A long time ago, I stopped thinking of myself as anyone other than the person who has to make the person on the cover of the album sound good. That’s my job—to make them shine.

So you were brought in to produce the Spanish-language record for Aguilera. That’s not unusual now; Ricky Martin has done separate albums for Anglo and Hispanic markets. But is this a kind of musical segregation? And does it limit you as a producer?
Not at all. I told Ron, if you did an album in Spanish with this girl, she would kill in Spanish. She had to work hard on pronunciation, and she has Spanish lessons every day. But this is a generation that’s bicultural. These are not Argentineans or Mexicans. These are the children of immigrants, and they are connecting to their Latin roots in a different way. Christina is an example of that. As for limiting me as a producer, no way. The Anglo record had several producers; I was the only one on the Spanish record. And I got to spend a year working on it with her.

Do you see yourself being used to legitimize her to the Latin market?
Perhaps the record label does, but I know it works in both directions. I worked with [contemporary Christian artist] Jaci Velasquez. I crossed her from English to Spanish. She’s another artist with a Hispanic name but who doesn’t speak it. You need someone who can work in both languages. A producer specializing in Spanish only would be totally lost in the pop [idiom]. A long time ago, I stopped thinking of myself as anyone other than the person who has to make the person on the cover of the album sound good. That’s my job—to make them shine. With Millie, who is from Puerto Rico, I realized that we were not getting onto the Ranchero [Mexican] stations in the U.S., of which there are something like 3,000, and they report to Billboard. So I said let me take a crack at it. I took a click track and built a Mexican-sounding track around her, and we had a big hit in that market: It went Number One for four weeks. Thank God for this new bicultural audience. I really believe that the Latin market in the U.S. is still relatively untapped. There’s something way bigger here than we can see yet. When I was president of the Florida branch of NARAS, we commissioned a study that indicates the growth of Latin is unstoppable. By 2007, we’ll have 75 million Latinos in the U.S. [The study shows that] for every 10 records sold here, at least four will be in Spanish. Those are big numbers, and they became the basis of the Latin Grammy Awards.

You love your Pro Tools setups. But do you also use commercial studios?
I use Crescent Moon and Hit Factory Criteria and Middle Ear. I like Digi-Note, which is a Pro Tools studio [on South Beach]. I thank God for Pro Tools. I can go out and play God with audio. If I miss analog, I just record some on tape and transfer it to hard disk.

Do you still do a lot of engineering?
I had to let a lot of that go. It takes too much out of you. I want to spend more time on songwriting. But I have a great engineer now named Bruce Weeden, who comes out of that Philadelphia sound. He keeps it very half and half, not using the plug-ins but using lots of outboard compressors and signal processors. Once I found Bruce, I knew I could quit engineering.

Some day, all producers will work from home. At the end of the day, the important thing is that you spend time with the project, not with the studio. When a producer owns the studio, the project wins in the end.

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Reprinted with permission from Magazine, February, 2001
© 2001, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved