Rick Rubin

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Rick Rubin once received a thank-you speech that sounded like an insult. In 2010, the British band Muse won UK Single of the Year at the Music Producers Guild Awards for "Uprising." Frontman Matt Bellamy took the stage and said: "I'd like to thank John Leckie for teaching us how to produce and Rick Rubin for teaching us how not to produce."

  Muse had never worked with Rubin. Many listeners heard a dig at him. Bellamy later explained that the joke was aimed at his own band, which had also taken a hands-off approach to making its album.

  The man at the center of that joke was born Frederick Jay Rubin on the 10th of March 1963. He co-founded Def Jam Recordings, founded American Recordings, and later served as co-president of Columbia Records. In 2007, MTV called him "the most important producer of the last 20 years," and Time put him on its list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2026, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

  His catalogue covers rap, heavy metal, country, pop and alternative rock. So how did a film student who played in a punk band end up shaping so many sounds? What does a producer actually contribute when the best-known thing about him is restraint? And why do some of the artists he worked with remember the experience so differently from one another?

  44453414

• 2. Punk Roots and Def Jam

  ›

  Long Beach, New York, is where Rubin was born into a Jewish family, the son of a housewife named Linda and a shoe wholesaler named Michael. He grew up in nearby Lido Beach. At Long Beach High School, he befriended the head of the audiovisual department, who gave him a few lessons in guitar and songwriting.

  A band with three friends came first, playing garage gigs and school shows. Then a teacher helped him start a punk band called the Pricks. Their biggest claim to fame was getting thrown off the stage at CBGB after only two songs, following a brawl with hecklers. The fight was staged. Friends of the band had been told to provoke it, so the show would be shut down and people would talk.

  At New York University, Rubin studied film and formed another band, Hose, which took inspiration from San Francisco's Flipper. In 1982, a Hose track became the first release on Def Jam. It was a 45 rpm seven-inch single sold in a brown paper bag, with no label on it. The band toured the Midwest and California and shared bills with Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü, Circle Jerks, Butthole Surfers and Minor Threat. Along the way Rubin became friends with Ian MacKaye, the Fugazi frontman who owned Dischord Records.

  By 1984, Hose was finished, because Rubin's attention had moved to the hip hop scene in New York.

  The guide into that scene was DJ Jazzy Jay of the Zulu Nation. By 1983, the two had produced "It's Yours" by the Bronx rapper T La Rock and put it out on Def Jam. Arthur Baker then helped it travel worldwide in 1984 through his own label, Streetwise Records.

  Jazzy Jay also introduced Rubin to Russell Simmons, a concert promoter and artist manager, at the Negril club. Rubin told Simmons he needed help getting Def Jam off the ground. Simmons and Rubin pushed Jazzy Jay aside, and the official label was founded in 1984 while Rubin was still a student. Its first release was LL Cool J's "I Need a Beat."

  Rubin then went looking for rappers beyond the Bronx, Brooklyn and Harlem. He found them in Queens, on Staten Island and on Long Island, and that search eventually led the label to sign Public Enemy.

  The next act he turned his attention to was a trio of former punks from New York.

  159101213

• 3. Rap Meets Rock

  ›

  Kate Schellenbach was the drummer who lost her place when the Beastie Boys changed direction. Rubin had played a key part in steering the group away from punk and toward rap, and her departure followed.

  Their 1985 EP, with the tracks "Rock Hard," "Party's Gettin' Rough" and "Beastie Groove," came out on the strength of Rubin's work with Run-DMC. Earlier Run-DMC recordings had been produced by Simmons and by Larry Smith, a musician from Orange Krush. Rubin's own productions were known for sometimes fusing rap with heavy rock.

  He also shaped how the Beastie Boys looked on screen. Rubin asked Adam Dubin and Ric Menello to co-direct the videos for "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)" and "No Sleep till Brooklyn." Those videos launched the band's mainstream hip hop career.

  Sue Cummings, an editor at Spin magazine and a friend of Rubin's, suggested the most famous crossover of the decade. Her idea was to have Run-DMC and Aerosmith record a cover of Aerosmith's "Walk This Way." The 1986 result is often credited with bringing rap with hard rock to mainstream ears and with reviving Aerosmith's career. That same year Rubin worked with Aerosmith again on demos for a new album, but the partnership ended early and left only rough studio jams.

  Still in 1986, Rubin produced Reign in Blood for Slayer, a record considered a classic of heavy metal. It was his first work with a metal band, and it began a long partnership. In 1987 he produced Electric, the Cult's third album, which remains one of the band's trademark works. He returned to the Cult for the 1992 single "The Witch."

  Film pulled him in as well. He appeared as a character based on himself in the 1985 hip hop picture Krush Groove, a story inspired by the early days of Simmons's career. He is credited as music supervisor on Less than Zero and as producer of its soundtrack. In 1988, he directed Tougher Than Leather, a second Run-DMC film, and co-wrote it with Ric Menello.

