¶ Intro / Opening
🎵 Music
¶ Nile Rodgers: Career and Chic's Early Influence
Welcome everyone to episode 123 of Soda Jerker on Songwriting. Joining us today is an American musician, songwriter, record producer, arranger, composer and co-founder of one of the biggest groups of the disco era. He's a Grammy and Ivanovello Award winner, a member of the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, and was also recently appointed chairman of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
In a long and glittering career he's worked with the likes of Sister Sledge, Diana Ross, David Bowie, Brian Ferry. Thompson Twins, the B fifty twos, in excess, Peter Gabriel, Daf Punk, Avici, Lady Gargar, and many, many more. It's an honor to welcome to the show the exquisite Niall Rogers.
As you're hearing this, Nil's just released the first chic album in twenty six years, called fittingly It's About Time. And on a boiling hot summer's day back in late July of this year, twenty eighteen, we had the incredible opportunity to visit Niall at Abbey Road Studios in London, where he was recently appointed Chief Creative Advisor. And what an experience it was, Bryce.
It was quite a day. I was actually trying to remember our first introduction to Niles music, and I think it was when your sister Claire brought two chic LPs back from a car boot sale.
I have no memory of that whatsoever.
I think it was and you made me a cassette copy and it had Say Chic on one side and uh Tungin Chic on the other.
Amazing.
Yeah, I'd not long taken up the base, so Bernard Edwards playing was just a revelation to me. Yeah.
And around the same time we saw that vintage clip of them on VH one doing Lafrique.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. I think Nile had that see through Fender Stress. Oh. And then we went out and picked up the whole of their back catalogue on vinyl, didn't we?
From Harry Records on Bald Street. I think we were keeping that shop in business back then.
And yet still they glared at us suspiciously every time we walked in.
Every single time.
¶ Early Life and Chic's Formation
Anyway, Niall was born in nineteen fifty two in the Bronx, New York City, and raised in Greenwich Village. He had a colourful childhood to say the least, and grew up in an artistically stimulating intellectual environment, surrounded by music and a coterie of eccentric local characters. Initially he had designs on being a percussionist, like his biological father, but wound up playing flute in the school orchestra, then clarinet, before discovering his true calling as a guitarist.
He began his professional career as a session player in NYC, touring with the Sesame Street Band and joining the Apollo Theatre House Band while still in his teens.
He met bassist Bernard Edwards in nineteen seventy and the two quickly bonded, Nard turning the hitherto jazz influence Nile onto funk and R and B. They went on to form the Big Apple Band together, which eventually evolved into Sheik, Bernard and Nile recruiting drummer Tony Thompson, and taking their cue from the likes of Roxy Music to forge the band's elegant, sophisticated image.
Signed to Atlantic in nineteen seventy seven, they recorded their eponymous first album on a minuscule budget in whatever spare time they had between gigs. Luther Vandross was among the backing vocalists and was very much their secret weapon on many of the hit records.
He was indeed.
The group went on to record the top ten albums Sei Chic and Risque and a string of hit singles, including the Dance Floor staples, Lafrique, I Want Your Love, Good Times and My Forbidden Lover.
Sheik's staggering success during this period led to Rogers and Edwards becoming the most in demand producers in town. Under their collective name, the Sheik Organization, they worked with the likes of Sister Sledge, Diana Ross, Sheila B. Devotion, Debbie Harry, Carly Simon, and more.
There's some absolutely superb tracks on the lesser known chic records too, aren't there?
Oh absolutely, yeah.
Real people, uh Chip Off the Old Block, I feel your love coming on. Yeah. Stage Fright, all fantastic. And I think while they're sort of rightly celebrated for the uptempo stuff and the disco anthems, I don't think they get nearly enough credit for their way with a lush ballad.
Yeah, or the guitar instrumentals, something like savoir fair. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I love that one.
That thing changed my life.
¶ Solo Work and Career Evolution
Sheik dissolved in nineteen eighty three, the same year Nal released his first solo album, Adventures in the Land of the Good Groove, and produced and played guitar on the smash hit Let's Dance album for David Bowie. Records for Duran Duran, Madonna and in excess followed. He also moved into film soundtracks composing the orchestral score for Eddie Murphy's hit nineteen eighty eight film Coming to America, definitely a firm favourite of ours.
Yeah, he did the soul glow jingle.
And for that alone he is on this podcast.
A true workaholic, Nal continued to be staggeringly productive into the nineties, and also introduced video game soundtracks into his repertoire. He and Bernard also reformed Sheik in nineteen ninety two and released the album Sheikism the same year. However, this new chapter in the band's history came to a very sad and premature close when Bernard passed away suddenly in Japan in nineteen ninety-six.
But the chic name lives on, and now continues to honor his fallen partner by playing sold out concerts around the world to this day.
In twenty eleven, Nile published his acclaimed autobiography, Le Frique, which is a candid, unflinching, and utterly absorbing read. We highly recommend you get hold of a copy.
