Jim-E Stack on the “Beautiful, Excellent Grind” of his Biggest Year Ever

When I met Jim-E Stack for the first time years ago, I couldn’t believe that his government last name was actually Stack. He assured me that it was, and after a quick search, Wikipedia backed it up. I am still waiting to see a scan of his passport; it just feels like too perfect a name for someone in his line of work.

As a musician, producer, and songwriter, Stack has been getting cuts since 2017, most notably on the Haim song, “Want You Back,” but 2025 has been his biggest year to date—he’s logged hours in the studio with Bon Iver, Lorde, Amine, and Hayley Williams. With Bon Iver and Lorde, he was involved in the entire project. He and I often talk off the record about his work, because I’m always interested in people who can successfully wrangle some of our best talents and shepherd them to where they want to go musically. With Grammy nominations imminent, I thought now would be a great time to hit record on Zoom and ask him about riding the wave, artist’s intuition, leaving fingerprints on the work, and keeping office hours.

GQ: I saw some of the posts about everything you worked on this year, and I thought, “I didn’t even know about a few of these.” You’ve really been on the grind.

Jim-E Stack: I’ve been cooking, dude.

I find everything in life is momentum-based. Is that what you’re living through right now?

It feels like I’ve been gunning it for a few years and have no life outside of it, which I’m trying to readjust.

When the rollercoaster is on the tracks, you’ve got to stay on it. You’re relatively young. You’ve got the energy. This is the time to be doing this.

I’m embracing that part of it while finding sustainable ways to do it. I can’t just do it for two days a week and then chill for the rest. I’m better when it’s a consistent practice. But if I’m just killing myself for two years straight, I’m not going to last.

That’s what’s so interesting about actors. They’ll just look like shit, and then when it’s time, they’ll lock in for a year and absolutely kill themselves. That cycle feels way crazier to me than what you’re doing.

So much of it is just contouring to someone else’s creative needs and intuition, so I can’t check out fully. I have to show up every day.

What was your first cut? What was the thing that really moved the needle for you?

There was a HAIM song I did a lot on with Ariel, but the first one for me was this Empress Of song, “When I’m With Him,” that I just love so much. I did that with Dan Nigro way back in the day, and it’s just a fucking banger. I was just getting into trying to produce and write songs, and he was one of the first people I worked with. We made something that was an instrumental idea, but I was like, “I love this. It feels like me.” It’s something I couldn’t express on my own. And then Lorely, Empress Of, and I did a few days, and I played her the idea, and we wrote a sick song to that. We put down a bunch of melodies, I arranged them, and we worked on some lyrics. That’s one of my favorites. I think that was 2017 or ’18. That was just a moment where I felt like, “I love this song. It feels reflective of me, and I’m doing what I need to be doing.”

The role of producer is so contingent on how the person or the band is feeling that day. How have you learned to maneuver around that?

You really have to submit to it, and that’s okay. A lot of other producers who are super successful aren’t comfortable working fully on the artist’s terms. But I’m coming into the studio, going, “What do you feel like doing today?” That’s just my vibe, as a person and as a producer. It’s about making room for their creative impulses. Sometimes, that means going off the tracks a bit, which can be scary, but I’m more comfortable with that than most. I’m not in the hits game, you know? My strength is connecting with the artist as a person, helping them get to where they want to go and what they want to speak to. I believe an artist’s intuition is something that can resonate with millions or billions of people.

But when you say you’re not in the hits game, you mean that some people go in there with that goal, but you enter with the mindset of, “Let’s make something great, and whatever happens, happens.”

Totally. And, when the work is truly tapped in with an artist’s intuition, I believe you can get to a hit. You can get to an impactful record that way. There’s stuff I’m sitting on now where I’m like, “This is a hit song for sure.” But we didn’t get there by going, “We’ve gotta catch them in the first three seconds,” or whatever.

Is there something that people come to you for specifically? Is it a drum sound? Is it, “I like having him around and he gets the best shit out of me”?

