Neil Diamond

American singer-songwriter who began as a Brill Building staff writer and became one of the best-selling solo artists in music history — and whose Rick Rubin-produced 12 Songs (2005) stripped away decades of orchestration to reveal the essential quality of his songwriting.

Through the Rubin-produced 12 Songs, demonstrated that decades of commercial gloss had been obscuring the quality of his songwriting — the stripped production revealing Diamond as a singer-songwriter of genuine depth — making it one of the most successful applications of the Rubin reduction approach.