If the producer's main goal is to represent an artist's expression,
should the producer in turn have an artistic voice?
No two producers are alike.
You have music producers that have a definite signature to everything
they do.
Every single production you hear sounds like them.
I'm thinking Max Martin, Dr. Luke, Timbaland, those type of producers.
Then there are other producers that you can hear their aesthetic.
But not every single pixel in this production sounds like them.
So if I think of producers like T Bone Burnett or Mitchell Froom,
these are producers that you know it's their production.
But you can still hear the artist come through, almost like a filter,
if you will.
Then there's the vast majority of other producers,
which are more chameleon like.
You hear productions where you really get the artist.
And the producer is just there in the service
of making the best of what they have available to them.
Which one of those three different types of producers is the better one?
There isn't a better one.
It's like a film director.
You can have directors that every single film that Alfred Hitchcock does
looks like Alfred Hitchcock.
Then you have movies that you can get the signature of the director and some
where you're just watching the movie.
You have no idea who directed it.
Which one is best?
It's for you to decide.
The thing that I find interesting is that we
need to figure out what type of producers
are we so that we can interact with our projects
in a way that is, again, efficient and almost genuine and sincere
with our artists.
Take this also into consideration.
A producer's job is to deal with logistics, with managerial stuff,
with business, with the psychology of everything that is happening,
interacting with all the technical bits.
But when we get to the musical, what are we bringing to the table?
I find that a big part of what producers bring to the table
are their ideas, their original ideas, their ability to sculpt the music
that lies in front of them.
So I always think of this.
If an artist hires a producer, and the producer has no ideas to give
but rather is a person that deals with the technical stuff
and the managerial stuff, why doesn't the artist just
hire an engineer and a manager?
So for me, there's no way of getting around the producer not having a voice,
not having ideas.
It's just considering, one, what type of producers
are we, so we can present ourselves and the way we work to our artists
and also understand that even though we do have a voice,
and we have to have a voice, that voice is always
going to be in the service of representing our artists,
what they want to say.
At the end, we are working on music.
And unless you the producer wrote the music,
we always need to take into account that even though we do have a voice,
we do have an artistic sensibility, it's always
second to helping maximize what the artist or the music is trying to say.