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Music producer Rick Rubin has been shaping the sound of popular music for the past four decades, winning nine Grammy awards. Few can match his wide range of production credits, which include pioneering rap albums, rock acts such as Red Hot Chili Peppers and chart-toppers including Adele.

As a student in New York in the early 80s, Rick fell in love with the emerging rap scene and co-founded the label Def Jam Recordings. He helped catapult the music into the mainstream, signing Public Enemy and Beastie Boys, and enjoying international success with the hit single Walk This Way, when rappers Run-DMC collaborated with the rock band Aerosmith. He also produced a highly-acclaimed series of stripped-back albums with Johnny Cash, starting when Cash was in his 60s and thought his recording career was over.

Here’s what we learned from Rick Rubin’s Desert Island Discs...

1. In the studio he likes to lie on a sofa with his eyes shut, rather than hunch over the mixing desk

“Well, I'm not technical in any way,” says Rick, “and my job is to listen. I can listen in the deepest way if I'm relaxed with my eyes closed.”

And what is he looking for when he’s listening so intently?

“It's just an experience. There are times when I'm looking for a specific thing, but in general it starts with the general experience of ‘What am I feeling?’ and I'm both listening to what's coming at me and paying attention to what's going on in my body as I listen.”

“Does something happen that makes me want to lean forward? Is there something that makes me want to laugh? Even if it's not funny, is there something that surprises me? Or makes me want to know more. Or bores me which happens, and then I’d say, ‘That's a problem’ - If it's boring to me, it'll probably be boring to someone else, or it's likely to be.”

2. He encourages musicians to try something new

After working with The Strokes on their 2020 album The New Abnormal, which won a Grammy, Rick teamed up with them again this year, and didn’t want to repeat their previous experience:

“We recorded [the new album] on a mountain top in Costa Rica with the band outside looking over the ocean and it was unbelievable. We've never done that before,” says Rick describing the scene.

So why go to all that trouble?

“If you've made several albums, and if each album is going through a recording studio, you get into this habit of [thinking], ‘We're doing another one, we're doing another one.’ And when you create this new venue for something to happen, it's not just another one, it's a different experience. And sometimes something as simple as turning the lights off in the room can change the way a performance happens, it adds to the adventure.”

3. Rick describes his second disc as ‘groovy’ – although the music is 300 years old

“I don't think we can have a conversation about music without somehow getting back to a foundational element and… including [this composer] seems necessary,” says Rick.

“There's something about this… there's this undercurrent, this groovy undercurrent that speaks to me. And technically it's a very modern recording and we can hear things that we don't hear in the traditional classical recordings [of this piece].”

“It also tells the story of taking something old, putting it through a new filter, and creating something fresh and new and exciting all over again after hundreds of years. And I love it.”

The composer that Rick is talking about is JS Bach and the track is called And at the Hour of Death. It’s a version of the first Prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1, produced by Christian Badzura and performed by the acclaimed Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson.

4. Rick’s Aunt Carol was a vital early influence

Rick grew up on Long Island, not far from New York City, and was an only child. He spent the week with his parents Mickey and Linda, and then at the weekend he spent time with his Aunt Carol who lived in the centre of New York in Manhattan.

“Carol had something to offer that was different than what my parents had to offer and my mom recognised that and wanted me to experience literature and classical music,” recalls Rick.

“[My aunt] would take me to Broadway shows and she would take me to museums, and my parents were less interested in those things. My parents rarely read to me whereas my Aunt Carol read to me constantly: Sherlock Holmes, lots of poetry. I loved it. I loved it.”

5. He’s chosen a song about a beach to take to his desert island

“It was by no means a beautiful place. It was as much of a dump of a beach as you could find,” laughs Rick, as he introduces Rockaway Beach by Ramones, which was inspired by the largest urban beach in the USA, situated in Queens, New York.

The song takes him back to his teenage years: “I was the only punk rocker in my school. There were no other punk rockers and there was no internet, so I couldn't meet like-minded people through social media. I was the lone punk rocker... for the longest time. Yes, it was a little sad!” says Rick.

And he still remembers the thrill of discovering Ramones at that time: “They were the first band to play fast that I ever heard, and I remember hearing them in junior high school and just laughing. It was really funny to me - made no sense. And it's funny to hear them sing about Rockaway Beach in such a joyous manner!”

6. He didn’t know how to produce records when he started out – but knew exactly what he wanted to hear

“To me, [rap] was punk rock,” explains Rick. “You didn't have to be a virtuoso to be a great rapper... You had to have a point of view, something to say, and usually something to be excited about.”

He loved the music he heard in New York’s hip hop clubs, but felt that the first attempts to record rap were too polite – and decided that the answer was to do it himself:

“The only reason I did it was because I bought 12 inch singles - there were no rap albums yet - and the music in the hip hop clubs didn't sound like those records. I wanted to make records, really for myself, that sounded like what I liked about going to the club which was much more raw, much less musical.”

“The fact that I didn't know how to make recordings allowed me to make ones that were true to what it was,” says Rick, “instead of following the rules of recording where you hire a great band and you make everything sound a certain way. That was not the case. I was making it much more like someone who didn't know what they were doing.”

7. The artists behind his greatest crossover hit took some persuading

Rick approached the hip hop band Run-DMC – his partner in Def Jam Recordings Russell Simmons was the elder brother of DJ Run, one of the founding members of the band – with the idea of recording the 1975 song Walk This Way by the rock band Aerosmith.

“They were fine with the idea of the music... because the beat [at the start of the original Walk This Way] – Psst-Dat-Ba-Boom-Boom-Dat Psst-Dat-Ba-Boom-Boom-Dat - was a well-known hip hop breakbeat so you would hear that beat in hip hop clubs already before Run-DMC ever did it. They’d never heard of Aerosmith and they never heard of the song Walk This Way, all they heard was the drum beat. And the drum beat was one that they were excited about performing on.”

“Then I suggested, ‘Well, we're going to do the lyrics, the Aerosmith lyrics,’ and they thought it was insane, like, ‘Why would we do that?’” But in the end Run DMC followed Rick’s idea, and the track was an international hit.

“It did what I hoped it would do in just explaining what rap music was to people who didn't understand,” Rick says.

8. Johnny Cash thought his career was over – until Rick invited him to record again

In 1994, Johnny Cash released the album American Recordings: he was 62 and had largely been written off by the music industry. The intense, no-frills, home-recorded album, produced by Rick Rubin, was a huge critical success, and Cash’s career enjoyed a great late renaissance, including a landmark performance at Glastonbury.

Rick recalls his first meetings with Johnny, after seeing him perform to a crowd of around 100 diners:

“He didn't know who I was, but he wanted to understand why I would want to work with him, because why would anybody want to work with him? In his mind, he was done.”

“We just sat and talked for a while. And I said, ‘Well, let's just sit down and play me songs you love and we'll figure out what to do.’ He sat in my living room and he just started playing me these songs, most of which I'd never heard, old, old country songs or old folk songs, and it was magnificent.”

Rick continued to work with Johnny Cash, almost to the very end of his life in 2003, making many more recordings:

“He wasn't well enough to tour anymore. His partner [his wife June] was gone. And his choice was to die or to carry on. And he chose to carry on.”