Jimmy Bralower: The Man Behind the Music

There is a particular kind of career in music that is easier to hear than to see. The artist is on the album cover. The song becomes inseparable from a voice, a face, a moment in popular culture. Somewhere behind it, however, are the people who understood what the record needed before the rest of the world heard it.

Jimmy Bralower has spent much of his life in that room.

His credits run through several generations of popular music: Madonna, Duran Duran, Cyndi Lauper, Hall & Oates, Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton, Peter Gabriel, Brian Wilson, Celine Dion, Jimmy Cliff, Donna Lewis, Jennifer Paige and M2M among them. His own website puts the career in numbers: 10 No. 1 records, 30 Top Ten singles, 35 Top Ten albums, more than 80 gold and platinum recordings, two Grammy Records of the Year and a Grammy Album of the Year.

But numbers only describe the reach of the work. They do not quite explain Bralower’s place in it.

He began as a drummer, and early. His first band, the Young Ones, had a major-label deal while he was still in his early teens. He worked his way through clubs and concert halls and into session work, then arrived at precisely the moment when the vocabulary of record-making was changing. In 1980, as electronic technology was entering the studio, Bralower began combining programming with acoustic drumming. His website describes him as one of the early studio drummers to incorporate programming into his work, first gaining significant notice as part of the creative team around Kurtis Blow on records including “The Breaks” and “Basketball.”

The machines mattered. What mattered more was that Bralower approached them as a musician.

That distinction has followed him throughout his career. He was not interested in replacing performance with technology; he wanted to find out how technology could carry the qualities of a performance. Decades later, he still describes the problem in essentially musical terms. “If you’re not going for performance, then you’re going for perfect,” he told Paula Atherton. Perfection, in this sense, is not necessarily praise. Without something to feel, he argues, a recording can become a presentation rather than a performance.

It is a useful way to understand why Bralower became valuable to so many very different artists. He could work in the new electronic language without losing his allegiance to the older one: people playing, reacting, listening and changing what they did because of what somebody else had just played.

During sessions with Cyndi Lauper, Bralower remembers reaching a point where programming drums alone no longer gave him what he wanted. He asked whether he could bring in another musician so they could play together, more like a small band. With longtime collaborator Jeff Bova, he developed a way of working with technology that retained that exchange between musicians—the musical back-and-forth that occurs when one idea provokes another.

“We learned how to perform with the technology,” he said.

That may be the shortest explanation of the Bralower phenomenon.

At New York’s Power Station, he found himself near the center of one of the great periods of modern record-making. He had become a fixture at the studio, working with owner Tony Bongiovi, when his work attracted Nile Rodgers. Bralower would spend four years making records with Rodgers, contributing to projects involving Madonna, Duran Duran, Chic, Mick Jagger, Peter Gabriel, Jeff Beck, Sister Sledge, Sheena Easton and Al Jarreau.

Bralower remembers the period less as a procession of famous names than as a remarkable working environment. Hit records were constantly being made around him. He could contribute an idea in the studio and, not long afterward, hear the finished record on the radio. He had gone from trying to get inside the record business to finding himself in its busiest rooms.

Rodgers helped open one door after another. Bralower worked with Duran Duran, Jeff Beck, Madonna and Sheena Easton. When Hall & Oates needed someone, Rodgers recommended him. Bralower worked on “Say It Isn’t So” and the album that included “Out of Touch.” Through producer Russ Titelman came Steve Winwood and “Higher Love,” followed by Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors album. Bruce Hornsby, Carly Simon and Peter Gabriel were part of the same extraordinary stretch.

His website fills in the larger record of those years: Hall & Oates’ “Adult Education” alongside “Say It Isn’t So” and “Out of Touch”; Steve Winwood’s Grammy Record of the Year “Higher Love”; and work connected to Eric Clapton’s Grammy Record of the Year “Tears in Heaven.” Bralower’s mentors and collaborators included Rodgers, Titelman, Phil Ramone, Jim Steinman, Gary Katz and Bernard Edwards. One magazine, according to his biography, eventually called him “the producer’s secret weapon.”

The phrase fits because Bralower’s career has rarely been about imposing one recognizable trick on every record. It has been about figuring out what the particular record in front of him requires.

He compares making music to a crossword puzzle. The form may look familiar every day, but the answers change. Knowing how yesterday’s record worked does not provide the solution to today’s. The accumulated experience instead gives him more possibilities: another way into a song, another route around a problem, another instinct to draw upon when the obvious answer fails.

Some of those lessons came from watching exceptional artists at uncomfortably close range.

Working with Mick Jagger on the title song for Ruthless People, Bralower needed to understand the chorus before programming the drums. He asked Jagger to hum the melody. Jagger did considerably more than that. As Bralower remembers it, Jagger came toward him in the control room and delivered the part as though he were performing in a stadium—singing and moving full-out. There was no casual demonstration, no half-speed version of Mick Jagger waiting for the real performance to begin.

