Meet Shawn Everett: the Grammy-winning producer who paints with sound

Welcome to Meet the Producers, a CBC Music series that highlights Canadian producers making waves in their respective genres. Producers are integral to building the backbone of the songs we love: they turn ideas into fully fleshed creations, and because so much of what they do happens behind the scenes, we wanted to shed a light on them. 

If you've been tuned into country, pop or indie rock over the past two decades, there is no doubt you've come across Shawn Everett's work. The producer and recording engineer, originally from Bragg Creek, Alta., has had a hand in albums made by some of the most recognizable names in those genres: Adele, the Killers, Miley Cyrus, Beck, Kacey Musgraves, Broken Social Scene, Alvvays, Carly Rae Jepsen, SZA, Weezer and many more. 

Everett has an unconventional recording style, starting each new production with a challenge to himself to approach his music-making in abstract ways. 

"There are a million YouTube videos that will tell you the correct way to do anything, including music, but I feel like people get too hung up on the belief that there even is a correct way to do something," Everett said in an interview. "I think that I like [to be] exploratory because it opens up a lot of avenues that maybe you wouldn't uncover by doing it the 'correct' way."

Being so experimental has been quite fruitful for Everett, considering he's won six Grammys for work with Adele, Alabama Shakes, Beck and Kacey Musgraves. 

He's also no stranger to the Juno Awards, with two Junos for recording engineer of the year already under his belt, and another nomination this year for work on Miley Cyrus's Endless Summer Vacation and Brittany Howard's What Now. 2024 marks the first time Everett has been nominated for producer of the year, for work on the aforementioned albums. 

Everett remembers first becoming aware of music production at six years old, watching an anthology series about the Beatles that broke down the sonic innovations on the early albums. His list of influences only continued to blossom as he entered his teen years: Chad Blake (Tom Waits), DJ Shadow, Brian Eno, Nigel Godrich (Radiohead's Kid A and OK Computer), Dave Fridmann (the Flaming Lips, Tame Impala and MGMT) and Alan Parsons (Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon).

Everett's recording skills were honed over four years at the Banff Centre, which he attended fresh out of high school. "I spent most of my time with abstract artists making sound collages and paintings, so that's probably a big reason why I do what I do with recording," he said. "If I'd gone down a different path [of schooling], my music would probably be different, but instead my training was to be as abstract and crazy as possible." 

After leaving Banff, he moved to Los Angeles in 2005, where he cut his teeth as a recording engineer for Tony Berg at Geffen Records. Everett has been mixing, engineering and producing consistently ever since. 

The Shawn Everett sound, dissected

There's a versatility to the music Everett produces, especially across genres, but the common throughline is his methodology. Like an artist adding different elements to a canvas, Everett sees music as a visual composition in his mind, as if he's painting with sound.  

A perfect example of his unconventionality is his recent work on American folk musician Anjimile's album The King. Everett and the artist created two rules: every sound on the album had to be an acoustic guitar, and the production of each song needed to be based on a painting. The pair spent many hours in galleries, as Anjimile selected paintings to correspond with the feel of each song. 

The production of the song "Animal" was inspired by Robert Rauschenberg's Untitled (1954), with the severity of the painting and Rauschenberg's use of multiple layers of oil paint influencing how they applied the guitars. "We just started getting into the idea of layering the same acoustic guitar part, deep sounds and high sounds on top of each other hundreds of times so that it feels like being like pummelled in acoustic guitars," said Everett.

Another common technique for Everett is to blend analog and digital recording methods. He not only likes using tape machines for the tones and texture they provide, but also for the way they force musicians to make music: the energy in a session is different when you can't do a million takes over and over. 

In a 2020 video for Mix with the Masters, Everett spoke about producing Brittany Howard's hit "Stay High," and how he wanted to use a Nagra tape machine to record the instruments, to imitate the sound of audio recordings from the 1960s. 

"I think that sometimes using a tape machine, it's not just the sound that changes, it's the actual feeling of the room that can change because people need to think about what they're doing in different ways," he said. "At the same time, there are albums that are being made on the computer that would never have been able to be made on tape. And they sound absolutely stunning. I don't have a preference, it's just like how you get different flavours out of foods by cooking them in different ways." 

Ultimately, Everett is an artist ruled by instinct and feeling over exacting technicality, and that's what makes his productions so compelling. Whether it's work with the world's biggest pop stars or indie darlings, his winning strategy is that he's never formulaic, and never does anything the same way. 

Stay tuned every month for new instalments of Meet the Producers to discover more Canadian producers who are making hits and pushing boundaries.