The greatest songwriter of all time, according to Rick Rubin
It was going to take a lot more than a couple of decent songs to impress Rick Rubin.
Even though 90% of his job makes him look like a fan internalising every single piece of music he has ever heard when he enters the studio, there’s a lot more going on than someone listening for a couple of hours. He was always trying to find the best thing that a song needed whenever working with one of his artists, and no matter what genre they fell into, he was going to remind his audience of why some of his favourite acts were considered some of the greatest in their field.
But the real superpower behind Rubin is how much changes from one record to the next. No one else would have thought that the same person that produced Public Enemy would have one day worked the same magic for everyone from Slayer to Red Hot Chili Peppers to Tom Petty to Johnny Cash, but Rubin was constantly thinking about evolving. He didn’t want to listen to one genre of music for the rest of his life, so that meant switching things up on whatever he wanted to hear at the time.
And if you listen to bands before and after they work with him, they seem to have a much clearer understanding of what they want every single time they finish one of their records. The Peppers were a great band even before Rubin came into the picture, but Blood Sugar Sex Magik was the moment they hit on the kind of magic that no one else could produce when they made tracks like ‘Under the Bridge’.
Having come from the world of hip-hop and punk music, though, you wouldn’t think that Rubin had the chance to slow things down too much throughout his career. Anyone else would have been glad to chase that adrenaline high for the rest of their days, but the fact that he could see the beauty in an album like Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever meant that he was attuned to the song before anything else.
Then again, not every artist that he worked with necessarily had to be the coolest person in the world. Roy Orbison was still a living legend by the time that Rubin paired him with Glenn Danzig, but even after decades in the business, to see the bearded producer work with a wild card like Neil Diamond was definitely a change of pace when he worked on his record 12 Songs in 2005.
Everyone and their mother had learned the magic behind a song like ‘Sweet Caroline’, but even before Rubin worked with Diamond, he considered him to be one of the finest writers he had ever heard, saying, “He’s one of my favorite artists of all time. It would be a dream come true. He wrote some many great songs, it’s just astounding.” And before anyone starts chuckling, Rubin is absolutely right.
There are many people that scoffed when someone with that many cheesy hits got into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but that kind of track record speaks for itself. Sure, ‘Sweet Caroline’ has been a part of American folklore ever since the Boston Red Sox started using it in their games, but if you look through everything from ‘Cherry Cherry’ to ‘I’m A Believer’ by The Monkees, it’s strange to think of how many songs that most people know without really knowing them by name.
And listening to Rubin’s work with Diamond, it seemed like he really tried to bring out that side of his musical idol even more. The purists of the world may have been discrediting him for not working with bands like System of a Down all over again, but Rubin’s wasn’t concerned about dwelling on the past. What mattered was the future, and it looked a lot brighter when working with the people who inspired him the most.