I actually saw Nile do a QA session just after it was published in a little arts centre in central Manchester.
Remember.
Yeah. And I remember Johnny Ma was sat a couple of rows in front of me. It was like the ghosts of Podcast Chet to come.
¶ Renewed Success and New Music
The last few years have seen a renewed appreciation of Nil's incredible body of work, and his work rate has been as feverish as ever. In twenty thirteen he appeared on Daft Punk's Random Access Memories, performing and co-writing on several tracks. Including the mega hits Get Lucky, which was a UK number one, and Lose Yourself to Dance. He also co-wrote Avici's twenty fourteen hit single Lay Me Down.
The brand new chic album, It's About Time, has been several years in the making too, and you can hear songs from that and a selection of classic tracks and hidden gems if you check out our Spotify playlist for this episode. Head to sodejker.com slash podcast, click on Niles page and you'll find a link under the episode player.
Our guest is very active online, so check out NilRoggers.com, at NileRoggers on Twitter and Instagram, and Facebook.com slash Nil Rogers official for all his latest updates. You can find us at Sodajer dot com at Sodajer on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook dot com slash Sodajeker.
If you're not already subscribed to the show on Apple Podcasts, please do so that you can automatically receive new episodes as soon as they're publish. If you get a chance, give us a quick review and rating too. You can also donate whatever you can to help us with the running costs of the show by visiting sodajeker.com slash donate.
One final thing, many thanks to Fran for all of her help in setting up this interview. Right, here we go. Please enjoy our chat with the wonderful Nal Roger.
🎵 Music
¶ Nile's Unique Songwriting Process
Nile, thank you for talking with us on the podcast.
That's awesome, man.
Loving the new chic music.
Thank you very much.
Um I was thinking probably the main challenge for you, given this great appointment at Abbey Road and the Songwrites Hall of Fame stuff and all of that, is just getting the time to lose yourself in the writing process.
Yeah, uh the fortunate thing for me is that I don't sleep much. Even though I've just started a new sleep program, I go to a sleep clinic. Rice. Let me tell you something. This works. It's really good. So I've had insomnia since I was five and a half years old. And I went to this woman. She's a brilliant
Brilliant doctor. Um, she explained to me, uh, Nile, sleep is a process. Don't you understand that early Homo sapiens and she goes in this whole rap on me and she says So when your body is tired and it starts to excrete melatonin, that's the signal to get tired, then sleepy, then asleep.
And I went, oh, that makes a hell of a lot of sense. So lately I've allowed myself to become tired, then sleepy, then asleep. Wow. Amazing. Like it's like, duh. I only had to wait sixty-five years before I found that out.
And that just makes you more productive in the day then?
Exactly the same. I'm I'm just you know just the fact that I can depend on something that was all so elusive my whole life.
And you've also been through kind of a lot of big changes and upheavals in your life since this decade started. Does that mean you have to wait till you're feeling inspired to write or can you just kinda make progress no matter how you're feeling?
write all the time.
Yeah.
It's just writing. It could stink, but it it's writing nonetheless.
Well all the sort of hallmarks of the chic sound are present on Boogie All Night, aren't they? Do the songs typically start with some kind of chord vamp on the guitar? Is that where most of them begin?
Um most of the songs start with an idea. It's actually um a picture. I see something, you know, like for some reason right now my mind is being flooded with blue. Your shirt, I've seen these walls a million times. But today for some reason it means something. The word blue sticks in my head, so I'm going blue, blue, blue, blue, blue.
Good.
And I don't know why this happens to me all the time. And then I get hung up on blue and then I'll write a song that has something to do with blue. And it won't be about the blues. You know, to be some clever thing about blue. So that's typically how I work. So look at this. Isn't Abby Road awesome? We get our Caffuccino delivered during your podcast. And a Brandon Mug. Yeah, happening, man. No wonder the Beatles recorded here.
Yeah.
And uh once you sort of have the idea, will you immediately start building the track or will you wait till the song's completed before you'll do anything?
It's always different. You know, it's my blessing and curse, um, that I'm never without an idea. Today I'm gonna work with new writers that I've never worked with before and I can't wait because I love to see what their process is because like I'm totally malleable when it comes to the songwriting process and how we go about it.
I've done it with hundreds and hundreds of people so I can easily switch to their style and never ask them to switch to my style because my style is all over the map. I don't have any one particular way of doing it. And I think that that's what's fun because it's exciting every single time. I was having dinner with a doctor and she was going on and on about some very powerful stuff. And I said to her, I said, Could you please excuse me? We were uh
having dinner at the rooftop of my hotel. And I said, Could you please excuse me for a moment? She says, Oh, sure. Uh what do you have to do? I said, I I need to go to my room. I have manuscript paper. I wanna write a song called Scars. She was like, This guy is a nut. Out of the clear blue sky I told her I wanted to write a song called Scars and she says, What makes you think about Scars? We were talking about whatever cuisine and I said, Well
For some reason I'm obsessed with scars right now. I don't know why, but the word is in my head and I lifted up my shirt and I showed her that I had two cancer operations and I had this weird pattern of scars. that look like stars in the galaxy. It looks like, you know, when you look at uh y you know, like uh Orion.
