Between 1967 and 1970, Bottrell attended Crescenta Valley Senior HighinLa Crescenta, California, he spent his junior year (1968–1969) at The Frankfurt International School in Oberursel, West Germany. He graduated in 1970 from Crescenta Valley Senior High. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara between 1970 and 1972, studying for a bachelor's degree in music.[1]
In 1974, he married Elizabeth Jordan, whom he met in high school. That same year, Bottrell got his first job in music, as an engineer at California Recording Studio in Hollywood.[2] In 1978, he moved over to Soundcastle Studios in Silverlake, where he met Jeff Lynne, who eventually hired him to engineer for ELO. In 1979 his daughter Adrianne was born. The 1980s were spent freelance engineering between Europe and Los Angeles, with clients including: The Jacksons, ELO, Michael Jackson, Madonna, George Harrison, Starship and Tom Petty. Daughter Laura was born in 1983. He worked for Michael Jackson at his house in Encino between 1983 and 1986, recording tracks for Bad. In 1988, Bottrell co-produced his first record, Aliens Ate My BuickbyThomas Dolby. In 1989, Michael Jackson asked him to co-produce, engineer and write songs for his album Dangerous, co-writing and rapping on the album's biggest hit, "Black or White". The song spent 7 weeks at number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart in the fall of 1991.
Bottrell's son William was born under difficult circumstances in 1990. That year, Bottrell built his own recording studio, Toad Hall Studio, next door to the Pasadena Playhouse[3][4][5]inPasadena, California and founded a weekly jam session called the "Tuesday Night Music Club".[6] One of the resulting acts was Sheryl Crow, whose 1993 debut album (produced and co-written by Bottrell) was entitled Tuesday Night Music Club. Her single "All I Wanna Do" from that album won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year at the 37th Annual awards in 1994 for Bottrell and Crow. The album won two additional Grammys and sold 3.8 million in the US.[7][8]
Bottrell was nominated for another Grammy for his work on Shelby Lynne's 1999 breakout album, I Am Shelby Lynne. During the making of that album, he closed his recording studio and moved his family of five to Northern California. His son William died after falling off a cliff in 1998.[9]
He was separated from Elizabeth that year and divorced in 2000.
^Boudreau, Matt. "Bill Bottrell: Zengineering w/ Sheryl Crow and Jeff Lynne". Tape Op Magazine. No. 59. Retrieved May 14, 2022. Paywall I think I was fourteen years old or something and we had a little rock band and somebody heard it and wanted to pay for us to record. They paid for us to go down to a recording studio in East Hollywood and record a single. Years later after I quit college and didn't know what I was going to do, I was working in a warehouse and I decided to get in my car and go down there and knock on the door at the same studio where I had worked in junior high and ask for a job.
^Hagan, Joe (July–August 2009). "The Ballad of Benji Hughes". The Believer Magazine. Retrieved January 11, 2013. It's a bit of a sore subject with me," he writes in an email. "For something so sincere, authentic, gorgeous, and pure to emerge during those desperate times was miraculous, and one of my most perfect works as a longtime record producer has never seen the light of day.
