Producers Now
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Zach Bryan’s “Something in the Orange” spent six weeks atop Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. But the track wasn’t recorded anywhere near Nashville — it was crafted alongside producer Ryan Hadlock, over 2,000 miles away at Bear Creek, the rustic barn-turned-studio that Hadlock’s parents had built in 1977 just outside of Seattle, not far from the birthplace of grunge. The genre-fluid song didn’t just top the country chart — it peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart, too.
“Even the term ‘country music’ is almost becoming passé in some ways because in working with Zach, in a lot of ways, he doesn’t really consider himself a straight-up country musician,” says Hadlock, who also produced Bryan’s “From Austin.” “He’s a singer-songwriter who happens to be from Oklahoma, has an accent and sings about the world he’s in… I think he will be doing amazing things for a really long time.”
Within Nashville, too, a similar genre-mashing ethos has bubbled up on hits such as Morgan Wallen’s muted, acoustic-based chart juggernaut “Last Night,” which spent 16 nonconsecutive weeks atop the Hot 100 in 2023. “He has one of those magical voices that allows him to span multiple formats, really,” says producer Joey Moi, who has worked with Wallen since his debut album. “He can sing a traditional country song, or over a hip-hop, contemporary production or a contemporary country production, and it still sounds like a Morgan Wallen song.”
As more and more country tracks have risen to the upper reaches of the Hot 100 this past year, many of the standouts — not only “Something in the Orange” and “Last Night,” in addition to other tracks by Bryan and Wallen, but also Luke Combs’ rendition of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” (which reached No. 2), Bailey Zimmerman’s “Rock and a Hard Place” (which hit the top 10) and Jelly Roll’s rock and country-blending “Need a Favor” (which broke into the top 20) — demonstrate an instinct for crafting sounds that appeal beyond the genre.
A mix of newcomers and veterans, they include Hadlock; Wallen’s “Last Night” producers, Moi and Charlie Handsome; Zimmerman producer Austin Shawn; Combs’ “Fast Car” co-producers, Jonathan Singleton and Chip Matthews; and Jelly Roll producer Austin Nivarel.
Notably, many of these studio creatives have résumés that extend beyond country. Before working with Big Loud artists like Wallen and Florida Georgia Line, Moi produced Canadian rock band Nickelback. Hadlock has worked with names ranging from Foo Fighters to Brandi Carlile, while Handsome’s credits include Post Malone, Kanye West, Juice WRLD and Lil Wayne.
For Wallen and Bryan, scaled-back production proved essential to the genre-traversing success of their respective hits. “We purposefully kept it simple,” Moi says of “Last Night.” “There are a handful of parts going on, but it’s more about the negative space and making it about the story, the vocal and the instrumental that runs throughout. It lends itself to being accessible by more lanes as far as radio formats; it was tougher to define as just a country song, or just a pop song or [adult top 40] song. It kind of fit everywhere.”
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Moi says the song’s sparse production partially resulted from Wallen’s own creative inclinations. “My natural instinct is to build these larger-than-life productions, and Morgan is great about coming behind me and being like, ‘Take this out and that part out,’ making sure I’m not doing too much on certain things,” Moi says. “I’d say he has had his best opportunity on the last two records to really imprint upon every aspect of it, from the songwriting to demos to our approach to tracking in the studio and postproduction. You can hear his contemporary, youthful thoughts over all of it.”
Similarly, Hadlock notes the minimal production on “Something in the Orange,” which utilized vintage mics and gear. “Sometimes old equipment is better at capturing emotion, and part of it is having a good room; I think people don’t always realize how much an instrument the room is that people are playing in,” says Hadlock, whose goal was a recording that sounded like Bryan was “playing right in front of you,” that would make “people listen to it and say, ‘Wow, that’s an amazing live recording.’ ”
For Shawn, the freedom to experiment was key in landing the right feel for Zimmerman’s “Rock and a Hard Place.” He and Zimmerman produced the song a half-dozen different ways before landing on the approach they used for the final recording. “We produced an almost John Mayer-esque, real smooth-sounding [version], then the acoustic version and one that was a dark piano ballad, with strings and fiddle that sounded almost like you were listening to a country Goo Goo Dolls song,” Shawn says.
As he did with “Fall in Love,” Shawn incorporated a “three-minute-long sample of just wind” into “Rock and a Hard Place.” “It feels like you are in a desert, and I wanted to feel that open style — we added fiddle and pedal steel, just subtly to bring out the emotive aspect. We wanted this song to feel like you could play it on acoustic guitar, but at the same time, it can still fit into a country radio modern format.”
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Shawn, who co-wrote Zimmerman’s “Fall in Love,” recalls the no-barriers approach he and Zimmerman took early on in developing his sound. “We thought about the kinds of songs he would want to hear and made the music as fans, just encompassing everything we love… There’s no gimmicks with this kid. His gift is making the music that defines him and his lifestyle.”
Ultimately, producers who encourage such experimentation — whether Combs’ cover of a 1980s folk-pop classic, Bryan’s poetic blend of country, folk and rock or Wallen’s country-to-hip-hop range — have shaped songs that are resonating with a multitude of listeners.
“He has always wanted to stay in the country lane, but we all knew he had a sort of contemporary side,” Moi says of Wallen. “If we planted our roots and built our foundation in a good spot, [we knew] we’d have the opportunity to explore other genres, and I think we’re in a sweet spot for that right now.”
This story originally appeared in the Oct. 7, 2023, issue of Billboard.
When producers Carter Lang and ThankGod4Cody worked on SZA’s culture-shifting 2017 debut album, Ctrl, the vibes were cozy and casual.
“We’d all bunker up and pretty much camp out in the stu’ and just be making stuff for weeks, if not months, at a time. Those adventures bonded us for life,” says Lang, 32. Adds Cody, 31: “I don’t even remember what the ultimate goal was except for making a fire album.”
But that “fire album” — one that’s still sizzling on the Billboard 200, 329 weeks after it debuted at No. 3 — created lots of unpredictable “pandemonium,” Lang says, from fans and the industry, and substantially raised the stakes for SZA, who waited five years before she released its follow-up, SOS.
