developed a lot economically,” Baron observed. “Restaurants are way fancier. Everything is way more expensive. The culture’s changed a lot. From what I understand, it was pretty rough in the 90s and there was a lot of economic calamity after IBM left. Post-Covid-19 it’s gotten way more expensive to live here, way fancier, way more music people. When I first got here there wasn’t a lot of professional music being done here. Woodstock was known for music and there have always been pockets of greatness, but the big studios had shut down, there weren’t a ton of producers producing a lot of work in the early 2000s. That really started to change in the teens. There were always musicians who lived in the area, but you can actually look now and say that The Lumineers record here, for example. There is music that is massively consumed coming from here, and that’s a really big shift. It’s putting the area on the map and we’re only at the beginning, which is super exciting. The more visibility the area gets, the better it is for all of us because it attracts more people. It’s good when things come out of here and then the minute there’s a hit out of here, people pay attention to it.”
While the Hudson Valley music scene is growing exponentially, Baron believes that because there are so many things happening, we need even more venues, more musicians, and more music people coming to the area. He cites Pete Shapiro taking over Bearsville Theatre as an influential addition to the growing music scene in the Hudson Valley. Across both the Billboard charts and the Hudson Valley, the indie-pop genre has taken over. Recent collaborations between UPAC and Bardavon with Impact Concerts are bringing more commercial artists to the area like Violent Femmes, Gregory Alan Isakov, and Father John Misty. Iconic Hudson Valley venues like Tubby’s, The Colony, Levon Helm Studios, Daryl’s House, The Avalon Lounge, and festivals like the O+ Festival, summer concert series with artists like Waxahachie, Snail Mail, Lucius, and Al Olender at Arrowood Farms in Accord continue to bring music lovers to the area. Just last week, Impact Concerts announced the opening of their new venue Assembly on the top floor of the former and renovated catholic school St. Joseph’s in the Stockade District of Kingston. Kicking off with a back-to-back bill of a local favorite The Felice Brothers on New Year’s Eve, Founding Partner of Impact Concerts Drew Frankel said, “there’s an energy and vibe of creativity that has drawn artists and musicians to the Hudson Valley and Catskills for well over a century. The Hudson Valley is redefining itself as a premiere destination for arts and culture.”
Baron cites one of his longest and closest creative partners, The Lumineers, in helping spotlight the Hudson Valley music scene, and partially credits them for the commercial revival of folk and indie music. “They have always been really authentic and formative. Even all the people that are doing well right now like Noah Kahan and Zach Bryan both have a similar energy,” Baron observed.
Kahan, who catapulted his career with the heartfelt and viral song “Stick Season” on TikTok, is one of the many artists who have benefited from the platform. Unsurprisingly, Baron believes the video-based app affected the music industry enormously, saying “it puts promotion in a very different space than paying for radio and major label promotion. It used to be that the major labels could just push products through and they would decide what was gonna be hit and you basically were forced because they pay for the radio and it would just get blasted into your life. You couldn’t escape it. Now, something gets uploaded of somebody doing a little performance and all of a sudden it blows up. No one can control it.”
Baron also pointed out that TikTok is a way that record labels can do A&R now. “My son is 16, and that generation is resistant to playlists, which is the way that older people used to discover music. Playlists still have their power, but they don’t nearly have the power they had two years ago. They’re really nice, but they usually don’t make you happen. Tik Tok makes you happen. If you’re lucky, you can move people off of TikTok to Apple Music, Amazon or Spotify, but for the most part, the under 22 age group determines everything about what’s a hit. That generation is very much into finding someone they like and then deciding, ‘Okay, we love Noah Kahan. So now we’ve chosen him.’ And then they go with the people they chose. It’s a very different way than it used to be.” Baron adds that the perfect, tightly packaged music went away with the rise of TikTok. “All of a sudden it was mostly performers at a piano or an acoustic guitar singing in a raw way and I can see her. I can see her room. I can see her posters. She’s not perfect.’”
