Kelly Lee Owens Breaks Down Four Perfectly Produced Albums

The Producers is an interview series where our favorite producers discuss their favorite music production.

Kelly Lee Owens talks about artistic inspiration with the wonder of a mystic. “Without sounding too woo-woo,” she says, “it’s something that’s beyond me.” When she began thinking about what would become her fourth album, Dreamstate, two years ago, a few things flashed in front of her mind’s eye: rave culture, huge hordes of people coming together, and a party-starting neon hue now known as Brat green. “I was getting all these downloads from the universe,” she attests. “It’s your job as an artist to figure out what the hell wants to be said.” This kind of decoding, she adds, can be a key part of the production process, too.

For the Welsh-born, London-based Owens—who makes electronic pop that frays techno’s smooth lines with bulbous analog tones, found sounds, and her own airy vocals—music production is a fluid process that works in concert with writing, mixing, arranging, and just being open to the possibilities around you at any given moment. “Good production puts a spotlight on the emotion you’re trying to convey,” she explains.

With Dreamstate, which was also inspired by the 36-year-old’s life-altering experiences opening for Depeche Mode last year, she wants to convey massive feelings that could reach the last row of a packed stadium. Whereas her previous records could be heady and insular, this one reaches for dance floor nirvana. It’s the type of music that begs to ring out across an endless sea of hands-in-the-air humanity—even the album’s couple of ballads are daunting in scope as they express a bittersweet blend of Jumbotron-sized sadness and hope.

To achieve such a communal sound, Owens ripped herself out of her own bubble and pursued a more collaborative approach. Though she produced her 2017 self-titled debut almost entirely by herself, and her two subsequent LPs were primarily made alongside just one close collaborator each, Dreamstate includes credits from bold names including Tom Rowlands of the Chemical Brothers, the electronic duo Bicep, and the 1975’s George Daniel, whose new label DH2 is also releasing the album.

“There’s this very toxic thing at the moment where, because of the state of the music industry, artists are expected to do everything in electronic production themselves, which I do,” she says. “If you don’t touch it all, especially as a woman, it’s like you’re not the authentic creator of your own music. But no one does anything alone, that’s boring. I’m so tired of it. This is still a Kelly Lee Owens record, and my collaborators helped me facilitate my vision.”

That vision includes plenty of analog sequencers and synths—including the Roland Juno 60, and Sequential’s Pro-One and Prophet-5—which Owens originally fell in love with because of their tangibility and inherent volatility when she started producing music a decade ago. “You can program a sequencer, but if it’s analog, it doesn’t mean it’s gonna actually play what you want it to play,” she says. “Eighty percent of the time it does, but the other 20 percent is where the gold is. There are no mistakes. I remember just getting excited about the fact that something was imperfect, kind of like how I felt about myself.” She smiles and lets out a small, knowing giggle.

At this point, with seven years of singular work and globetrotting gigs behind her, Owens is more confident than ever in her abilities as a writer, singer, performer, and producer. But would she ever consider producing someone else’s album? She seems surprised by the question. “I’ve been scared to do that, because my creative process is so fast and unplanned,” she says. But after some more hemming and hawing, she lands on an answer. “There’s a track on the new Ariana Grande album called ‘We Can’t Be Friends’ that is very Robyn-esque, that she produced with Max Martin—I feel like I could have produced that,” Owens says. “I would love a crack at doing something like that. I grew up with pop music, it’s really deep in me, and I’m only starting to explore it.”

Below, Owens expounds on four of the artists and albums that have inspired her most as a producer.