Lorde - Sober

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. This episode contains explicit language. Lorde just put out a new song and announced that she has a new album coming out this June. She's also touring in the fall with some past song exploder guests like Blood Orange and Empress Of as support.

And so hearing all of this news these days, I thought it would be nice to revisit her Song Exploder episode from twenty seventeen. She came over to the studio and I have a very cute photo of her playing with my dog from right before we recorded the interview. Here's her episode on sober. Lorde is a Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, and producer. My full name is Ella Maria Lani Yelich Ocona. So it's a whole thing.

Her second album, Melodrama, debuted at number one on the charts in june twenty seventeen, five months. Before her 21st birthday. In this episode, Ella breaks down her song Sober. You'll hear how it started with the original demos she made with her co-producer Jack Antonoff and how the song changed over the course of working on it.

My name is Lorge, I'm breaking down my song's sober. I remember I had spent the summer in New Zealand and I was reeling from this summer which was very much like wild and fluorescent, that first summer on the cusp of being an adult. I'd just come out of a relationship and was just like drinking all the time. I'm just like either like sleeping or getting ready for like what we were gonna do that night.

When you come out of a relationship, you just want to fill the quiet as best you can. You know, you're like, I just don't want to deal with this quite yet. So I'm gonna make every moment full and social and and busy and loud and then I won't have to think about it. So this song in particular was set at a party. But uh There's such angst to it. I and this like very distinct memory of

Standing in the corner of my lounge having like a very tense conversation with somebody and people on my back porch dancing. The DNA of sober is wanting to tell someone how you feel and knowing they feel the same way and needing for the the evening's theater to come and have all the characters going and then you can let your guard down. That was kind of the spread of the night which became sober. I worked on this record with my co-producer and co-writer Jack Antonov.

People sort of tell you you have to come to LA. They send you to all these like fancy studios and I think when you're beginning a project that can be terrifying. So there's Westlake recording studios, which is like very fancy, and Michael Jackson recorded there and

I couldn't make anything good there. And then we discovered this room down the back, which is like a production room. We called it the Rat Nest. It's like this Tiny little room, very dirty, and that room really was the room where Sova started to take shape. Your whole thing started on the Juno 106. And I just recorded these vocals. Yeah. moody, emotional journey, I knew exactly where the chords had to go. I was literally pulling Jack's sleeve, going, no, no, no, here.

Can you do it like this, a plan? Through a lot of this process, you know, I had such specific ideas about all of this stuff. I knew exactly what it was so early. And he was very open to me playing God over the writing session and such an. intense way with that, which is cool. And a lot of people, you know, I think would not be so good at doing that. For a long time, Jack was like, I like the song. I don't I don't know if I quite, you know, visualize it like you do and I'm

Trust me. This is my passion project. Like so it does the verse and then it goes. And it's an uneven number of bads. weird thing that my brain absolutely needs. And like props to Jack, that's why I love Jack so much. He was sort of trying to get his head around it when we were writing it and he was like, oh, there's an extra bar and

I said, is that wrong? He was like, no. If Jack had been like, no, we can't do that, I think that would have really changed the course of like what we ended up doing for this album. But the fact that he's like, no, it's cool. We can make it work. So April 2016, we go to Coachella, Jack and I. We're in a studio and we can work in the day and go to the festival at night.

So we went to the studio and I was like, I love the idea of it just snapping into this little groove. And I sung Jack the rhythm of the groove that I wanted and he made it really quickly. Jack is always just like going around hitting a bunch of shit and the main sound in this is the little bongo he like hit with a drumstick. And then I I went It's vocal sample. It's me going night, midnight, lose my mind, I midnight, lose my mind. As soon as I heard that first loop, I went hi.

And I really clipped it kind of princy or MJ-ish and uh and just put it over the top. So the song was like really intense 20 seconds, it just flipped into the funnest groove ever. And, you know, it felt like changing the radio station or something, which I was into. It was cool. And it stayed like that for a really long time.

