HOT SECOND ACT SHOOTER JENNINGS

How a country-rock outsider became an in-demand producer with a fascinating résumé

APPEARING OVER FaceTime one recent afternoon, Shooter Jennings turns his phone around to proudly show off a painting Marilyn Manson had commissioned for Jennings’ wife that depicts Liam Gallagher and Jon Bon Jovi holding hands. Unlike Gallagher and Bon Jovi, Jennings and Manson are friends. They spent the past year and a half working on Manson’s upcoming album — the latest entry in Jennings’ unexpected second act as an in-demand, Grammy-winning producer. “It’s unlike anything he and I have ever done,” Jennings says, lighting up a cigarette. “It was like me and Manson started a band together and made a whole new thing.”

That willingness to work side by side in the trenches with an artist has turned Jennings, 41, from a country-rock outsider into a hot commodity behind the console. In the past two years, he’s produced records for Americana star Brandi Carlile, country legend

Tanya Tucker, Guns N’ Roses’

Duff McKagan, the rock band

American Aquarium, psych-folk songwriter the White Buffalo, and California country singer

Jaime Wyatt. “I hate it when a producer’s records all sound the same,” he says. “To me, it’s about sliding inside of an artist’s style and making the most interesting-sounding record from within.”

As the son of an outlaw-country pioneer, Jennings grew up in the studio. But whereas his dad, Waylon, was busy making music with Telecasters and steel guitars, Shooter obsessed over the production of Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine. “Tom Morello mentored me a lot,” he says. “It was always about song arrangements and song structures, and what’s more effective when you move a chorus around.”

Beginning in 2005, Jennings released a series of country-leaning solo albums, many produced by Dave Cobb, but eventually found himself itching for a new outlet. He began producing left-of-center country bands like Hellbound Glory, in addition to his own experimental LPs. When it came time for Carlile to record By the Way, I Forgive You, she asked Jennings and Cobb to co-produce. The album won Jennings a Grammy. He won another the following year, with Carlile, for Tucker’s While I’m Livin’. “I’m very scatterbrained,” he says, “but I can hear certain corners of songs and where to go with them.”

Jennings is already booked with studio time for the rest of the year. He’s remixing songs for Margo

Price (“Like an old-school Nine Inch Nails remix album”) and plans to produce a new record for Billy Ray Cyrus that he wants to sound like Harry Nilsson. When asked to name his dream project, Jennings returns to that Liam Gallagher painting: “I’d love to do an Oasis comeback record.” JOSEPH HUDAK