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

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.

After getting his start in the industry in the early 2010s as a recording engineer, Poole now works with a cadre of high-powered talent like Dua Lipa, Caroline Polachek, and RAYE, with credits on Future Nostalgia, Radical Optimism, and Desire, I Want To Turn Into You. Ahead, The FADER got an inside look into his practice as he talks about working with Lipa and Polachek, why breaths are just as important as lyrics, and the little details that make up an unforgettable pop song.

The FADER: So what exactly does a vocal producer do?

Cameron Gower Poole: Vocal production for me is the intersection of technical and artistic and creative, because you’re thinking not only about the technical capture of a vocal, you’re also thinking about performance. Is the performance powerful and compelling? I love to look for [an] artist’s identity in a vocal. When you think of someone like Dua Lipa or Madonna, for example, they have such a distinctive vocal, they could sing one word and you would know exactly who it was.

What does this look like in a studio?

I think the environment of the studio is important, and recording vocals and vocal production should be this sort of effortless process. [But] there’s a bit of anxiety [from] people stepping into the vocal booth. My goal in most sessions is to blur that boundary and almost coax someone into recording. Not in a manipulative way, but maybe we’ll be chatting for a little bit, and then there’ll be a point where an artist pops headphones on and [I’m] like, “You know what, I need a sec just to fiddle with the equipment over here. You just sing along for a minute.” A few minutes go by and all of a sudden [they’re] singing and I’m recording.

That weirdly reminds me of going to the doctor and they’re distracting you while you get a shot.

Exactly. In those kinds of sessions my role as a vocal producer is very much reading the room. One of the hardest things I would say about vocal production is knowing when to push someone and when not to push someone. If you’re pushing too hard you might damage their confidence, but if you’re not pushing hard enough, then you might miss some amazing opportunity.

When you say pushing, what do you mean?

Pushing for a performance. You think about Billie Eilish and how she sings very softly. In the studio with someone I might say, “Why don’t we think about how Billie Eilish might sing this?” They might sing it really softly, but I might want them to go even softer than that. “Imagine someone’s asleep and you’re whispering into their ear.”

Or the opposite of that, maybe someone is belting a note and they’re doing a perfect job of belting that note, but actually what I want is it to be on the brink of just falling apart, and to feel that raw emotion. It’s pushing people in that direction, or pushing to encourage someone to really lock into the groove or rhythm of something.

Do you have thoughts on what vocally makes a great pop song?

People get caught up on this idea that there’s a formula for a great pop song, but I don’t think that’s true. I think there are definitely consistent components, though. A hit song will have a strong melody and probably some clear lyrical theme, but at the core of it, it has this vocal that is engaging and captures you, where you listen to it and you feel something from it.

You work closely with Dua Lipa. How would you describe Dua’s vocal identity, and how have you worked with her to hone that?

Dua has a powerhouse voice, and it’s so impressive to be in the studio with her when she’s singing. There’s one song on [Radical Optimism] called “Falling Forever” and I remember being in the studio and she recorded that.

I remember first hearing that song and being like, damn!

Imagine being in the studio when she sang that. It was amazing because I’ve never really heard her sing like that before. [When] we played it back to her, even she was impressed. With Dua and artists at that level, generally, they come with such a unique sounding voice, so my job is to hear that and not get in the way.

You also work with Caroline Polichek who’s got one of pop music’s most distinctive voices. What can you tell me about her vocal practice?

I [worked on] “Butterfly Net,” “Blood and Butter,” and “I Believe” from her last album. I remember when we were comping vocals together. She’s incredibly hands-on, and she co-produces all of her records. I’ve not seen her do it myself, [but I know] she will go through and comp, and do pitch adjustment and pitch correction on her own vocals herself.

We would be comping the breaths as well. We would find the best sounding breath or the most rhythmic or emotional breath. There’s so much feeling that can be got from a [sharply inhales] breath, as opposed to a through-the-teeth breath. I love that she has an ear for that and she wants to pick those things.

I feel like that’s such a small detail that people often overlook, well-timed breaths.

I think breaths are as important as words in a vocal performance. I learned so much from [Polachek], that level of meticulousness in sculpting a vocal performance and shaping a sound with different textures and manipulations and things, but that’s a very Caroline thing to do.

As a vocal producer, have you noticed any “trends” in the way people sing?

Some distinctive ones for me would be like, in the U.K. when the Arctic Monkeys first sort of came out, there was a very particular style of singing or accent that Alex Turner would sing with, because that was a regional accent and that’s how he spoke. But it spawned a whole generation of people singing in that style, even though they weren’t from [there]. I think the same is true with Billie Eilish. She is a trendsetter, and so many people are inspired by that, which is great, and often they go on and sing in their own version of that style.

I think it’s a fun tool to think about. I was working with someone the other day and we were like, how would Cyndi Lauper sing this? [That’s] a cool way to spice things up a little bit. If you have a distinctive, identifiable voice, you can do a little impression of someone but it still sounds like [yourself].

Is there anything else you think people overlook about vocal production?

One thing that’s been on my mind lately is technology, particularly AI and how technology is so available to everybody in the music creation world that anyone can get any sound. I feel like we’re getting a lot of very homogenized music, where a lot of stuff kind of sounds the same. What stands out to me now is records that have a realness and a rawness to them. I think great examples are Sabrina Carpenter or Lady Gaga’s record MAYHEM. There’s a distinct personality and all of the instruments are real and they’re performed by real people, which we’re lacking from stuff made by people on laptops. [I hope there’s] more of those imperfect, human-sounding records.