Yeah.
Connect the dots. Oh Ryan, look at that thing. And I just says I'm now looking at all of these people knowing that we all have scars. And wouldn't this be a beautiful song if you think You had a scar that was so horrible, but someone was so in love with you that the first thing they wanted to do was kiss that ugly scar.
And she looked at me and she says, That's beautiful. So I said, Can I go write the song please? And I left and I ran downstairs, wrote it down real quickly, and then came back up and finished my dinner.
Wow. And and seeing as you'll have words like that that are so prominent in your thinking process before you even pick up an instrument or anything, does that mean that you'll immediately try to marry those words to a melody when you do sit down? Or might you write a piece of music and then start to put the words in like
It's it's it's different every time. See I would love to give you what it seems like you're searching for It seems like it's saying, uh huh, see that's how he does it. But if I said that I'd be less than honest because It doesn't work like that. Um, we were just driving over in the car and we were talking about the credits on the album. There's a song I wrote called Queen that features Elton John. And I said, You know, I wrote that song twenty five years ago maybe?
And I remember when I got Elton to sing the song, I told him the story. He saw Diana Ross and says, Oh, I r I sang that song that now I wrote for you She had no idea what he was talking about. It was twenty five years ago. Elton called me up and said, Nala, Diana said you didn't write that song. I was like, Elton, use your brain. She just forgot. It was twenty five years ago.
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So you will keep hold of ideas, you'll never sort of throw anything away in in case you might use it later on. Right.
Right. Um the the chromatic um turnaround in in We Are Family, the dun dun dun dun dun dun dun. I wrote that when I was seventeen years old at Woodstock. And I just I I pinched this from another band. It was in the one of their songs. It was a lick in one of their songs. And they went, uh do do do do do do do and we didn't have tape you know, like cassette players and stuff. So I just filed it away in my brain and said, One day
Yeah.
That's going in a song. So as we wrote We Are Family and it does the normal turnaround. I got all my sisters with me. We are family. It's the second ending turnaround. Wow.
You mentioned the chromatic melody. It made me think of um Sober of the New Records, which has that kind of nice descending melody in the chorus. Who did you work with on that one?
So you won't know this person because he's he's not famous at all yet, but he's done a couple of things with me that's been fantastic. I call him rock. And Rock and I, we first worked on So I did this film and I wrote this song called Love Me Sexy. And so Rock and I started grooving on this sort of Barry White kind of thing. And uh it felt great. So when uh Sober came up I had actually written it as an EDM song for David Geta.
And it was really fast. It was flying. And um I didn't have it ready in time. So Gatter didn't use it. So I just said, uh, let me give it to Rock and see what he thinks. Rock and his son took a whole different approach. They said, Well, what if we made it into like an R and B song? So they made it into an R and B song and when they gave it back to me, I said, You know what?
I'm gonna turn it into a new Jack Swing song because I like Teddy Riley so much. Right. And this is an important concept when it comes to my music.
I have something that I call the DHM, which is the deep hidden meaning. Once I work with a writer or another artist I explained to them the essence, the concept, the DNA, if you will, of the composition and what I'm going for. Therefore it can live as an EDM song with David Geta. I actually recorded it with Keith Urban as a country song and it's killing.
It's so good. It's unbelievable. Once I tell you the DHM, you're gonna go back and say, I cannot believe it was that simple. Every chic album, every single one is the exact same narrative. Here it is. Oh world. We're an opening act. for a big star. We gotta go out and we gotta warm up the stage for people who've never heard of us before, and then a big star is gonna follow us. So we gotta let you know who we are. That's why on every single record we do, we say we are chic or to do chic chic.
So like on um on uh Till the World Falls, we have one of the assistants here go, You are now listening to Sheik.
Yeah.
And every single record, if you go back to the beginning, we treat the album as if this is our new show.
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¶ Chic Organization and Bernard Edwards
As kids we were completely captivated by your partnership with Bernard Edwards, your creative partnership. We used to kind of search for all the chic records and we were fascinated by this concept of like the chic organization.
Is it a company?
Yeah.
That that must have been kind of a great framework for writing songs.
It was fantastic, not only for writing songs, but also for the way that we carried ourselves, the way that we treat people, the way that we act. Um, throughout our entire history. Man, we've been doing this For more than forty years, since the beginning of the whole disco debauchery party, who can do more Coke than the next person? Who can do more girls than the next one? Who can do more, you know, all that stuff. You've never heard of a chic scandal.