  In 1986, a Village Voice cover story had called him "the king of rap." Rubin later pushed back on the title, saying the label's success was a shared effort with Simmons and the artists.

  By 1988, the partnership behind that effort was over.

  6615161210

• 4. Burying Def

  ›

  A falling out with Lyor Cohen, then the president of Def Jam, ended the partnership between Rubin and Simmons in 1988. Simmons stayed in New York with Def Jam. Rubin moved to Los Angeles and started Def American Records.

  The new label leaned toward rock and metal. Rubin signed Danzig, Masters of Reality, the Four Horsemen and Wolfsbane. He also signed the alternative group the Jesus and Mary Chain and the stand-up comedian Andrew Dice Clay. He did not leave rap behind, though. He signed the Geto Boys and kept working with Public Enemy, LL Cool J and Run-DMC.

  In 1993, Rubin noticed that the word "def" had been accepted into the standard dictionary. His response was theatrical. He held a funeral for the word, with a casket, a grave, celebrity mourners and a eulogy delivered by Al Sharpton.

  The label became American Recordings. Rubin compared the moment to what happened to hippie imagery. He said: "When advertisers and the fashion world co-opted the image of hippies, a group of the original hippies in San Francisco literally buried the image of the hippie. When 'def' went from street lingo to mainstream, it defeated its purpose."

  The first major project under the new name would pair him with a country legend whose career had gone quiet.

  20151419

• 5. The Johnny Cash Sessions

  ›

  Johnny Cash's American Recordings arrived in 1994 as the first major release on the renamed label. It held six cover songs, plus new material that other writers composed for Cash at Rubin's request. The album was a critical and commercial success. It helped revive a career that had hit a fallow period.

  Rubin repeated the formula for five more albums. Unchained used Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as the backing band. Solitary Man, The Man Comes Around, A Hundred Highways and Ain't No Grave followed. The Man Comes Around was the last album released before Cash died. Its "Give My Love to Rose" won the 2003 Grammy for Best Male Country Vocal Performance. "Bridge over Troubled Water," a duet with Fiona Apple, earned a nomination for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals.

  The record's best-remembered track came from Rubin's introduction of Cash to "Hurt," a song by Nine Inch Nails. Cash's cover of it, also on The Man Comes Around, became a defining song of his later years.

  Rubin brought other musicians into the Cash sessions. John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers played on a Cash record. The band's drummer Chad Smith later played on a Chicks album, so the circle ran both ways.

  A second set of recordings tied Cash to another veteran. Joe Strummer's final album, Streetcore, was released after his death. It included two songs Rubin produced, "Long Shadow" and a cover of Bob Marley's "Redemption Song." Strummer had written "Long Shadow" for Cash, who never recorded it. Rubin also produced a version of "Redemption Song" with Strummer and Cash together, and it appeared in Cash's posthumous box set, Unearthed.

  The musicians who passed through Rubin's circle soon included one band he would work with for more than two decades.

  19142610

• 6. Hit After Hit

  ›

  Blood Sugar Sex Magik, released in 1991, was the Red Hot Chili Peppers' fifth album and the first Rubin produced for them. Its singles "Give It Away" and "Under the Bridge" launched the band into the mainstream. Arguably, it was his biggest success as a producer.

  The partnership produced eight albums in all, among them One Hot Minute, Californication, By the Way, Stadium Arcadium, I'm With You, Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen. Together they yielded 14 number-one singles on the Billboard Alternative Songs chart, a record the band still held as of 2022. They also drew 16 Grammy nominations and six wins. Stadium Arcadium earned Rubin a Producer of the Year Grammy for 2006 and a nomination for Album of the Year. The band has sold over 80 million albums worldwide, most of them Rubin-produced.

  After 24 years, the band announced in late 2014 that it would work with Danger Mouse on its 11th album. Rubin came back in 2022 for two albums released seven months apart, and both produced number-one singles on the same chart.

  His list of other credits kept growing. He produced Mick Jagger's Wandering Spirit in 1993, Tom Petty's Wildflowers in 1994 and AC/DC's Ballbreaker in 1995. System of a Down's self-titled album followed in 1998, and The Mars Volta's debut De-Loused in the Comatorium in 2003. In 2005 he executive-produced Shakira's two-album project Fijación Oral, Vol. 1 and Oral Fixation, Vol. 2. He produced Jay-Z's "99 Problems" and appeared in its video. He also worked with Eminem on "Berzerk."

  In May 2007, Rubin was named co-head of Columbia Records. That year he co-produced Linkin Park's Minutes to Midnight with Mike Shinoda, and the pair went on to make A Thousand Suns in 2010 and Living Things in 2012. At the 2007 Grammys he won Producer of the Year, Non-Classical, for 2006 work with the Chicks, Michael Kranz, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, U2, Green Day and Johnny Cash. He won it again in 2009 for Metallica, Neil Diamond, Ours, Jakob Dylan and Weezer. He also won Album of the Year twice, for the Chicks' Taking the Long Way and for Adele's 21.

