So how would you describe your role as a producer, in general?
Just as fan. Making music that I want to hear. You’re so close to something when you write it that it’s hard to have any perspective on how it hits someone else. My job is to be a professional version of the outside world—a listener who is not attached to any of it, who doesn’t know the story of how it was written, who doesn’t know how it works, who doesn’t know why this is important to you. Every record producer does something different. A lot of them are former engineers who come at it from the technical side.
But you’re not twiddling the knobs and positioning the mics …
I come from more of the fan side. It’s not so much how we’re going to do it. Instead, I become a partner with the artist in trying to realize the best version of who they could be.
The artist I think of when you say that is Johnny Cash. You resurrected his career with the American series, and all those unlikely, contemporary songs you recorded together. How did you first connect with him?
I started the new label after leaving Def Jam. Up until that point most of the artists I’d worked with, at least on the label side, were new artists. But I thought it would be really cool to work with a significant known artist who hasn’t been doing their best work. It felt like it would be a different kind of challenge: a fun, stimulating, new set of problems.
What are those problems?
People who’ve made a lot of records tend not to make records as good as the ones they made when they’re younger. When you’re young and you get to make your first record, or your second record, it’s the most important thing in your life. When you’re making your 10th record, or your 50th record, it doesn’t have that same …
Centrality.
Yeah. It’s not, like, it. That’s one piece. Another piece is that there’s a cycle that’s dictated by the reality of being a touring artist [when you only have eight weeks between tours to make a record]. At some point in time the cycle takes over, and even though you’re not really ready to make the record during that window, it’s the only window you have, so you put it out. Cracks in the foundation start. And slowly, over time, the creative process gets eroded, and it becomes something that’s just a window in the schedule instead of the most important thing that drives the whole train.