Ian Kirkpatrick has a stated goal that runs against everything a hit producer is supposed to want: he wants no one to know it was him. Not his sound, not his signature, not even his gear. "I take pride in people not being able to identify the source of a sound," he told The FADER, describing a favorite tone from an unlikely place. "It's not a preset. It's the bottom of a trash can in a hotel in Vegas."
That philosophy, call it maximalist minimalism, has quietly powered a catalog that includes Dua Lipa's entire Warner Records discography, three albums' worth of Selena Gomez singles, and the record that reshaped Sabrina Carpenter's career. Kirkpatrick, born September 20, 1982, and raised in Encino, built that catalog from a garage studio in the San Fernando Valley into eight Grammy nominations, and, as of 2026-07, zero wins.
Two Decades, One Voice Hiding in Plain Sight
Kirkpatrick's path started far from Top 40. In the mid-2000s he and manager Dan Petel built a home studio in Petel's parents' garage, tracking Warped Tour-adjacent acts on Fearless and Drive-Thru Records: Breathe Carolina, Neon Trees, Young the Giant. His production of Plain White T's "Rhythm of Love" went platinum in 2010, but the real pivot came from a cold MySpace message. Warner Chappell A&R executive Marc Wilson reached out, and Kirkpatrick signed a publishing deal that moved him from band production into professional pop songwriting rooms. "Two years of learning just how difficult it is to actually write a pop song," he told The FADER of the stretch that followed.
The breakthrough arrived in 2015 with Jason Derulo's "Want to Want Me," written at a Lake Arrowhead songwriting retreat after the song had already been passed on by CeeLo Green, Carly Rae Jepsen and Chris Brown. It went triple platinum in the US and hit No. 1 on Billboard's Pop Songs chart, triggering a wave of same-year placements with Nick Jonas, Andy Grammer and Justin Bieber's "The Feeling."
The Sound-Source Obfuscation Trick
What separates Kirkpatrick from other hitmakers is a deliberate refusal to let a listener trace a sound back to its origin. He builds tones that don't register as a preset, a sample pack, or a signature synth, then hides them inside the biggest possible hook. The pitched, half-time vocal chop on Dua Lipa's "New Rules" pre-chorus, the manipulated "I got new rules, I count 'em" line, is the most cited example: a 2017 US 5x Platinum, UK No. 1 single built partly on a vocal effect nobody could immediately place.
"It's not a preset. It's the bottom of a trash can in a hotel in Vegas."
He works almost entirely inside Steinberg Cubase, drawing from a personal sample library reported at over 300GB, leaning on Cubase's Time Stretch and MediaBay tools for the chorus-drop chops on both "Want to Want Me" and "New Rules." His physical rig is deliberately spare: a Mac, a Steinberg AXR4 interface, a MIDI keyboard, almost no outboard gear. "All of my favorite production tricks are things I do in Cubase," he has said.
Dua Lipa, Selena Gomez, and the Disco Detour
The Dua Lipa partnership stretched from "New Rules" in 2017 through 2019's "Don't Start Now," the disco-forward lead single from Future Nostalgia that arrived just as COVID-19 lockdowns began, and into 2024's Radical Optimism. "I grew up on Daft Punk, the Bee Gees and some cool European DJs, so those bass lines are ingrained in my soul," he has said of the Euro-funk lineage running through "Don't Start Now" and "Pretty Please." Running parallel is an equally deep Selena Gomez relationship, from 2017's "Bad Liar" through five tracks on 2020's Rare and into 2025's collaborative album with benny blanco.
The Sabrina Carpenter Multiplier
Sabrina Carpenter's 2024 Short n' Sweet stands as Kirkpatrick's most career-defining recent credit. He wrote, produced and played on "Taste," "Coincidence," "Bed Chem" and "Needless to Say," with "Bed Chem" becoming a fan and critical favorite before he returned for the deluxe edition's "Bad Reviews." The album pulled three Grammy nominations tied directly to his credits, including Album of the Year.
A Detour Into Raven
In 2025, Kirkpatrick's name turned up somewhere unexpected: track six of Isabel LaRosa's debut album Raven, released April 18, 2025 and built almost entirely inside her sibling partnership with Thomas LaRosa. Kirkpatrick co-wrote and produced "Home," one of only a handful of outside credits on the record alongside Amy Allen. "Thomas and I wrote this song, and Ian Kirkpatrick produced it, and it was such a good flow when we were working," LaRosa has said of the session, released as a standalone single on Valentine's Day 2025.
Un-Identifiable, On Purpose
Kirkpatrick's more recent work, drum-programming Olivia Rodrigo's "get him back!," stepping into industrial film scoring on Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's TRON: Ares, only extends the pattern. He has said he is "so scared of overproducing," and that the goal of any session is production so deliberate it disappears. For a man with a billion-plus streams and eight Grammy nominations, that disappearing act has become the loudest thing about him.