Los Angeles, CA (October 5, 2026)—The list of artists he’s worked with is staggering: Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Madonna, Michael Stipe, Brandi Carlile…. For any top producer/ songwriter, that would be a career’s worth of highlights; for Andrew Watt, it’s just what’s come out in the last year.
On the heels of co-writing and co-producing much of Carlile’s Returning to Myself album, Watt performed live with Lady Gaga at the Grammy Awards in February, and then played in and music-directed the telecast’s all-star Ozzy Osbourne tribute. The following month found him collaborating with Michael Stipe on “I Played the Fool,” the theme song of the HBO comedy Rooster, and then more soundtrack efforts—three co-writes/productions with Gaga for The Devil Wears Prada 2—came out in early May.
That same month, Paul McCartney’s long-awaited The Boys of Dungeon Lane album was released, co-produced with the former Beatle and packed with a half-dozen co-writes, followed in July by both Madonna’s Confessions II (two cowrite/co-productions) and The Rolling Stones’ Foreign Tongues, which he produced and also cowrote two tracks for. Uniformly, the releases have all been critical successes.
Watt’s knack for drawing the best out of legendary artists has made him a go-to producer in recent years—the full Watt production resume features everyone from Pearl Jam to Iggy Pop—and his ability to genre-hop doesn’t hurt either. It’s a flexibility that underscores what he does best: support the artist, regardless of where it takes him.
“I think you’ve gotta be whatever you’re needed to be,” he says, “whether that means being an amazing listener, or your job is setting the vibe so that the artists can be the best versions of themselves, feel creative and throw it down. [Sometimes] that means playing every instrument on a song and helping with the writing and being a part of the actual recording process as a performer. I mean, it’s all things.”
• Discover more great stories—get a free Mix SmartBrief subscription!
Getting immersed in so many creative aspects can help keep things moving forward, but it can also have unexpected—if intriguing—consequences, like when Watt produced the Rolling Stones’ 2023 album Hackney Diamonds and then went right into working on Pearl Jam’s Dark Matter. “Keith [Richards] had just showed me so much about open tunings and playing different inversions, so my hands were in that mentality,” he recalls. “Then there was a song that ended up being on the Pearl Jam album that was in Open G tuning. I think those kinds of things can carry over.”
Perhaps it’s inevitable that working with the best would lead to learning from them as well. “Every time I’m lucky enough to share a couch with Paul McCartney, I become ten times the musician I was before, just learning about chord movements and passing chords from him,” says Watt. “If I get to go work on something else soon after I’ve been in the studio with Paul McCartney, the desire for passing chords and chords that are a little deeper, and going from major to minor and modulating, is sharp!”
FANNING THE FIRE
Getting musical insight one-on-one from Keith Richards or Paul McCartney is the kind of experience that music fans dream of—and Watt knows where they’re coming from, because he is, above all else, an unapologetic fan. Rather than let it cloud his judgement in the studio, however, he uses his fandom as a tool for setting baseline expectations.
“I try to be as familiar as possible with the output of the artist and the things that I love personally about what they do,” he says. “If I’m making music for myself and the people in the room, and the artist is making the music for themselves because they really love it, and we’re ticking that box of what we love while we’re doing it, then I feel it translates to other people.”
Fandom can inform his views on why something does or doesn’t work, but it also acts as a constant reminder that he’s in the artist’s corner. “I’m happy for people to know that, to wear my true heart on my sleeve, to talk about what I love,” he says. “Everyone’s a fan, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing this. You’re a fan, I’m a fan, anyone that’s ever graced your magazine is a fan—that’s why they got into making music! How are you going to get the job working for the Rolling Stones when you’re the one person in the world that’s not a fucking Rolling Stones fan? Come on, how are you going to get that job?”
He says all that with a big grin, but the comment also gives lie to the innate scrappiness often found in Long Island musicians raised in the shadow of New York City. Born Andrew Wotman in 1990, Watt grew up in Great Neck and taught himself to play music by listening to Pearl Jam CDs. His insatiable music fandom took off in high school, however, and before long, he was grabbing the train to Manhattan every Monday night to watch the city’s top session players jam at The Cutting Room.
When it was time for college, Watt became part of the city’s music scene, too, attending NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music for a while before dropping out to play in a string of bands. While there were fleeting glimpses of success on the horizon, nothing quite stuck, and he found himself scratching by, gig to gig. Things began to change, however, when he took a touring guitarist job backing Australian singer Cody Simpson, who was opening for Justin Bieber in stadiums. By chance, Watt befriended the tour headliner, the two of them jamming to rock classics during soundchecks, and that eventually led to Watt’s first songwriting hit, “Let Me Love You” by DJ Snake featuring Bieber.
Over the next few years, pop songwriting and production credits started to pile up for Watt as he worked with Shawn Mendes, Camila Cabello, Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus and others, but it was a long association with Post Malone that changed his career trajectory forever.
The two had already worked together multiple times when Watt wound up recording “Take What You Want”—a 2019 collaboration between Malone, rapper Travis Scott and metal legend Ozzy Osbourne—in his own home studio. The track was a hit, but just as importantly, Osbourne was blown away by the experience, shocked at how painless and fun it had been.
Inspired, the metal mainstay teamed up with Watt to record a solo album—his first in 10 years—and that’s when things broke wide open. 2020’s Ordinary Man was widely hailed as a triumphant return to form for Osbourne, and he wasn’t shy about crediting his collaborator, telling Classic Rock at the time, “In the back of my mind, I was going, ‘I haven’t got the fucking strength,’ but Andrew pulled it out of me.”
While the album was a hit, Watt’s efforts were rewarded in another way, too, when he took home his first Grammy Award—Producer of the Year, Non-Classical—in 2021, thanks to his work with Osbourne, Dua Lipa, 5 Seconds of Summer and A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie. Since then, acts new and veteran alike have lined up to work with him, and it’s resulted in 13 Grammy nominations and five wins to date, including two earlier this year—Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Dance Pop Recording—with Lady Gaga.
