Emile Haynie Navigated Heartbreak With a Little Help From His Friends

Emile Haynie says the word “friend” a lot. I notice this because I have noticed it about myself recently. When I say friend, I say stuff like—“This person I just met, my friend,” or, “This young child, my friend,” “This Uber driver who took me on this amazing journey, my friend.” When Emile Haynie says “friend” he’s not talking about babies, or barely buddies, his friends are Brian Wilson and Lana Del Rey. As one of the world’s biggest pop producers (and collector of visvim sneakers), Haynie has spent the last 15 years working on a lot of albums which you’re familiar with including Lana's Born to Die, Eminem’s Grammy-winning Recovery, fun.’s Some Nights, plus countless cuts by Kanye, FKA twigs, Mark Ronson and many others. Over this time he’s no doubt forged the kind of relationships that can only be made in the padded caves of studios, in that intimate, incubatory zone where time slows down and people make bonds that usually require surviving emergencies or being naked together.

As a professional producer, Haynie must have not only made a lot of friends, but also soothed a lot of egos, weathered a lot of storms, and fought a lot of A&R. After all this time you’d think the process of making records would have no surprises left to offer him, except it did: last year, when a painful breakup left him unable to work, and he moved from behind the mixing desk for the first time to record We Fall, his debut solo album.

We Fall makes a lot of sense as a first time effort. It has a looseness and an intimacy that comes from being made by impulse, with no imperative from an existing audience or record contract. Like many debuts, it was laid down in a makeshift studio setup. But take into account that the new artist in question has co-written some of the bigger pop songs of recent years, and that the makeshift studio was in his hotel room at LA’s Chateau Marmont, and you find yourself in unknown territory. It’s also worth taking into account that, every time Haynie felt a song needed a different voice he was able to reach out to some of the most interesting contemporary singers around, not to mention some of the most important pop musicians of all time, and thus you realize We Fall is something truly unique. There probably won’t be another time that Brian Wilson, Randy Newman, Colin Blunstone of the Zombies, Lykke Li, Dev Hynes, Father John Misty, Lana Del Rey, Julia Holter, Charlotte Gainsborough, Sampha, Nate Ruess of fun., Andrew Wyatt, Romy Madley Croft of the xx, and Rufus Wainwright all come together in one setting, unless someone throws a particularly amazing dinner party, and if Haynie can bring even just three of them together for a live performance, the server for the ticket website will probably implode.

Incredibly, despite the large cast of contributors and guest singers, each singer’s personal style is represented in the songs they perform on—be it the idiosyncratic major scale on fun. Vocalist Nate Ruess’ vocal performance for “Fool Me Too,” or Lana’s husky warble on the line “All I want is to make your money grow” in “Wait For Life”—Haynie’s emotion is always breaks through. It’s like the feeling behind the song is so raw that nothing can overpower it.

You don’t need to probe deeply to figure out what fuels the fire of this record. The lyrics circle around lost little girls and fame chasers; there are repeated references to falling down, or falling apart and you probably won’t get more than a song in before his music triggers a memory of that time something similar happened to you. Although We Fall is a fairly remarkable event in modern pop music, and an admirable example of an expert making themselves vulnerable in the act of trying something new, in the end, what you’re listening to is a really great breakup album. At times tender, at times mad, Haynie’s songs actually seem to gather power by being filtered through other people. Heartbreak and all the subsequent questions it prompts might have come across as single-note if he’d tackled them all himself, but passed from person to person, each artist draws light and shade from different parts of the emotion. Haynie’s figured out how to isolate the essential parts of all his singers’ voices, and, as a result, it’s some of the simplest tracks that leave a lasting impression, like Lana’s “Wait for Life,” Sampha’s turn on “A Kiss Goodbye,” and “Ballerina’s Reprise,” where Father John Misty and Julia Holter trade melodies like a stripped, dreamier Postal Service. Appropriately though, the standout track is sung by Haynie himself: on “Dirty World,” he implores his lover to get real, or be alone forever, until Lana in voiceover carries the song to its end, like a friend sitting with you ’til closing time, because your heart is trashed.

I Skyped Haynie in a studio in LA to discuss other great breakup albums, growing up in Buffalo, turning down Ultraviolence, and the enduring power of the Hollywood myth. He was, as you might expect, really, really friendly.