“There was a little pressure to help her complete the tasks that she had at hand and for her to be happy with the final product and not have a sophomore slump,” Cody says. Yet re-creating Ctrl’s mellow, free-flowing and dependable environment was crucial to ensuring the artist felt comfortable enough to produce another masterpiece. Upon its release, SOS spent 10 nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, bolstering SZA’s superstar status. She earned her first Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 with “Kill Bill,” which she made with Lang and Rob Bisel, 31, both of whom also worked on other SOS top 10 hits “Good Days,” “Nobody Gets Me” and “I Hate U” (the lattermost of which Cody also co-wrote and co-produced).
“The three of us are the people she probably would trust the most to finish the music and bring it home,” says Cody, who with Lang and Bisel has credits on 19 of SOS’ 23 songs. “I feel like we all were involved in everything, except the artwork. It was like a group project in college.”
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Cody met SZA in 2014, when he was working closely with her Top Dawg Entertainment labelmate Isaiah Rashad, after she heard Cody making a beat in the room next door, came in and spontaneously recorded the song “Sobriety.” A year later, Lang — who had been working with R&B and hip-hop artists from his Chicago hometown like Chance the Rapper and Ravyn Lenae — ran into SZA at a studio and soon after joined her band while she toured her third EP, Z. He eventually met Cody at TDE’s Carson, Calif., headquarters while working on Ctrl.
Around Ctrl’s release, Bisel briefly met SZA while she was recording at Rick Rubin’s Malibu, Calif., studio, Shangri-La, where he had worked his way up from intern to house engineer. The two eventually reconnected at the beginning of 2020, when he flew out to Rubin’s house in Hawaii to help her record SOS. The album was not only made all over the place — from Lang’s Glendale, Calif.-based studio to SZA’s Malibu home to Westlake Recording Studios — but also with a variety of other producers, like Jay Versace, Michael Uzowuru and even Babyface.
“Back in the day, it would be Timbaland or Pharrell [Williams] and one person, or just them. Now it’s you and six other people, and you might figure out that there are two other people you had no idea about afterward,” Cody explains. “You have to be comfortable with collaboration. It’s a must at this point.”
Set the scene when you’re working with SZA. What’s her creative approach like?
Carter Lang: She takes her time to get in her zone, so it’s about being patient with each other. I can just sit there and jam on something or play beats and not feel like we’re giving any invisible pressure to each other to create. The music can really inspire [her], and she’ll just want to riff on something. It feels more like vibing out around a campfire.
How do you all work with each other and the other collaborators SZA brings into the fold?
Lang: We might be in different places, but the day after, we’ll be in communication about what has happened. We’ll send a track around, or she’ll incubate it. Having our own studios and then being able to converge without having to be in the same place is special, and that was created by our friendships and how fond we are of each other. We trust each other’s voices and what we’re going to put on the track.
Rob Bisel: It was a lot of jamming. [With] “Seek & Destroy,” that was all of us hanging out one afternoon like, “All right, we got to make something more upbeat.” It just felt like everyone was doing one thing at once, and, suddenly, a track fell into place.
Lang: That one was like butter. I stepped out of the room for a second and came back and saw all three of you guys [Cody, Bisel and Tyran “Scum” Donaldson] ripping on your parts. I was like, “OK, this is obviously a crazy moment.”
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Are you surprised by SOS’ tremendous success?
Bisel: I knew people would love it, but I didn’t know commercially how that would be reflected. I thought it would do well, but 10 weeks [at No. 1] is insane. I’m still processing that one. There was some stat about Aretha Franklin that we beat [becoming the longest-reigning No. 1 on Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums by a solo woman, beating out Franklin’s 1968 set, Aretha Now] and that one was like, “Whoa.”
Why do you think “Kill Bill” resonated so much?
Lang: It had this personality to it already. You can just see a cartoon playing out in your brain. The fact that people loved it and lifted it up like that echoes the sentiment of being able to put your thoughts out there in the most authentic and even aggressive way, but over such a sweet-sounding, psychedelic-sounding beat.
Bisel: A pretty common piece of wisdom you’ll hear from producers and songwriters [is], “Make the music that you would want to listen to yourself.” And that was 1,000% the case with that song. The first night we made it, I was like, “Wow, I think we really did something special.” I vividly remember [Cody being] one of the early believers in that song.
ThankGod4Cody: I remember we were talking about how to make [the title] appropriate. (Laughs.)
Bisel: I remember thinking, “I wonder if we need to give this a more on-the-nose title, like ‘Kill My Ex’ or something.” But the more we lived with the “Kill Bill” title, I was like, “Ah, this feels cool. I think it’ll stick with people.”
It’s fascinating how cohesive the album is, given how stylistically different the tracks are. How were you able to balance them out?
Cody: Even though it is different, it’s still all of us. We all listen to everything, including her. We’ll come back and be playing new music that each other has found, and it’s the most random music you’ll probably ever hear.
Bisel: But at the end of the day, she’s writing all of these songs and they come from such a genuine place. That is the glue that binds it all together.
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How have you seen SZA grow while making SOS?
Lang: She’s always exceeding her own potential. When I finally saw the tour and how insane she was going with her choreography, range and stamina, and then recalling all the moments we rocked out onstage, it really hit me. The transformation was super apparent. She feels refreshed and revitalized and excited to perform her music. She sounds so amazing, always has, but she has grown into her voice so well.
Bisel: She was already a pretty phenomenal writer when I met her, but her pen got sharper and more personal. I also think she got a lot faster, and the process of writing became even more natural to her the more time she spent working on this album. She’d have songs like “I Hate U” or “Kill Bill” where she would write them in under an hour. The ideas flowed more effortlessly from her.
How have you seen yourselves grow?
Lang: I learned a different level of collaboration where I really get a kick out of watching my friends play instruments. [Before], I used to want to be a part of everything and play, play, play. Being a backboard in the most neutral way and just letting the music happen was a different part of the process.
