Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie haven’t quite seen it all yet, but they’ve been through enough to seem as if they had — and they make you believe it — without really having to say anything. It’s a trick good producers develop — a survival strategy. An attitude. When a band enters the lab-like atmosphere of a studio with some songs and maybe a vague notion of trying to capture an elusive spark that is, by definition, unquantifiable and unexplainable, it’s the producer’s job not just to make it happen, but to make the band believe that it will happen. That the foreign jungle of knobs, faders, patch chords, and computers that is the modern recording studio is a friendly place. That they’ve put themselves and their songs in good hands. And, since first working out of Boston’s Fort Apache Studios in the late ’80s, Slade and Kolderie have been making whatever it is happen for well over a decade now — most notably, perhaps, for the hard-to-handle Courtney Love and Hole on their 1994 landmark Live Through This (Geffen), and also for the delicately introspective Radiohead on their debut Pablo Honey (Capitol, 1993). The Slade/Kolderie-produced Life’ll Kill Ya (Artemis), far and away the best Warren Zevon album in what seems like forever, was released in 1999. And the two just put the finishing touches on the new Go-Go’s album.

So if Slade and Kolderie haven’t quite seen it all yet, you certainly get the sense that there isn’t a studio situation they wouldn’t be able to handle. Hell, these are the guys who lived through Live Through This. That was before Courtney was concerned about her public image. And between them, working together and singly, they’ve left their elusive imprint on dozens of other recordings that helped form the backbone of the indie-, alternative-, or whatever-rock canon — now-seminal recordings by Dinosaur Jr., the Pixies, Throwing Muses, Uncle Tupelo, Morphine, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones . . . the list goes on. So it’s one thing for Slade and Kolderie to sing the praises of an artist or a band they’ve worked with, or even to catch one of them admitting to a certain humble degree of uncertainty about this or that session — but it’s quite another to imagine either one of them out of his element in a recording situation.

In that respect, there may be no better way to sum up the duo’s experiences playing together again (before helping to found Fort Apache, Slade and Kolderie were in the Boston bands the Sex Execs and Men & Volts in the early ’80s) than simply to quote Kolderie relating one of his first experiences at the sessions for the new Raisins in the Sun (Rounder). “I remember sitting down on the couch at the studio in Tucson and there’s sort of this awkward silence because we’re all thinking, ‘Okay, are we going to do this now?’ ” Kolderie recalls when I meet with him and Slade at the Courtside Restaurant in Cambridge. “So I raised my hand and said, ‘I’ve got a little something — G to D-flat, twice, and then go to D for the chorus. And Jules [Shear] is kind of looking at me really intently, so I played it a couple of times, and he’s looking at me, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh no. He thinks I’m an idiot. This is horrible. I wish I’d never come out here.’ But then he kind of comes over and he goes, ‘D. D. Now E. Good, now back to G. Okay. Okay, now B-flat again.’ In two minutes we had a song.”

That was in May of 1999. The seven Raisins (in addition to Slade and Kolderie, the group includes singer/songwriter Shear, veteran bassist Harvey Brooks, legendary producer/keyboardist Jim Dickinson, former Green on Red guitarist Chuck Prophet, and ex-Dylan drummer Winston Watson) had exactly 10 days together in a Tucson studio to write, record, and mix an album. They started, basically, from scratch, unless of course you count their collective decades (“300 years,” Kolderie estimates) of recording and performing experience. And that does count for something. “I have to say,” says Kolderie, “speaking for myself, I was just kind of hanging on for dear life just trying to keep up. The level of musicianship was just so damn high. Dickinson’s spent his whole life making the kind of voodoo records where you don’t pay that much attention to the technical side. When he played the piano part on the Stones’ ‘Wild Horses’ — and he’ll tell you this story if he gets a chance — the piano was so out of tune that there were only a few notes that he could play. And Chuck’s a disciple of that. And Jules is all feel. Still, nobody knew if it was going to work out. I mean, none of us had ever played with Winston before. So there’s always that moment where it’s like, ‘Here comes the downbeat,’ and within 10 seconds you just know.”

Adds Slade: “Yeah, one of the skills Winston developed working for Dylan is that when you play with Dylan you never know what the next song is going to be or what feel he’s going to want. That really benefited this band.”

“We were actually freaking out the guys who worked at the studio,” Kolderie continues, “because Chuck would take his cue vocal mike and put it down on his acoustic guitar, and he’s playing along, and we’re playing in this one room with no isolation booths or anything like that. And the engineer would run in and go, ‘Let me put a better mike on that,’ and we’d go, ‘No. Get back in there. It sounds fine.’ ”

“Paul was playing around with an echo pedal and a tremolo pedal,” says Slade, “and the engineer, in typical engineer fashion, said, ‘Oh, you know, we can put that on later.’ And the whole room went silent. You’ve never seen seven guys roll their eyes all at once like that.”

