MBW’s World’s Greatest Producers series sees us interview – and celebrate – some of the outstanding talents working in studios across the decades. This time, we meet Swedish writer-producer Rami Yacoub, who reflects on his partnership with Max Martin, Britney’s breakthrough, One Direction fans sleeping outside his studio, his five-year hiatus, and selling his catalog – several times. World’s Greatest Producers is supported by Hipgnosis Song Management.
For most songwriter-producers, that first American No.1 single is something to obsess over.
Charts are closely monitored for signs of upward momentum. Data points are scrutinized for clues that this could be the tune that’s headed for the top. Armies of music industry workers are mobilized to relay details of every spike in sales and streams.
However, Rami Yacoub and Max Martin, it seems fair to say, are not most songwriter-producers. When Britney Spears’ eternal …Baby One More Time – the first song they’d ever worked on together, which is not a bad way to start – hit the summit of the Hot 100 in January 1999, they were so busy in the studio it took them almost a month to notice.
“Max walked into the studio one day when I was comping some vocals and said, ‘Oh, by the way, we’re No.1,’” chuckles Yacoub. “I was like, ‘Where?’ ‘Oh, the US’. ‘When?’ ‘Three weeks ago, I forgot to tell you.’ I call him Max ‘By The Way’ Martin…”
The pair attempted a belated celebration, heading out into Stockholm on a quiet Monday night for a Swedish feast of Beef Rydberg, champagne and cigars, but their hearts weren’t in it. Conscious of the recording session they had booked for the following morning, they called it a night before 11pm, and have rarely made a big deal of their astounding commercial success ever since.
That’s because, for Yacoub at least, writing and producing the song itself has always been the most satisfying part of the process.
“None of us realized what an amazing record it was until our heritage and legacy became something in the culture,” he says. “At the time, it was just a song to us. It wasn’t something we thought about. Now, it’s easier to look back and see the impact…”
Ain’t that the truth. Over the ensuing two-and-a-half decades, both with Martin and without, Yacoub has co-written and co-produced enough top-tier smashes to fill a jukebox and still have enough left over for the best Now! That’s What I Call Music compilation in the franchise’s history.
And yet Yacoub says he hardly seemed destined for such songwriting stardom. At school, he wasn’t overly interested in music, intending to become a doctor until he got into heavy metal and decided to start a band. Eventually, he started to write poems/nascent songs (“The first was called Love On The Battlefield,” he chuckles, “It was very rock!”) and, later, experiment with synthesizers.
Bitten by the production bug, he earned a reputation as a remixer and radio jingle-maker. That led to working with Lutricia McNeal, an American singer living in Sweden, and they scored a couple of big European hits in the mid-1990s.
‘Every producer and writer in Sweden knew about Denniz and Max, because Denniz taught Max everything.’
A friend secured him an interview at Cheiron, the legendary Swedish studio run by Denniz Pop, where Max Martin was coming to prominence. But when Pop passed away tragically young in 1998, Yacoub was devastated.
“Every producer and writer in Sweden knew about Denniz and Max, because Denniz taught Max everything,” Yacoub says. “So Denniz was a mentor to all of us. Even though I was only there for a short time before he passed, it felt like I knew him forever. He inspired all of us; the only reason we’re all here is because of him.”
Yacoub proudly helps to carry on Pop’s legacy through the Denniz Pop Awards, which honors those making an outstanding contribution to Sweden’s international pop music heritage, and its Backstage program, which connects emerging Swedish talent with the music industry.
With Pop gone, Yacoub, Martin and other regular collaborators continued on his pop mission, writing and producing a seemingly endless string of hits for the Jive-Zomba Britney-Backstreet-Boys-*NSYNC hit factory and many others, until around 2006 when, burned out, Yacoub decided to take a year off.
One year turned into five, before he re-emerged with Kinglet Studios in Sweden and began a new hot streak in partnership with Carl Falk and collaborating with others, working on most of One Direction’s megahits, plus the likes of Nicki Minaj’s Starships.
After 1D became a global phenomenon, Yacoub took another break before reuniting with Max Martin in Los Angeles in 2018. More hits for the likes of Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber and Post Malone have followed.
Right now, however, Yacoub has cleared his diary bar some sessions with a couple of developing acts he’s working on. He’s also involved with the advisory council at Malibu’s Oaks Christian School. And, while he complies sheepishly when young artists ask him to call their parents “because my Mom loves your songs” and occasionally struggles to decipher their text speak, he remains uniquely fluent in the language of international hitmaking.
Time then, for him to sit down with MBW in the bright Swedish sun to talk Gaga, One Direction and why he wouldn’t change a thing about the music industry…
WHY IS SWEDEN SO GOOD AT POP MUSIC?