'Cause we treat people with kindness. You know, we're always cool with somebody. Um, every now and then, especially right now, there's so much stuff going on in America now with the Me Too movement, and I get a lot of phone calls from friends of mine. 'cause in my memoir I say that I used to um hold up in the bathroom in the women's bathroom at Studio fifty four and out of all the years that I was there, not one woman has ever
asked me to leave the bathroom. She never felt uncomfortable, never felt that I was impinging upon her privacy because that was the vibe we were in. It was just all cool. Um it was like, wow, man, I'm so cool. They'll let me stay in the bathroom with them while they do their business. It's awesome. Um also, you know, I had a lot of drugs. Maybe that had a little something to do with it. But we we just lived in a time where
the people that I hung out with were just cool. And the people in the Chic organization were really just exceptionally nice people. And if you follow their careers as individuals and you see them after they gone from sheep, you know, Luther Van Dross. I mean, unfortunately so many of'em have passed away, but they all do great things. Bernard Edwards.
wound up doing great things with the power station and Duran Duran. You know, I find it really interesting that you have an incredible franchise like the James Bond franchise. Only one person has ever gotten a number one record. That's Bernard Edwards and Duran Duran with a view to a kill. Not gold finger. Not not not live and let die. Not none of those records. They only went to number two. Only Duran Duran and Bernard Edwards went to number one.
So cool.
And we we've made you talk about uh kinda how your ideas were typically quite complex and Bernard was like a master of distilling them down into strong hooks. You'd have like multiple songs in one idea.
Oh yeah. Yeah. He was famous for saying uh things like, uh, Yeah, brother, I really love that. But um you got three or four songs in there, my man and I would say, uh, what do you mean? Well this could be a song, that could be a song. A really great example of that in the modern world is uh Daft Punk Get Lucky. Right. Get Lucky was the beginning of another song and it became its own zone.
Ah. I think um dance dance dance is one of the classic examples of you having more than one idea and
Dance dance, dance are hysterical. Um, there's a little micro moog line that's a counterpoint. So the contrapuntal micro moog melody was my original hook, which went doing ding ding. Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding That's what I wrote That's what I originally wrote against all that ding ding ding ding ding nothing but a bunch of demi semi quavers going against each other.
But it but it's melodic. When you hear us playing it live, that line when we go, I'm just dancing to the beat, feel the heat, I move my feet, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. dun dun dun dun headed towards the floor, gonna get down It makes me sound like damn this guy's a compositional genius It was like, No, dude, let's stick that in the background. I would have never wrote that. Ever.
It was just um a great rewrite. It was Bernard arranging. Also, it wasn't like he was trying to not hurt my feelings. He knew that it was a good piece of music. It's just that Where do you fit it in and what instrument plays it? Let's not sing it, let's just play it and put it behind the scenes.
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¶ The Art of Rewriting: 'Sober'
So do you tend to have maybe two phases where you'll write in that kind of unbridled way and then later on there's a much more controlled editing kind of phase where you'll really think through all the parts?
Yes, absolutely. Uh when people call me a great writer, I always correct them and say, No, no, no, I'm a great rewriter. 'Cause the first stuff I write is ridiculous. Here's how I compose. I write something that makes me happy. The thing that makes me happy is completely complicated because I'm accomplishing something that I normally am not able to do. A song like Sober, since that's modern, right? It's on our new record.
Sober started out as a guitar exercise because I had sent my guitar away to Fender to be made into a hundred replicas. So when I had gotten the guitar back, that was my very first day of playing up and down the neck to see if they had messed my guitar up. So I started playing exercises and I lucked up on an exercise that I had never played before.
That's when it became the EDM thing for David Geta. I was like, dude, listen to this. And because of the way that I was playing it, you also could interpret it in a country way. So like I could play deal but I'm playing it fast beep with them there with them there. So Keith Irvin comes in and goes killin' nothing makes me sober like you again. And that was great. We went off on that journey. It was totally happening. It was really good song. I wish I had it close by and I'd play it for you.
So that's how that happened. But then in the process of rewriting it went through many incarnations. But what was important was to keep the spirit and the soul, the deep hidden meaning of sober that that there's this kind of freedom that um comes with intoxication. And even though I haven't had a drink in twenty four years, I still remember the feeling of that freedom. I remember what they used to say it was called courage in a bottle.
courage in a bottle. You just like, hey man, let's go jump off this. Yeah, it sounds like a great idea today. You know, so um to write, She Only Loves Me When She's Sober. Um Every time we wrote or rewrote the song, we had the concept of this sort of unbridled freedom, right? This type of recklessness that comes from being inebriated. And at the end of that cycle, you go back to ah
Whew, I'm sober. Whew. I got through that one. They go back to their normal life. It's nice. You go for the weekend, we get to party and act like it's crazy. Maybe you can act like you don't even know me. Maybe it's wife swapping or husband swapping. Whatever, you don't even know me. Monday morning we wake up, Hey sweetheart, how are you? Time to punch in a time clock and you know and be
🎵 Music
¶ Rhythm Guitar and Voice Leading
Your rhythm guitar playing or the chucking as it's known, um, I suppose it's it's considered your kind of signature. But it seems to us that it's your knowledge of sort of chord invasions that really help kinda define that classic cheek sound. Yes.