Bisel: [Working on SOS] forced me to step up. [When it comes to] my own creative output, [I] made so much stuff. For every song that I worked on that made the album, I probably made 100. It forced me to be more resilient and knowing you got to keep stepping up to the plate no matter how many times you strike out.
Cody: I learned what producing really consists of and how it’s deeper than music. It’s [about] you setting the vibe of the whole room, setting the vibe for the day and making sure that the artist is good and comfortable and in the best space to get out whatever ideas they have.
This story originally appeared in the Oct. 7, 2023, issue of Billboard.
“Every year ends, and I think to myself, ‘That was a little crazy!’ ” Jack Antonoff says with a laugh. “It shouldn’t feel familiar, but it does.” That’s because the 39-year-old studio polymath has rarely experienced a quiet 12-month period over the past decade, juggling multiple production and songwriting projects while fronting his own band, Bleachers.
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During the past year, Antonoff has helped steer Taylor Swift’s mega-selling Midnights, Lana Del Rey’s sweeping Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd and The 1975’s ultra-catchy Being Funny in a Foreign Language, while also prepping Bleachers’ fourth full-length. He has signed a new label deal with Dirty Hit Records, brought in label founder Jamie Oborne as manager and inked a new deal with Universal Music Publishing Group. (“It doesn’t feel like anything’s shaken up, just that the team’s got a couple new members,” Antonoff says of the moves.) All the while, he’s eyeing a potential fifth consecutive producer of the year, non-classical Grammy nomination and third straight win, which would be the first three-peat in the category this century should it occur.
Two years ago, Antonoff shared with Billboard his seven habits of highly effective producers. As he hunkers down in the studio for the next few months — finishing Bleachers’ follow-up to 2021’s Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night and generally “chipping away at stuff” — he revealed his latest takeaways from his past year’s work.
Don’t Let Commercial Gains Distract in a Creative Space
Case study: Taylor Swift, “Anti-Hero”
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Midnights scored the biggest Billboard 200 debut of Swift’s career and her Eras Tour became the summer’s hottest stadium ticket, but Antonoff says that he marvels at how his frequent collaborator keeps her level of superstardom very much outside the studio. “There’s not a lot of panning back in the room — ‘Whoa, look at this [achievement], look at that!’ — because that would feel like popping the balloon,” he explains. “When I work with Taylor, there’s still just this person who has these life experiences and this remarkable gift of writing about them.”
See: “Anti-Hero,” the lead single from Midnights that sardonically prods at Swift’s insecurities. “When we made ‘Anti-Hero,’ I just thought, ‘Wow, that’s so honest and funny, and also so sweet and so sad,’ ” Antonoff recalls, adding that the song, which became Swift’s longest-leading Hot 100 chart-topper earlier this year, wouldn’t have worked if they had been preoccupied by her radio appeal during its creation. “It has this weird beat going through a tremolo — no part of me was like, ‘F–king A, that’s the song to take over the world!’ ”
Sometimes the Spark Takes Time…
Case study: The 1975, “Part of the Band”
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“Who would you want to work with?” It’s a question Antonoff often hears, and one he finds impossible to answer. “I can only want to work with someone based on knowing them and seeing where they’re going,” he says. When Antonoff met The 1975, he envisioned a creative partnership where he could add to the band’s sound on its fifth album — but still experienced “that weird kind of early-relationship stuff” on Being Funny in a Foreign Language, his first project with the British rock group.
“Part of the Band,” the restrained, stream-of-consciousness lead single, helped alleviate some of that awkwardness. “It wasn’t the first thing we did,” Antonoff recalls, “but there’s a big difference between the first thing you do and the moment that you’re like, ‘Oh, sh-t. We have that ability.’ Anyone can get in a room and carve out a song and make it sound halfway cool, but the idea of collaborating with people is doing something bigger than the sum of the parts.” Ultimately, “Part of the Band” unlocked the rest of Being Funny in a Foreign Language, which spun off five top 40 hits on the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart.
…And Sometimes a Hit Can Take a Really Long Time
Case study: Taylor Swift, “Cruel Summer”
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“That was always one of my favorite songs I’d ever done,” Antonoff says of Swift’s Lover standout, a synth-pop fantasia that became a fan favorite upon the 2019 album’s release. “Cruel Summer” didn’t become a hit single during the Lover album cycle, which was curtailed due to the pandemic, and Antonoff made peace with its cult-classic status. But earlier this year, as the song became the centerpiece of the opening of Swift’s mega-selling Eras tour, “Cruel Summer” began soaring in streams, then in radio play, and climbed all the way to No. 3 on the Hot 100, morphing into one of the defining songs of the summer of 2023.
“It was just like, a huge thumbs-up from the universe,” Antonoff says of the song’s viral resurgence this year. “I take it all as a reminder to do what you believe in, make the songs you believe in. You never want to do anything that you don’t believe in for the sake of success, because the only thing worse than doing something you don’t believe in is being recognized for that thing! … With [‘Cruel Summer’], I loved that it existed, and didn’t need anything more from it. It’s just this bizarre icing on the cake.”
Ambition Comes in Many Forms
Case study: Lana Del Rey, “A&W”
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Antonoff says that his most frequent collaborators share the characteristic of “becoming obsessed with understanding what their ambition is and how to access it constantly” rather than resting on their laurels. That creative curiosity manifests itself in different ways: For Swift, after the indie-folk storytelling on folklore and evermore in 2020, “There was this sense of blazing out of the cabin” with the personal pop of Midnights. Meanwhile, The 1975 came to Antonoff after several winding, esoteric full-lengths, and he helped push Being Funny in a Foreign Language into uncharted territory for the band: a tight, interlude-free pop-rock record.
For Del Rey’s Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, the seven-minute centerpiece, “A&W” — which begins as a folk lament before flipping into a trap refrain midway through — resulted from experimenting with other album tracks like “Peppers” and “Taco Truck x VB,” mashing up sounds until arriving at the most innovative structure possible, according to Antonoff. “This sprawling thing was the most ambitious thing to do. A song like ‘A&W’ is just an example of what happens when you just know people so well that you can really support each other into strange places.”
