Rick Rubin certainly knows how to feed into the sense of mystery that surrounds his production style. Both fans and critics have long speculated on what it is he actually does in the studio, and Rubin made headlines during an interview in 2023 when he claimed not to know how to use a mixing desk.
Now Finneas – a much-more hands-on kind of producer both on his own records and those for other people, most notably his sister, Billie Eilish – has had his say on the myth of Rick. And, like many of us, he’s a little perplexed by it.
“He’s made work that I’m really inspired by,” he tells Billboard. “I’m a little confused by his kind of – he swears that he knows nothing at all about music, and it’s like, just Google Rick Rubin, Johnny Cash. There are many videos of him setting up the mics. He doesn’t know nothing.”
Almost certainly not, but Finneas also has a theory as to why Rubin likes to play down his technical abilities.
“I think what I assume he means by that, and I respect this, is similar to what I’ve said before: there are a lot of people that know a lot more than I do. I don’t know the most, but I also don’t know nothing.”
Finneas goes on to suggest that perhaps Rubin is attempting to make sure that people he may be working with aren’t put off because they’re not genius technical producers.
“I think it’s an effective — I think I try to do the same thing, which is, I don’t want to make people feel like it isn’t achievable,” he says. “I think that you don’t want to intimidate somebody out of trying to make something by way of, ‘I have my 10,000 hours, I know so much, you’ll never know as much as I do.’ So I like that about that.”
Discussing his own production style, Finneas says that, although he’s been encouraging his sister Billie to get more involved in the technical side of things and take on some of the vocal engineering work in particular, there also benefits to working with someone who thinks about sound and music more descriptively.
“One of the things I said to her like a year ago was, one of the challenges with the more you know is the less you imagine, I think. So what I want is for an artist to just be purely imaginative.”
Finneas also remembered a key moment in his production journey – when, in 2011, Apple decided to significantly drop the price of its flagship DAW.
“I was saving up to buy Logic Pro,” he recalls, “and it was like $799 or something, and I was saving up, and in a couple months I’d have enough money, right? And then they dropped the price to like $199 and I was like, bro, I can afford this.”
