Only 24, and at Home in the Top 10

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/arts/music/benny-blanco-hit-maker-for-rihanna-and-maroon-5.html

Version 0 of 1.

ONE of the first things you notice about Benny Blanco, besides the impish brown eyes and the curly hair piled up in a Prince-like coif, are the many curios adorning his hands and wrists.

He started collecting them a few years ago to mark the hits he has helped write and produce. The old Rolex on his right wrist he bought when Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” topped Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in 2011. The fat silver ring on his left hand was added last summer when “Payphone,” by the same band, reached No. 2. And a Buddha ring on his left thumb marks the rise of Trey Songz’s “Heart Attack” to No. 3 on the R&B chart last June.

At 24 Mr. Blanco is already running out of fingers. Since 2008, when the pop hit maker Dr. Luke first recruited him into his stable of songwriters, he has had a hand in six No. 1 hits on Billboard’s Hot 100 as a writer and producer, working with artists like Rihanna, Kesha, Katy Perry and Maroon 5. He’s been a writer for another seven songs that have cracked the Top 10. It is hard to listen to pop radio for 10 minutes without hearing a song on which Mr. Blanco has played a pivotal role. Last month two songs he helped compose and produce — Rihanna’s “Diamonds” and Kesha’s “Die Young” — were lodged in the top two spots on Hot 100 chart. Over the past three years he has been behind ubiquitous radio hits like Gym Class Heroes’ “Stereo Hearts,” Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite” and Kesha’s “Tik Tok.”

Lounging among giant pillows on the bed he keeps in his home studio in Chelsea — he says he likes putting a bed in every studio he uses — Mr. Blanco acknowledged that luck has played a role in his winning streak. “I am still waiting for the day that they say ‘Time’s up, Blanco,’ ” he said, grinning lazily. “Back to your shift at Walmart.”

Songwriting for pop radio is a team sport these days, and Mr. Blanco is by all accounts like a utility infielder in baseball, someone good at all positions who makes everyone better at their jobs. He is talented at making electronic beats and drum tracks from bizarre samples. But he also has a gift for sunny hooks and catchy chord progressions, and if the need arises, he can turn out competent lyrics, often with a crisp and profane edge.

“I just try to fit in where it makes sense,” he said. “I’m not particularly good at anything. I’m not an incredible guitarist or piano player or songwriter. I think what I do is, when I notice someone is really good at something, I try to get that out of them.”

Mikkel S. Eriksen, part of the songwriting team Stargate, said that Mr. Blanco, as a producer, always reaches for unexpected sounds. On “Diamonds,” the Rihanna hit he wrote with Stargate, he took a snippet of Mr. Eriksen’s singing, altered the sound electronically to make it dirtier, then used that timbre, manipulated with audio software, to create ghostly accompaniment lines. “His technique is somewhat unorthodox,” Mr. Eriksen said, “as he almost never plays the keyboards but throws in weird samples and alters them to the right pitch to go with the song.”

Mr. Blanco is a scavenger of peculiar sounds, including those made by his body; his French bulldog, Disco; the lock on his door; and the clatter of bowls on a table — all of which he has incorporated into Top 10 pop songs.

He shuns building music from scratch with computer-generated timbres. He instead seeks out traditional instruments and low-end keyboards, records them and then builds melodies and chords from the tones they yield. His studio is littered with peculiar instruments: rare guitars, ukuleles, a pump organ from Egypt, a Roland analog synthesizer from the 1970s, stacks of cheap Yamaha and Casio keyboards and assorted percussion instruments, toy pianos and accordions.

One of his favorites is a small Yamaha keyboard that he used to record parts of “Tik Tok” and Ms. Perry’s “California Gurls.” He bought it for $25 at a yard sale. The keys are yellowed and uneven, and he had to install a jack so it could be connected to a soundboard.

“I just want to sound different than everyone else,” he said. “I don’t care if it sounds bad. I just want people to be like, ‘Yo, that dude Benny was different.’ Even if it sounds awful, at least they can’t say, ‘Oh well, I’ve heard that before.’ ”

Yet his collaborators say Mr. Blanco’s biggest asset lies not in his hard-to-duplicate catalog of sounds but in his ears and instincts. Much of what Mr. Blanco does during songwriting sessions, they say, is direct the creative flow of other musicians, pulling them in directions they would normally avoid.

