Ian Kirkpatrick (born September 20, 1982) is an American record producer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist raised in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, whose catalog runs from Plain White T's and Breathe Carolina through Jason Derulo's "Want to Want Me," nearly the entirety of Dua Lipa's discography, Selena Gomez's Rare, Sabrina Carpenter's Short n' Sweet, and, in 2025, "Home" from Isabel LaRosa's debut album Raven, one of only a handful of outside collaborators brought onto a record LaRosa otherwise made almost entirely with her brother Thomas LaRosa.
Ian Eric Kirkpatrick was born on September 20, 1982. Multiple independent sources, including his English and French Wikipedia entries, consistently place his upbringing in Encino rather than the neighboring, often-confused Sherman Oaks. In a 2020 interview with SongwriterUniverse he confirmed the detail directly: "Yes, I grew up in Los Angeles; in Encino, in the Valley." He describes his heritage as "Irish Moroccan Jew," noting that his mother was born in Casablanca, Morocco, and that his father is of Irish descent, whom he calls "severely Irish."
Music entered his life early. His parents gave him a drum set for his fifth birthday, and he played in small bands through junior high and high school, developing into a rhythm-first musician rather than a technical virtuoso. "I'm definitely not the best musician, but I can hear it in my head and make it happen with midi," he has said. He briefly studied economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz while producing music on the side, but found the coursework unengaging: "I didn't learn anything from economics. I was on my computer the whole time... I was chasing sounds. [School] was filler at the time." He left to pursue music full time.
A formative influence arrived via Aphex Twin's 1997 track "Girl/Boy Song," which pushed him toward computer-based, electronic production. He cites Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and Autechre, the IDM ("intelligent dance music") lineage, as foundational, an unusual reference set for a producer who would go on to define mainstream Top 40 pop. He has been managed since his earliest days by Dan Petel of This Is Noise Management, a relationship that predates his professional career and traces back to a shared home studio.
Around 2004, Kirkpatrick and Petel built a home recording studio in the garage of Petel's parents' house, tracking local bands before graduating to acts signed to Hollywood Records, Fearless Records and Drive-Thru Records. This put Kirkpatrick squarely inside the pop-punk and Warped Tour ecosystem of the mid-to-late 2000s, where he produced, engineered and mixed for Breathe Carolina, Neon Trees, Young the Giant and the Plain White T's. His production of the Plain White T's 2010 single "Rhythm of Love" went platinum and reached No. 5 on the Adult Contemporary chart, an early commercial marker.
His first genuine hit came with Breathe Carolina's 2011 single "Blackout," from the platinum-certified album Hell Is What You Make It, a credit (producer, engineer, mixer, writer) that opened doors to sessions with established pop songwriters including Bonnie McKee and JKash. The pivotal business turn came via, of all things, a MySpace message: Warner/Chappell A&R executive Marc Wilson reached out cold, leading Kirkpatrick to sign a publishing deal with Warner Chappell Music. That deal moved him out of band production and into professional pop songwriting rooms, though the transition was not immediate. "Two years of learning just how difficult it is to actually write a pop song," he told The FADER, describing the stretch before his commercial breakthrough.
The turning point arrived in 2015 with Jason Derulo's "Want to Want Me," written during a songwriting retreat in a cabin in Lake Arrowhead alongside a group of collaborators including Sam Martin, and championed inside the industry by APG Music executive Mike Caren. The song had already circulated, at various points shopped to or recorded by CeeLo Green, Carly Rae Jepsen and Chris Brown, before landing with Derulo roughly eight months after its demo was written. It went on to be certified triple platinum in the US and platinum in the UK, and it reached No. 1 on Billboard's Pop Songs chart.
The success of "Want to Want Me" triggered a wave of placements within the same calendar year: Nick Jonas's "Levels" and "Area Code," Andy Grammer's "Good to Be Alive (Hallelujah)," and Justin Bieber's "The Feeling" featuring Halsey, from the Grammy-nominated album Purpose. Within roughly a decade of starting out in a garage studio, Kirkpatrick had become a top-tier Top 40 hitmaker.
Kirkpatrick's longest-running and most publicly identifiable artist relationship is with Dua Lipa, beginning with her 2017 self-titled debut single "New Rules," which he co-wrote and produced. The track became a US 5× Platinum, UK 2× Platinum single and reached No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart, and its pitched-up, half-time pre-chorus vocal treatment, the manipulated "I got new rules, I count 'em" hook, became one of his most cited signature techniques.
