The Rick Rubin method: It’s not for everyone. Warm-voiced, flowing, bearded like a deity, the legendary record producer (nine Grammys) is about mindset. He’s about essence. He’s hands-off, allowing the possibilities to manifest, and then abruptly, disorientingly, hands-on, demanding take after take of a guitar solo or vocal line. And if you are, for example, a late-stage rock star from the postwar slums of Birmingham, England, it might all tend to make you a bit grumpy. “I still don’t know what he did,” Geezer Butler, the Black Sabbath bassist and lyricist, told SiriusXM a few years ago, recalling Rubin’s work on Sabbath’s 2013 comeback album, 13. “It was a weird experience … He played us our very first album, and he said, ‘Cast your mind back to then, when there was no such thing as heavy metal or anything like that—and pretend it’s the follow-up album to that,’ which is a ridiculous thing to think.”
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