“What kind of music do you listen to?” I ask record producer, songwriter, and sound mixer, Rodaidh McDonald. What seems like an almost idiotically on-point and juvenile question to ask someone who devotes their entire life to the music industry is answered, to my surprise, with an honest ease close to how most of us do. He buries his face in his hands, confessing, “I always go blank when someone asks me what I'm listening to.” 

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and now residing in Los Angeles, Rodaidh McDonald has always known he was an artist. Before music, he studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art, but as his technical expertise soon sparked, he later moved to London to study music and sound design. He tells me about this time after college. Like many young post-grads, there’s that sort of transitional preliminary period of sudden unknown. This formative time in your 20s often epitomizes exploration, experimentation, and, frankly, the desperate need to find a job. 

“I was DJing and putting on parties. I had a small studio in North London. I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag and washed myself in the sink,” he laughs.

While the latter bit of this sounds like a scene out of St. Elmo’s Fire, the 1985 coming-of-age film, McDonald was living his 20s as they should be lived: exciting, tenacious, and a bit uncomfortable. Simultaneously, he spent this time learning how to record, making it evident that McDonald was, and still is, an incessant learner. It's through this period promoting parties that he was introduced to Richard Russell, the owner of British record label XL Recordings, and his career was thrust upon him. 

His time at XL forged a decade-long relationship of growth and accomplishment, where McDonald produced work for a wide array of artists, including Adele, King Krule, the xx, and Vampire Weekend. Working with the xx, an English indie rock band from Wandsworth, London, was one of his career’s earliest and most influential partnerships, initially recording their debut album, xx, back in 2009, and producing I See You in 2017. Preserving a union as special as this one, for nearly 10 years, requires what all relationships do—a foundation of trust. Having worked with a number of artists beyond his career at XL, including Sampha, Don Toliver, FKA Twigs, and Omar Apollo, McDonald has crafted a medley of strong relationships rooted in attentiveness and resolution. In a calm and assured demeanor, he shares, “It requires a relationship where communication is clear and taste is aligned, and that the artist feels protected, but also challenged. You need enough intimacy to understand the vision and enough distance to make objective decisions. When an artist feels like their world is understood, they're more willing to take risks.” 

In an industry that’s constantly evolving, with algorithms siphoning through media to model “taste” for mass audiences, authenticity—and choice—is at its most valuable. We discuss musical sincerity and the sometimes lack thereof in modern music. He explains that “sometimes lyrics can feel like a space that has to be filled, rather than something that's kind of more…deeply lived in.” For McDonald, genuine partnerships come easily. With production contributions and mixing to Mustafa’s 2024 album, Dunya, he describes the project over Instagram as “some of the best songwriting and lyricism of recent times.” As a music producer, his role varies by project, having more or less involvement depending on what stage the project is in. “Sometimes we have a completely, like, blank canvas, and I start by playing them something I've already made that I think that they would enjoy… sometimes the writing can be kind of done, or maybe there's, like, a missing part that I can help fill in.” McDonald lives in the harmonious balance of artist and producer, of when to listen and when to create. “The relationship is rooted in service more than ego,” he tells me. “It's my job to understand what the artist is trying to become, and then help kind of build the conditions where that version of them can come through.”

This synergy requires patience and correlation, abilities McDonald has reflected in practice long before music. We’re talking about his time before London, when he wanted to be a painter, and the influences on his current work. In retrospect, he never really stopped painting, in a way. “Making small sketches towards a bigger piece of work, this is what we do all the time,” he begins to share about the parallels of his creative pursuits, “Throwing paint at the canvas and scraping it away to reveal something else, all these things, there [are] so many parallels in it.” 

While McDonald still illustrates in the rare free time he has, as noted on his Instagram, doodling friends’ faces in crayon on restaurant paper tablecloths, his art emanates from the same tastes and palates, emulating through different forms of narration. 

Currently venturing into new realms of music, mixing and producing for film scores, McDonald sits at his desk in his backhouse recording studio, cushioned atop Mount Washington, and plays a sample of his newest track on the upcoming Aleshea Harris thriller movie, Is God Is, set to release on May 15, 2026. The vocals are soulful and breathtaking, a given coming from the incontestably remarkable Moses Sumney and Kara Jackson. For the short clip that McDonald shares, his undoubtedly emotive, intentional, and deeply singular mixing style hums loud and clear.

Photographed by Dean Bradshaw

Styled by Gorge Villalpando

Production Assistant: Eliot Correll

Style Assistant: Kallie Collett