Little Simz - Free

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirway. Little Sims. Who put out our first out of the first time? Mercury Prize, a Brit Award. She also starred. Her most recent album is called Lotus and came up with And it followed a pretty tumultuous time in her career. I got to talk to Little Sims about one of the songs. My name is Simby Where does the story of this song start for you?

This song kinda happened in two parts. It was the year twenty twenty two, like springtime. I was reading this book called Conversations with God. And it talks a lot about love and fear and the duality of those two things. Mhm. I had this feeling like why is it fear and not hate? But that book definitely unlocked that for me. And I was just in a deep state of like documenting my thoughts and feelings on paper. So I kinda wanted to write like my take. So I wrote the words as like a poem.

Would you read the poem? I think love is understanding that people can change and loving them anyway through every stage. I read all about love, then I gave it to Jade. I think love is sharing knowledge is so much to gain. I think lovers every time I put pen to the page. If I don't love what I'm doing and I'm hardly engaged, God, you love me though. I'm flawed. I know I'm not an innocent child, but I am yours.

And if you're with me, you is safe. I know my body isn't immortal, but I am brave. I think you know it's real love when it's sincere. I'ma show them I ain't scared, eradicate fear. I'm not the best like poetry deliverer, I don't think. No, that's not a great. No, some people that are so aware of like the space and the cadence and stuff. But I think mine just ends up sounding like a rap or like I'm just yeah. When you were writing that, who do you think you were writing it for?

Like what are the parts of that that you felt like you most needed to hear? I think that love is forgiving yourself. That just that line, yeah, really hits me. Because I just think, you know, we make mistakes. and carry a lot of like shame and a lot of blame sometimes. And it weighs us down. Well, it's definitely weighed me down and I think I've just had to forgive myself. Do you know what I mean? I came into this industry like very trusting. How old are you?

I started performing when I was like nine. But when I started putting out music, I was probably like fourteen, fifteen. There's a lot I probably would have done different. But then even when I say that I'm like, Would I though?'Cause I guess it has made me who I am. So I think It's just embracing all that comes with who you are and like Same way you can learn to accept people, I think. You learn how to accept your shortcomings and just try and be better and just forgive yourself.

So you said that the song happened in two parts. What was the second part? I wrote the poem and then got in with Miles, who produced the song. So I'm Miles Clinton James and I'm a record producer from uh North London. How did you and Sims first meet? Oh goodness. I mean that was a a very long time ago. I was a session musician and the first session was maybe twenty fourteen. I can vaguely remember playing some bass in a studio somewhere in East London.

And yeah, just remember thinking she was really focused. She had her her headphones on and, you know, was writing on a notepad. That's my earliest memory. So we probably didn't speak a huge amount there. How did it go from that situation where you're not speaking to each other and you're there as a session player to becoming the producer of this track? Mm-hmm.

You know, post that session I uh was called in quite a bit to work with Sims and I would be playing, you know, whatever it was needed at the time, so it could have been guitar, bass, percussion. And on the previous album, I was involved quite heavily on the the writing side of things. So I was in, you know, with the full band and and orchestra and, you know, coming up with ideas in the moment. Um so yeah, that was maybe the session that consolidated our relationship.

We definitely spent a lot of time just connecting, yeah, emotionally, absolutely. And then June last year we had a proper catch up over the phone. We spoke about kind of where she'd been, where she was currently, you know, she was in quite a A difficult space, I would say. She called me up and I could tell there was an emptiness or hollowness in her voice. The call really took me off guard, to be honest. I was in another session and I could feel how charged, how tense.

she was feeling, you know, even just over the phone. I just got out of a situation that kind of just rattled my whole shit, to be honest. someone that I was creatively intertwined with and worked on a lot of music with. And I think when you create with people for a long time, you almost start to feel and almost get made to feel like without this setup. you can't do what you do. Yeah.

And yeah, it just really rocked me a lot. I can kick myself and beat myself up and like, oh you idiot, like you should have known and you should have da da da. My response to that was like, I'm not confident in myself and I'm not gonna come to this studio and make everyone believe that I am, I'm not a pretender and that's not how I feel. And that kind of yeah, that stopped me in my track.

But what I can try and do is use it and I can talk about the fact that I don't feel confident in myself in a song like free. And what made you wanna reach out to Miles specifically? He just wasn't afraid. I knew he was just gonna be super down to like try whatever and that excited me because I didn't know what kind of album we were gonna make but I wanted to feel free and just like a kid that is just this is just play.

