Why a vocal producer is the secret sauce behind pop’s biggest hits

thefader.com:

From Whitney to Madonna to Ariana, pop music is built on iconic voices. But how are they captured into a powerful, enduring song?

Enter the vocal producer, the often overlooked profession wrangling these instruments into the irresistible product we eventually hear on the track.

Cameron Gower Poole, a vocal producer based in London, describes his job as a mixture of engineer, spiritual mind reader, and life coach, one who can see the vision of what a song needs to sound like and has the technical chops to get it there.

Like a sculpture chiseling a chunk of marble, he’s coaxing out that intangible something that makes a song a hit. “The emotional core of [pop] records is this vocal,” he says.