‘Judgment is the price of being creative’

Rick Rubin is a legendary American record producer who co-founded Def Jam records, which helped popularise hip hop. He has worked with everyone from Johnny Cash (whose career he is credited with reviving) to Paul McCartney and Kanye West. He sat down with The Spectator’s Rory Sutherland to discuss creativity, Bach, Sherlock Holmes, JFK assassination theories and more.

RORY SUTHERLAND: It’s a huge pleasure to see you again. Just for the benefit of older Spectator readers, it’s probably worth defining what a music producer does because it’s ambiguous. People might imagine someone sitting there, adjusting the levels on one of those enormous mixing decks. In fact you never touch any of that stuff. You don’t really play an instrument. And you don’t read music. (No shame in that. The Beatles couldn’t read music either.) Your involvement, as you often say, is that in the studio you’ll be found lying on a couch and listening rather than interfering with any of the equipment or any of the specifics of the piece. Is your value as a kind of catalyst?

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RICK RUBIN: It’s a lot like being a coach. I listen. I take in whatever’s going on. I give feedback honestly, clearly, as best I can. What I’ve come to learn from doing it for a while is it’s more helpful to point out the problem areas than to give solutions. The artist can figure out what they can do to solve the problem. Seeing where the weak links are is a big part of my job.

RS: It’s an approach in which – and I’m vaguely familiar with it in advertising in the sense – your task is not to be right, it’s to be interestingly less wrong.

RR: ‘Interestingly’ is a good word because so much of what it’s about is creating something that can capture the imagination, which tend to be the things that don’t fit.