Producers are often the true architects of a hit song. Just look at Benny Blanco, the American record producer (and songwriter) whose arrangements, chord progressions and even lyrics have defined a generation of music. Blanco’s undeniable influence on popular music is this century’s greatest hit.
As Britney Spears sang on one of Blanco’s breakthrough tracks as both writer and producer, Circus: “There’s only two types of people in the world / The ones that entertain, and the ones that observe”. Blanco, 37, born Benjamin Levin, has been entertaining us from behind the boards over the last 17 years and has 29 number one hits and counting under his belt. Born in Virginia, Blanco first found himself enthralled with music at the age of five when he heard Nas’s The World Is Yours on a visit to a cassette tape store with his older brother. They’d go every afternoon. “I was five or six and he was 11 or 12, and I remember that they would never let you buy parental advisory songs that had curse words in them, but my brother knew someone there so they would always hook us up,” Blanco told Vibe. “My brother was like, ‘This dude Nas is crazy good, you have to listen to him.’ So I picked up the new Nas one and then he was like, ‘You also have to listen to [the R&B group] All-4-One.’ I got both of those tapes at the same time. I was hooked. I went back every week.” In his teens, Blanco would go on to make the five-hour bus journey from Virginia to New York, where he would meet with record executives, hustling to get an internship. “I was hitting up [producers] all over MySpace, right when it got big… everyone like Jimmy Iovine, Polow Da Don, and I would cold-call people and pretend I was a lawyer. They would pass me through and I would say, ‘Please let me play you my demo.’ I did a lot of wild shit to just try and grab people’s ears.” Blanco thought he would be a rapper, exclaiming to his mum at the age of 16, “I’m going to be the biggest in the world.” His stage name comes from the Al Pacino film Carlito’s Way (Blanco is played by John Leguizamo), which inspired his rap career until he decided, “no one cares what a chubby Jewish kid from Virginia thinks”, at which point he began making beats instead, transitioning to producing under an internship with Disco D. He then worked under the Dr. Luke, who mentored him.
As the world was recovering from an economic recession and becoming increasingly online, Blanco’s style fuelled a feeling of hopefulness at the turn of the decade. It began in 2008 with Circus, then Katy Perry’s breakthrough I Kissed a Girl and Kesha’s defining track TiK ToK. There was a liberation and optimism in the music he was a part of. His synth-based pop sound paired with intentionally emotional lyrics began a new wave, transforming mainstream music from the heavily Auto-Tuned electro-pop (which we’re currently hearing the revival of) to a more refined, melodic sound that was high energy. It made us want to dance again. His major hits came next on Teenage Dream and defined pop for the rest of the decade: euphoric and infused with a feeling of freedom through anthemic choruses and glossy production. Blanco’s epic run continued with Maroon 5’s Moves Like Jagger, Kesha’s We R Who We R, Rihanna’s Diamonds and Taio Cruz’s Dynamite, before evolving into a more refined pop sound in the mid-2010s.
Collaboration has been a key component of Blanco’s success. His friendship and songwriting partnership with Ed Sheeran has been well documented: their most successful collaboration was on Justin Bieber’s platinum-selling Love Yourself in 2015. In a year saturated with heavily electronic hits it was a risk, but it paved the way for a more stripped- down, acoustic sound in mainstream pop, polished with Sheeran’s guitar skills and folk sensibilities. Discovering his ability to guide an artist has been integral to Blanco’s process. In an interview with New York radio station Z1000, he said, “I always tell people it’s like weightlifting. Some days some artists come in and they can put the whole stack up. Some days they’re a bit shaky and you have to help them put them up. I pick my battles, I wait for those moments. Sometimes I’ll be: what are they doing? But then I let that process happen because a bad [idea] can become something good that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.” He recalls it going this way with Sheeran on Love Yourself. “It was after a long night, we were exhausted, it’s three in the morning in the back of the tour bus. We were writing a song and it was not good. It was to the chords of Love Yourself. I was like, why don’t we just write what’s actually going on in your life? And he said he didn’t want to write a song about that. I said, OK, let’s write a song about not wanting to write a song. And then he sang, ‘I don’t want to write a song…’” That simplicity and humanity in Blanco’s songwriting soared on The Weeknd’s Starboy, Sheeran’s ÷ and fiancée Selena Gomez’s most critically acclaimed work, Revival. On Valentine’s Day, the couple announced the release of a surprise new album charting their love story, I Said I Love You First, out now.
In 2018 Blanco made a significant shift, launching his solo career. His debut single, Eastside, featuring Halsey and Khalid, was a perfect showcase for Blanco’s now fully refined ability to blend genres and create viral, poignant pop. His debut album, Friends Keep Secrets, released the following year, was a success and featured collaborations with the new voices dominating music: Swae Lee, Gracie Abrams, Omar Apollo and Juice Wrld, among others. The release cemented Blanco as not just a producer for other artists’ visions, but an artist in his own right, and his undisputed ability to be one step ahead. “I feel like my strongest thing is just having my finger on the pulse,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2022. “’Cause a lot of it is just knowing what you want to hear.”
The release was distributed through his own record label (now dissolved) and paved the way for Blanco to take on a mentoring role with younger producers. A responsibility he had taken on naturally, mentoring artists and friends like Halsey, Cashmere Cat and Charlie Puth, has evolved into guiding a younger generation of producers who are now putting out number one hits themselves. Blake Slatkin, a previous intern of Blanco’s, is defining the current decade. In just five years, Slatkin has already achieved genre-defining credits on 24kGoldn’s Mood, which topped the Billboard Hot 100 for eight weeks, Stay by The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber, which held the position for seven weeks, Sam Smith and Kim Petras’s Unholy and, more recently, he contributed to the sound of the summer on Charli xcx’s 360.
Perhaps Blanco’s genius is his childlike nature and wonder when it comes to making music. There is no recipe. “I’m not particularly good at playing any instrument. I’m actually not even mediocre at anything. Everything I do takes a long time,” he told the respected music tech mag Sound on Sound. “When I play guitar, I play one note at a time and layer that until it becomes a chord. The same with keyboards, although I can play them slightly better: I can play chords on them…” Blanco collects instruments, too, and has more than 50 keyboards in his studio alone. In a world where producers craft sounds through a simple MIDI keyboard and computer software, Blanco searches for the real deal. “I use the toy keyboards a lot. Kesha’s TiK ToK, for example, was done on the same old Yamaha keyboard that I got for $25 at a yard sale, on which we did California Gurls and Teenage Dream. When I go to another studio, I will usually just rent a few keyboards, or buy one at a yard sale or something.” His reason is that he “always wants people to wonder where the fuck I get these sounds from”. Blanco continues to nurture new talent, create pop bangers and has even explored his love of cooking online in last year’s Open Wide: A Cookbook for Friends. As we await Addison Rae’s 2025 debut, which she’s hinted he’s co-producing, Blanco’s work on 2021 debut single Obsessed is a reminder of his pioneering ear. We’re hooked.
Portrait by Johnny Miller. Taken from 10 Magazine Issue 74 – MUSIC, TALENT, CREATIVE – on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