The partnership deepened on 2019's "Don't Start Now," the lead single from Future Nostalgia, on which Kirkpatrick is credited as writer, producer, vocal producer and engineer. The song, along with the album's "Pretty Please," leaned into an explicit disco and Bee Gees/Daft Punk/Two Door Cinema Club influence he has called his "guilty pleasure of production." Future Nostalgia arrived in early 2020 and became an unexpected cultural touchstone during COVID-19 lockdowns, its disco escapism landing at a moment when audiences wanted exactly that. "Don't Start Now" earned Kirkpatrick two nominations at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards, for Record of the Year and Song of the Year, while the album itself won Best Pop Vocal Album (a Dua Lipa award, not a direct Kirkpatrick nomination). He also co-produced "Fever," Dua Lipa's 2020 collaboration with Angèle. The relationship extended into a third album cycle with 2024's Radical Optimism, on which Kirkpatrick worked alongside Kevin Parker, Danny L Harle and Andrew Wyatt on tracks including "Falling Forever" and "Anything for Love," contributing writing, production, drums, guitar and programming, stretching a single artist collaboration across Dua Lipa's entire Warner Records discography from 2017 through 2024.
Running parallel to the Dua Lipa arc is an equally deep working relationship with Selena Gomez, beginning with 2017's "Bad Liar" and continuing through "Back to You" (from the 13 Reasons Why soundtrack cycle, 2018) and "Look at Her Now" (2019). Kirkpatrick then wrote, produced and arranged a run of tracks on Gomez's 2020 album Rare, including "Look at Her Now," "A Sweeter Place" featuring Kid Cudi, "Souvenir," "Bad Liar" and "Back to You." The relationship resumed in 2025 on Gomez's collaborative album with benny blanco, I Said I Love You First, on tracks "Talk" and "That's When I'll Care."
Beyond these two central partnerships, Kirkpatrick's discography reads as a cross-section of 2010s and 2020s pop: Britney Spears's Glory ("Hard to Forget Ya," "If I'm Dancing," later reworked as "Matches" with the Backstreet Boys on the 2020 deluxe edition), Chromeo's Grammy-nominated Head Over Heels, Shawn Mendes's self-titled album, the Backstreet Boys' DNA and Millennium 2.0, Pitbull, Blake Shelton's CMA Album of the Year Based on a True Story..., and Céline Dion's "I'll Be" from Love Again. More recently his catalog has swung toward critically sharper, younger acts: Lizzo's Grammy-nominated Special, the Chainsmokers' So Far So Good and later singles "Bad Advice" and "Breathe," Charli XCX's CRASH, Troye Sivan's Something to Give Each Other (whose "Got Me Started" earned a Grammy nomination), Olivia Rodrigo's Guts (co-producing and drum-programming "get him back!"), Miley Cyrus's Endless Summer Vacation, Jessie Reyez's PAID IN MEMORIES, and Tyla's A-POP. In 2025 he also stepped outside pop entirely as an additional producer and programmer on Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's Nine Inch Nails score for TRON: Ares, a notable genre departure into industrial and film scoring.
Sabrina Carpenter's 2024 album Short n' Sweet stands out within this run as a career-redefining credit for both artist and producer. Kirkpatrick wrote, produced, engineered and played bass, guitar and keys on "Taste," "Coincidence," "Bed Chem" and "Needless to Say," with "Bed Chem" in particular becoming a fan and critical favorite; he returned for "Bad Reviews" on the 2025 deluxe edition. The album earned three Grammy nominations in categories tied to his credits: Album of the Year, Best Engineered Album, and, via Troye Sivan's "Got Me Started" from the same nomination cycle, Best Dance Pop Recording.
Kirkpatrick's stated production philosophy is best summarized as maximalist minimalism: building the biggest possible sounds from the fewest, least identifiable elements. "I like to create the biggest sounds with the least amount of discernable stuff. It's to the point, deliberate production," he told BMI, adding, "I take pride in making my production and songwriting un-identifiable." He has described being "so scared of overproducing," citing Selena Gomez's "Bad Liar" as an example of a record that stayed minimal because "the song just didn't want anything else on it."
A defining habit is what might be called sound-source obfuscation: designing tones that cannot be traced to a recognizable synth preset or sample pack. "I take pride in people not being able to identify the source of a sound... It's not a preset. It's the bottom of a trash can in a hotel in Vegas," he told The FADER, describing his method of turning found and unconventional sounds into hooks. The pitched, half-time vocal effect on Dua Lipa's "New Rules" pre-chorus is the most widely cited example of the technique in practice.
