“So beautiful”: The one artist Rick Rubin said could sing anything well
Not every songwriter is necessarily the right singer for the job whenever they get in front of a microphone. Although they might have the emotion to bring a tune across in the same way that Bob Dylan does, it’s easy for someone to get the right vocalist who’s capable of taking a song into the stratosphere. And since Rick Rubin was always looking at the music he made from a fan’s perspective first, he knew that there were certain artists that he couldn’t really go wrong with.
When Rubin first started, though, the idea of tuneful singing was the last thing on his radar. He had grown up in the world of punk rock, and that was all about wearing someone’s emotions on their sleeve and playing the most raucous music they could think of whenever they strapped on their guitars. And when hip-hop started becoming his primary focus, he was more interested in how the rhythm got someone moving rather than the breathtaking vocals behind every track.
Because in the world of hip-hop, anything could be an instrument in the right context. Thanks to the major sampling boom going on in the late 1980s, bands like Beastie Boys and A Tribe Called Quest turned their approaches to hip-hop into their equivalents of psychedelic and jazz music, respectively, with each of them looking at snippets of tracks and trying to find the musicality behind something as short as three seconds.
It was almost anti-music theory, but once Rubin got hold of records by people like Tom Petty, he knew the power of what a great song could do. Full Moon Fever was already stuffed to the brim with great tunes, but when Rubin began working with Petty on albums like Wildflowers, he was always a great creative director, always knowing when the band captured the right feeling for a song like on ‘Crawling Back To You’.
By the time he had entered the 2000s, though, Rubin had struck the perfect balance between the tuneful and aggressive side of his roster. He was never that far away from bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers, but it wasn’t out of the question for him to work with a band like The Dixie Chicks and suddenly find his way back into the world of System of A Down a few albums later. Whenever any producer gets the chance to work with Adele, there’s hardly any real work to be done.
Despite working with some of the most recognisable singers in music history like Johnny Cash, Rubin felt that what Adele was doing was absolutely flawless during her rendition of The Cure’s ‘Lovesong’, saying, “She sang it so beautifully as well. I mean, she sings everything so beautifully. You don’t have to do anything to get her to sing great. You just have to set up a mic and let her sing it. She sang it so much, when we worked on it; when the band was playing it, she sang. She must have sung the song, I don’t know, 30 times in a row. And every time was astounding.”
While this was before she started facing her vocal issues, Adele has hardly lost a step in recent years, either. Her music might sound like a relic of days gone by in many respects, but listening to a song like ‘Easy on Me’ is still an emotional experience for anyone who hears it, if only to listen to those beautiful runs that she does on the chorus.
Most singers need to spend a few years before they grow into the singer that they want to be, but while an artist like Michael Jackson took time before developing into the voice we would one day hear on Thriller, Adele is everything that someone could ask for in a vocalist every time she takes the stage.
