The Rolling Stone Studio
The producer/songwriter goes deep on getting Madonna and Charli XCX together, working with Michael Stipe, why Black Sabbath didn't make one more album, and much more
Producer/songwriter Andrew Watt spent yet another wildly overscheduled year working with legends, producing both Paul McCartney‘s The Boys of Dungeon Lane and the Rolling Stones‘ Foreign Tongues (his second album with the band), while also co-producing Brandi Carlile’s Returning to Myself and two songs from Madonna‘s Confessions II. Continuing his much-lauded Mayhem collaboration with Lady Gaga, he worked with her on multiple new songs as well, including tracks for The Devil Wears Prada 2. He also co-wrote and co-produced Michael Stipe‘s track “I Played the Fool,” and is working with Stipe on his long-awaited solo debut. Also on his schedule: a new album with Elton John.
In a new episode of The Rolling Stone Studio, Watt sits down with Brian Hiatt to talk about all those collaborations and more. Watch it on YouTube or above; here are some highlights from the discussion:
Watt played matchmaker for Madonna and Charli XCX for the “Danceteria” remix he worked on. “I actually put them on a text message together,” says Watt, “to kinda meet and talk before they were ever gonna do a record together, because they just needed to be friends. They’re both so awesome and so cool, and really special people to me in my life. I was at a wedding with Charli, and I was like, ‘Have you ever met Madonna?’ And she’s like, ‘No, we actually, we don’t know each other.’ And so I just, I thought that needed to happen.” The original “Danceteria” grew out of Madonna’s stories about the downtown New York club “where it all started for her.” “She would tell us, like, you know, you look around and there’s Nile Rodgers and there’s David Byrne,” Watt says. “And she obviously invented talking on a pop song, right? … So we threw the beat on, and then she started just talking about her life. It’s her origin story.” For the remix, he says, “Charli recorded her part, but then they worked on the track and the production together … It’s a completely different record than the original.”
Watt calls Lady Gaga “my older sister,” and says their sessions have brought him to tears. “Greatest feeling in the world is when you make a project with an artist, it ends, and everyone’s sad, and you’re gonna miss each other, and then they call you back, and they’re like, ‘Let’s make more stuff,'” Watt says. “She and I are from the same place. We’re from New York. We both grew up playing in the Bitter End, and were walking in the … same streets, and in the same scenes a couple years apart. … So it feels like my sister, you know? Like my older sister, couple years older than me. When we sit, we break a song down, even when it’s an electronic song, and I’m on the guitar and she’s on the piano, sitting head-to-head and going through the song, it’s like it’s one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. It’s brought me to tears multiple times.”
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Watt is in the middle of making Elton John’s next album, and because Elton has lost much of his sight, they had to rebuild the way he writes songs. (Lyricist Bernie Taupin previously told Rolling Stone the new process is “a whole different ballgame” for John.) “Famously, Elton writes songs by reading a lyric,” Watt says. “He is going through life in a completely different way than ever before, and my God, the spirit of this man is unlike anything else. 99.9999999 percent of people would’ve just folded, and he continues on… He’s wanting to make music, and so we had to adapt…. The way we kind of flipped it around was he’s one of the great melody writers ever. We could throw on some drums for him that made him feel a certain type of way, and he could just play to the drums and come up with melodies first and have, like, a feel, or, ‘Let’s do something that feels like a great soul record.’ … And Bernie is so imaginative as well, so he was able to then listen to that, hear a basic rough little melody of Elton and come up with ideas to what he was doing. … And then Elton is the master of putting Bernie’s lyrics down to the song. Once Bernie would come up with the lyric, after, we’d put it on a huge screen for him, and he’d scan through it, and he’d figure out where he’d wanna put it, and he’d go little by little, and it was perfect.”
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Watt says Stipe is determined to get his solo album exactly right. “ He’s extremely hard on himself,” Watt says. “He works really hard at his craft, and he kinda beats himself up, I think, in a healthy way. I’ve seen him write lyrics, throw them out, write them again, all on his own merit. So I think he is wanting to make sure that he is gonna say exactly what he wants to say, and make a sound that’s exactly how he wants it to sound… He’s working with a bunch of different people, different flavors of different [musical] beds, and then finding his way around them. But he’s one of the all-time greats, great songwriter, great lyricist, great melodist. And really fun to be around.”
Watching Paul McCartney work, Watt says, was like going to college. “His time alone is extremely important,” Watt says. “Tucking away, often in a small space, and writing, taking stuff home and writing in the morning. He’s fearless…. He was kind of teaching me the way he works…. You can write a song out of anything, and then sometimes you switch it up and go to a weird thing, which changes form a million different times. And then it goes to a rock section. Then it goes to a bluesy guitar section. … It was kind of like, let me show you how we can use the studio. He loves playing characters, even, like, ‘Rocky Raccoon.’ … His imagination is unlike anyone else’s. Like Mozart, you know? … Bouncing around the studio and playing every different instrument. Watching him arrange background vocals, which he does either at the piano or with a guitar in his hand at the mic, and goes through the note and sings it, and is really choosing the notes and arranging them. He’s incredible at coming up with the perfect part on every different instrument and not making you feel like he played any instrument worse than the other. I mean, it just sounds like someone who’s a master on each instrument. Sounds like a band.”
On the Rolling Stones’ albums, Watt stood in the room with the band and called out song sections like a conductor. “I would always be in the live room while the band tracked, kind of as far from Keith as I am from you, and Mick kinda right in front, and be in that circle so I could watch how they’re interplaying with each other,” Watt says. “You don’t want it to ever be an arduous process with a band like that. They’re magic. If you’ve seen a Stones show, you see what happens when they hit a magic moment. … So my job would be to have a mic like this and call sections. ‘B section.’ … ‘Okay, let’s go back to the A section. Take it out on that.’ … They’re playing the tune that they made, and I’m arranging it kind of as it’s happening, in the moment.” Will there be another Stones album? “I don’t know. I didn’t know if there was gonna be another one after the first one. If they call, I’m there,” he says. “It’s the greatest honor of my life being around that band.”
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Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi recently said he passed on recording a final Sabbath album because Watt was “too excited” about it. Watt says Iommi wasn’t being serious. “You know me. I’m definitely an excited musician, person. … That would be a true statement,” Watt says. “But that’s not why it didn’t happen…. [Ozzy] was just like, ‘Let’s make a Sabbath album.’ He’s like, ‘We didn’t do an album with [drummer] Bill Ward.’ As Ozzy does, he gave me the marching orders: ‘Call Tony. Then you call Geezer. Then you call Bill.’ … So I called Tony. ‘Would you wanna do it?’ ‘Yeah, that sounds cool, if Bill would do it, yes.’ Geezer, ‘If Bill would do it, yes.’ It was all about, ‘If Bill would do it, yes.’ So then I had to have a conversation with Bill, and that was one of the strangest and funniest and coolest, at the same time, ’cause you’re talking to Bill Ward, conversations.” Ward “was unable to do the album for personal reasons,” which killed the project. As for Iommi’s comment: “I think he’s just taking the piss. … Which anyone that wants to do that with me, they absolutely should.”
Watt confirms he worked on unreleased Ozzy Osbourne songs and that there are “kind of” plans for them. ”There are some songs that we made for a specific reason, and yeah, that’s all I can say,” Watt says. “They’re hard for me to listen to. I haven’t listened to them.” The night before Osbourne’s final concert, he adds, “we sat and we listened to the stuff that we had made, and made notes. And that and the next day were the last times I got to see him. … But we had a beautiful listening session and talked about a lot of stuff. It’s hard to think about, but I miss him every day.”