It was a sound initially. My drums were definitely a part of that. That’s something that resonated with Justin [Vernon] initially. But from there, it became about being there in a supportive role and doing things on an artist’s terms. I’m down to realize a vision that way.

You’re down to go to Wisconsin and just see what happens.

Exactly. It’s funny, I’ve been doing some interviews recently, and people are pulling out common threads between different albums, and I’m like, “Whoa, I guess you’re right.” You don’t realize while you’re in it, but zooming out a bit, you’re like, “Oh, there actually is a common thread here.”

If you’re going to kill yourself working on this shit, you should have a stamp on it. Even if it’s not blatantly apparent to the listener, but for you personally, to go back and hear it like, “Oh, yeah. I left some fingerprints on this.” That’s how it should be.

As a producer, I’m enabling and following someone else’s creative intuition, and I think that is a creative act in and of itself. If you’re doing it right and authentically, that’s going to come through again in all those little ways.

Would you consider yourself technically proficient? Could you be an engineer if you needed to be, or are you vibes-only?

There’s a basic level of, “Oh, this doesn’t sound right, move the mic this way,” that I have, but I’m not super keyed into all the angles and degrees. What I’m into, more than anything, is just capturing that raw sound. Sometimes that means things not being perfect, but I always gravitate towards those sounds in recordings. On Justin’s record, we got such great sounds in so many ways by really fleshing it out with Ian, who is this fucking amazing engineer. But some of my favorite sounds on that record were from Justin and me just jamming in his garage. There’s a keyboard sound on the song “Walk Home” that’s literally just the keyboard plugged into Logitech computer speakers with a $200 mic. And that, to me, feels real. I hear the space, I hear the person, I hear humanity in it. It’s not this sterile, perfect thing.

Justin, Ella, and Hayley all have defined sounds and records that have been widely embraced. Those seem like intimidating situations to enter into.

They’re all artists who are reaching for something more and different every time and aren’t content doing the same thing or the easy thing.

I have a tough time with this because I want my favorites to grow, but sometimes people take a hard left, and I’m like, “Well, what did you think was going to happen?”

It depends. Sometimes you have to make art that’s not your best. That’s part of it. You have to fill in the negative space around you to reveal who you are. But it’s interesting. As a listener, I remember Kanye taking that hard left turn with 808s & Heartbreak, and I just wasn’t into that. I’m sure it was a huge record, but if he hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t have made Fantasy, and he definitely wouldn’t have made Yeezus. But as an artist, a producer, or just a maker of stuff, you have to be confident in taking those swings, even knowing that they might not connect. I was just reading about Blade Runner and how it was not commercially successful when it came out. It was panned critically in the New Yorker, and Ridley Scott, to this day, has that bad New Yorker review up in his office.

When you’re in the studio, are you showing up at 10:00 PM? I feel like you work regular hours.

I prefer to. The zone for me would be an 11:00 to 12:00 or 7:00 to 8:00 type vibe. The late-night stuff comes up, and it can be really fun, but if I got up that day at 7:30 and someone wants to start at 9:00 PM, I’m like, “Bro, you’re not going to get shit from me. Sorry.”

Yeah, dude. Once the sun goes down, I’m tapped out. I’m up early enough to do whatever you need, but once the sun is down, that’s Chris time.

I remember doing that on Dominic Fike’s album, Sunburn, and that was a really amazing, crazy ride.

He was a late-night guy?

Yeah, and we also had crazy momentum while doing it. And there was a day when I pulled up at 1:30 and left at 10:00 AM. But I would be just so depressed if that were my whole life. If I just never saw the sun.

Studios, as nice as they can be—no matter how comfortable they can feel, you’re still in a dark room for eight hours. It’s not conducive to a healthy lifestyle.

And it’s a real grind too. In your average eight-hour workday, at an office job, they do two to three hours of work, you know? But in the studio, you’re fucking doing it. You’re paying for the day to be there, it’s two grand or whatever. It’s a fucking grind. It’s a beautiful, excellent grind—

But it’s a grind.

Everybody’s grateful to do it, but it’s real heavy lifting.