Noisey: Are you living in LA permanently now?
Emile Haynie: I’m kind of transitioning. The past year I’ve spent seven months, six months here. Home is still New York—my mom is there, my friends are there. I’m starting to really enjoy coming out here more and more.

The LA lifestyle is really tempting. It’s so beautiful…
Yeah, maybe it’s an age thing. I’ve always loved New York so much: It’s my town, and I have loved the energy and walking out your door and get into something at any given time, but now I appreciate new stuff. Like going to a nursery and buying trees.

What area are you most drawn to over there?
The Hills, I went to the Malfi coast in Italy once and was just like “OK this is the most gorgeous place I’ve ever been,” and the Hills in LA kind of remind me of that—you feel like you could be up on some cliff in Europe. It’s so serene, especially if you find a little place that’s tucked away and private.

LA can be really healing as well.
Absolutely. If you just need to turn your phone off and sit at the piano or just cook or just hide away, what better place to do it? There’s gorgeous places everywhere, but personally, for what I do, I have to live in New York or LA, so I have to choose between them. Appreciating the landscape is really drawing me in here right now.

Do the two different cities affect the music you make in them?
New York is kind of grimy and fast paced and high strung, and it comes out in the music. It was great for [FKA] twigs’ album, it really set the tone, but for my record or for Lana’s stuff it’s beautiful to be in LA, and to appreciate that side.

Do you find any inspiration in the myth of Hollywood?
I’m into it, I really am. Movies like LA Confidential and all that stuff, it’s so cool and fascinating. The history is still here, whereas NY is so expensive by this point—everything is new and you’ve got to be rich to get in the game—whereas in LA, there’s still these old school haunts. You can eat at Taylor’s Steakhouse and pretend that Dean Martin is in the booth next to you, because it still looks like that.

You grew up in Buffalo and lived there till you were 18. Was hip-hop culture the dominant force for kids where you were growing up?
That was the music in my neighborhood. When I was eight or nine is when I started to appreciate music and really pay attention. The guys I hung out with, the people around us, the older girls who lived down the street—it was just hip-hop. Everything from Eric B and Rakim and BDP, to when NWA came out, to when the Geto Boys came out, all of that late 80s, early 90s hip-hop. That’s the thing about Buffalo too, it wasn’t focused on five boroughs New York rap, it was way more of a universal thing. West Coast, Southern music, it was all appreciated in Buffalo. It’s far more similar to Detroit than to the Bronx.

And Detroit is actually where you started your production career, right?
Yeah, I was living in Queens at the time. Doing some stuff here and there and connecting with some more underground battle rappers and people in that scene and doing tracks, but it wasn’t until I went to Detroit that I got my first real cut—they would call it a placement—on a major album. That was stuff on Eminem’s label. I was about 20.

And you were 30 when you won your first Grammy. That’s really young to be doing all this stuff. Is it a weird position to be in when coming to make your first solo album?
It’s kind of late to be making a first album, right? I mean I’m going to be 35 in July. Like a lot of people start that path a lot earlier, but I started making music when I was really young. It was the only thing I was passionate about.

Do you have to get into a different headspace when you’re producing your own stuff. Like do you get tougher on yourself than other people? Do you need someone to come in and do what you do as a producer?
I just did it the same. I’d never experienced it before. I didn’t know what I was doing, but the beauty of it was I wanted to do it fast. I’ve always had a studio and been like, “OK I’m going to go to the studio now,” whereas this was like—the piano was 20 steps from my bed so I just worked constantly, whenever I wanted to. If I woke up in the middle of the night and had an idea, I’d work on it, and there were so many people constantly coming in and out that I didn’t have much of a chance to second guess like I normally would. I had my friends supporting me saying, “This is good this is good keep it up.” That made it different. It was a group effort. When you’re working with an artist it’s their world, and for the first time it was my world pushing me along.