There's so many different kinds of producers out there who work in so many different ways. I was wondering for you, what do you want from a producer? I think the role of the producer is to essentially understand what the artist wants to say. And allows them the room to be able to express that and then compose this soundtrack to that story.

Most of the other tracks on the album were created from scratch together with Sims, um where three is uh an exception to that. Three came out of an evening hangout with my closest friend, um, who's also a co-writer on the song guy called Alex Bonfanti. He and myself, we've been friends for the longest time, but as he's toured more and I've got children, we don't find much time to connect, so I'd hold these evening kind of catch-ups.

you know, with no real pressure on what would come out of it, just really for us to catch up. I jumped on drums and Al is an incredible bass player. He's the guy who's actually playing bass on the song. Something that you can only hear when you have I think that might actually be our saying whom you know, he was he was lucky he was lucky and then he was pretty happy with the groove I was playing. Amazing.

I love stuff like that. There's so much hidden stuff in stems that no one would ever know about. But leave it in. It's part of the vibe. Where were you recording this? So I'm based at the studio in North London, which has already been around um since the seventies. It belongs to a band called the Kinks. Oh, wow.

and I have a room right at the top of the building. So I've over the years collected a number of tape machines and and three, in fact, was one of those songs that was recorded directly to Two Inch Tape in one pass You know, in this day and age it's quite special I'd say not many people try and record directly to You know, with no ability to erase or or at least uh you know limited ability to do it.

The bass line on this is I mean it's like the opposite of a loop. Even as the chord progression cycles back around, the bass part's always doing something different. you know, we actually jammed the song from beginning to end. So there was all this great movement that was happening naturally in his playing and you know sometimes unfortunately people can go in and tidy stuff up and yeah, simplify a lot of stuff. But in this case I just felt like actually this

is what it was supposed to be. You know, this interaction is human and shouldn't be tidied up too much. Yeah. So there's all this natural variation, you're right. These little things are just, I think, what makes it special. But yeah, Alex is wicked man, he's great. We started off with the drum and bass groove, you know, and then I eventually Nylon guitar from backing. It feels really dry and basic. Definitely I love having it around.

And that's myself on Congress and my friend Alex playing tambourine. And what we would do when we have these jams is we'd lay the drums, bass, and guitar down and'cause I've my room's full of, you know, African drums and weird bits of percussion. We'd do one pass just for fun of percussion together to give it some life. Question that the love will set us free. So there you're hearing myself and Alex with a microphone, you know, six feet in front of us.

And we are singing, but not at that original pitch. In fact, what we're doing is we're singing at a lower pitch, and I've sped that up. No kidding. Yeah, so the original vocals were done by myself an hour at a lower pitch. So we'd recorded the original instrumental.

And we wanted to get into that space of early kind of Jackson Five, kind of early seventies soul. And you know, a lot of those singers had almost, you know, squeaky, high pitched vocals. So one creative way to do that was actually to slow the tape down. Sing at a lower pitch. So that's what your voices actually sound like. There you go, exactly, yeah. So we're using some pretty old school period correct stuff. Just tape machine technology.

Absolutely. We didn't have any computers involved at this early stage. Part of the catch up is just recording to tape, no screens and just playing. And then when you go and play the combined vocals and rhythm section back together, your voice is actually formatted up so you sound higher. Where did those words come from? I know me and Alex for quite a while had been going to a lot of uh marches in central London. We were feeling injustice in the world was kind of

weighing heavy on our hearts and you know, more love was more needed. So that was something that just felt right. It matched our energy.

But even after we finished the song, we didn't really know what to do. My conversation with Little Sims and Miles James continues after this. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikeshi Her Way. I started making song experiences. when I was feeling lost in my own music career.

And then for over a decade I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product. of that.

Including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron in Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabond, Fenn Lilly, and the producer Phil Weinrobe. I'm gonna be on tour playing in cities across the US starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Simeen Nosrat, Jason Manzukis, Josh Molina, Min Jin Lee.

John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all gonna be my conversation partners on stage. And then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and tickets for the shows on my website rishices.co or just go to song exploder.com Slash live. That's songexploder.com. Live. Thanks.