Bernard actually taught it to me. Um when I first started playing, it was really mainly about soloing. I became popular because I could play pretty fast. And it was the fusion era. So John McLaughlin and people like that had come up. So on all of my early recordings, you know, before Chic, what people would call me for was they would call me to play either classical guitar
you know, which you I could really play that fast. Um or to play on jazz records where I'm playing some, you know, really fast kind of licks that are going with the big band or what have you. It was only after I met Bernard that he started to explain to me that with my sort of um you know, you'd have to call it what it is, sort of higher level knowledge of harmony and rhythm.
and composition, the fact that I could write for every instrument in a symphony orchestra was, man, like we got a guy in a band that can do that. This is great. So now that I'm in a band, I had to cover those parts by myself.
So I had to write rhythm guitar parts that sort of make those melodic things happen. Like if you think in terms of David Bowley's Let's Dance and we play that little dominant chord pyramid at the beginning, where it's sort of uh paying homage to the Isley brothers twist and shout. But the way that I play it on guitar, it's got this cool little inversion thing going on that few guitar players would do. They normally would just play the same thing over and over and over again.
Yeah, I mean I get that impression from it that it's not about just playing a G or any G. It has to be the right inversion of G so that kind of in that sequence it makes the melody happen.
That's exactly correct, bro. It's what we call voice leading. Correct. So if you listen to Bowie's China Girl and you hear my guitar part, Uh I go from the tonic I go ding ding to the major seventeen ding ding ding six. 5 thing thing thing thing thing thing thing thing thing thing thing thing in the loudest thunder But it was just being able to sit down with David and just play by myself with him. And he's like, Man, this
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If I play I'm Comin' Out and I just play it like regular guitar players and just play the the chords like I just play. what I hear cover bands do, it doesn't sound like I'm coming out to me at all. Like I have to do the voice leading with the horns and all that sort of stuff.
And some of the songs seem to be based more around, say, a chord sequence like My Forbidden Lover, but then others will start with a with a bass or a guitar riff like Sheik Cheer or Everybody Dance. Would you kind of build up like an arsenal of riffs over time that you could sort of dip into and turn into songs.
I always have tried to do that, but it never worked. Like this morning I was listening to something and I freaked out and I ran across the room and I took out my iPhone and said, Let me record this. I'll probably never go back to that lick again. But um so I've been doing this maybe 45 years, which is amazing to me. But because I'm never at a loss for musical motif.
be it actually melodic, harmonic, or most of the time a word or a series of words, because words take me to music, which is the most wonderful part of my life, is that if I'm stuck on a musical phrase, I can actually think of words that'll get me out of that um snare, if you will.
¶ Song Inspiration and Social Commentary
Um, I was working on a song with Muramasa and Nao and Anderson Pac, and we were working on the chorus and we're working on the chorus, but I had a point that I was trying to make until the world falls. I said, you know, guys, everytime we do a song we always talk about put your hands up in the air and then it makes me feel good and so and so. I said but
The way that the world feels right now, I said, I'm gonna be honest with you. I wake up every single day and I think we're just sort of hanging by our fingernails on the edge of a cliff,'cause we have a president that can just do something wacky and ridiculous And I like to believe in humankind and I like to believe in steadfastness and logic.
But
when I see things that are happening now in this world, I'm going, Man, that would make President Nixon turn over in this way. Are you kidding me? This is ridiculous.
Mm-hmm.
That's one of the things I really like about Till of World Force though is that it fulfills the same kind of function that good times fulfills, like as soon as the world falls apart, you appear with some funk that just makes everybody feel better, you know.
A great example of this was the other day we were doing a concert. This um gentleman had a heart attack in the first or second row and the paramedics came out and saved him. And he didn't want to leave. I'm like, dude, you just had a heart attack. They're trying to take you. He's going, No, I'm having a good time. I want to stay at the show. I want to stay at the show. And it was like it was the weirdest thing I had ever seen in my life. And it reassured what I was thinking that.
You know, when we're inside these four walls, we feel safe. Like when I'm sitting here in the recording studio of Abbey Road, I feel like I'm within this safe compound and whatever else is happening out there in the world. will happen and if something bad happens, I'll just walk out and go, What the hell happened out here? Because inside here, we're cool.
So I say we can dance until the world falls, go on and on until the world falls down. And when I use the word and we can make the world fall down, I don't mean us. We meaning humankind can destroy the world and who are the people who gonna survive, as I say in the second verse. Now that the coast is clear, after they've brought the world down, we're the survivors, the people who love each other, the people who go out and dance.
that gentleman who had a heart attack and still wanted to stay like I'm gonna be missing something. Uh pal, we're trying to save your life. But no, this is feeling good to me. Eventually they pulled him out, but it was unbelievable. I've never seen anyone put their own lives in danger to listen to a concert.