Make an Entrance
Case study: Bleachers, “Modern Girl”
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Bleachers’ upcoming fourth album, which Antonoff and his six-piece group made with co-producer Patrik Berger and a few special guests, translates the jubilance of the band’s live show into a studio setting. Not every song is as boisterous as “Modern Girl,” released in September as the project’s lead single, but for Antonoff, its 1980s-indebted mix of jittery vocal energy and uncorked saxophone blasts captured “enough left-field sh-t that speaks to where the album is going” and was the obvious introduction.
“Putting out albums is like pulling at both the past and the future, and ‘Modern Girl’ just felt like this perfect shock and comfort moment, both honoring where Bleachers has been and where it’s going,” he says of the new album, due next year. “I’ve always believed in this ‘house’ mentality of just understanding what an album is, and ‘Modern Girl’ just feels like the biggest front door.”
A version of this story originally appeared in the Oct. 7, 2023, issue of Billboard.
“I just need to make one edit. Could we start talking while I do it?” Mike Dean asks, lowering himself into a leather office chair in his Los Angeles home studio.
He swivels his seat to face a widescreen monitor and scrolls through scores of waveforms in his Pro Tools session, searching for the right spot to doctor. It’s a song from Diddy’s just-released The Love Album: Off the Grid called “Another One of Me” (featuring The Weeknd, French Montana and 21 Savage), and mere days before its Sept. 15 release, Dean has been tasked with crafting a slightly cleaner version of 21’s verse.
Despite the clear urgency of the work, Dean appears unfazed, steady. “It’s OK. I like to do eight things at a time,” he explains while he rotates among vocal editing, answering questions, FaceTiming a manager and ripping from his bong. This is not the first time the writer, producer and engineer has performed last-minute miracles for an A-lister’s song — and it certainly won’t be the last.
Dean’s stoicism and keen editing ear are among the many reasons he has been hip-hop’s most in-demand collaborator for decades, often skillfully guiding the genre’s most temperamental and perfectionistic talents — from Kanye West to Travis Scott to Jay-Z — to complete their best work.
He recalls the February 2016 evening when West played his seventh studio album, The Life of Pablo, for fans at Madison Square Garden in New York. With a packed house of nearly 20,000 at the arena and 20 million tuned in at home through a livestream, West shared a sampling of its tracks, including now essential hits like “Famous” and “Ultralight Beam.” As on the six West albums that had preceded it, Dean was a trusted collaborator in creating Pablo. Fans waited well past the event’s scheduled start time, but few could have guessed the reason for the delay: Almost none of the songs were done.
“It was crazy,” recalls Dean as he clicks over to his camera roll on the monitor, searching back to the photos he took that night. “We had 16 songs unfinished. I think we finished something like four songs, gave them to Kanye, and he went down there and played that shit in front of 20,000 people.
“Then I finished some more and rushed from the studio. We had to jump out of the cab about 10 blocks before the arena because the traffic was so bad,” he continues, still searching for that specific night on his camera roll, casually whisking his cursor past other culture-defining moments in the process: The Weeknd’s headlining Coachella set, West’s Yeezus-era Saturday Night Live performance and many raucous Scott shows. “I ran to MSG, fought to get to the basement and then to the floor and gave him the memory stick.”
Michael Tyrone Delaney
Finally, Dean locates one of the pictures of that night. In it, West stands in the center of the frame in a red long-sleeve shirt and black baseball cap, arms lifted above his head. Under the halo of a white spotlight, he appears to be leading a religious rite rather than a listening party. Dean stands to West’s right sporting a flat bill hat from MWA, his label, and a slick black windbreaker. Despite the preceding chaos, Dean’s countenance betrays no signs of alarm. “I’m calm, really,” he says with a shrug, zooming in on himself in the background. “I’ll put a memory stick in a computer in front of thousands of people.”
His most prolific relationship of all is with West, whom the Texas born-and-bred producer-engineer met when he was still living in Houston circa 2002. In the preceding years, Dean had become a local legend, defining the sound of the Dirty South by producing, writing and mixing records for Geto Boys and Scarface and touring with acts like Selena.
“Kanye first came to my house when he was working on his mixtape, songs like ‘Through the Wire.’ I remember he had on a backpack and tight pants,” he says with a laugh. “You know, people in Texas don’t wear tight pants.”
Though West has now cycled through dozens — if not hundreds — of other creative collaborators throughout his career, Dean has been his singular through line. He has been with the artist from mixing parts of The College Dropout (2004) to producing much of Donda 2 (2022). He says the key to fostering such long-term relationships with artists, including West, is to not “try to follow them too much” and “stand up for what [I think] is right” for a song. “You let them do their thing but steer them in the right direction,” he says, though he admits “that gets harder, though, as they get bigger and bigger.” (Dean declined to comment about the current status of his creative relationship with West.)
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Don Toliver, who worked on his 2020 hit “After Party” with Dean, says he loves collaborating with the producer because he is “the ultimate badass at mixing and mastering. If Tony Montana from Scarface worked in the music industry, he would be Mike Dean, deep into his craft and bringing that essence and vibe to the music as well.”
But Dean’s best-known strength is his penchant for synthesizers. From where he sits in his studio, these analog instruments cocoon him, stacked in columns up and down all four walls of the room. He points out a few of his favorites: a Memory Moog from 1978, the latest Prophet from Dave Smith Instruments. Then Dean gestures across the room to a clunky keyboard with colorful knobs and buttons and wood grain siding. “That’s the one Michael [Jackson] played ‘Billie Jean’ on. That’s the most important synth in the room,” he says, beaming. Of course, he has other favorites in storage — in his two garages, his other studio or his Texas house.
In recent years, some Dean acolytes have dubbed him “The Synth God.” “Every year, I turn the synths up a couple dBs [decibels],” he jokes. “On [West’s 2005] Late Registration, the synths were really tucked in, but since then it has just gotten louder and louder.”
