Rock and roll wasn’t really built to grow old, and most late-career albums from even the greatest legends get a pat on the shoulder at best and calls for retirement at worst. But recent music from the Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Ozzy Osbourne, Elton John and even Pearl Jam have a vigor and vitality that belies the artists’ years. And they all have one thing in common: 33-year-old producer Andrew Watt, who wasn’t even born when most of those musicians were in their heyday.
How beloved is he? Elton enthuses, “Andrew Watt is an extraordinary talent and musician with a boundless and electrifying spirit. Not only is he an excellent producer, but he is someone I call a dear friend.”
Mick Jagger says, “I knew that Andy and I could work together as soon as we met. He has such infectious enthusiasm and a great work ethic, plus he’s a great musician too. We immediately clicked and made what I thought was going to be a tough job into a fun and easy one.”
Keith Richards adds, “Andrew has a contagious vitality about him coupled with an unrelenting enthusiasm, which is one of the great qualities of a producer. Also, he was great fun to work with, another great quality!”
So what is it about this guy? He’s energetic, talkative and a music geek of the highest order — he has tattoos of Bowie, George Harrison, Prince, James Brown and the Stones, although he admits of the latter with a laugh, “I had to hide that one to work with them.” He’s an accomplished guitarist and songwriter who made his mark as a producer of pop and hip-hop: He won the Grammy producer of the year trophy in 2021 for songs with Post Malone, Miley Cyrus, Dua Lipa, 5 Seconds of Summer, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie and Osbourne (and is certainly in the running for the 2025 awards as well).
Over the past few years he’s continued working in pop — most recently on Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga’s “Die With a Smile” — as he’s also broadened his reach into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s top 1%: He’s been recording with Paul McCartney, who even joined him onstage in the Hamptons this past August at a performance by the Smith & Watt Steakhouse, his just-for-fun covers band with his close friend Chad Smith, drummer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers (who Watt saw perform at Madison Square Garden when he was 11).
But still, how does one work with those legends without completely losing one’s shit?
“You lose your shit privately,” he says with a smile. “Because Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Elton John, Eddie Vedder — they’re fully capable of producing an album by themselves. They understand song structure, mix, a good snare-drum sound, they’ve done this forever. So none of them needs a producer — but they are choosing to hire a producer.”
Watt’s energy, musicality and studio savvy are key to his success, and the diversity of his experience belies his age. A Long Island native born Andrew Wotman, he was raised in a music-loving household, although no close relatives are musicians. “I got the Beatles, Zeppelin and Sabbath from my dad; Nirvana, Pearl Jam, A Tribe Called Quest and Wu-Tang Clan from my [older] brother; and mom listened to George Michael, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye. I loved it all.” He started playing guitar at 10 and formed his first band the following year — and even at that age, he was an alpha.
“We’d be rehearsing and then my friends would say, ‘We wanna go play Nintendo,’” he recalls. “I’d be like, ‘Nintendo?! We gotta practice!’”
He led rock bands as a teenager, but the truly formative experiences took place on New York’s club scene of the mid-and-late ‘00s, where he performed as a solo artist, played guitar with a DJ friend and also worked as an intern at Questlove and the Roots’ legendary jam sessions, helping to book and produce the shows and occasionally sitting in.
“D’Angelo, Wyclef, Mos Def and lots of others played there, and I learned about promoting shows, how to run a band, how to do horn sections,” he recalls. “It was insane, how much I got to learn.”
He signed with Republic Records as a solo artist, but his path to becoming a hit producer came while playing guitar for pop singer Cody Simpson on a tour that included dates opening for Justin Bieber. Watt was sound-checking one afternoon in 2013 and suddenly heard someone playing along on the drums. He turned around and saw Bieber. “We jammed for, like, 30 minutes, ended up hanging out and playing music,” Watt recalls. “One of the songs I showed him was ‘Let Me Love You,’” which Watt later recorded with DJ Snake and Bieber. It became Watt’s first hit, reaching No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2016.
