The Auto-Tune was something I was really specializing in. She wanted something that sounded kind of edgy, so we went with a more aggressive effect. When you’re singing and you know how to play with the Auto-Tune, it’s really a tool. T-Pain knows how to sing, and I mean that in no disrespect to her, but if he wants that C he goes right for that C. In this case, it was really a gamble. Whatever she got closest to, that's what it did. There was a few times where Auto-Tune let’s you dial in and say, “This note should be a C, instead of the D it keeps going to to,” but obviously everything is a business and we didn’t have 100,000 hours to work on everything, so some things just had to go as it went. At least nothing is out of tune — not necessarily a note you may find pleasurable, but not out of tune.

Maybe three or four songs in, she got more comfortable showing me the lyrics. She was also leaning to me for guidance and to let her know where to go with things. One of the tracks where I really tried to help was about her boyfriend that passed away at 16. I said, “I know you want that aggressive sound, but maybe we should start with a piano piece before.” But I can’t say that we sat in the studio and curated all 12 of these songs together. It was very much, I just produced it whenever I could, and I sent it to her for a yay or a nay.

When it came out, I couldn’t believe the bad press it got. It was everywhere: “Aw man, this is so fucking horrible.” And then The Guardian, that same year, did the Top 50 Albums of that year, and it made it on there. They really honed into the avant-garde part of it. Look, like Scarface, that was something that when that came out, everyone was like, “This is a garbage movie, I can’t believe Pacino would do that, it’s the worst Cuban accent.” But it became something that people, now at least, glorify.

Eventually, a bunch of people started hitting me up. My name got out there in a couple articles, and I remember I got a message on my Twitter that said, “Hey, if you’re the guy who produced My Teenage Dream Ended, that album really changed my life.” I was so taken aback, especially after reading all the backlash, not really expecting those words to be said to me. That was really cool.

I still work at the recording studio. We do everything from post-production work to recording singers, rappers, etc. Not only do I engineer and produce, but I also publish records. I go out, find people that have good quality content, and maybe put the final touch on it, whether that’s taking a very good acoustic song, adding some electronic production, and placing it somewhere. I love to do stuff like that. There’s an artist named Vnus Amr, and we did a little EP that did very well in Miami and we even just got it placed on a couple TV shows. I’ve done some engineering work with these guys The Jackie Boyz, who had a deal with Universal Music. We were writing for everybody, be it Justin Bieber, One Direction, Jennifer Lopez. I’d play my beats sometimes, and from that, I got a lot of confidence to say, “Let’s try this lyric instead.”

