Yahoo Movies Hitmaker of the Month: Producer-Songwriter ILYA Talks ‘Unholy’ Matrimony of Sam Smith and Kim Petras; What He Learned From Max Martin
Generous of spirit as he was throughout our interview, one of the last things Ilya Salmanzadeh – the producer and songwriter known mononymously as Ilya – said, before dashing back to work, was how he wanted to inspire budding producers the way he was motivated by mentors like Max Martin in Sweden at his start.
“I think it’s important for people to know that if I can do it, anyone can,” says Ilya from Los Angeles after a morning’s workout, training on the boxing bag. “There’s always something in the air that says “anything is possible.”
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Ilya, Variety‘s Hitmaker of the Month for October, is doing more than bobbing, weaving and jabbing in the ring or breathing in the breezes of Los Angeles as he celebrates co-writing and co-producing (with collaborators Blake Slatkin, Cirkut, Jimmy Napes and Omer Fedi) Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ “Unholy.” Currently No. 1 atop the Top 100, and the second single from Smith’s upcoming “Gloria” album, due in January 2023.
“Working with Ilya over these last four years has truly been an honour,” Smith tells Variety. “He is such an incredible artist and he allows me to be free and myself in the studio. I am very lucky to have had the opportunity to work so closely with him.”
This is not Ilya’s first big collab with Smith (that would be 2019’s “How Do You Sleep?,” co-written with Savan Kotecha and Max Martin and produced by Ilya). In terms of hits, Ilya has had a handful, including his first track of many with Ariana Grande (2014’s “Problem” which became one of the fastest-selling singles in iTunes history), as well as Ellie Goulding’s 2015 hit, “Love Me Like You Do” (then, the most-streamed song in a week on Spotify). Ilya has also made successful showings with Beyoncé (the Grammy-nominated “Spirit”), Jennifer Lopez (“First Love”) and Camila Cabello (“Oh Na Na”). In 2015, Ilya remixed Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” with Kendrick Lamar, and scored his first No.1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Success, however, is never the main goal for Ilya, despite his desire to win. Says Ilya: “I’m extremely competitive to the point where I’ll put myself in the underdog position, but my toughest competitor is me, pushing myself to do better.”
Instead, Ilya is in the game of songwriting and producing for love, rather than sport. “Honestly, when I was a kid, I never knew that ‘songwriting’ was a job,” he says. “I took for granted that the artists wrote what they sang. Once I became interested in creating music – first through EDM because I got a demo version of a music-making program called Dance eJay in a cereal box – writing and producing became a thing. I had always listened to and loved R&B, pop, hip hop and singing, and eventually wanted to try my hand there. The artist-producer thing was where I wanted to go. But it started with EDM and that cereal box.”
Born in Iran, raised in Denmark, Ilya moved to Sweden at age 11 and gravitated to rap and R&B through the auspices of his “hip hop-head cousin” and the affinity for how producers Pharrell and Timbaland gave even the poppiest of songs a hip-hop edge (“They were so different sounding, and I used to mimic their production techniques as practice,” he says).
Ilya created a slew of demos so formidable that in 2005 at the age of 19, he was signed with Warner/Chappell Music in Stockholm for his writing. “Obviously, I was super-excited,” he says. “I didn’t even know what a publishing deal was or did — a thing that signed you as a writer. I didn’t have any cuts to my name then, that wouldn’t happen until I was like 25. So, I was grinding for a few years, as I always look to the future. Especially seeing all these crazy Swedes making records — like Max and Shellback — it was thrilling to be a part of that then.”
Max Martin and Karl Johan “Shellback” Schuster helped Ilya tremendously in his development as a songwriter and a producer. “I’m from the hood in Sweden, and as a minority, you have this urge to show everyone that look down on you or not accept you for who you are, that you can also do it like them, or even better,” he says. “And once you get success, you can go wrong in terms of focus. Material things, you know? Having Max, Shellback and Savan around me… they taught me to focus on the music. Skip everything else. That helped me a lot.”
Ilya started seeing success early on with Mohombi & Nelly (“Miss Me, 2010), The Lonely Island (“Mama,” 2011) and Fifth Harmony (“Me & My Girls” 2013), But it was Grande’s “Problem” with Martin that credited him with an international smash.
