Inside Track: Grant Boutin

Having proved his worth on Tate McRae’s second album, producer and songwriter Grant Boutin played a pivotal role in the third.

Released in September 2023, Tate McRae’s hit ‘Greedy’ helped steer her second album Think Later to platinum in the US and her native Canada. This year, McRae’s third album, So Close To What, went to number one in at least a dozen countries, including the US.

So Close To What has been Tate McRae’s most successful album yet.McRae’s first album, I Used To Think I Could Fly (2022), was made with famous writers and producers including Blake Slatkin, Charlie Handsome, Charlie Puth, Greg Kurstin, Finneas and Louis Bell, all of whom have appeared in SOS. Kurstin also featured on Think Later in addition to Ryan Tedder, lead vocalist of OneRepublic and one of the most successful writers and producers in the industry. Tedder has many writing and production credits on So Close To What, and other big names like Rob Bisel, Emile Haynie, Lostboy, Ilya and Blake Slatkin also contributed, along with the relatively unknown Grant Boutin. Boutin co‑produced five tracks on Think Later, including ‘Greedy’, and on So Close To What, he has writing and production credits on eight songs, including four songs on which he is sole producer. Moreover, Boutin was again involved with some of the big singles, including ‘Revolving Door’ and ‘Sports Car’.

Planting Seeds

Growing up in San Diego, Grant was inspired to start making music by a very young Tom Norris, now one of the world’s top producers and mixers. (Norris, who was featured in SOS August 2020, this year collected two Grammy awards for his work on Charli XCX’s Brat.) “When I was a kid, Tom was my next‑door neighbour. I would often go over to Tom’s house, and he was an early teenager willing to hang out with an eight‑year‑old. He’d be making house music in Fruity Loops, and I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen, even as I was too young to understand what he was doing. When I was 11, I downloaded Fruity Loops, and started messing around with it.

“Tom was not only my introduction to Fruity Loops, but also to electronic music. He made me a CD with music by Pendulum and Junkie XL, and so on, that I listened to non‑stop during family vacations. My parents also required me to take piano lessons. I hated it when growing up, but by age 15‑16 I enjoyed being expressive at the piano. It made me a better musician than I would have been otherwise.”

The young Grant Boutin grew up fascinated by EDM and future bass in particular. “I listened a lot to Timbaland, and when I was making dance music, I never gravitated towards four‑to‑the‑floor stuff. I always wanted interesting syncopated drum rhythms. Whenever I tried a house track, I never felt inspired or that I had an edge in originality in that lane. So all I did was EDM. Whenever I created a cool groove and added some melodies on top, it felt fresh.

“As a teenager I developed the idea of combining chords and melodies with hip‑hop beats and electric music, but didn’t know how to achieve it. But when I heard Wave Racer in 2014, I thought, ‘Yeah, this is exactly what this combination should be, but I’m going to do it my way.’ Wave Racer was doing future bass, and I was into that genre really early. I watched it become big, and started my electronic project Grant Bowtie when I was in middle school. I signed with Monstercat, and released my music via them.”

Networking

The pandemic then steered Grant’s career in another direction. “I went to the USC Thornton School of Music where I did their Music Production Major. Straight after I graduated in 2019, Covid hit. I was living in downtown LA with a friend, stuck in a dark room with a window looking out at a wall. Until then I had only been doing my artist project, and dance music was dead at that point. I had been DJ’ing since the end of college, and really loved it. But no more live shows were happening.

“At the same time, I had been getting a bit tired of dance music. When it came to making a new sick drop, I wasn’t sure what to do that hadn’t been done 100 times before. The favourite parts of my tracks became the vocal sections that lead up to the drop. My old manager had also pushed me into exploring songwriting and production for others, so I started doing more collaborative sessions, and writing songs all by myself. I wrote tons of really cliché songs!”

Grant eventually came up with what he calls “some cooler stuff”, and managed to sign a publishing deal. In 2023, Lou Al‑Chamaa joined Avex Publishing as Senior VP and Head of A&R Publishing. He liked Grant’s stuff and put him in a room with fellow developing writer Coleton Rubin. The two wrote “a really cool song”, which Al‑Chamaa emailed to Ryan Tedder, who, says Grant, “became obsessed with the song and really wanted it for OneRepublic”.

That song, a ballad, has yet to be released, but Grant and Rubin contributed to another OneRepublic song, ‘Mirage’. Tedder’s company Runner Music partnered with Avex to publish Grant, and his career was beginning to take off. “Ryan started bringing me in for sessions, and found out that I could do other things too, like K‑pop, and that I could turn things around really quickly. One could say I was in a producer boot camp with him for the first year of working with him. He’d send me demos and things that he had started and asked me to flesh out the production more or just to try to make it sound more finished. He’s doing so many songs every day, he doesn’t necessarily have the time to tweak everything.”

One of the things that Tedder sent to Grant during that time was an early version of ‘Greedy’. “He sent it to see what I could come up with. I don’t think there were any instructions. It already had quite a bit of what’s in the final version, including the drums and the vocals, so I started filling up the ambience, swapped out some of the drums, and added more bits and pieces. My tendency is to overproduce and throw too many little sound bits into every crevice of the song. They ended up loving what I did for the chorus, because they wanted that really full, and they deleted everything I had added to the verses and pre, so there was a big contrast between the two sections.

“I thought it was a cool song, and I really got into a flow state when working on it, but I had no idea that it would become a single, let alone a global...