Blake Slatkin started performing Ed Sheeran and John Mayer songs on his guitar as a 10-year-old. Now he’s in the Oscar conversation for “Drive,” a song he recorded with Sheeran and Mayer for the soundtrack of Apple’s Brad Pitt racing drama F1.
His advice for people who want to be musicians for a living?
“Just be a fan. Be the biggest fan of music, be a lover of music, and work harder than anyone,” he says in an interview you can see above or watch here.
“The best advice I was ever given was by my mentor, and he said, ‘You have to think of your career like a snowball, and you just keep packing on and packing on and packing on. And eventually it’s big enough that it just has to roll down the hill.'”
That mentor was record producer Benny Blanco, for whom Slatkin worked as an intern before becoming one of music’s most successful producers himself. He didn’t play Blanco his music for four years, because he wanted to make sure it was good enough.
‘Drive’ Producer Blake Slatkin on What a Record Producer Does
Slatkin, who grew up in Los Angeles, started out as a fan himself — with aspirations to be more.
“I just wanted to be a rock star. And honestly, it was Ed and John and their music, who made me pick up a guitar in the first place. They both inspired me, and I used to cover their songs, and I learned guitar by copying them. … I used to play on stage and sell tickets to my friends, my teachers and stuff, and do little gigs around town.
“And then when I found out what a producer was, and I found out that there are people making all of my favorite music that I didn’t even know about, and they were behind the scenes, and they could, like, switch genres and do this for years and years — the second I even found out what that was, it was like, ‘That’s what I’m gonna do.’ There’s never anything else I wanted to do.”
Being a producer has worked out very well for him.
Slatkin’s collaborators have included Justin Bieber, Lizzo, Lil NAS X, Gracie Abrams, Omer Fedi, 24kGldn, The Kid Laroi and many more. He won a Record of the Year Grammy for Lizzo’s About Damn Time.
For “Drive,” Slatkin assembled and played in a supergroup for the song that also included Dave Grohl on drums, Pino Palladino on bass and Rami Jaffee on keys.
Slatkin says the role of a record producer is simply “to make sure that the best song possible happens, by any means necessary to get there — whether that’s by assembling the right group of people, whether that’s doing it yourself, whether that’s being a therapist to an artist and having a conversation so meaningful that they end up writing a perfect song all themselves.”
He adds: “It’s completely different with every artist I work with. And that’s why I love my job, is because no day is the same,” he adds.
Blake Slatkin on Making ‘Drive’ for F1
Making Drive started with just getting Sheeran and Mayer, longtime friends, into a room together. Their first efforts were pretty similar to what ended up on the record.
“Ed said, ‘John, give me a rock riff.’ The first thing John played on guitar was that riff,” says Slatkin. “Then the first thing Ed sang into the little scratch microphone was the verse, and then he went into the hook, and and that’s the demo that we came away with, with just the melodies and some scratch lyrics. Later, Ed and I finished the lyrics. John and I worked on the production.”
The song closes out F1, and it’s a clean, exhilarating anthem that feels like a wave of release and a fresh start, packed with promise and adrenaline. You can listen to it here.
“I try the hardest to make it sound like we don’t try hard,” Slatkin says. “That’s the biggest thing — making it seem like it’s like a magic trick…. making it seem so effortless and like everything just happens when you want it to. But getting to that point is hard. It’s work.”
Main image: Blake Slatkin. MovieMaker.