Grande, says Ilya, like Sam Smith is “easy and fun” to work with, with “good vibes,” “no ego” and “wonderful energy.” Taylor Swift too, with whom Ilya worked as a remixer (“Bad Blood”) and vocal co-producer (“End Game”) is “lovely” as well. “I believe in positive competition and collaboration, hyping up everyone and giving everyone else in the room positive energy – that’s how you get positive energy back,” he says. “They make me want to do better.”
Ilya has always avoided having a signature sound or feel. “There’s too much pressure to do the same thing repeatedly, then having to find a new sound once that signature is dated,” he says. What he does have, foundationally and “subconsciously,” is a hip-hop, R&B and EDM mix in his head, a penthouse-to-pavement vibe that swells with a raw but sleek tone. Equipment-wise, the producer is fond of his Teenage Engineering OP1 synth (“I love it so much I bought one for Labrinth for his birthday”), his JUNO 106, his new MiniMoog (“one of the best synths ever created, and I love synths”) and his SP1200 that he frequently uses for drums and percussion.
Going back to good vibes and great energy, there is “Unholy,” a track that was written in Jamaica with the vocalist’s longtime collaborator Jimmy Napes, Cirkut, Omer Fedi, Blake Slatkin and Ilya in one room, rather than separately in a digital universe.
“In the beginning, we had no idea how it was going to go,” says Ilya of the group. “We know and love each other, but this could be a mess with so many people writing together. But for some reason, after a first day where we tried to separate ourselves into two rooms, Sam just said let’s all work together. It was Sam’s initiative. And it just worked out. Everybody gave the other space to talk and try out things. No one was in the other’s way. The flow was magic and the energy was dynamic. And Sam drove it all with their ideas.”
It has been like that between Smith and producer Ilya since the two got together in LA with co-writers Martin and Kotecha for 2019’s “How Do You Sleep?”
From the start, there was a lingering feeling that this would not be the last time they would collaborate. “I think I was vetted before going in,” says Ilya with a laugh about meeting Smith’s Capitol label A&R person, Charlie Knox, and discussing the singer’s headspace at the time. “Sam wanted to move into pop while retaining the soul they’d had on their previous records, and I loved that. I was on the same wavelength at that time. And meeting Sam? They were the nicest, sweetest person in the room. That helped us make that song — Smith taking all the worry away with their presence. And I knew I wanted to be around Sam more but working with them was so much fun. They dare to try anything.”
The first new bit of team experimentation on “Unholy” came courtesy of a haunting Arabic scale progression and a deeply undulating bass line. “The song’s process was so crazy,” says Ilya of a Jamaican session lunch break where that Middle Eastern melody was initiated. “Sam wanted something wild, an interlude that didn’t sound like their usual. Mess up their voice. Do something crazy. So we all began jamming, hitting glasses and humming – and I recorded that on my phone with Voice Memo. When I was done with lunch, I put that into Abelton, made a loop and found the tempo. Then Omer came up with those two chords in the Arabic scale — something I gravitate to as OG Persian music has that sound, as does Omer’s Israeli roots — then we mixed in the choirs, the bulk of which was us trying to sound like a British choir. Once we mixed it all together everything became doubly haunting.”
The second order of new business on “Unholy” was the introduction of German vocalist Kim Petras into the mix. “Kim came in and killed it,” says Ilya enthusiastically. “She wasn’t in Jamaica with us, but Sam wanted a feature… and Kim was perfect. When she got into the studio, she was freestyling and I was blown away.”
Ilya is reticent to speak publicly about the rest of Smith’s “Gloria,” but marvels at how “Unholy” came together. “’Unholy’ was one of those, ‘Oh we can do THAT now?’ moments, a weird song that no one quite got, but we knew that it was more than an interlude,” he says. “Sam had the same feeling. And thank God, because that melody was stuck in my head since the moment that we sang it. Still, the whole album isn’t based on ‘Unholy.’ It all marries and flows together so well, like everything Sam Smith does. As for ‘Unholy,’ I don’t know why it succeeds save for the fact that Sam loves it and stands behind it. Kim loves it; I love it; and it speaks to their authenticity.”
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