  Rubin left Columbia in 2012 and revived American Recordings through a deal with Republic Records. The first releases were ZZ Top's La Futura and the Avett Brothers' The Carpenter. That same year, he tried to record a cover album with Crosby, Stills and Nash, but the brief sessions failed. Graham Nash called them "irritable" and "not a great experience."

  A failure like that raises the question of what, exactly, Rubin does in a studio.

  1927282641

• 7. The Sound of Subtraction

  ›

  Strings, backup vocals and reverb are the three things Rubin became known for removing. His trademark sound was stripped down, with bare instrumentation and naked vocals. By the 2000s, though, he was using such elements himself. The Washington Post described a Neil Diamond session in which a swelling string arrangement carried the singer's baritone to a crescendo, while Rubin leaned back as if floored by the song's emotional power.

  Dan Charnas, a music journalist, worked in the 1990s as vice president of A&R and marketing at American Recordings. He described Rubin as fantastic with sound and arrangements, and tremendous with artists. In his words, Rubin "gets more honest and exciting performances out of people than anyone."

  Natalie Maines of the Chicks offered a gentler explanation. She said Rubin has "the ability and the patience to let music be discovered, not manufactured." Then she added a joke: "Come to think of it, maybe he is a guru."

  Dr. Dre went furthest, calling Rubin "hands down, the dopest producer ever that anyone would ever want to be, ever."

  Not everyone who worked with him agreed.

  40412614

• 8. The Critics

  ›

  Corey Taylor, the frontman of Slipknot, said in 2014 that he met Rubin only four times while the band recorded Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses). He complained about the bills the band received and called Rubin overrated and overpaid. In 2016, Taylor expressed regret for those remarks. He said he wanted to make amends and blamed the friction on being freshly sober, unsure of himself, and unused to anyone who worked the way Rubin did.

  In 2019, Taylor returned to the subject while comparing Rubin with Greg Fidelman, who had produced Slipknot's album We Are Not Your Kind. He called Rubin "a nice guy, absolutely nice guy," but said the band saw him no more than once a week until the vocals were finished at his house. Taylor blamed Rubin's other work commitments.

  Geezer Butler, bassist of Black Sabbath, gave a mixed verdict in 2022 on the band's 2013 album 13. He found the experience strange. Rubin's first instruction was to forget that they were a heavy metal band. Rubin played them their first album and told them to "cast your mind back to then when there was no such thing as heavy metal." Butler said Ozzy Osbourne and Tony Iommi were frustrated by Rubin's suggestions, and that he still did not know what Rubin had done.

  Another complaint concerns volume. Since at least 1999, listeners have blamed Rubin for the loudness war, in which recordings are compressed and sometimes clipped to sound louder. Tim Anderson of The Guardian criticized the "excessive compression and distortion" of Californication, released that year.

  Metallica's Death Magnetic in 2008 drew the same complaint. A remixed version appeared in the video game Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, and fans said they preferred it because it was less compressed than the official release.

  Ben Ratliff of The New York Times said of Black Sabbath's 13 that "your ears aren't given room to breathe." Jon Hadusek of Consequence of Sound wrote that the mix deserved disparagement because the levels were crushed by distortion and compression.

  Outside the studio, the man behind these records lives by a very different set of habits.

  Since he was 14 years old, Rubin has practiced Buddhism and meditation. He also prefers to go barefoot for spiritual reasons, a habit that earned him the nickname "barefoot sage." He lives in Malibu, California, and spends part of the year with his family in Tuscany, Italy. He is married to Mourielle Hurtado Herrera, a former actress and model who became a farmer, and they have a son born in 2017.

  His tastes are less serene than that picture suggests. As a young man, Rubin held season tickets to WWE events at Madison Square Garden through the 1970s and 1980s. He has named the wrestlers Roddy Piper and Ric Flair as influences, and says villainous wrestlers shaped the public image of the Beastie Boys. From 1991 to 1995 he financially backed Smoky Mountain Wrestling, the company run by promoter Jim Cornette. He was a vegan for over 20 years before he began eating meat again.

  His advice on creativity has reached well beyond records. He contributed a chapter to Tim Ferriss's book Tools of Titans and often posts guidance on Instagram. In 2021 he co-starred in McCartney 3,2,1, a six-part documentary series about the career of Paul McCartney. That July, he signed with Endeavor Content to develop his home studio, Shangri-La Recording Studios.

  On the 17th of January 2023, Penguin Press published his first book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Rubin said: "I set out to write a book about what to do to make a great work of art. Instead, it revealed itself to be a book on how to be." That year he also began hosting an interview podcast on Apple Podcasts, called Tetragrammaton.

  In 2024, Rubin founded the Festival of the Sun in Italy. The yearly event combines live music by international artists with meditation sessions, culinary presentations and film screenings.

  4748495054