[Laughs] It’s been like that for a very long time, we’ve had big acts like Roxette and ABBA. It’s not something in the water – it’s just regular tap water, it tastes amazing though!
We have a lot of public music schools, so the option to choose music going to high school is very common and Swedish folk music is very rooted in the culture.
Plus, you’ve heard Swedish people talk and we have a very melodic language – we all speak English but we speak very up-and-down, it’s very pitch-based. And the darkness might help – we work a lot! It’s a combination of a lot of things – it’s not magic, but it’s got to be something…
MAX MARTIN HAS BECOME THIS ALMOST MYTHICAL FIGURE IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY. WHAT’S HE LIKE TO WORK WITH?
He’s very much real! At Cheiron, it was incredible and it wasn’t just him. The whole group was so kind – we were a collective, this little bubble. The first lunch I had with Max, on the first day I started working with him, he told me, ‘I know you’re good, but it doesn’t matter how good you are if you don’t work well socially with this team’.
‘When I first worked with Max, we did insane hours, but we were kids, we were 20. We didn’t have much time for anything else.’
That was the philosophy Denniz had, the group had to work amazingly together, and you’ve got to love each other. To this day I still believe strength is in numbers; a group that really clicks together and works as a family – and that’s what it was.
When I first worked with Max, we did insane hours, but we were kids, we were 20. We didn’t have much time for anything else – at that time, the internet was non-existent for us, so we didn’t care about playlists or placements, we just did songs and they got released.
WERE YOU GUYS SURPRISED TO BE ASKED TO WORK WITH BON JOVI ON IT’S MY LIFE?
Well, during all the [initial] success, we got phone calls from all over to work with different people. But we knew when to say no to things, because you’ve got to know your limitations.
They called us to do a follow-up song to Aerosmith’s I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing, the Armageddon song. I was like, ‘Are you crazy, there’s no way we can do anything close to that song, let’s just say no’.
LA Reid played us this girl he wanted us to work with and, after he played the songs, we literally said, ‘What are we supposed to do with this? We’ll just fuck it up’ – and that was Alicia Keys.
We got asked to work with Whitney Houston, but Swedes are very much against drugs and she had just been caught with a bag of weed, so we said no. It was crazy.
But when Bon Jovi called, we said yes. Max went and worked with Jon [Bon Jovi] and Richie [Sambora] for a week and they wrote the song. I picked Max up from the airport and he was like, ‘I think I have something good’. He played it and I was like, ‘That’s amazing’. ‘Shall we produce it?’ ‘Of course we should, it’s Jon Bon Jovi, it’s awesome’.
‘our brains were so programmed to do beautifully crafted pop songs, it was like we forgot what rock was.’
So, we started producing it but, even though we come from rock, our brains were so programmed to do beautifully crafted pop songs, it was like we forgot what rock was.
We sent it to them and they were like, ‘This is great, but it’s too pop for us’. ‘What do you mean, it sounds fantastic! You’re crazy!’ But we were like, ‘Go ahead, do your thing on it’ – and they did.
They sent it back and we’re blasting this song like, ‘This sounds like shit’. So, we tell them, you’ve got to re-produce this. It took a lot of rounds and I still didn’t think it sounded good by the release. Max was like, ‘This is never going to work’. But it did! It completely revived their career, but we did not know that was going to happen, trust me.
WHY DID YOU TAKE A BREAK FOR FIVE YEARS?
I was tired and we’d become like an old couple. I was full, we had so much success and I was like, ‘Oh God, I need a year off’.
I took one year and then, between 2006 and 2007 I was like, ‘Maybe I should get back on the horse’.
I had some people book some LA sessions for a couple of weeks and the first day, it was like speed dating. One person came in at 3-4pm then said, ‘I’m going to go to the next session’. I was like, ‘What do you mean, the next session?’ I was so used to working for a week or two weeks on a song. So, I was like, ‘I’m not ready to go back to this business, I’m going to take another break’.
I didn’t even get back into it before I got tired of it! It took three or four years before I figured out I needed to find a Swedish team again.
BUT WHEN YOU DID COME BACK, YOU CAME BACK WITH A BANG…
I always tell people that, during those five years off, not once was I stressed about other people working. I wasn’t like, ‘Oh shit, they’re making all these hits’, I was just enjoying life. But when I stepped back into it, I didn’t have any fear about, ‘Did I lose it?’ It’s like jumping back on a bike; it takes a second, you’re wobbly, then you just go.
DID YOU REALIZE WHAT YOU WERE GETTING INTO WHEN YOU AND CARL CO-WROTE WHAT MAKES YOU BEAUTIFUL WITH SAVAN KOTECHA FOR ONE DIRECTION?
No! Obviously, we were up close with Simon Cowell but it was quite guitar-based and very different to the Backstreet Boys. One Direction was an anomaly, when they blew up. Everybody was trying to do a boyband, but they never came back. You had The Wanted, they had one song. It was something different and we didn’t realize.