Dozens of major productions followed — Post Malone, Lana Del Rey, Juice Wrld, Miley Cyrus, Bieber, Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello’s smash “Señorita” — but the shift to rock came about in an unmistakably Hollywood fashion. While recording with Malone, “One night we went out to [legendary rock nightclub] the Rainbow and he bought a picture of Ozzy right off the wall there. I said, ‘We should do a song with Ozzy!,’” which eventually resulted in their 2019 duet “Take What You Want” — and Osbourne enlisting Watt to produce his next album, “Ordinary Man,” released in 2020.
“I was so honored,” he says, “but I was a pop producer, so I wasn’t sure. But Chad and Duff [McKagan, of Guns N’ Roses], who has become a good friend, were like, ‘You’ve got to do it, and we’ll do it with you.’”
Elton John also played on the album, which led to Watt working with him on his all-star 2021 “Lockdown Sessions” collection. That ended up being his entrée into the upper echelons of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“During the pandemic, [longtime Stones producer Don Was] called me and said, ‘I’d love for you to do a mix of this Rolling Stones song, something that feels a little more modern but still rock, like what you did with Ozzy and Elton. I think you and Mick would get along.’ The most gracious thing ever! So we all had a Zoom and I worked on some songs, and then in 2022, I was working with Dua Lipa, and I texted Mick that I was in London. He told me to come over for tea — that trip was so crazy because I got to do that, have margaritas with Paul McCartney and go to Elton’s house for dinner. Anyway, he said, ‘We’ve been working on this album for 18 years and we have to finish it. We might work with a bunch of different producers, or one producer. Would you be interested?’ Of course!”
Eventually, and with Was’ blessing, he found himself not only producing but co-writing two songs on “Hackney Diamonds,” which could very well be the last Rolling Stones studio album (and also features McCartney and Elton playing bass and piano, respectively, on one track each). But the obvious question is, how exactly does anyone produce the Rolling Stones, let alone someone young enough to be their grandson?
“I just tried to produce from the front row [of a concert] and think, ‘What do I want to hear?,’” he says. “It’s gotta have energy, and it’s gotta evoke the things that people love about the band, and fit in with the hits. Also,” he continues, “the Stones and Pearl Jam are completely different, but it’s a very similar philosophy: They’re the best bands in the world, so record the band playing live and don’t belabor it. Let it feel real and raw, but mix it modern so you could play it against a Post Malone or a Lady Gaga song and it still sounds like it’s got the same sonic kickass.”
Less technically, he also brought an endless supply of the nerve that got him there in the first place.
“You hear all these [intimidating] stories, but you’ve got to let them go,” he says. “I came with no baggage, so asking Mick or Keith to do something that they wouldn’t normally do — anyone around them would say, ‘They’re never going to do that.’ But I just asked. That’s how songs like ‘Rolling Stone Blues’ happened,” the Muddy Waters classic that gave the band its name all those years ago — and which, amazingly, they had never recorded.
“I wanted them to do a blues song,” Watt says, “and Keith had been playing this unbelievable acoustic blues that I’d kept asking Mick to write lyrics for. Mick didn’t really get frustrated with me that much over the course of the album, but he had so many lyrics to write that he was finally like, ‘Andy, I’m not writing lyrics for a blues, stop asking me!’
“Then one day Keith was playing ‘Rolling Stone Blues,’ and I asked if he’d cover it. He said, ‘In a heartbeat, but Mick will never do it.’ I said, ‘Do you mind if I ask him?’
“So I called Mick and said, ‘Listen, I gave up on the blues lyrics, but Keith’s playing ‘Rolling Stone Blues’ and it sounds fucking amazing. You guys have never covered it — let’s just record it, and if it’s not great, we won’t use it. ‘Okay, I’ll be there in two hours.’” The song, recorded with just Jagger, guitars and harmonica and produced to sound like a scratchy old blues record, is not only the closing track on the album, it could very well be the perfect full-circle last song on the final Rolling Stones album.
“It was the same thing when I asked Paul McCartney to play bass on a Rolling Stones song: silence for 10 seconds, then ‘Yeah, I’d love to.’” He concludes, “Just ask the question! The worst that can happen is no.”
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