The greatest craftsman Rick Rubin ever worked with: “The best”
There is no set process to the way that Rick Rubin works on a record.
It’s fun for him to understand what the artist wants out of him whenever he’s working on a record, but the number-one rule for him usually comes down to whether the music is speaking to him in the right way. He has to be in love with what he’s working on every step of the way, but he felt that some of the best musicians he ever worked with would woodshed until they have the right idea for whatever song they’re working on.
But while Rubin’s job seems to be to become the greatest listener in the room at every single turn, it’s a much harder job than it sounds like. No one would have the guts to tell someone like Johnny Cash that they needed to do a song over again or talk to Flea about how his bass line is messing with the feel of the song, but if Rubin knows what he wants out of the tune, he needs to be brutally honest every step of the way.
And the same can be said for everyone that he works with. While there are more than a few people who hated every second of working with Rubin when they started putting everything together, it’s not like the records don’t speak for themselves. Rubin knows how to push his favourite that one step too far in the recording process, and most of his best albums are the ones where the artists are more than up to the challenge.
Red Hot Chili Peppers were willing to go that extra mile when working with him on Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and Slayer pushed themselves to the brink to make one of the greatest thrash metal albums of all time with him, but when Tom Petty first heard of him, he wasn’t trying to seek Rubin’s wisdom or anything. He just knew they were on the same wavelength, and his work on Wildflowers turned into one of the finest heartland rock records ever made.
Petty didn’t intend to do that going in by any stretch, but when listening to all of the songs working in conjunction with each other, he wasn’t going to settle for anything less than perfect. The initial plan was to have it be a double album, but even if they whittled everything down to one disc, the whole thing holds together as one of the most beautiful works of art that he ever made.
And while Rubin did give his input where it was needed, he was the first to say that he saw no one who worked harder than Petty when it came to creating his masterpieces, saying, “[Tom Petty is], of anyone I’ve worked with, the most a craftsman. He can write a song and then know how to take that song and make it into the best record that it could be.”
Adding, “I’ve sat down with him where he’ll play a song that’s written in five minutes, complicated story, and I’ll ask him afterwards, ‘what’s that about?’ or, ‘what’s the inspiration?,’ and he’ll say he has no idea; It just comes through him.”
Petty was already tuned into some kind of force whenever he made some of his records, but he wasn’t willing to question his process or anything. If he was going to try to pick apart his songwriting routine, he knew that it would probably go away, so his only hope was to try to make the best songs that he could and hope that the songwriting gods were smiling on him whenever he picked up a guitar.
Rubin wasn’t going to be able to ask him to make a masterpiece out of the blue, because he knew as well as Petty did that he wasn’t trying to work under pressure every day. It just needed to be the right time and the right place where he captured a song out in the wild and came back with a little bit of magic.
