You often hear of producers becoming artists - in fact, in the electronic music world, the two titles are frequently used interchangeably - but Dan Nigro has now offered another take on the role.
Nigro, it turns out, thinks of himself as both producer and band member, having worn these two creative hats successfully for Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan, two of the most successful artists of the year.
“I come from being in a band,” Nigro tells Variety [he was previously in indie-rock outfit As Tall As Lions]. “I come from a world where it’s a team of people making music. And I feel so lucky that I met Olivia and I met Chappell because to me, they’re these incredible artists that needed, like, a band member (as) somebody else to make music with.”
This need, reckons Nigro, has been caused in part by the changing face of music production, and the fact that today’s technology means that you no longer need a full band in order to record a complete song.
“I don’t wanna say it’s easy to make a song, but it’s easier to make a song than it was 20 years ago,” he says. “But because people are able to work individually, it makes it harder for people to want to get together in a group of four or five people and really like hash out making a song. So I just think that nowadays, there’s room for producers to play the role of the band.”
Nigro goes on to reveal that he spotted something in both Rodrigo and Roan that made him a good fit for them.
“They’re both rock ‘n’ rollers in my opinion,” he says. “And that’s kind of why I gravitated towards them as a quote unquote band member, as a team player: I just love their rock ‘n’ roll spirit. Both of them just have such attitude and grit in the way that they approach making music. And I love that about them and always want to help them bring that part out in the music, you know?… They’re both rockers in the best way possible.”
Rodrigo in particular has embraced the ‘band sound’, describing her recent guitar-heavy Guts World Tour as “my own spin on a rock show”. She’s also been given the seal of approval by Kim Deal, whose band The Breeders supported Rodrigo for a few of the dates.
“I think she likes loud guitars - in this day and age!” says Deal of Rodrigo. “She finds loud guitars exciting and wants to be around them.”
Of course, as well as being Rodrigo and Roan’s producer, Nigro also co-writes for both artists. In fact, he was a songwriter before he was a producer, but says that it was partly for financial reasons that he decided to hone his “production chops”.
“It is so hard to make money as a songwriter nowadays, unless you have a hit song,” he says. “It really becomes difficult because there’s not a lot of album sales. And then also the streaming favours the master side. So obviously producers are making money on the master side more than the songwriters are. So it definitely favours the artist and the producer in that sense.”
