Tommy Brown, the Producer Who Listens

Ariana Grande’s longtime producer has a signature approach that runs deeper than a given sound or mood.

There was once a time, hard as it is to imagine in this age of wide celebrity and insider fandom, when music producers were artists’ secret weapons—the operative word being “secret.” Until not that long ago, producers largely existed behind the scenes. They didn’t tag their songs, as has become the norm in hip-hop (“Mustard on the beat”). And they certainly weren’t the credited, lead artist on tracks, as has been normalized by EDM producers like Avicii and Calvin Harris. Where now many music fans can parse the down-tempo stylings of a 40 track from the woozy, bass-heavy rattle of a Metro Boomin joint, producers’ styles were once largely unknown to the listening public.

Call Tommy Brown old-school. Though he’s only 32—and has the top-braid to prove it—the long-time Ariana Grande producer talks about his role like he’s a grizzled veteran. Bring up producers tagging tracks in his presence, for instance, and he’ll cite the great Quincy Jones, who, no, didn’t use a tag. “I think it takes away from a song being classic,” he says over the phone from Los Angeles, where he lives and works. “I'm not doing a song with the artist for me to be famous. People forget that the vocalist is the star. It's not the beat. It's not the track. Let the star be the star.”

Though Brown’s dogmatic approach may sound a bit antiquated, it’s hard to argue with the results. Stars of all stripes—T.I., Travis Scott, Chris Brown, Jennifer Lopez, Meghan Trainor—have sought him out. He’s been producing for Ariana Grande since she made the transition from teen actress to pop star. And recently, with Grande’s “thank u, next” and “7 Rings,” he’s logged back-to-back chart topping singles—and just as notably, the two biggest smashes on an album partially produced by pop’s preeminent hitmaker, Max Martin.

Brown’s style, so much as he has one, is partially responsible for his recent success. Like Martin, who has worked with Grande since 2014’s My Everything, he lets the star shine by not smothering a vocal in convoluted arrangements. But where Martin leans towards sticky, thumping rhythms, Brown tends towards live instrumentation and an overall lusher sound. Across Grande’s past few albums, the Max Martin tracks have largely been the inescapable earworms (“Problem,” “Side to Side,” “No Tears Left to Cry), where the Tommy Brown tracks have been more understated, the back-catalog love letters and slow dances (“Better Off,” “Honeymoon Avenue,” “pete davidson).

Tayla Parx, who worked with Brown on several thank u, next tracks, says that Brown “is amazing at hip-hop drums but also R&B chords,” and that “he can do literally the best part of hip-hop and the best part of R&B.” And indeed, if you listen through Brown’s catalog, you’ll hear the product of these skills; his songs happily wed robust beats and satin melodies. And yet, even if you know what to listen for, to the untrained ear a Tommy Brown track is difficult to pick out of a shuffle.

Rather than relying on a sonic signature, Brown’s ethos of hit-making centers on the interpersonal aspects of the job. He says he doesn’t think about genre or a song’s function so much as making what he calls “truth music”: “When we go in and work with artists, it's like, ‘Let's make everything truthful,’” he says. Granted, that sounds vague and rather obvious, but in pop music, truth isn’t always a given. And more practically, for Brown, emphasizing artists’ truths means that his process relies on fostering relationships and having conversations that go beyond music. “We just sit in a room and talk. Like, 'What's going on with your life?'”

The rapper Gorilla Zoe was one of the first artists to work with Brown, back when Brown had just ditched community college in his native Pittsburgh for Atlanta’s popping trap scene. Brown spent nights passing out beat CDs at nightclubs, and his tag, “Crack King” (a Biggie Smalls refrain), written on the CDs, piqued Gorilla Zoe’s interest. “I heard 808s and 909s and the drum kicks, but I heard music,” Zoe recalls. “Like, instrumentation over it. Oboes and violas and strings and harmonicas and all different kinds of instrumentation that wasn't normal over hardcore drum kicks.”

Brown’s tracks, with their inspired musical pairings, sounded like they’d been crafted by a hot industry veteran, so Zoe was surprised to learn that Brown was in fact a 20-year-old with a day job at Sears. (He built his skills as a kid taping and transcribing songs on the radio and, later, by spending a summer listening to all 1,000 records in his great aunt’s collection.) But what impressed Zoe most—still does—was Brown’s presence in the studio. “He listens,” Zoe says when asked what separates Brown from other producers. “I go into the studio with most producers and they already have a path that they're ready to take you down. [Tommy] lets it happen.”

For artists, Brown’s approach can feel liberating. “The special thing about him is, he's real,” Zoe says. “When it's real, it can happen at the drop of a dime. We can walk in the studio and start talking, a couple jokes here and there, and the idea pops up in somebody's head, and we go. And it's going to have a potential to be a big record.”

Which is precisely what happened with “thank u, next” and “7 Rings”—and, to some extent, with all five of the thank u, next tracks Brown worked on. The album sessions followed a tumultuous period in Ariana Grande’s personal life marked by the death of her ex, Mac Miller (a close friend of Brown’s), and her breakup with SNL’s Pete Davidson. Brown likens the album sessions to therapy. Grande, Brown, and a small group of close, long-time collaborators gathered in New York last fall, got tipsy off champagne, and, in Brown’s words, had “the open, honest conversation.”

For “thank u, next,” the conversation was about what Grande gained from failed relationships. “7 Rings,” on the other hand, was inspired by the, at times convivial and emotional, two-week creative process itself. Grande, at one point, took her girlfriends to Tiffany’s for breakfast with bottles of bubbles, and bought them friendship rings. They had barely gotten back to the studio before turning the outing into a song. “That [story] was the truth of the song, and it just connects with people,” Brown says. “Real connects with people differently than a make-believe story.” But more than simply being honest, the success of songs like “thank u, next,” and “7 Rings” is owed to their immediacy and intimacy. Grande gave fans her unbridled feelings in the moment—something that would’ve been near impossible for a team of outsiders to manufacture.

The success of the songs, and the album more generally, was all the sweeter for Brown because of the context—the hard times, the long road he’d traveled with Grande and much of their crew, the bonding that happened while making the album. “It felt like a new start to my career,” he says. Though, the accomplishment hasn’t eased a sense that he’s doubted. “It's like, the first song [goes to number one and people say], ‘Oh that's crazy. Y'all got so lucky.' And the second song, 'Oh man, that's crazy.' It's like, 'No, we're going to continuously do that and we're going to prove that this is what we do.' There's room for more hitmakers.”

That’s what he says, but what it really sounds like Brown is saying is that there’s room for more approaches to hit-making. That you don’t need to know Tommy Brown’s name. Just that what he’s doing is viable.