SELF-PRODUCED, AT THIRTEEN

To watch a thirteen-year-old produce a record is to watch a category of grown-up authority be handed, without ceremony, to a child. The Recording Academy has now done exactly that. Producer of the Year, Classical, an award historically split between career studio hands with three decades of session credits, was voted on Monday night to LUCA STARR, whose entire production discography, so far, consists of one record he made himself, in his living room, at twelve.

He is, per the Academy's own records, the youngest producer ever named to the category. He is also, per an internal poll of the classical producers wing that we have seen, the only nominee this cycle who received a first-place vote on more than sixty per cent of returned ballots. In a category built to reward the invisible hand behind other people's sound, the panel chose, this year, to name a producer whose own name is on the cover.

“Producing is just deciding. That's the whole job. Somebody has to decide. I decided. Then I told David, and David did it.”

David, in this case, is David Roswell, the engineer, whose relationship to STARR on the record is best described, per Roswell himself, as “the hands of a producer who was too small to reach the patchbay.” Roswell, reached this week, laughed. “He knew what he wanted. I don't say that the way people say it about kids. I say that the way I say it about the two best producers I've ever worked for. He knew what he wanted, and he could tell you, in a sentence, why he wanted it. And he was right.”

Sound on Sound sat in on the third day of the September sessions, in Loudoun County. The boy was in socks. He was chewing gum. He was, in every direction we looked, in charge. He addressed Roswell as “Mr. Roswell.” He addressed his sister, Amara, as “Amara.” He addressed his mother, June, as “Mom,” and he addressed the microphone as, at one point, “the little one on the left.” He said “please” more often than any producer we have ever watched work. He never raised his voice. He was, in the two hours we were there, corrected once, by his sister, on the pronunciation of a French phrase. He accepted the correction, wrote it down, and thanked her.

He also, in that same two hours, retracked a single left-hand phrase seven times, until, on the eighth, he told Roswell to stop the tape. When Roswell asked if he wanted to try again, he said no. When Roswell asked which take he wanted, he said the first one. When Roswell asked why he had done the other six, he said, without irony, “So I would know the first one was the one.”

Amara Starr, later, said the family had assumed the producer category would be a stretch. “It's an insider's award,” she said. “We are not insiders. We are a house in Virginia. I think the insiders decided, this year, to be honest about what they were listening to.”