In spite of the deadline pressure, there’s nothing hurried, harried, or even remotely unfinished-sounding about Raisins in the Sun. If anything, the album has a remarkably relaxed, rootsy vibe. In addition to all-around confident yet understated playing and a bittersweet, soulful melody, tracks like the wistful and wrenching “You Can Let Go Now” are spiked with satisfying little couplets like “You’re spending time neither of us can afford/And you say patience is its own reward” and “It’s the thunder that scares you after the lightning burns/I know your world, I know how slow it turns.”

“That song’s an interesting story,” Slade says. “I was just testing out the sound of the B3, and I was playing this little riff that I’ve always played, when Jules stopped and goes, ‘What’s that?’ And I go, ‘Oh, it’s just my little lick that I always play.’ So he goes, ‘Play it, play it.’ And he took that and he started to write that tune.”

“That was actually the first song we recorded,” Kolderie says. “And while they’re working it out, I’m in the control room madly trying to finish the drum sounds and get everything set up to record it when everyone starts turning to me and going, ‘Record it!’ So as the song progresses the drum sounds actually change because I was still finishing the sounds while they were doing that take. I didn’t even get to play on it.”

As tight as the Raisins are, and as natural as Shear seems to be with a lovelorn lyric, Raisins in the Sun has its fair share of unguarded fun moments too — Shear and Prophet trading verses on the Memphis-style R&B number “Candy from a Stranger,” for example. “Come on Chuck let’s go and take a chance,” Shear croons on the first verse, and Prophet answers in kind: “Jules, my man, I say when in doubt/Nothing we can do but to work it out.” The album ends with the mainly instrumental “Glenn and Stone,” a song that’s probably best described as a Southwestern-flavored Motownish surf-rock ditty with an eerie bridge on which, in one of the album’s lighter moments, you can hear Shear plead “Take me back to Woodstock” and Prophet shout “Take me back to San Francisco.” The lascivious “Stringbeen” and the gritty “Chicken Fried” are rootsy novelty numbers in the best sense of the term.

For Kolderie (who these days has a room of his own at the new Q Division Studios location in Davis Square) and Slade, the 10 days in Tucson were something of a return to the way they worked in the days before most projects with their names on it came with large recording budgets. As Slade tells it, “When we had our first four-track, we’d spend a lot of the off-hours recording on our own. What we’d do is make up a fictional band, and the assignment was to make an album for that fictional band.”

“I remember one weekend when we were kind of snowed in and we went to the store and got a bunch of beer and decided to make the beer album,” Kolderie recalls. “I believe one of our parameters was all the titles had to be on the label of a bottle of Michelob. So we did ‘Cold Filtered,’ we did —”

“ ‘Finest Obtainable —’ ”

“We did ‘Hops and Barley,’ I think. We were just in this weird frame of mind, really in the groove, where you don’t think about it much. It was like that way in the early days of Fort Apache, too. I remember one day, Slade called me up and goes, ‘I can’t do this Sebadoh session, can you do it, man?’ So I go down there, and I knew Lou [Barlow] from when we’d worked on Bug together for Dinosaur Jr. So he was like, ‘Oh, okay, I got Paul instead of Sean.’ So I ask him what’s up and he goes, ‘All right, this song’s called ‘Give Me Indie Rock.’ So I said, ‘It’s an anthem, huh?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah.’ So we did it in a night, and that was it. You just never knew what it was going to be. Shit was just coming at us. We didn’t have time to think about it much. Someone would call up and go, ‘I have a band, ah, I want you to do: they’re called Uncle Tupelo, they’re from Belleville. Can you let them stay on the floor of the studio?’ ”

“I once recorded a Moonie,” Slade suddenly remembers. “A woman came in with her acoustic guitar and she sang songs about the Reverend Moon and how great President Reagan was.”

And that’s really nothing compared to some of the experiences Slade and Kolderie heard about from their fellow Raisins. “We’d be riding in the van to go out to dinner and ‘Summer Breeze’ by Seals and Crofts would come on the radio, and Harvey would just cock his head and say, ‘I played on this,’ ” Slade recalls.

“That would happen all the time,” says Kolderie. “We’d be driving around listening to oldies radio and someone in the van would be, like, ‘I think I might have played on this.’ ”

“Harvey actually played on a lot of hits,” Slade continues. “He was the first-call session guy for a long time. I think he might have played on ‘Hang On Sloopy’?”

“I think he might have,” Kolderie says, “But I don’t think we should say that, because it might not be true. But Harvey was on stage with Dylan when Dylan went electric the first time. He went on tour with the Doors. I mean, we’d finish a session and Dickinson, who is not impressed by much, would say something like, ‘Sure good to play with Harvey . . . pretty wild.’”

With the album finally out, Slade and Kolderie are hoping to share a few more experiences with the Raisins, perhaps in the form of a tour of some sort. Nothing definite has been planned yet, and for now Slade and Kolderie as just glad the Raisins have come as far as they have. “To me,” says Slade, “the best achievement is that the album has come out. That was never guaranteed. It [was] entirely possible that it could just be another cassette in our library of recordings.”