As I greet Mike Dean over a video call, it\u2019s five days until the closing of the first round of voting for the 2026 Grammy Awards. His production work on the Weeknd\u2019s Hurry Up Tomorrow is up for 10 categories. I ask him if there\u2019s a particular category he\u2019d like to win. \u201cI\u2019ve never won Song of the Year or Record of the Year\u2026\u201d he says, sitting in the kitchen of his California home, wearing a gray T-shirt, sipping a glass of ice water, and occasionally inhaling from his bong. \u201cI\u2019ve been nominated several times, and just never got the big category.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dean\u2019s not nervous, though. His life doesn\u2019t depend on it, he says. After all, the producer, audio engineer, and multi-instrumentalist has been nominated for 19 Grammy Awards, winning seven of them, most recently in 2022 for Best Rap Song as one of the songwriters for Kanye West\u2019s \u201cJail,\u201d featuring Jay-Z.<\/p>\n
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Over his more than 30-year career, Dean\u2014who\u2019s known for his synth-heavy production sound\u2014has worked with 2Pac, Scarface, Madonna, Selena Gomez, Lana Del Rey, and countless others. He\u2019s also released his own music, the six-album 4:20 series.<\/p>\n
Dean started out in music as a pianist and keyboard player, eventually getting into synthesizers in high school.<\/p>\n
Fresh after graduating in 1983, he started playing with Mexican-American singer Selena. \u201cI\u2019d be in the studio with her, and that\u2019s whenever I started hitting record and overdubbing keyboards and producing,\u201d he says. \u201cThat was the beginning of it, I guess, with Selena.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dean eventually got into hip-hop, working alongside artists such as Scarface, Geto Boys, and the Dogg Pound before forming a partnership with West as a producer, engineer, and multi-instrumentalist on almost all of his albums. Then there\u2019s Travis Scott, with whom Dean has collaborated on all of his music since 2013.<\/p>\n
Now, as Grammy season rolls around, Dean has solidified his status as a legend in the field, with way too many accomplishments to mention here. In our brief chat, we only scrape the surface of all that he\u2019s done throughout his career, how he approaches producing, and how he wants to be remembered.<\/p>\n
How do you approach sound design? Do you approach it differently now than when you did back in the \u201990s?<\/strong><\/p>\n Not so much, really. Just still trying not to overproduce and make enough space for every instrument that\u2019s there, instead of putting too many things and then having to fight it in the mix to make it all work. It\u2019s much easier with computers instead of back then, [when] we were using drum machines and tape and SMPTE time code, locking things up. It was a lot harder to get into making beats. You couldn\u2019t just go out and buy loops and figure out with YouTube how to make beats. Back in the day, you\u2019d buy an MPC drum machine, you had this thing with 16 sounds in it that sucked, and you had to find sounds and put them in there and make songs, you know? It\u2019s a different era.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve said before that you \u201clet the synths talk.\u201d What does that mean to you creatively?<\/strong><\/p>\n You\u2019re always turning knobs trying to find something new or different. And then you\u2019ll have those happy accidents. That\u2019s where all the cool stuff happens. I might play a keyboard part on one keyboard and then assign it to another keyboard, and it does something crazy.<\/p>\n How much of your process is about technical perfection versus emotional instinct?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s a natural balance, a yin-yang type of thing\u2026half technical experience, from doing the same thing over and over and seeing when you\u2019re going down bad paths and stuff, and half just emotional flow state, as people are starting to call it.<\/p>\n Like getting in the zone?<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah, stream of consciousness.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve worked in a lot of different genres. What do you think ties all of your work together sonically?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n My chord voicing and leading notes. I choose to put chords together, and what note goes on top, that turns into what inspires the singer or the rapper.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve worked with Kanye, Travis Scott, The Weeknd, Beyonc\u00e9, so many major artists. What do you think makes a collaboration truly work?<\/strong><\/p>\n Patience and trust. They have to trust you to let you do your thing, which everybody does now. Earlier on, I had to push more to get my ideas across. Now, I just put too many ideas and let the artists pick through it a lot of times, let them thin it out, sit with me, and arrange stuff.<\/p>\n Is it a back-and-forth type thing, where you\u2019ll let them listen and then they come back with feedback?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Beyonc\u00e9 is a good example of that. It was her Renaissance album I worked on. I did all those songs. They sent me the songs to work on, and I just sent them the fuck out. I just played synths all over them, and then sent it back to her and she\u2019d sit with her engineer and arrange what I played and where she wanted it. I never heard it again until it came out. That\u2019s one work state that I don\u2019t do very often, but I do enjoy it.<\/p>\n How do you balance contributing to an artist\u2019s vision while keeping your own creative identity? Is that something that you even think about?<\/strong><\/p>\n Not really. It just happens. I don\u2019t really need a producer tag. I kind of have a sound people can feel, and it\u2019s me. Or hopefully, they can. Sometimes you get into a flow state with the artist where that\u2019s like the perfect situation. Working with Abel [The Weeknd] on this last album, towards the end of the album, me and him were just in the studio, just locked in, just finalizing stuff. And that\u2019s when it gets exciting to me. It\u2019s when you have 72 hours to turn in and you have 144 hours of work to do, and you just do it.<\/p>\n<\/span><\/div>\n
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