His genre lineage runs from IDM and glitch electronic music (Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Autechre) through disco and Euro-funk (Daft Punk, the Bee Gees), a combination he says shaped his bass and rhythm sensibility directly: "I grew up on Daft Punk, the Bee Gees and some cool European DJs, so those bass lines are ingrained in my soul." That disco lineage surfaces most explicitly on "Don't Start Now" and "Pretty Please." Technically, he is closely associated with Steinberg Cubase, adopted, in his words, because "it was the only DAW where I could move as fast as I was thinking," leaning heavily on Cubase's MediaBay sample browser (drawing from a personal sample library reported at over 300GB) and its Time Stretch and Slip editing tools for the guitar-stab and chorus-drop chops heard on both "Want to Want Me" and "New Rules." His physical studio setup is deliberately spare: a Mac-based rig, a Steinberg AXR4 interface and a MIDI keyboard, with little outboard gear, since, as he puts it, "all of my favorite production tricks are things I do in Cubase." Gear-tracking sources also document his use of Barefoot monitors, Kontakt for 808 programming, the Cthulhu plugin for piano sounds, a UAD 1176 compressor on vocals, and Waves L2 Ultramaximizer at the mastering stage.
A 2025 music-criticism newsletter, Inside The Credits, singled Kirkpatrick out for a rare feat: producing what its author judged to be the single best song on six different high-profile albums, Jessie Reyez's "FREE," Sabrina Carpenter's "Bed Chem," Troye Sivan's "Got Me Started," Olivia Rodrigo's "get him back!," and Dua Lipa's "Pretty Please" and "New Rules," arguing that his catalog repeatedly elevates individual tracks above otherwise uneven major-label pop albums.
Kirkpatrick's business infrastructure has remained remarkably stable across his career. He has been managed since his earliest days by Dan Petel of This Is Noise Management, the same collaborator with whom he first built a home studio around 2004; the company's roster page continues to promote his ongoing work, crediting him for co-producing Tyla's "CHANEL" and for his writing and production credits on Sabrina Carpenter's "Taste," "Bed Chem" and "Coincidence."
On the publishing side, Kirkpatrick's early Warner Chappell Music deal, the one triggered by a cold MySpace message from A&R executive Marc Wilson, remains his professional home; he has participated as a marquee songwriter and producer at Warner Chappell's annual Las Vegas Songwriting Camp alongside other top-tier hitmakers including Amy Allen, Murda Beatz and Tay Keith. His performing-rights affiliation is with BMI, which has profiled him repeatedly through its news arm and recognized his work at its Grammy-nominee and Pop Awards events, including coverage of the Short n' Sweet writing team and his attendance at the 2026 BMI Pop Awards. No credible public net-worth figure exists for Kirkpatrick; general celebrity-net-worth aggregators either omit him or conflate him with unrelated same-named public figures.
On Isabel LaRosa's debut album Raven, released April 18, 2025, Kirkpatrick co-wrote and produced track six, "Home," alongside Isabel and her brother Thomas LaRosa. The credit is notable because Raven was, by LaRosa's own account and the album's production credits, made almost entirely inside the sibling partnership documented elsewhere as Slumbo Labs; outside collaborators on the record were limited to a small handful of names, Kirkpatrick, Amy Allen, Delacey and OJIVOLTA among them. "Home" was released as a standalone single on February 14, 2025, the same day the album itself was announced, and is described as an intensely personal song about leaving the family home. LaRosa has spoken about the session directly: "Thomas and I wrote this song, and Ian Kirkpatrick produced it, and it was such a good flow when we were [working]." Apple Music and YouTube production credits list Kirkpatrick as composer, lyricist and producer on the track.
The exact date or circumstances of Kirkpatrick's first connection to LaRosa or to the Raven sessions are not documented in publicly available sources beyond the general framing that a small group of outside collaborators were brought in for the first time on that album cycle. The credit nonetheless places Kirkpatrick, at one remove, inside the same production ecosystem that runs through Thomas LaRosa's Slumbo Labs operation, a hub that has separately shaped multiple careers documented elsewhere on The Ring.
Kirkpatrick's catalog has amassed songs with over a billion individual streams on Spotify, and by 2018 he had placed twelve singles on the Billboard Hot 100, with both "Want to Want Me" and "New Rules" reaching No. 1 on Pop Radio. His Grammy history spans eight total nominations as of the 67th Annual Grammy Awards in 2025, across Album of the Year (Justin Bieber's Purpose, 2017; Lizzo's Special, 2023; Sabrina Carpenter's Short n' Sweet, 2025), Record of the Year and Song of the Year (Dua Lipa's "Don't Start Now," 2021), Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical (Chromeo's Head Over Heels, 2019; Short n' Sweet, 2025), and Best Dance Pop Recording (Troye Sivan's "Got Me Started," 2025), with zero wins to date per Grammy.com's own artist page.