While many of his contemporaries add so-called “producer tags” — audio identifiers on tracks where they stake their claim — Dean mostly shies away from that. “My sound is usually my tag,” he says matter-of-factly. It’s a claim that’s evident on records that feature what has become known as a Mike Dean Outro — a 30-second- to minute-long ending devoted to Dean’s transcendent synth work; one of the best-known examples is on Scott’s 2019 single “Highest in the Room.” Of the 59 total producer credits and 106 songwriter credits Dean has amassed on the Billboard Hot 100, “Highest in the Room” is one of his few No. 1s (along with Scott’s Drake-featuring “Sicko Mode” and Kid Cudi collaboration “The Scotts”). “That’s when the outro really went viral,” he says, though that was far from its first iteration. He has been doing these characteristic endings since West’s “Stronger” in 2007. “I just always jam on songs as much as possible… But [the outros are] becoming almost cliché to me now,” he says.
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Savvy rap fans have known about Dean since the 2000s — or earlier, if they followed Houston hip-hop — but the producer, 58, has intentionally increased his visibility in recent years. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Dean started to see himself as more of an artist in his own right. He began a series of solo albums, released annually every April since 2020, each titled 4:20, 4:21, 4:22 and, most recently, 4:23.
He also started livestreaming as he played around on his synths, building avant garde instrumentals from scratch as teenagers frantically sent goat and fire emojis in the chat. The videos let Dean be more transparent with his process, and they amassed a following quickly, even among his famous friends like The Weeknd — who texted Dean, “You should open for me on tour.” Soon he was performing with the singer in stadiums around the world. To keep up with his other musical commitments, Dean worked out of a 10-foot-by-10-foot makeshift studio, designed for the back of his tour bus.
“It wasn’t too hard to work out of there, really,” he explains. “I did Travis’ second album in the back of a bus once. Plenty of my songs have been made like that.” It was during that time on the road, he says, that he created much of the songs and score for The Idol, the dark HBO drama co-created by The Weeknd and Euphoria producer Sam Levinson. The show was widely panned and ultimately canceled; one of its highlights, however, was Dean’s scoring work and soundtrack. Apart from co-writing the score for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, The Idol was Dean’s first major gig as composer, and his synth mastery laid the perfect morose undertone for the action onscreen.
Dean himself was also written into the show, playing “Mike Dean,” and furthering his mystique. In his first scene, he arrived in a matte black Tesla, emerging from the car’s butterfly doors in a fog of smoke, bong in tow — a meme-worthy entrance caricaturing his real-life demeanor and pot habit. It was Levinson’s idea: “I was first approached about Euphoria season two,” Dean says, which ultimately did not happen. “Then they asked me if I wanted to do music for The Idol, and when I met Sam, he asked me, ‘Well, do you want to be in the show, too?’ I guess he thought I was funny.”
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But moving forward, Dean says TV and film work isn’t a priority: “I’d work on some select projects but not too much. I’m looking more at being an artist and putting out my own music and touring than anything else right now.” And as usual, he’s dutifully at work behind the scenes on the year’s biggest records. In 2023, he has already lent his expertise to Scott’s Utopia, the Idol soundtrack and Metro Boomin’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse soundtrack. And because Dean is never entirely predictable, he also worked on Paranoia, Angels, True Love by Christine and the Queens.
“I don’t work much,” he insists. “I just smoke weed and f–king hang out and make music — it’s not work.” He swiftly turns his head to look back at the monitor, refocusing. “Sorry,” he says. “I actually need to get to editing this.”
This story will appear in the Oct. 7, 2023, issue of Billboard.
“We all must make a choice — to be a hero or a villain.”
The familiarity of Morgan Freeman’s commanding voice couldn’t calm down the fans — 80,000 of them, reportedly — standing around Coachella’s Sahara Tent. The perilous tone of his monologue, paired with producer Mike Dean’s sinister synths, stressed the festival’s need for a hero. And comic book animations projected on either side of the stage illustrated there was only one man for the job.
Wearing a custom black Chrome Hearts suit, a masked Metro Boomin emerged from beneath the stage, his purple cross-embroidered cape fluttering in the desert wind. But regardless of the Academy Award-winning actor’s resounding introduction, it was the usually soft-spoken producer’s booming voice that caught festivalgoers — and one of his many guest performers — by surprise when he greeted the crowd.
“When we was done, Future kept telling me, ‘Bro, I ain’t know who the f–k was talking!’ ” Metro recalls. “ ‘I ain’t know you could do that! You be in a room and just be so quiet.’ ”
Future’s description of our hero’s usual alter-ego is true today as Metro sits at his own Boominati Studios in North Hollywood. He isn’t cloaked in his luxe costume; instead, he’s wearing a black Barriers hoodie with the image of Michael Jackson’s moonwalking silhouette highlighted by a baby blue spotlight. One of the studio’s ceiling lights floods him in the same blue as the bandanna wrapped around his tri-colored dreads.
He has gotten more comfortable in the spotlight lately. Over the last decade, Metro, 30, has transformed from a behind-the-scenes trap beat-maker to one of rap’s most in-demand producers. He has managed to take over pop music, too, and without compromising his signature sound, which is characterized by eerie synth loops, 808s, soulful samples and orchestral finishes and branded by his notorious producer tags. (“Metro Boomin want some more, n—a!”) So far, he has produced 115 Billboard Hot 100 songs, including 10 top 10 hits, among them Post Malone’s Quavo-featuring “Congratulations” and Future’s “Mask Off,” and two No. 1s, Migos’ “Bad and Boujee” (featuring Lil Uzi Vert) and The Weeknd’s “Heartless.”
But Metro’s latest solo album, Heroes & Villains — which he released Dec. 2, 2022, on Republic Records and his own label, Boominati Worldwide — continued his ascent into rarefied air: the producer-turned-successful artist. The sequel to his 2018 debut album, Not All Heroes Wear Capes, which topped the Billboard 200, and the second installment of an ongoing trilogy, Heroes & Villains built on Metro’s own cinematic universe, adding depth to his sound with more live instrumentation, like the horns on “Superhero (Heroes & Villains)” or the choral vocals on “Umbrella,” and assembling hip-hop Avengers like 21 Savage, Young Thug, Travis Scott and Don Toliver to perform their melodic and slick-tongued superpowers.
