These Women’s Work
A growing group is making major strides with star artists — and pushing for equity in a field that can look like a boys club
TRAKGIRL HAS PRODUCED and written for Vic Mensa, Jhené Aiko and Dawn Richard, among others, and her vision board has even higher goals — from having a Barbie made in her likeness to seeing a woman finally take home a Grammy Award for producer of the year. “We’re trying to do things that are ‘impossible’ because it’s all possible,” she says with a contagious sense of positivity.
Trakgirl is one of a handful of women — including Alex Kline, Suzy Shinn, Jenn Decilveo and mastering engineer Emily Lazar — who are not only more indemand than ever but are also fighting for equality in the field.
Growing up in Virginia, Trakgirl (born Shakari Boles) was inspired by local heroes like Pharrell Williams, Missy Elliott and Timbaland, and studied footage of them at work in the studio. “There are no producers in my family, no music industry people,” she says, “so I wanted to build something for myself legacywise.”
She’s well on her way, and is building something for others, too. In 2018, she and her manager, Ashley Kershaw, co-founded The 7, an empowerment initiative named to represent the less than 7% of engineers and producers who are female, to encourage women to seek both creative and business roles in music.
An even bleaker stat arrived in March on International Women’s Day, when the fourth annual “Inclusion in the Recording Studio?” study, conducted by Stacy L. Smith and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative with funding from Spotify, revealed that of the songs to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2020, just 2% were produced by women.
“The numbers are definitely disheartening,” says Trakgirl. “I don’t try to think about the elephant in the room because once you start thinking about that, it distracts you from your purpose. Of course, when I first started getting into these rooms, it wasn’t like I always had that armor. It took some time for me to build that.”
On the same day the USC study arrived, Grammy-winning engineer Lazar, who has worked in the industry for 25 years, launched the nonprofit We Are Moving the Needle to prioritize representation and inclusivity across all technical fields within the recording industry.
“I hit this place where it was like,
‘Enough is enough. Not enough is changing,’ ” she says. “No more benchwarming.”
Lazar — founder of New York mastering facility The Lodge, with credits on thousands of albums from Foo Fighters and Garbage to new immersive-audio reissues for The Beatles and The Rolling Stones — was shocked when John McBride, owner of Nashville’s Blackbird Studios and director of its Blackbird Academy, told her in January that he hadn’t had a female applicant in two years. “I just lost my mind,” she says. McBride suggested creating a scholarship for women to encourage more applications, but Lazar pushed for two scholarships a quarter. As she told McBride: “I’m not sending women down there by themselves to be the only woman in the room.”
Within days, hundreds of applications poured in. With We Are Moving the Needle, Lazar hopes to drive more applications with other scholarship opportunities — not only for women but also underrepresented people of any gender identity. (She cites the importance of male allies in the field, praising her co-mastering engineer of a decade, Chris Allgood.) The nonprofit is offering scholarships to the online program She Knows Tech; in under 30 hours, it had 75 applicants. Lazar says the response confirms “what I felt in my heart was actually true: that the numbers were going down, but that the people are out there with the desire to learn, and currently, for whatever reason, they’re simply not comfortable enough to engage.”
Shinn can understand why. She has carved out a niche in alternative rock, most recently producing Weezer’s Van Weezer, which debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Rock Albums chart in May. And yet, while studying music production and engineering at Berklee College of Music years ago, she was discouraged by her own professor — and the only one who was a woman. “I was so excited to work and learn from her, and she pulled me out of class to be like, ‘Hey, it looks like you’re not getting it. Maybe you should drop out,’ ” recalls Shinn. “It really fueled the fucking flame of, like, ‘All right, you want to tell me to drop out?’ I know how I look. I know that at the time I was bleach blond wearing pink — I know how it was.”
She now says a goal of hers is to make producing “seem awesome for a girl. You don’t have to hide in a dark room and not wear makeup and your hair is never done — that’s not the life that I live, and that’s the life that I thought I had to live.”
Decilveo — who co-wrote and coproduced Andra Day’s 2015 smash, “Rise Up,” and co-produced Marina’s new album, Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land — says that she, too, has been “overlooked and discounted” as a woman. “It fucking sucks,” she says. “It makes me feel like I want to quit.” Three years ago, Decilveo started the boutique publisher Manzanita Lane in hopes of ensuring that other artists, songwriters and producers never feel that way.
Hit country songwriter-producer Kline says that being able to offer a woman’s perspective shouldn’t limit her to only working with other women. “Even though there are all of these barriers being broken, it’s still like, ‘I’ve got this girl, and the girls should get together.’ I’m happy there are tons of talented women in town, but I also want to be like, ‘Let’s just make sure that we’re not having the boys over here and the girls over here.’ ”
Kline — who recently scored her first major hit as a sole producer for Tenille Arts’ “Somebody Like That,” which peaked at
No. 3 on the Country Airplay chart — is part of a growing wave of producers making strides, and history. In June, WondaGurl — the Toronto native who has worked with Rihanna, Travis Scott, Drake and numerous others — became the first Black woman to win producer of the year in the 50-year history of Canada’s Juno Awards. She followed that up with a partnership deal with Red Bull Records for her label, Wonderchild. Lazar, for her part, says she has had “quite a few ceiling-breaking moments” — from becoming the first woman mastering engineer nominated for record of the year (Sia’s “Chandelier”) to the first woman to win best engineered album, non-classical (Beck’s Colors). But, she adds, whenever someone described those feats in terms of gender, “it ended up oddly discounting the achievement.” Which is why this year, when three projects that she worked on all scored nominations for the album of the year Grammy (Coldplay’s Everyday
Life, Jacob Collier’s Djesse Vol. 3 and HAIM’s Women in Music Pt. III) — a first for any mastering engineer — she could only describe the feeling as “boggling.” “It wasn’t about gender anymore; it wasn’t about male or female,” she says. “I was the first person.”
And ultimately, for these top producers, that is what it all comes down to: unbiased respect. “What we’re pursuing,” says Trakgirl, “is bigger than me and my career.” It’s a sentiment echoed by Lazar, who says, “We’ve been able to help create pathways and a support network and avenues for people to fight their way through this — and I couldn’t ask for more.”
Although, she adds, she actually could: “more money, more support, more employment opportunities. More and more and more. We need it.”