Did you leave the hotel to record any stuff?
I did Randy Newman at the Village Studio, I wasn’t going to have him come to my room…

I’m glad you mentioned Randy Newman. The curation of people on the record is so unique —you’re not going to hear that on any record again ever—but it made sense to me, because it’s LA, and because of the process, I imagine people just popping in to say hi. Was this the case?
The thing about those guys is that they did pop in, but I got their records and became obsessed with them first. The reason I got Randy Newman is because I’d never heard “Sail Away” before. He popped into my life, I became fixated by that record in particular and I had this song, “Who To Blame,” and I just couldn’t imagine not having him on it. The same thing with Colin Blunstone: I love the Zombies but my friend Gina put me on to his solo albums and I was like, “How did I miss this?” I really got caught up with new music. It’s not going to be new to a lot of people but growing up in Buffalo and collecting records where you collect soul and obscure British Sound Library records, I somehow overlooked Randy Newman, and Van Morrison, and even Pet Sounds. I always loved Pet Sounds, but it wasn't until making this record that I started sitting with headphones on and obsessing about every minuscule detail.

Colin Bluntstone

– “Say You Don’t Mind”

It’s crazy how you can latch onto certain songs when you’re going through a breakup. There was one year I listened to this one Alicia Keys on rotation. Other than “Sail Away” did you have any songs that served that purpose?
There’s this song on Astral Weeks by Van Morrison called “Beside You,” which became this weird thing like I had to listen to it 80 million times. And Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentleman, We Are Floating in Space…it was weird. It wasn’t like I was listening to the whole catalogue. It was the same songs over and over and over.

And the amazing thing is you were able to reach out to these people. I mean, if I called up Alicia Keys to say, “Sing on my album,” I’m not sure I’d have the same result…
She’s pretty cool, maybe she would. But really it felt like a homage as well. Getting Brian Wilson was just—I felt it was really important. Just to have the co-sign, even if he didn’t sing on it, just to have his opinion meant a lot. And Randy Newman, I wrote that song before I heard “Sail Away,” then my friend heard it and said, “You should listen to this,” and all the dots got connected. After I heard “Sail Away,” I couldn't imagine anyone else singing it.

I sometimes think stuff happens magically just so albums can get made. Like there’s no way of predicting the thing that will pull the whole piece together.
That’s how the good stuff happens. I've been producing for a long time now so I’ve been through it all. When the label sets it up and it’s a manufactured vibe, that’s the stuff that I don’t end up releasing, that doesn’t click. It’s always the thing where you bump into someone and you hang out and get along, it’s that kind of encounter that makes it happen.

Speaking of recording, you mentioned in GQ that you wished you’d left more room for Lana’s voice on Born to Die. Even as the producer of that album, which went on to do so well, do you still have doubts about the process?
I’m super proud of that record and I stand by it, but you live and learn. I’m happy with how I produced but sometimes the nuances in her voice are so beautiful. It’s like Sampha. We worked on “Too Much” and I was like, “There is nothing I can put on this,” his voice is so hauntingly beautiful, this is just what it needs to be. Doing hip-hop for so long, I’ve always been drawn to these big chamber sounding orchestra samples, with a million sounds going on. Working with Sampha changed all that, and Lana has a voice like that too, it’s so special when it breaks and cracks.

I have such a soft spot for a breakup album, because they’re basically the only albums that is a tool which fulfills a specific function for the person making it and the person listening to it. Did you find it cathartic to make We Fall?
I didn’t know what the fuck I would do if I didn’t make this. I couldn’t produce. I couldn’t sit with another artist and write about their life. It really filled the void. What else could I have done?

Did you have to give up work to make it?
I tried doing regular production work. I spoke about this a little in a different interview, but one of the things that was hard at the beginning was I was supposed to be working on Lana’s Ultraviolence, and she’s someone who is so important to me, and I just couldn’t do it. She’d written it already and she had her songs that she’d written on piano, and it would have been more of a production gig, and I just couldn’t do it. I made attempts with some of these amazing artists I would have always loved to have worked with, but I just couldn’t focus. Then, once it became a real thing that I was making my own album, I didn’t need to do anything else.

Before I go, do you have a favorite breakup album?
Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space, Marvin Gaye Here My Dear. I love the idea of doing reprises, bringing themes back. I love that.

We Fall is out now.

Emma-Lee Moss has written two breakup albums and contributed 50 percent of the views to Alicia Keys’ “Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart” video. She’s on Twitter.