Heroes & Villains became Metro’s third No. 1 album, earning his biggest opening week yet, with 185,000 equivalent album units (according to Luminate), and its lead single, “Creepin’,” with The Weeknd and 21 Savage — a remake of Mario Winans’ 2004 R&B smash “I Don’t Wanna Know” (featuring Diddy and Enya) — spent the first half of 2023 in the Hot 100’s top 10, peaking at No. 3. Between Heroes & Villains’ No. 1 debut and Lil Uzi Vert’s Pink Tape, which topped the Billboard 200 in July, no other rap album reached No. 1 on the list, making it the longest wait in a calendar year for a rap album to lead the chart since 1993 (the year Metro was born).
Amiri sweater and jacket.
Sami Drasin
The album’s success was unsurprising to those paying attention to Metro’s creative promotion strategy for Heroes & Villains. He tapped Freeman, who narrated Metro and 21’s chart-topping album, Savage Mode II, to star alongside him in an action-packed short film directed by Gibson Hazard that also featured actor LaKeith Stanfield, Young Thug and Gunna. The clip kicked off his extensive rollout, which also involved an on-the-nose way to reveal the album’s featured artists.
A$AP Rocky had texted him one day about “this artist on Instagram that was doing all these comic book covers for hip-hop artists. And I was like, ‘Damn, this sh-t looks crazy,’ ” he recalls. “I DM’d [the artist, Alejandro Torrecilla], and I was like, ‘Yo, I’m finna start rolling my album out in three, four weeks. What if you did a cover for every artist on here and I just roll out the features that way?’ ”
The promotional efforts didn’t stop once the album was out: Metro embarked on a four-city in-store CD signing tour, debuted a live beat-making hologram of himself in Los Angeles and Miami, and projected his Heroes signal (from the cover of Not All Heroes Wear Capes) around the world (literally). “He was more in people’s face,” says Republic vp of marketing strategy Xiarra-Diamond Nimrod, who has worked with Metro since 2017. “[With Not All Heroes Wear Capes], we didn’t have as many in-store components. But this time around, we wanted him to have that interaction with [fans] and bring them into his world.”
The heightened visibility around Metro allowed the superproducer to transform into a superstar, separate from the ones with whom he regularly records. And more public-facing opportunities outside of music helped turn him into a household name: Earlier this year, he starred in and produced the music for Budweiser’s Super Bowl LVII ad and teamed up with the MLB Network for its Opening Day video, which was soundtracked by “On Time” and “Trance” from Heroes & Villains.
“That’s one of the things we discussed when we first met: Do you want to be that low-key producer who you know some of their songs but you can walk right past them today and not know who they were? Or do you want to be out and known, like Swizz Beatz, Timbaland or Pharrell [Williams]?” says his manager, Ryan Ramsey. “The numbers he’s doing on his own albums show he’s at that level where people are going to see him and say, ‘Hey, that’s Metro Boomin.’ ” Ramsey, who also manages Brandy, has represented Metro for the last two years under SALXCO, alongside the management company’s founder and CEO, Wassim “Sal” Slaiby; SALXCO vp of A&R Rahsaan “Shake” Phelps; and Amir “Cash” Esmailian through his own YCFU management company.
And while his No. 1 rap album set a high bar, getting a prime-time slot at Coachella served as the perfect climax for his rollout. “We had every intention of stealing the weekend,” Metro confidently says in retrospect.
Junya Watanabe jacket, Fendi pants, Louis Vuitton shoes.
Sami Drasin
In order to pull it off, he recruited a superstar-trained team: creative director La Mar C. Taylor, who works closely with The Weeknd; show director Ian Valentine, whose creative studio Human Person (which counts Billie Eilish and Post Malone as clients) was also responsible for animation, staging, lighting and content; choreographer Charm La’Donna, who works alongside major acts from Kendrick Lamar to Dua Lipa; and his longtime recording and mixing engineer Ethan Stevens, who helped him curate the setlist. He even passed on using Coachella’s designated livestreaming crew and hired his own to ensure the quality of the video and flow of the performance for folks at home.
“There was so many people advising me, ‘Don’t spend your money on that show.’ But I was like, ‘Nah, n—s have to get this,’ ” says Metro, who remains mum about how much Coachella paid him to perform but reveals he spent “over four times” that amount to ensure it happened just as he envisioned. “People were already hearing me different with this album. But they needed to see me different now.”
While his albums have established Metro as a masterful curator, “Trochella” confirmed he was an equally skillful showman. And much like his albums, he brought out his all-star collaborators, including The Weeknd, 21 Savage and Diddy for the first live performance of “Creepin’,’’ to perform the hits they share. While he mostly flexed his superproducer muscles from behind the DJ booth, he made sure to bask in his glory from the stage, too.
As Metro’s biggest risks — like dropping an album during the holiday season or investing a small fortune in an impressive Coachella set — have continued to pay off, he credits his unwavering dedication to the art. “Over time, [I’ve] established trust between me and my listeners, [so they know] that whatever I have to offer as far as music or anything, I’m definitely putting 1,000% into it,” he says. “It’s not about, ‘Oh, look at me like a star!’ Look at me like I care.”
Growing up in St. Louis, the producer born Leland Tyler Wayne looked up to hometown hero Nelly. Country Grammar was the first explicit CD he bought, and it inspired then-literally young Metro to become a rapper. But rapping requires beats, and since he couldn’t afford any, he decided to make his own. Producing turned into a bigger passion and came with added benefits, like not having to compete with so many other aspiring rappers — and sounding like a more legitimate profession to his mother, Leslie Wayne.
Leslie played an instrumental role in getting his career off the ground: When Metro was 13, she bought him his first laptop, where he downloaded the popular music production software FL Studio. And when he was in high school, she made 17-hour round-trip drives from St. Louis to Atlanta nearly every weekend so he could work with artists he connected with over social media, like OJ Da Juiceman and Gucci Mane — while still returning home before school on Monday morning. (Leslie died in June 2022, and Metro pays tribute to her often on social media and during live performances.)