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¶ Improvisation and Musical Mastery
The chic song I've always wanted to ask you about. I don't know if you get asked about it a lot, but um Savoir Fair. Mm-hmm. And that leads back to what you said about your guitar playing before. It's such an incredible piece of music. Is that mainly improvise?
It's totally improved.
It's like it has movements to it.
Yeah, because what happened was that we're not going to be able in the old days every song had to have an A side and a B side and um at that time we hadn't had the album quite laid out yet because we did the second album say chic and we are family at the exact same time. So now we had a pool of compositions and we weren't sure which songs would wind up being instrumentals, which songs you know what I mean?'Cause writing is a process. As I said, I'm not a good writer, I'm a rewriter.
So w which songs we were gonna rewrite and which songs we were gonna do a certain way. So one day we were just sitting with the band jamming and I said, you know, I've always loved the way my strat, the way my hit maker sounds when I put it in the out of phase position and just lightly touch it. And I just started going, jing, jing it, jing, jing, jing. And then that turned into other thing I went uh do do dun dun. 다음 영상에서 만나요!
Dun dun dun si do do be boop. So it sounds like it was composed because after I played it, I then orchestrated on top of me. But what I play And that initial recording session is just the band I wrote out a simple chart for them to follow, as Rob Sabino would say. Most of us were just playing don.
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Were all your solos improvised on the right? I was thinking of the one from Give Up on the Diana album which I love. Again, that's it just flows so well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause I think I remember that that was scoop boop beep boop boop boo. Yeah. So my jazz teacher he used to always say something to me. He would say, Nah, connect your shit. And to to jazz guys like that, a solo would always incorporate multiple systems. So there would be octaves. So on Give Up, I start with octaves. I go do do do do do do so it's octaves, chords, and single note. Connect your shit, man. So the uh I think on give up I think I do all three techniques. Yeah.
So you developed most of these skills from such a young age by studying clarinet and an orchestration. Is that how you mastered this stuff?
Um guitar wasn't natural for me. The B flat clarinet was very natural for me. Um, I had started out on the flute and I played open hole flute. I was pretty stupid. I was a asthmatic. Try and try and give a five year old, six year old asthmatic an open hole artly flute or Haynes or something.
In those days they gave it high quality instruments, you know. So um I'm Uh but uh by the time I got to a a single readed instrument, you know, you blowing it and then the vibration you have a tone like wow, check this out. So the B flat clarinet felt very natural. The guitar playing came from Bernard um and private tutors and listening to other guitar players. The interesting thing about the B flat clarinet though is that unlike a saxophone, um the fingering
changes when you go up the octave and stuff like that. So I had to become very aware of the different fingerings of the woodwinds, you know, the piccolo, the flute. The saxophones, which believe it or not, most people don't realize that saxophones are not part of a symphony orchestra either,'cause they weren't invented.
Um, so the woodwinds are the bassoon, um, the piccolo, the flute, um the oboe. Um, so we'd have the double reeds, but we didn't have saxophones. Saxophones I learned when I was doing Big Bang. The saxophone is like the guitar. We're outcast.
Yeah.
¶ Orchestration and Breaking Rules
Yeah, I think it's always been the string arranging on Chic Records. It's just always been like a lesson for us, hasn't it?
Yeah, and I think it it sounds to me like you approach a lot of the string lines like you'd write a guitar line. I think that's maybe what gives it the unusual sound.'Cause there's sometimes unusual intervals or Yeah.
The the really great example of uh a wacky Nile Rogers string arrangement is something like Lost in Music.
Right.
Even though it's insanely simple, I loved watching the string players' faces when when it goes And we go duh. We telegraph the note that they're going to they go here a seventh away. And now he's looking at them and they're like, um, Mr. Rogers, are you sure you want him to do that? You don't want to just go, duh. No, I want you to go duh. And they will go, okay. Um and that became a real hook, man, when we hit your lot of music caught in a trap.
🎵 Music
¶ Producing Sister Sledge and 'Le Freak'
It feels like you and Bernard when you were working on those records, especially Sister Sledge, you kinda designed the story for those acts maybe and and pretty much dictated every note on those records.
Yeah, you have that concept exactly right. We never met Sister Sledge until the day they walked in and sang. I guess the only proper way to describe our relationship is we Conceived Sister Sledge from a series of interviews that we had with the president of the company. We were label mates. And then we basically superimposed our ideas of who they were onto them. And just recently, Kathy Sledge, who's a brilliant vocalist,
She said, you know, now after the fact I realized that we were just going along for the ride. She said there was a lot of tension between Sister Sledge and us because they had never been treated that way and we were not trying to be hostile or anything like that. But we knew we had a sound and we knew that it was unorthodox. And it was hard to teach somebody something unorthodox. It's hard to show somebody, no, this is actually cool when it's breaking the rules. It's like you don't do that.