For Bralower, it became a lesson: “never ever go halfway.”

There were other moments that carried a different weight. He made a record with Brian Wilson. During work on Eric Clapton’s Journeyman, Titelman told him there would be a surprise at the session. The surprise was George Harrison. Harrison had written songs Clapton recorded for the album, and Bralower suddenly found himself working in a room with Harrison, Clapton, Jim Keltner and Clapton’s band.

For someone who says the Beatles were the reason he was making music in the first place, the situation could easily have been paralyzing. Instead, it illuminated something fundamental about his career. Admiration had to give way to usefulness. He was there because he had a job to do.

“They are expecting me to do something great,” he remembers realizing during that period.

Bralower also understood why musicians from an earlier generation were comfortable having an electronic specialist in those rooms. He was not simply “the technical guy.” He knew the music that had made those artists important because he had grown up with it himself. The technology was new; his musical instincts were grounded in everything that preceded it.

That balance became increasingly important as Bralower moved beyond programming and arranging. His career expanded into producing, writing, mixing and remixing. His production and remix of Jimmy Cliff’s “I Can See Clearly Now” and production of Diana King’s “Stir It Up” appeared on the Cool Runnings soundtrack. He co-produced Cyndi Lauper’s “Hey Now (Girls Just Want to Have Fun),” mixed Donna Lewis’ “I Love You Always Forever,” co-wrote Celine Dion’s “Misled,” contributed to four Dion albums and co-arranged “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” with Jeff Bova and Jim Steinman. He also co-produced Jennifer Paige’s debut single “Crush.”

Then came M2M. Bralower went to Oslo to work with the newly signed Norwegian singer-songwriters, producing and co-writing “Don’t Say You Love Me,” which became their gold debut single and appeared on the Pokémon: The First Movie soundtrack. He subsequently co-produced and executive-produced their debut album. In 2000, Atlantic Records appointed him Vice President of A&R and Staff Producer.

By then, Bralower had occupied almost every useful vantage point from which a record could be understood. “I’ve worked on both sides of the glass in the studio, and been on both sides of the desk in the office,” he said in the interview. “I’ve seen it from every angle.”

That breadth matters because Bralower’s idea of making records has always extended beyond recording them. Song selection matters. Arrangement matters. Performance matters. Sound matters. So does knowing when to intervene and when to leave something alone.

His career with Ryan Shaw provides a later, more intimate version of the same story. Bralower signed Shaw to his production company and released music through his own Dynotone Records. His website records three albums and three Grammy nominations for the label. In the interview, Bralower identifies the nominated Shaw performances as Ashford & Simpson’s “I Am Your Man,” the Bralower co-write “In Between,” and the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” from three separate records and nominated in three different years. Some of those records were made not in one of the famous Manhattan rooms of Bralower’s earlier career, but in the studio in his basement.
The surroundings had changed. The principle had not.

“The award came from doing something right,” Bralower said. “It was not the goal.”

Today, much of his work is concerned with preserving the kind of artist development that shaped the world in which he learned his trade. His production company offers production, mixing, mastering, drum programming, career consulting and artist development. His stated approach to production is collaborative; his artist-development work centers on defining goals and building a realistic path toward them.

Bralower sees that work as increasingly necessary. In his view, artists are now expected to arrive with much of the development already done. He argues that the older A&R system, whatever its faults, gave developing artists people whose job included listening, steering and helping them improve. He has tried to recreate some of that function for musicians and writers who are serious about building careers rather than chasing a single viral moment.

It is consistent with the role he has occupied for decades. Behind a star, and behind a successful record, there are decisions most listeners will never know were decisions at all: the groove that finally feels right, the sound that belongs to the singer rather than merely to the moment, the arrangement that leaves room for the vocal, the performance worth preserving even when it is not mathematically perfect.

Bralower’s career has been made in those decisions.

For all his association with technological change, he remains suspicious of technology when it begins dictating the music rather than serving it. He has spent decades working with machines, yet he keeps returning to interaction, personality and feel. “It’s all about performance, even with the technology,” he says.

That is perhaps why his résumé can stretch from Kurtis Blow to Madonna, Hall & Oates to Celine Dion, Steve Winwood to Ryan Shaw without becoming merely a collection of famous names. The continuity is not genre. It is the work behind the record: listening closely enough to recognize what is missing, knowing enough to offer a solution, and having enough restraint to understand that the solution is supposed to reveal the artist, not the person who supplied it.

The stars were meant to be out front.

Jimmy Bralower learned how much could be accomplished from just behind them.

Visit JimmyBralowerProductions.com

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