“I think Benny’s greatest strength is his taste and his ability to know when something is amazing,” said Ammar Malik, who wrote “Stereo Hearts” and “Payphone” with Mr. Blanco. “When I’m in the room with him, he inspires me to find a different sound, one that I didn’t know how to do on my own.”

Adam Levine, the lead singer and songwriter for Maroon 5, said: “It’s almost as if he has the Midas touch in putting the right people together at the right time to create a musical moment. He’s about the collaboration. And he’s so good at nailing down who does everything best.”

When the production of “Payphone” stalled, Mr. Levine said, it was Mr. Blanco who called up the rapper Wiz Khalifa, with whom he had worked on other projects, and invited him to do a solo. Though Wiz Khalifa had never touched a ready-for-pop-radio song, he freestyled a rap over a beat that Mr. Blanco invented on the spot, and it became central to the song’s appeal.

Mr. Blanco starts songwriting sessions by playing a mixtape of tunes he finds inspiring, tracks he has harvested from the Internet to evoke the sound he wants. He then pushes the artists to jam along those lines until he hears the kernel of a song. He likens the process to group therapy.

“When you are writing in the studio, it’s like the people who are in the studio with you are a dysfunctional family,” he said. “You are basically like a therapist. It’s psychology.”

His colleagues say one of his studio tools is a wicked, self-deprecating sense of humor, which he uses to break tension. “He’s so funny, it’s crazy,” the rapper Spank Rock said. Asked about his passions outside music, Mr. Blanco said, deadpan, “Lots of peyote and masturbation.”

Mr. Blanco, whose real surname is Levin, never expected to become a pop tunesmith. Growing up in Reston, Va., he fell in love with hip-hop, he said, when he bought a Nas cassette at the age of 5. He started rapping and making beats when he was a teenager, performing at his older brother’s college parties at the University of Delaware. Before he graduated from South Lakes High School, he was making weekend trips to Philadelphia, Atlantic City and New York, where he befriended producers who let him use their studios.

Among them was David Shayman, or Disco D, an eccentric and troubled beat maker who became his mentor. After graduation Mr. Blanco moved to Brooklyn and worked as Disco D’s intern, an experience he likened to being a monk in a kung fu monastery. (At one point Mr. Shayman threw Mr. Blanco’s CD collection out a window.) Through Mr. Shayman, who committed suicide in 2007, Mr. Blanco met the Baltimore rapper Spank Rock, and in 2008 the two of them put together “Bangers & Cash,” a raucous EP that quickly landed them a contract with Downtown Records.

That collection of five risqué raps also attracted the attention of Dr. Luke, the former guitarist for the “Saturday Night Live” band who has become a hugely successful pop songwriter. In 2008 Dr. Luke recruited Mr. Blanco to help create songs for Britney Spears and two new artists: Ms. Perry and Kesha. Mr. Blanco said he had little interest in writing Top 40 songs at the time. His tastes ran toward left-field electronic music, like the tracks Justice and Diplo were making, and his main influences were Prince and Motown vocalists like David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks of the Temptations.

But working with Dr. Luke taught him about song structure and dynamics, about creating rising drama and moments of respite from that drama in the verse, bridge and chorus. “Pop songs are like a D.J. set crammed into three minutes,” he said. Asked to define the secret to a pop hit, he said it was simple: The message must resonate with listeners. “You’ve got to feel like that could have been me,” he said.

Over the last two years, as his reputation has grown, he has started moving out of Dr. Luke’s orbit, collaborating more with the Swedish songwriters Shellback and Max Martin and, more recently, with the Stargate duo and with Bruno Mars. He has also begun to dip back into hip-hop and urban music, composing songs with Wiz Khalifa like “Work Hard, Play Hard” and “No Sleep.”

Though his dance card this spring includes projects for Maroon 5 and Rihanna, he said he is looking to break out of pop and further establish himself in hip-hop. He relishes the role of newcomer. “I want to be that new guy that no one wants to work with,” he said.