He moved to Atlanta in 2012 to attend Morehouse College but dropped out after one semester to pursue music: In 2013, he got his big break when he produced Future’s acclaimed “Karate Chop” (featuring Lil Wayne). And Metro seemed to take over hip-hop in 2015: He joined the Rodeo Tour with Travis Scott and Young Thug as a supporting act and the latter’s touring DJ; produced most of Future’s DS2 album; worked on Scott’s debut album, Rodeo; and executive-produced Drake and Future’s joint mixtape, What a Time To Be Alive.
But he experienced a career-defining moment in February 2016 when Kanye West dropped The Life of Pablo. Right before premiering it during his Yeezy 3 fashion show at New York’s Madison Square Garden, West called Metro about one of the songs he had produced, “Father Stretch My Hands, Pt. 1.” “I didn’t put that tag on that beat. It’s Kanye’s sh-t,” Metro explains. “He asked for it like, ‘I’m finna play the album, but I need the tag on the song.’ And he just threw it in there real quick.” In a now viral clip, West is seen screaming and embracing a raccoon fur trapper hat-wearing Kid Cudi before “If Young Metro don’t trust you, I’m gon’ shoot you” blasts throughout the arena’s speakers. Metro’s tag catapulted him into the pop culture zeitgeist, from the numerous memes that flooded the internet immediately after to the hype it still creates whenever a DJ plays the song at a party. “That just took it to a whole ’nother stratosphere,” he reflects.
Amiri sweater, jacket, and pants.
Sami Drasin
From there, Metro continued building relationships with other rappers and elevating their music while reinforcing his reputation as the genre’s go-to producer. “A lot of times an artist will say, ‘I want to work with you, but send me beats.’ With Metro, it’s the opposite. He wants to create with you at a very intentional level,” says Vladimir “V Live” Samedi, who began working as Metro’s tour bus driver in 2016 before he was promoted to Boominati’s head of A&R. Metro dropped collaborative projects with Big Sean, Nav and 21 Savage, the lattermost of whom Metro has worked with on three full-lengths: Savage Mode, Without Warning (with Offset) and Savage Mode II. “Metro is the greatest producer of all time. I wouldn’t be where I am today without the help of my brother,” 21 Savage tells Billboard.
With prestige, a star-studded network and a stacked production discography, Metro had all the tools he needed to fly high on his own. He launched his Boominati Worldwide label in partnership with Republic in 2017 and, the following year, released his first solo album, Not All Heroes Wear Capes, a cohesive, superstar-filled set that plays out like a movie soundtrack. His hero motif stems from a family tradition: He, his mother and his four younger siblings used to “always go see every single Marvel movie together. We done followed the whole timeline on some nerd sh-t,” he reflects. “It has always been an interest to me.”
Sony Pictures Animation, which produced 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in association with Marvel, took notice. The studio worked with Republic on the first Spider-Verse soundtrack (which yielded Post Malone and Swae Lee’s mega-smash, “Sunflower”). When the time came to work on its follow-up, Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group president of music Spring Aspers says it “was just pure luck in terms of timing” that the label had just finished working on Metro’s Heroes & Villains campaign and decided he was its “ideal partner.”
“It started off with him doing a couple songs, and then it just got to the point where I went to him and was like, ‘Yo, do you want to executive-produce this whole thing? Because it looks like I’m going to have that conversation,’ ” Ramsey recalls. “He said, ‘Man, that would be dope!’ ”
Martine Rose suit.
Sami Drasin
Metro started working on the Spider-Verse soundtrack at the end of December — the same month he released Heroes & Villains. “We’re already on a roll; might as well keep it going,” says Stevens, who also served as executive producer. Compared with the two-and-a-half years they spent working on Metro’s solo album, the duo knocked out the Spider-Verse soundtrack in six months. Metro Boomin Presents Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse taps a diverse web of artists — Don Toliver, Nas, Lil Wayne, James Blake, Myke Towers, Mora and more — to deliver an ingenious mix of hip-hop, pop, Latin and Afrobeats that nods to the film’s protagonist Miles Morales’ African American and Puerto Rican heritage.
“He once texted us a line that a string quartet had played,” says Phil Lord, one of the film’s co-writers and co-producers, of what became the opening sequence of “Am I Dreaming” with A$AP Rocky and Roisee, an up-and-coming St. Louis artist whom Metro discovered on YouTube years ago. “Then he had [Mike Dean] come over and do this really wild synth stuff. That became the song that’s on the end credits of the movie. And now that’s going to be the official Oscar submission for the film.”
When the time came to promote the soundtrack, Lord and Chris Miller, another one of the film’s co-writers and co-producers, took a page out of Metro’s playbook. “In the first movie, there was this phenomenon where people were making their own ‘Spidersonas,’ ” Miller says. When they saw what he did with Heroes & Villains, they tapped the film’s character designer, Kris Anka, to create Spidersonas for each of the featured artists on his soundtrack.
But they had a special plan for Metro’s own caricature. The day before Metro attended one of the Spider-Verse film screenings, Lord and Miller asked him to swing by the studio an hour early to test out some lines they had written for him. “The Republic team, our team, the music executives from Sony and the editors were crammed into another booth,” Lord recalls. When everyone cracked up after he recited, “My bad, everybody! There was somewhere to run,” Miller says they knew “that was the winner.”
Now his Spidersona — and his voice — actually appear in the film as Metro Spider-Man, but Nimrod wanted to ensure that fans would see him off the silver screen, too. “We made these cool cutouts of his character and were hanging them from light poles, and there were decals on the sidewalks and walls,” she says. “People were fully stealing these cutouts and tagging me on social like, ‘I got my Metro Spider-Man hanging in my room!’ That’s when I was like, ‘OK, now this is fire.’ ”
Amiri sweater, jacket, pants, and shoes.
