Rick Rubin

Rick Rubin is a record producer, a co-founder of Def Jam Recordings and the founder of American Recordings. He began Def Jam while a student at New York University, working with Russell Simmons to build a label around a form of music that was still outside the mainstream. His work with LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC joined a close listener’s taste to the practical tasks of finding artists and getting records made. Rubin’s reach later extended across rock, metal, country and pop. The point of that range was not to apply one fixed sound to every artist. In his account to David Senra, the first hip-hop record he made was an attempt to capture the energy he heard in clubs and missed in commercial recordings. In later work he kept looking for the particular voice of the performer, often by removing parts that hid it. His collaboration with Johnny Cash began in 1993 and led to American Recordings in 1994. Their work explored both songs Cash already loved and material outside his usual setting. Rubin’s Fresh Air interview describes the care required to move from a stage performance to an intimate recording. This is a record producer’s work with people, interpretation and selection, alongside his role in building labels. Rubin also served as co-head of Columbia Records. In 2023 he published The Creative Act: A Way of Being, a book on the conditions for creative work. He chose to write about the reader’s practice rather than recount famous studio sessions. His interviews describe attention, experiment, craft and completion as parts of that work, with a place for both open exploration and a later schedule.