And early on, especially people who learn to sing in the church. they were governed by certain rules that you just didn't break. Where it's like chic, we had no problem breaking rules. We parallel motion, are you kidding me? We are so into parallel motion. It was ridiculous. It was like If you listen to the string climb up when we do Le Freque, everybody laughs and they go, Le Freak, you know, a song is supposed to have a middle eight, what the hell is that? A middle thirty two or something?
Now freak. And you guys go do do do do do do do and you just play on endlessly like that. The bridge, and you're just playing, and you go, I said freak, and you just keep playing, and you go, now, now, now, now, freak. It's so completely unorthodox. And it wound up being the biggest selling single in the entire history of the Warner organization. The entire history of the whole catalog. So at first we were really proud because it was
the biggest single in Atlantic history, but now it's gone on and surpassed like, you know, everything. And really it's because of streaming now. If you look at the metrics of how m often La Fric gets streamed Um, compared to say another big record, like a you know, We Are Family, which gets streamed a lot. They still stream Le Freak Ah Freak O in Mexico City every day.
Yeah.
Like a few thousand people listen to Laveric.
¶ 'I'm Coming Out': A Concept Song
And how interesting is it that song and songs like I'm Coming Out have come out of your own experience or your own observations of things that you noticed and thought, Ooh, you know, that's a song. Mm-hmm LaFreak is like a personal protest, isn't it really? But um I'm Coming Out, for example Is uh where you saw the
A bunch of transvestites. Yeah. Fantastic. I mean, talk about the songwriting process. Once again, there was an image, an image of transvestites, uh, but not just transvestites, Diana Ross impersonators. in the men's bathroom when I'm going in to use the bathroom. And no big deal. I lived in the bathroom in those days. You were there to get high or every now and then you use the bathroom for what it was actually constructed for. And I noticed that I was using it for that purpose.
And I looked to either side and the left to the right and I went, Whoa, I'm in with all these Diana Ross impersonators. This is amazing And my first reaction was to say Hey guys, you won't believe this. Like I'm actually working with Diana Ross, and I thought they would all cheer. And I kept thinking, oh man, I'm gonna seem like an idiot.
Yeah.
They're gonna think I'm some jerk. So I couldn't say anything and we didn't have cell phone, so I had to run outside the club and find some kind of call box where Bernard, who was at home asleep with his kids, I always used to make fun of him because Bernard had so many kids. I said, You have like a cadre you know, yo, Platoon, can you wake up?
Yeah.
Can you wake up the drill sergeant and have him get on the phone? And um and Bernard was totally asleep. Yeah, man, what you want, man? I said, Please, man, please wake up Bernard, write this down'cause I know I'm gonna forget by morning. I'm gonna get drunk, I'm gonna forget it. What are you talking about, man? What what you mean, man?
I said, I'm in this bathroom. I said it's like a Fellini movie. I'm I'm in a bathroom with a bunch of Diana Ross impersonators and I says, We gotta write a song called I'm Comin' Out because Diana Ross to the gay community, if she sang I'm coming out would be like James Brown. Say it loud. I'm black and I'm proud. And he's like, what? What? I said, Bernard, please, just do this for me, man. Do this. Please. I don't have a pen. Do it. Do it. Do it.
And then finally he woke up and we start laughing. He gets it. He goes, Oh man, yeah, I get it. Imagine that. Diana Ross walk up to the microphone going, Umin out
What?
Is it just a strong concept?
It was unbelievable. So it had nothing to do with music at all. It only had to do with a concept, a word, the deep hidden meaning. It was like Look at this. So Diana loved the song, so when we finally wrote it, you know, when it turned into music, uh come in now. She didn't even think about what it was about. Except we had interviewed Diana and we knew that she was leaving Motown, right? So we were sort of we didn't know but she was threatening, so
The song had great double entendre. Oh my God, Diana Ross threatening to leave Motown. We sure better make a great record. She's gonna be out there on her own with no Barry Gordy. This better be a monster. So she says, There's a new me coming out. I wanna live because Diana Ross really had nothing. She didn't own anything. At that time, the two biggest female
X
of all time with number ones were Barbara Streisand and Diana Ross. I can pretty much guarantee you Barbara Streisand was much more well off than Diana Ross. Diana really had no ownership of anything. She just owned herself. I'm Diana Ross. So we thought, man, let's give
🎵 Music
¶ Artist's Evolution and Chic's Identity
You know, as a composer, you're really anonymous, but you know you have a job to fulfill and that job is to take an artist, the arc of their lives, and go to the next place in that story. Right. So I don't want to make the last Diana Ross record. No way. I want to make the next Diana Ross record. So my brain is already geared up for a fight just to convince people, isn't it better?
just artistically to take a chance of doing something new and different, even if you fall on your face because you've done something That says, as an artist, I was thinking and living and breathing and moving on. And I've been around a lot of musicians who've had a really great career and then all of a sudden they say, um, we gotta go back to our roots, man. We gotta go back to the beginning. You know, we've lost ourselves. We've gotten away from the source.
