Multiplatinum and Grammy-winning producer Khris Riddick-Tynes has made hits for some of the biggest artists today. Riddick-Tynes has an ear for good music, which led him to produce SZA’s song “Snooze.” The song is now nominated for a Grammy as Best R&B Song.
Riddick-Tynes spoke with rolling out about his career, why he got into producing and the creation of “Snooze.”
What is the story of “Snooze” coming together?
It was awesome. The initial idea of doing the session came through Babyface asking me to produce with him on his Girls Night Out album. A lot of the girls that are on the project are close collaborators of mine, so it meshed perfectly.
I was in Atlanta, and I was working with Baby Tate. I got a call from Babyface and he’s like, “We’re gonna start the album and the first session is going to be with SZA, can you make it back in town?” So I came down, and on the plane, I had the pocket of the drums in my head already. There’s another song that we did that she wrote and cut, and as she was cutting that song, I gave the session to Leon Thomas.
At Babyface’s studio, there are two rooms, there’s a B-room and a C-room, which is a smaller room for production. Leon was in there, and I gave him the session, and he did his thing on it and did his thing with the keys. He was playing it, and SZA was coming out. The way the studio works is there’s a recording booth and then there’s the actual control room. And then over here is the C-room. She comes out of the recording booth and she hears the beat to “Snooze” that we just made. She doesn’t even go into the control room, she goes immediately into the C-room. She’s like, “Yeah, load that up. I want to do that next.” With her, if she’s warm or if she’s hot, just go. She took it, and she went in there. She put her headphones on, and she did the whole thing in, like, 15 to 20 minutes.
What was the atmosphere like in the room during the session?
It was dope. I was like, “This is fire.” You have to remember, as producers and writers, we do so many songs. They’re probably about 20,000 songs in the catalog in your whole career as a producer, so you don’t get too high or too low. You don’t know when stuff’s coming. … It ended up finding the light, and she ended up coming back to it and finishing it out. We knew it was special, but we didn’t know what was going to happen. I think, as a producer, you have to desensitize yourself from feeling or getting too attached to songs because you just never know. You never know when they’re going to come.
