“The less tightly you’re grasping onto something, the more room there is for magic to come in”: Jim E-Stack on the importance of giving your music “space”There’s a natural temptation in modern music production to over-shape every moment – to refine, compress, automate and perfect until nothing is left to chance. But not for Jim-E Stack.
The 33-year-old producer – who worked on Lorde’s latest album Virgin and Bon Iver’s Sable, Fable – tells MusicTech that the biggest breakthroughs often come when you loosen your grip and let songs unfold naturally.

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“I have a very open approach to making music these days,” Stack says. “I’ve found the less tightly you’re grasping onto something, the more room something has to grow and the more room there is for magic to come in.”
It’s an ethos that runs counter to a culture of meticulous tinkering – especially among producers, whom Stack notes can be “perfectionists by nature.”
“The more I push back on that, not necessarily in the details, but in the big picture of not trying to bend a song or production to my will and leave things a bit more natural, all the work just always feels weightier,” Stack explains, emphasising the value of stepping back and letting the artist’s vision take centre stage.
Trusting the process sometimes means embracing mistakes as well. The producer points to Sable, Fable’s If Only I Could Wait, featuring Danielle Haim, as an example: “I was really hearing this live drum thing and spent a whole fucking day recording all this shit. And it was just wrong. Justin [Vernon, Bon Iver] and I have this dynamic where I had the space to do my thing with it, and he had the space to say, ‘This isn’t right.’ That exchange is really important.”
He also recounts how Lorde’s Man Of The Year – which started as a “bass loop” he’d laid down – was the result of a happy accident in the studio.
“She wrote a bunch of melodies and we arranged them, did some lyrical work. There was a point where I was like, ‘OK, let’s flesh it out. I’m gonna put a smooth sub-bass under it.’ I went to the Minimoog, pressed the bass down and the filter was all the way up. It blew my head off. I went to turn it down, to make it smooth. And she was like, ‘No. That was sick, that felt awesome.’”
“It was not what I was imagining for the song at all,” the producer admits. “[But after that, every] song had the synth filters all the way open.”
Stack has since carried this approach into his broader workflow, learning “not to bring in a new sound just for the sake of it” and “to use your existing tools in the song you’re working on”.
“[It helps] you build a creative structure, and it presents you with a really distinct piece of work,” he says.
The post “The less tightly you’re grasping onto something, the more room there is for magic to come in”: Jim E-Stack on the importance of giving your music “space” appeared first on MusicTech.