(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 7 February 2026 21:30, UK
If you look at what Rick Rubin does on paper, the fact that he’s a legend doesn’t seem to make any sense.
Yes, he might be one of the finest producers that the world has ever seen, but his habit of sitting in the studio with his legs crossed, deep in thought, doesn’t usually look any different from an average stoner listening to their favourite records in their bedroom. But even if Rubin looks like he’s doing absolutely nothing every single time he works with a new act, he has been blessed with some of the best ears of any producer that has ever lived.
That’s because Rubin is coming at every single record from a fan’s perspective first. He wouldn’t have been producing some of the biggest bands that he’s worked with if he didn’t know the ins and outs of the way they work, and even if there are some fantastic moments where he gets into the nitty gritty details of what a song needs, sometimes the best advice he could have is to tell his artists to go back to the drawing board and come back with something that he could work with.
It’s a little bit cutthroat, but Rubin wouldn’t have taken on any job if he didn’t feel like the talent didn’t have the power to move him. He had faith that he could remind everyone why Johnny Cash was such a legend when he worked with him, and despite Wildflowers sounding nothing like that Tom Petty had worked on before, the songs had the same kind of staying power that you would expect out of anything that the Heartbreakers had done in their prime.
That’s not to say that everyone he has worked with has been the most enjoyable band of all time. Working with everyone from Slayer was always going to be an acquired taste, and any of the older folks who listened to some of Cash’s records would have had a heart attack if they heard what he was doing with Slipknot in the 2000s, but every now and again, Rubin would find that sweet spot where he couldn’t go wrong.
Even though he had a close relationship with bands like Linkin Park and Red Hot Chili Peppers throughout his career, there was something about working with Carlos Santana that felt different. He had been used to hearing him back in the 1970s and even the radio-friendly rock that he did on Supernatural, but when he saw him working in the studio, the producer finally found someone that seemed to have the same love of music that he did when working on the album Africa Speaks.
But even if Santana had that infectious energy working off of his fellow musicians, hearing him play guitar over top of everything was good enough for anyone to fall in love in Rubin’s mind, saying, “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Hearing it on record is one thing but hearing it in the room is another. I couldn’t imagine anyone who loves music sitting in the position I was in listening to this not being blown away.”
On the album in question, though, Santana was as much out of his comfort zone as Rubin was. He was used to working with every pop star under the sun, but hearing him embrace different textures and having Buika lend her vocals to every single song was the real cross-cultural album that he had been trying to make for years.
Santana still sounded like himself to a certain degree, but not every artist needs to switch up their sound drastically if they want to go outside of their wheelhouse. He had the same musical vocabulary that he had before, but whereas earlier he would have relied on some blues licks, he was channelling pure emotion on the fretboard on this record.
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