The artist Rick Rubin called the “greatest songwriter alive today”
Whenever Rick Rubin entered the studio, it never mattered what genre he was dealing with.
For all the ridicule he gets for showing up at an artist’s studio and not really touching the board all that much, his ears are some of the best in the business when it comes to everything from country music to heavy metal to some of the most foundational hip-hop records of all time. Not many people can have that diverse a catalogue, but it all comes from Rubin serving the song before everything else.
Everything that he ever worked on was being done from a fan’s perspective, and as much as the fans might clamour for whatever their favourite band is doing next, Rubin felt like the audience came last every single time he entered the studio. The minute you start thinking about the audience is when you start to stagnate, so the best thing that you can ask for is making music that’s going to make you happy above anything else.
That’s what happened with Public Enemy, the same way it happened with Tom Petty, but it’s not like Rubin was just throwing caution to the wind with every artist he worked with. There were occasionally some eccentric bands that excited him like System of a Down, but whenever he was working in the studio, what caught his ear was usually the music that had a lot more weight to it than a bunch of musical fluff.
Which makes sense coming from someone born and bred in the punk tradition. Rubin didn’t get into the business with the hope of being one of the greatest producers in the world, but by listening to what turned him on, it turned out there were a lot of people who had the exact same taste that he did when he started introducing everyone from Slayer to Run-DMC to the world. But even if he had massive respect for more straight-ahead punks, classic rock was still where it all came back to.
There wasn’t a single groove that AC/DC played that he didn’t like, but going back all the way to the days of the British invasion, Rubin was always examining everything that The Beatles did. And while working with the likes of John Lennon would have been exciting, coming from someone as adventurous as Rubin, he was still marvelling at what Paul McCartney did whenever he talked about artists he’d love to work with.
He did get the opportunity to talk with Macca more than a few times, but Rubin wanted to really dissect what compelled him to write those fantastic tunes, saying, “I guess Paul McCartney would be high up on the list, just because he has made so much music that has moved me for so long, and he’s maybe the greatest songwriter alive today.” But for all of McCartney’s pedigrees, his diverse catalogue tends to get forgotten more often than not.
Everyone and their mother might like to rehash the more simplistic pop songs that he made back in his Beatle days, but there was a lot more he had to offer than a few catchy tunes. He was the one that started the band’s avant-garde journey in their prime, and even when they broke off to work on their solo careers, RAM was wildly inventive for its time, even if the rest of the world took a few more years to catch up to it.
McCartney was bound to have peaks and valleys like every artist does, but the idea of him working with Rubin would make for some of the most adventurous tunes of his career. The bearded guru doesn’t really need to critique one of the finest melodists of all time, but if he got the right songs on the record, maybe Macca could create something as delightfully strange as Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.