And they do a record that they're sort of like trying to copy their original record, but I'm not doing that at all. Like sometimes there's four or five writers on a record because now my life has changed. It's not just Bernard and I sitting in a room and it's us against the world. I now live in a world where
four or five people could be hanging around me and we could all throw ideas out and it's cool because I write ensemble music. So I can sometimes now have the ensemble around me and not feel intimidated or feel like Oh man, now I gotta give like five percent this or yeah. Like it's so not about the money and the the hierarchy or any of that stuff. It's it's like I've been part of this community that's accepted me.
which is the songwriting community and we're big. You know, like people ask me now, well, now why do you call it chic? I'm thinking to myself, why would I ever want to be anything but Sheik? I don't want to be a solo artist. I write ensemble music. I write music for a whole bunch of people to perform at the same time. That's how our vocals even work most of the time. Luther Vandross helped us develop that. It was what we call the gang vocals.
Unison.
All singing unison. It was great. You can listen to my two solo records and see where they were coming from. Psh, no way. I want to be in chic. Mm-hmm.
Oh we love adventures in the land that's
Yeah, no.
Oh it's cool.
¶ David Bowie's Insight and Legacy
Yeah. So man, I didn't realize this until just a few days ago. So when I met Bowie, we went back to my apartment like a couple of days later to listen to my first test pressing for Adventures in the Land of the Good Groove. And whilst listening down from top to bottom,'cause that's how we listen to records in those days, from the beginning to the end, that we gotta watch the whole movie. Um
We listened down and I became immediately depressed because I knew that it was a flop. It was going nowhere. There wasn't one radio station I was gonna play at. No black radio stations. Definitely no white radio stations in America is like that. Black radio, white radio. So uh what happened was David said to me, and I'll always remember this quote'cause it really made me feel like a giant. David Bowie said to me, Naya, darling.
If you do a record for me half as good as that one, I'll be the happiest man in the world. And I kept thinking, this is a flop. But then just a few months ago, now that I'm thinking about it from Bowley's perspective, what if David Bowley has said, Oh man I wanna go to the land of The good roof. Wow. Oh man, you think Let's Dance was the bomb. What if he sang that? That's what he was thinking. I didn't have a clue. All I kept thinking was this is now Rogers record. And I was like, damn it.
I should have right there on the spot, written my record company and says, hey David, here's your new album.
Stop the vocals on.
How cool oh my god. Oh my god.
Fantastic. Well, Nile, it feels like this has been kind of a lifelong quest for us to get you on the on the podcast. But this has just been an absolute thrill. Thanks so much for doing it and thanks for all the great records.
The dream come true for us now. Thanks.
Oh man, you guys are so cool. I know I talk too much, but you know.
No.
It's okay.
Thank you.
🎵 Music
¶ Reflecting on the Nile Rodgers Interview
That was Nile Rogers talking to us at Abbey Road Studios in London, fulfilling a lifelong dream for us.
And for him,
Of course, yeah. He needed this.
Of course. It's the final uh feather in his cap. But uh yeah, he was fantastic guy, everything we hoped for and uh we interviewed him, sat in this tiny little recording booth which really gave us a chance to connect with him, didn't it?
Yeah. I mean you can't help but gel with someone like that though, can you? He's so affable and so interesting.
and still really has that thirst to create. I don't think I've heard any previous guests say they had to get up from the dinner table and say, excuse me, I have to go and write a song now. Yeah.
The force is strong with this one.
Yeah, yeah.
He's one of my favourite guitar players too, so getting to ask him about Savoir Fair and the different inversions he uses and stuff.
And how he connects his shit, to coin a phrase.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Just amazing.
And obviously great stories about Bernard and that incredible partnership they had and those amazing hit records they made.
Yeah, what a fantastic experience. So that's it folks. Hope you enjoyed that. This has been an amazing year for us so far. Not only have we recorded a live episode at Rack Studios, which is on the way soon, we've also now recorded within the hallowed halls of Abbey Road.
I never thought we'd get to say that. And of course if you heard our bonus episode from our Paul McCartney interview, you'll know that immediately after our interview with Niall we were whisked to studio two of Abbey Road for a secret Paul McCartney gig.
One experience.
Don't think that one will be repeated.
So if you haven't heard about that then check out the bonus episode on the Paul McCartney page. Make sure you pick up a copy of It's About Time, which is available everywhere now.
Thanks again to Niall, to Fran and to the staff of Abbey Road.
Look after yourselves out there, folks.
See you next time.
🎵 Music
You know, sometimes, man, you think you see clearly and you don't. Like with me and Miles Davis, you know, it's like I thought I was reading him perfectly and I was getting everything wrong. I would write these songs and Miles would scream at me, go, Motherfucker, I can write that shit.
Yeah.
I want a motherfucking good time.