Sami Drasin
Metro Boomin Presents Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse reached No. 1 on both the Soundtracks and Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts — matching, and outperforming, respectively, the performance of the first Spider-Verse soundtrack, which also received a Grammy nomination for best compilation soundtrack for visual media. Ramsey hopes Metro’s Spider-Verse contribution can score the same distinction, and given the success of Heroes & Villains and “Creepin,’ ” next year could well be Metro’s long-awaited Grammy breakthrough. Incredibly, he has been nominated only once, and not for a project one would have expected him to have worked on: He co-produced Coldplay’s “Let Somebody Go” with Selena Gomez, from the band’s Music of the Spheres, an album of the year nominee. “[Frontman Chris Martin is] a good friend of mine. Sometimes we work on ideas; sometimes we just go walk outside,” Metro explains casually.
But with so much music to make, industry accolades are far from his mind. He’s currently wrapping up his long-awaited joint album with Future and still working on his project with J.I.D that the two teased earlier this year. Metro is also working on A$AP Rocky’s highly anticipated album, Don’t Be Dumb, and is one of a few trusted producers working on The Weeknd’s final album.
Nonetheless, there are a few other artists he dreams of collaborating with in the future. “I still really want to do something with Justin Timberlake,” he says. “I need to work with Miguel. I still haven’t worked with Jay-Z.”
But while Metro will always make time for the music, he plans to spend the next decade focused more on his businesses. Since he launched Boominati, “a lot of the business was focused on Metro and our producers that we work with: Chris XZ, Doughboy and David x Eli,” Samedi says. Now Metro is transferring his artist discovery and development skills to the executive side so he can start signing artists. And, he teases, he has already started his own production company that will allow him “to do stuff for screen.”
“The amount of grind and effort I put in my 20s into the music, I’mma put into the business aspect through these 30s,” he says. “I watched my music seeds grow from 20 to 30. I can watch the rest of these grow from 30 to 40.”
This story will appear in the Oct. 7, 2023, issue of Billboard.
The best part of producing Mick Jagger’s vocals, according to Andrew Watt, is when he begins taking off his clothes.
“He starts in like, a sweater, a button-down and a T-shirt,” the producer-songwriter recalls of a studio session with the Rolling Stones legend, “and then, two takes in, the sweater comes off. Two takes later, the button-down comes off. All of a sudden, he’s down to a T-shirt, and he’s ripped, and he’s 80, and he’s f–king giving you full-blown Mick Jagger, shaking and sweating as he sings every note.”
Such fantastical rock-star run-ins have become relatively commonplace for Watt — but the 32-year-old and 2021 producer of the year Grammy winner, who wore a different Rolling Stones T-shirt every day to the studio while producing the band’s forthcoming album, Hackney Diamonds, still recounts the experience with giddy breathlessness. “You can’t not be jumping up and down with excitement,” he says of watching Jagger work his magic, “because that’s what we’ve all been trained to do for the last 60 years.”
Over the past half-decade, Watt has transitioned from scoring hits for pop stars like Justin Bieber, Camila Cabello and 5 Seconds of Summer to guiding late-career projects from rock’s legacy elites, including Ozzy Osbourne, Elton John and Iggy Pop. While the New York native still collaborates with modern A-listers — Watt worked on the majority of Austin, the recent full-length from frequent collaborator Post Malone — his career has become an inverse of the “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme, with the 1990s baby blending in with legends in their 70s and 80s. “It’s like going to college,” he says, “and learning from the literal masters.”
Helming Hackney Diamonds, due Oct. 20 on Geffen Records, represented a true bucket-list item for Watt, who was introduced to Jagger by veteran producer Don Was in the middle of the pandemic and struck up a friendship over FaceTime. In the summer of 2022, Watt was in London working with Dua Lipa, and Jagger invited him over for some tea; after years of false starts and scrapped demos for the Stones’ first album of original material since 2005’s A Bigger Bang, Jagger asked Watt if he would be interested in helping them cross the finish line. Watt’s jaw dropped: “You have this moment where you’re like, ‘Am I even capable of that?’ ” he says. “It’s the greatest honor as a kid with a guitar who grew up idolizing every single thing Keith Richards ever did.”
Courtesy of Polydor
That level of lifelong fandom, combined with an urgency to secure results, is what Watt believes makes him so effective at sharing the studio with icons more than twice his age. He understands that “these legends don’t owe anyone anything,” as he puts it, “so the only reason they’re making a new album is for themselves.” With that in mind, Watt encourages artists to pursue ideas indiscriminately — less conversation, more raw creation — and then it’s his job to approach projects from the viewpoint of what fans most want to hear.
When it came to the Stones, “Any fan wants to hear the greatest live rock’n’roll band of all time,” Watt explains, “so to do anything else with them in the studio is just letting everyone down.” When preproduction for Hackney Diamonds began in September 2022, Watt pushed the band to work efficiently and made sure to prioritize its live energy, particularly within the interplay between Richards and Ronnie Wood.
Session locations ranged from Los Angeles to Paris; Steve Jordan took over the drum kit from Charlie Watts, who died in 2021 but is posthumously featured on two tracks carried over from earlier sessions; and Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder were among the guest stars to swing by. The result is a lean, 11-song Stones album that Watt says was mostly finished in under six months, and that “you could put on against other contemporary music, but is still loose and really gets grooving at certain points.”
Although Watt likens the experience of producing a Stones album to climbing a personal Mount Everest, he also says that he has plenty left to accomplish in his career. Aside from contributing to Lipa’s highly anticipated third album, Watt recently co-produced “Seven,” Jung Kook’s Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper featuring Latto. “That was the first time I worked with an artist who didn’t speak the same language as me, so we communicated through music,” he says of the BTS star. “It was the complete opposite of my work with The Rolling Stones, but that’s what keeps it interesting.”
Watt says that his work with various music legends has already started to inform his new stars. “Watching Paul McCartney arrange background vocals and harmonize with himself?” he says. “I’m taking that s–t with me to every production I do for the rest of my life.”
This story will appear in the Oct. 7, 2023, issue of Billboard.