Kirkpatrick's public-facing identity centers on the handle "Cloudology" rather than his own name across most platforms. His Instagram, @cloudology, functions as his primary production account, and he periodically livestreams on Twitch under the same handle, at times inviting fans to submit stems for him to build tracks around in real time. A Twitter/X account under the handle @iek is referenced in archived stream descriptions. His own YouTube channel (reported at roughly 237,000 subscribers as of mid-2025) hosts extended, technically detailed breakdowns of his own records, including a New Rules Breakdown running more than two hours, a rapid-fire 25-tip production video, a claps and Reason-focused walkthrough of Selena Gomez's "Bad Liar," and a drum-production breakdown of Sabrina Carpenter's "Bed Chem." This unusually open, education-oriented approach, demystifying his process through full livestream and breakdown content rather than only promotional material, has made him a recurring reference point in home-recording and bedroom-producer communities on Reddit and Gearspace.
Across interviews spanning nearly a decade, Kirkpatrick presents as obsessive, detail-driven and self-deprecating about his limits as a performing musician relative to his strengths as a producer, repeatedly invoking the word "OCD" to describe his working method: "Among my peers, I have a reputation for being OCD about my approach," and, elsewhere, "I'm super OCD in general, but production is the perfect scratch for that itch." He has spoken candidly about the emotional cost of chasing hits: "It's scary... I'm certain I've taken years off my life with the stress. You have to be so blindly committed... to the point that it's a little bit of an obsession," while also framing success as partly a numbers game: "you write 100 songs and maybe one of them does well."
He speaks warmly, and at times starstruck, about A-list collaborators, calling Katy Perry "the funniest human being I've ever met in my life" and "the most normal, no-ego person," and describing taking anti-anxiety medication before a Britney Spears vocal session out of nerves, then finding her studio presence "insane" in a positive sense, delivering takes with minimal direction and no ego. He describes songwriting relationships in almost familial terms: "Working with writers, most of the time you're in a relationship with them... it's like, 'What's up? How's your dog? Let's write a song.'" Coffee is a constant in his process: "thank God for coffee, because that is like my co-producer." During COVID-19 lockdown he described a disciplined routine of early mornings, exercise and combing SoundCloud and Hype Machine for new music, citing Disclosure, D'Angelo's Voodoo, and Doja Cat's "Say So" among what excited him at the time.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1982 | Born September 20 in Los Angeles; raised in Encino. |
| c. 2004 | Builds a garage home studio with future manager Dan Petel; begins producing local and Warped Tour-adjacent bands. |
| 2010 | Produces Plain White T's "Rhythm of Love"; reaches platinum certification and No. 5 Adult Contemporary. |
| 2011 | Breathe Carolina's "Blackout," from platinum album Hell Is What You Make It, becomes his first major hit. |
| 2015 | "Want to Want Me" (Jason Derulo), written at a Lake Arrowhead songwriting retreat, reaches No. 1 on Billboard Pop Songs and goes multi-platinum; wave of placements follows with Nick Jonas, Andy Grammer and Justin Bieber ft. Halsey. |
| 2017 | First Grammy nomination (Album of the Year, Justin Bieber's Purpose); co-writes and produces Dua Lipa's "New Rules," the start of a multi-album partnership. |
| 2019 | Second Grammy nomination, Best Engineered Album, for Chromeo's Head Over Heels; produces "Don't Start Now." |
| 2020 | Future Nostalgia (Dua Lipa) becomes a lockdown-era cultural touchstone; works extensively across Selena Gomez's Rare. |
| 2021 | Two Grammy nominations, Record of the Year and Song of the Year, for "Don't Start Now." |
| 2023 | Grammy nomination for Album of the Year, Lizzo's Special. |
| 2024 | Co-produces Dua Lipa's Radical Optimism; becomes a key architect of Sabrina Carpenter's Short n' Sweet. |
| 2025 | Co-writes and produces "Home" on Isabel LaRosa's debut album Raven; works as additional producer/programmer on Nine Inch Nails' TRON: Ares score; Short n' Sweet earns three Grammy nominations tied to his credits. |
| 2026 | Writing credit on Chantal Kreviazuk's In My Own Voice; attends the BMI Pop Awards. |
He was raised in Encino, a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles. He confirmed this directly in a 2020 SongwriterUniverse interview: "Yes, I grew up in Los Angeles; in Encino, in the Valley."
Jason Derulo's "Want to Want Me," written in 2015 during a songwriting retreat in Lake Arrowhead, gave him his first No. 1 on Billboard's Pop Songs chart and his first multi-platinum certification, triggering a wave of placements with Nick Jonas, Andy Grammer and Justin Bieber the same year.
