Rick Ruben on the creative process

Newsweek has a great profile on Rick Rubin, the greatest music producer of the past 30 years.

The entire piece is interesting. Especially good are the bits where Rubin talks about his creative philosophy in the context of making Licensed to Ill with the Beastie Boys:

We worked on the album for a long time, two years in all, which is part of the reason the record is as good as it is. Each song really has a life of its own, because it might be a month between writing two songs. It wasn’t like “OK, we have six weeks to make an album.” It was natural—the natural flow of making a really good piece of work. I can remember at one point getting a call from Mike D really upset, like, “What’s going on? Why isn’t our record done yet?” I just said, “I don’t really have control over that. It comes when it comes.”

And:

From the beginning, all I’ve ever cared about is things being great. I never cared about when they were done.