Though he's all smiles today, Haynie's We Fall is the embittered story of a long-term relationship told after its breakdown, soaked in traditional songwriting, and packed with guest features that run the spectrum from Brian Wilson to Lykke Li, and Lana Del Rey to Rufus Wainwright. It's a singular achievement for a debut, and one that could only have been pulled off by Haynie, who over the last 15 years has gradually become the go-to producer for pop's biggest names. It's also a world away from where he started, growing up in Buffalo in the 1980s on a strict diet of New York hip-hop.

As a child, Haynie obsessively curated proto-mixtapes of his favorite tracks, but didn't even think of making music himself until he dropped out of school at 15. Balancing "shitty jobs" with a burgeoning DJ career, he started getting into production and daydreaming about becoming the next DJ Premier, eventually making the ambitious move to New York proper—or at least, his mom's basement in Queens—at the tender age of 17. "My quote unquote 'hustle' would be to sit in my house making beats all day, and then make a tape or a CD," Haynie recalls. "I would go to record stores and bump into a producer I was a fan of, or sometimes on the street there'd be a famous artist, and you'd just give them your beats." Unlikely as it sounds, that's how Haynie's first big break came in 2000, when he was 20 and working in a sneaker store. "A friend of mine got a job as the assistant to the assistant tour manager for D-12," he says. "I was a huge Eminem fan at the time, and I got the intel on when D-12's tour bus was going to pull up to Madison Square Garden for a big show. So I just sat there on the corner—I was waiting on 9th Avenue and 33rd Street—and sure enough the bus rolls up. Proof came bopping off the bus, so I gave him a CD."

"The next day, my pager starts blowing up," Haynie continues. "It was Proof, saying 'I listened to your CD the entire way back to Detroit. It's 11am now, there's a 4pm flight—can I buy you a ticket to come out to work with us?' That was it, I got on the flight and spent like a week with them."