Since her 2017 debut single "New Rules," through 2019's "Don't Start Now" and the album Future Nostalgia, and into 2024's Radical Optimism, a partnership spanning her entire Warner Records discography.
He co-wrote and produced "Home," track six on Isabel LaRosa's debut album Raven (2025), working alongside Isabel and her brother Thomas LaRosa. It was one of only a small number of outside production credits on an album LaRosa otherwise made almost entirely within her own sibling partnership.
Not as of the 67th Annual Grammy Awards in 2025. He has eight total nominations across Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Engineered Album (twice) and Best Dance Pop Recording, and zero wins to date, per Grammy.com's own artist listing.
He is closely associated with Steinberg Cubase, which he has said he adopted because "it was the only DAW where I could move as fast as I was thinking," relying on its MediaBay sample browser and Time Stretch and Slip editing tools.
Mostly not. His primary social and livestreaming identity runs under the handle "Cloudology" across Instagram and Twitch, alongside a personal YouTube channel devoted to detailed production breakdowns of his own catalog.
| Year | Artist | Title | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | Plain White T's | "Rhythm of Love" | Writer, producer |
| 2011 | Breathe Carolina | Hell Is What You Make It ("Blackout") | Producer, engineer, mixer, writer |
| 2013 | Blake Shelton | Based on a True Story... ("Do You Remember") | Writer |
| 2014 | Nick Jonas | Nick Jonas ("Nothing Would Be Better," "Wilderness") | Producer, writer |
| 2015 | Jason Derulo | Everything Is 4 ("Want to Want Me," "Cheyenne," "Love Me Down") | Writer, producer |
| 2015 | Justin Bieber ft. Halsey | "The Feeling" (from Purpose) | Writer, producer |
| 2016 | Britney Spears | Glory ("Hard to Forget Ya," "If I'm Dancing") | Writer, producer |
| 2017 | Dua Lipa | Dua Lipa ("New Rules") | Writer, producer |
| 2017 | Selena Gomez | "Bad Liar" | Writer, producer |
| 2018 | Chromeo | Head Over Heels | Writer, producer (Grammy-nominated) |
| 2018 | Shawn Mendes | Shawn Mendes ("Mutual") | Writer, producer |
| 2019 | Dua Lipa | "Don't Start Now" | Writer, producer, vocal producer, engineer |
| 2019 | Backstreet Boys | DNA ("Is It Just Me") | Writer, producer |
| 2020 | Dua Lipa | Future Nostalgia ("Don't Start Now," "Pretty Please") | Writer, producer, vocal producer |
| 2020 | Selena Gomez | Rare (multiple tracks) | Writer, producer, arranger |
| 2022 | Lizzo | Special | Writer, producer, engineer (Grammy-nominated) |
| 2022 | The Chainsmokers | So Far So Good | Writer, producer |
| 2022 | Charli XCX | CRASH ("Move Me"), "Sweat" | Writer, producer, engineer |
| 2023 | Troye Sivan | Something to Give Each Other | Writer, producer (Grammy-nominated) |
| 2023 | Olivia Rodrigo | Guts ("get him back!") | Co-producer, drum programmer, synth |
| 2023 | Céline Dion | Love Again ("I'll Be") | Writer |
| 2024 | Dua Lipa | Radical Optimism | Writer, producer, drums, guitar, programming |
| 2024 | Sabrina Carpenter | Short n' Sweet | Writer, producer, engineer, bass, guitar, keys |
| 2025 | Isabel LaRosa | Raven ("Home") | Writer, producer |
| 2025 | Selena Gomez & benny blanco | I Said I Love You First | Writer, producer |
| 2025 | Jessie Reyez | PAID IN MEMORIES | Writer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, engineer |
| 2025 | Nine Inch Nails | TRON: Ares soundtrack | Additional producer, additional programmer |
| 2025 | Tyla | A-POP ("CHANEL") | Writer, producer, keys |
| 2026 | Chantal Kreviazuk | In My Own Voice ("If I'm Dancing") | Writer |
Ian Kirkpatrick's single documented point of contact with The Ring's core roster runs through Isabel LaRosa, whose 2025 album Raven he helped produce on the track "Home," working alongside her brother and primary collaborator Thomas LaRosa. Readers interested in that production hub can consult the wider profile of the LaRosa siblings' Slumbo Labs operation, and readers tracing the pop-industry side of Kirkpatrick's career may cross-reference his shared Warner Chappell and BMI circles against other hitmakers and producers profiled on The Ring.