After the first album, they came to Sweden and it was insane the amount of girls that were sleeping outside the studio and running away from home. We had 4,000 or 5,000 girls outside our studio, they broke into nearby houses to try and get into the studio, parents were looking for their daughters on the street in sleeping bags. It was insane!
HOW WAS IT WORKING WITH BLOODPOP ON LADY GAGA’S CHROMATICA?
Gaga’s one of the last true artists. It was one of the most unbelievable experiences working with an artist I’ve had, because of the way she writes and the way she is in the studio.
I’m pretty picky with my vocals. I want the best, so I’ll push artists. She’s very open with what she’s been through and she was like, ‘Rami, make sure my vocals come through’. I was like, ‘I will, don’t worry’. ‘No, no, you need to feel what I’m saying – let me tell you what this song is about’. She wanted me to know, so I could get that emotion out of her.
HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHO TO WORK WITH?
It’s very different now from five years back, and that was very different compared to 2010. I had a discussion with Ryan Tedder about times now compared to 2010-11. Then, you’d write a song and be like, ‘This is a hit, who shall we give it? Katy Perry?’ And it usually was a hit. The gut feeling was there.
But music has changed a lot. It’s not that easy to know anymore, there are way fewer artists and they are becoming better at writing songs themselves, so they want to be present in the room. And once they’ve found their team, they stick to it – it’s not so easy to just send a song.
At this time, I pick my projects very carefully, because my family is my priority, so I don’t just do session after session. There’s a handful of people I can work with without having an artist. It’s a jungle out there, there’s a lot of noise.
YOU ONCE SAID EVERY SONG SHOULD SOUND LIKE IT TOOK 5 MINUTES TO WRITE – HOW DO YOU DO THAT?
We leave no stone unturned. We work through everything. It could take two weeks. Take Side To Side by Ariana Grande feat. Nicki Minaj – the pre-chorus took three weeks to do.
‘You can work through a song until your ears bleed, but it should sound like you just did the first thing that came up.’
There were 40 or 50 different pre-choruses before this pre-chorus, but it sounds like it was always there. And that’s the trick. You can work through a song until your ears bleed, but it should sound like you just did the first thing that came up. If you don’t have the experience, it’ll just sound like a bunch of hooks after each other.
IS THAT HARDER TO DO IN THE AGE OF MULTIPLE CO-WRITERS AND CO-PRODUCERS?
Yes and no. Somebody needs to steer the room. With 14, 15 people, it’s kinda crazy, but you never actually end up with 15 people in a room. It’s three or four, then it gets sent off, somebody samples something and it becomes like a football team!
BEYONCÉ’S ALIEN SUPERSTAR HAS OVER 20 DIFFERENT WRITERS ON THE CREDITS, INCLUDING YOU. DO YOU KNOW WHAT THEY ALL DID?
[Laughs] No! I don’t know anything, I don’t even know what I did, to be honest with you! It’s just a snippet of a melody that somebody took and I was just like, ‘OK.’
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE MUSIC INDUSTRY?
I’m purely creative. I’m good at networking with fellow writers, producers and artists but I’ve never been interested in the label side of it. To this day, I don’t look at charts. Once I do a song, I move on to the next, I don’t cloud my head with stuff I can’t affect.
The only thing I look at is YouTube reactions. There’s no better feeling than that, or going to a concert where 50,000 people are singing What Makes You Beautiful; that makes a grown man cry. Those are the moments I live for, I don’t live for statistics. I don’t care about statistics at all.
YOU SOLD PART OF YOUR CATALOG TO OLE IN 2011, LONG BEFORE IT BECAME A TREND. HOW COME?
I believe in selling catalogs every five years. You build it up and then you sell it. It’s always going to be my song, my name is always on the credits, it’s not going to be written by BMG or Sony. I’d rather take that money now and make good use of it.
If you make two or three hits, you make $3-5 million in two or three years from those songs. So, getting $70 or $80 million is a big difference, that’s building wealth and it’s hard to build wealth as a songwriter unless you sell catalogs – or you’re Max! I don’t think anybody could afford his catalogs, they’re probably worth $5 billion!
IF YOU COULD CHANGE ONE THING ABOUT THE MUSIC INDUSTRY, RIGHT HERE AND NOW, WHAT WOULD IT BE AND WHY?
Honestly, nothing. Do I miss the old days? Yeah, of course, we all do, it was better before. Do I miss the physical and the analog? Oh yeah, I do. Do I miss loading a tape machine, do I miss the physical buttons when I record Britney, cutting in and out and messing it up because you had to be super-fast touching the sliders?
Sure, but that’s what memories are for. We’ve got to move on. The world changes and you’ve got to change with it, otherwise you’ll be left behind.
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