Baron has always been drawn to this raw, vulnerable style of music: “I always liked that spirit and energy of things feeling really interactive and feeling like they happen as a photograph rather than a fully photoshopped-AI painting. I like it when things aren’t perfect. I like hearing humanity – even someone clearing their throat or cracking a note – anything that makes me feel like there’s a human being involved in the process. For me, humanity is at the core of what I really love in music,” he said. Baron is a man of contrasts, citing his love for blending retro and modern with the orchestrated and raw, and believes the contrast is what brings out the emotion of a scene or in a song. “I like mixes that sound more like rough mixes rather than a super slick, photoshopped LA kind of mix.The opposite of my musical style would be a song from a Marvel comic movie – songs that are perfect and big and glitzy and there’s no humanity left in it. It’s still beautiful and it’s amazing art, but I’m not interested in that. I’m way more interested in something that looks like a Jim Jarmusch movie that’s not perfect, a little grainy, a bit [off], and very human. I like humanity and I like to hear it. I like to work with people who are brave enough to show the world that they’re not perfect. It’s insane how vulnerable you have to be to be good. You have to be willing to be raw and be seen.”
Baron had his own TikTok success story after producing the viral song “Scared to Start” by Michael Marcagi – a perfect example of both Baron’s and the younger generation’s desire for authenticity. At almost 500 million Spotify streams and counting, the song produced by Baron that went viral on TikTok was a song from an EP made with no label and no expectations. “Marcagi was in a band that got dropped from the label and broke up because they were all at that age where they start having children and getting married. We did everything in-house and mastered and mixed the record. One night, he had insomnia and couldn’t sleep. He went on Google, searched for images, found one he liked and posted it with the second verse of the song with the hashtag #vanlife. It blew up. He calls me and he’s like, oh, did you see what’s happening with the song on TikTok? It was at five or six million views overnight because Colorado van life people picked it up and it just took off,” Baron said. He has produced all of Michael Marcagi’s released music, including the most recent single, “Good Enough”, co-written with the lead singer of the Lumineers, Wesley Schultz. Marcagi and Schultz recorded it together at Sun Mountain Studios.
Baron’s approach to music has been influential to dozens of artists, one being Ginger Winn, a singer-songwriter and producer who recorded her debut album with Baron at Sun Mountain Studios earlier this year and debuted it live at the Woodstock Way Hotel. Winn sought out the producer after being drawn to the raw, emotional production of The Lumineers most recent album, Brightside, and the fact it was a complete album meant to be listened to as a singular piece.
“David was fun and easy going to work with but also shared his ideas and thoughts,” she said. “He has a deep knowledge of music theory that allows him to bypass a lot of the unnecessary sounds that many producers throw in without knowing exactly why they are doing it. His classical training keeps his music open without overcomplicating things, and the assortment of his vintage synths that he has adds so much to his sound as a producer.”
Baron mentions the global success of Kahan’s “Stick Season” as proof of the importance of remaining authentic. “Noah was trying forever until he got commercially big,” he said. “It’s interesting because I worked on his first record for Republic–a very commercial label. They were trying to make him into a pop artist. And then Covid hit. He always wanted to be a folk artist, so he decided that he was just going to do his own music the way he wanted to do it. And because it was Covid, they basically said ‘go knock yourself out.’ He finally made a record that he wanted to make and that’s the one that did it: when you let the artists actually do what they want.”
Above all, Baron believes that allowing yourself to be yourself is an act of bravery. “Life is just life. It’s like a river. You’re gonna get on a boat and it’s going to go where it’s going. Some things are going to be good, some things are going to be bad, but it’s just going to go anyway. So you might as well enjoy the ride, because it’s the only ride you have. It’s very hard because if you have check marks of things you need to achieve to be happy, you’re really never going to be happy. You’re better off just taking each day as it comes.”
If Baron’s 2024 was any testament to this hypothesis, his everyday bravery and dedication to being authentic in both how he lives his life and how he creates music seems to be working well.
Join the family! 