How did you first hear the track that Miles and Alex made? I think Mars just played it. And then I just had it. And I don't know, I just felt really emotional. It felt poorly. And bright. And so I just got in to just keep playing it. Yeah? So what made you want to reach back? Creo que era esto. The love will set us free. It just felt super fitting to talk about love. Fear can be dressed in a form of protection. Fear can be the culprit of slowing progression.

Can you tell me what you were thinking about in terms of your flow and delivery in the verses? I just wanted it to feel conversational. Like I could just say this to you. And also, I think I love that style of like rap where it's in the pocket. Why did you want it to feel conversational? Because I think this is a conversation. Like let's talk about it. Like if we were going around in a circle and everyone had to say what they thought love and fear was about.

This is what I would say and I can pass the mic and let's have a discussion, do you know? Like, I don't know anything. And that's why I say I think in the lyrics. I think that love is forgiving yourself. It might not be. Yeah. Like I don't know. from what I think and what I feel, that's what I think it is. And it's like once upon a time, I probably thought love was pain.

If you don't feel pain, then that's not love, then is it? Yeah. And so I think yeah, it changes and I'm just getting more understanding of what I think it means to me. This is a wider conversation. I think we fear all the answers so we don't ask the questions, yeah. I think that shit is a lethal weapon. I think we fear being naked from the fear of rejection, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The why are we obsessed with seeking perfection? And then we get to the end part.

Yeah, after those first two verses, the song kind of shifts. It was an accident that last verse. I'd had a section looping, I was probably working on editing for something in Pro Tools and I had this loop going. It was just a loop in. You know, when she heard that, you know, she just got writing immediately. Can't hold me down'cause I've always been Like, just keep looping it and I'll just keep going. That was a cool moment because it was so accidental. You couldn't write it.

I love how in this section Change the word of the sample. Like Free to three, depending on the context of what you're saying. Yeah. Do you have a favorite line from the first one? I like Auntie Cymbi what she called me when my niece turned three. That's my favorite too. 'Cause I have a niece and y that just that's so sweet. It's like a little emotional dagger you just like snuck in.

Can you tell me about the strings that are also in this track? How did you end up deciding to add those? I struggled with a feeling that the chorus, you know, the main wishing that the love will set us free section didn't feel for want of a better term, chorusy enough. And I always had in my back of my mind some of the initial references, you know, the Jackson Five stuff had audacious uh string lines. So he teamed up with an amazing string arranger, Rosie Danvers.

She came round to the studio one day and I sang some some ideas, loose ideas, and she went away for ten days or so and kind of arranged some of the ideas that I sang, you know. And then we were fortunate enough to get one string day across the whole record. You know, which includes maybe six or seven songs with strings on.

So we're in a studio called Rack in London. We have a power cut in the middle of the day, the whole studio blackout. Nothing's working. So I'm like, oh my day. We literally have this one day. You can imagine how expensive a day with full string section, you know, in a great studio in London costs you for the power to go down, so it became quite

stressful very quickly. We had candles lit and we had to rewire pretty much the whole studio to bring in external power on these, you know, it was really quite a stressful day. the players rehearsed it in the dark. It was like we're flying through the songs or whatever. So we get to three and it might have been like the second to last song we had to do strings on. But because it wasn't a priority and we're running out of time, we're like, Oh, can we just do the stuff that

we need to get strings for. But Rosie was just like, let's just do this, it'll take twenty minutes, bang, bang, bang. And as soon as the first like note comes in with the strings I never forget me and Mom just looked at each other like, yo. Everything about the song made even more sense. It just felt so classic and it just worked. It was perfect.

And it did just add, you know, when I was saying I was looking for something to give that chorus that feeling of it landing and feeling special, the strings. Experience And it might change, you know what I mean? Maybe in ten years. Not so much about self self. That might be an idea. Yeah. You know, of what I think love is. I needed to hear as reminders to myself. earlier like I don't really know anything. So I think I'm down to chat.

Mm-hmm. And now here's Free by Little Sims in its entirety. To learn more, visit Songexploder.net, where you'll find links to buy or stream free. This episode was produced by me, Mary Dolan, Craig Ely, and Kathleen Smith, with production assistance from Tiger Bisco. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent,

listener supported, Artist Owned Podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me, you can sign up for my newsletter, which you can find on the Song Exploder website, And if you want to support the show another way, you can get a Song Exploder t-shirt at Songexploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. Thanks for listening.