So flash forward, New York, November 7th, my birthday. We're in a studio. We're at that stage with the album where we needed someone to take us out of our zone a little bit. And we meet.

Millet, who is very wonderful, works on Frank Ocean, and realized he is my favorite type of producer. He wants to hear you talk about the genesis of the song and the emotional energy and like I'm sort of used to clipping my language for technical people, you know,'cause people don't want to hear about the colour of an evening or the way a light looked on a wall or whatever, but he really does and it really helps him do great work.

And so with the song I was like I just met him and I was kind of just like looking at the floor and telling him the story of the song and he was like, Okay, cool. We booked the big room downstairs at electric lady for him to muck around in and uh we went down there the next day and Malay has taken that groove.

That groove that came in right at the end of the song for that twenty seconds and underlaid it underneath the whole song. And he's taken out these really serious minor chords that were like the chords of my fucking This buoyant, urgent, insistent party court. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. The song feels right for the first time in almost a year. It was incredible. We

flawed by it it had the movement that it needed. It instantly felt like we were in the vignette that we'd been chasing for a long time. He was like, yeah, I had to uh sacrifice your perfect chords.

It's okay.'Cause it's it worked so well. And that was really exciting to me. So it really needed to just be pushed off the edge by him. Yeah, it was so funny that that didn't come from me, but you know, sometimes know what something deserves to be, it takes somebody else's good idea to get it there and for there to be fresh ears involved. And I think in that session I also came up with the uh little stop. It goes More with Lord.

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, Rishikesh Herway. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career.

Yeah. 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. This album is the product. All of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and 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, Samine 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 get tickets for the shows on my website RishiCage. C O or just go to songexploder.com. Net slash live. That's song expansion. Slash live. Thanks.

We recorded the vocal for this verse with Kook Hurral. Cook is a legend. He just records vocals, that's all he does. He does all of Rihanna's vocals. And in a song like this, especially this verse, the timing is like very syncopated. We're sleeping through all the days. Days go as long as it can, and then it would have to snap back and go to the next part. And my favorite thing to do with vocals is get so specific. drop more of regret or anger or lust or

tiny smile on this word which you rip away on the next word. You know, I I'm really into slight emotional molecular chemistry and getting this vocal bouncing off the walls perfectly. Could not have done that without Kook. Was sleepin' through all the days, I'm actin' like I don't see every ribbon you used to tie yourself to me.

Second verse to the song is one of my favorite things I've done with vocal production. I'm a big fan of thinking about the characters that my vocals are playing in songs. I always think about that and There's always those moments in a party where you sort of throwing your head back and forth and being like, What is this like fun house of terror that I'm running around and you know?

Especially if you're drunk, who knows what else is going on, you know. And I love this idea of there aren't people in your house, there are just bodies walking around and you only care about one person at the party anyway and it's like these little kind of voices pinging out maybe they belong to these detached bodies. Oh God, I'm closin' my teeth around this The two We basically recorded straight harmonies through the verse and then chose little moments for them to ping out here and there.

Certain harmonies only exist on a certain word. It's like all those little voices in your head that are like telling you someone's bad news. There's like so many different vibes that the vocals in that second verse take on. Can we keep popping?

Hey. Just these like little bratty kind of shouts in the back of the song. So I feel like the lead is you saying what you wanna say and then sometimes those are what slips out. Imagine this narrator like trying to keep those voices in and just ah and you sort of oh shit, cover your mouth, you know, ah ah it's just like popping out all over the show. There's always an element of strange feedback ticking away at the back of a Jack Antinoff song to really like give it body and uh I love that.

This is some classic Jack Antonov shit right there. Jack's always doing a lot of that, taking a sound and pitching it and distorting it and pulling it to a weird place. Oh, and then I had the idea for the horns. You remember all that great Hudson Mohawk looter stuff? I mean it was the best. I was raised on tonight. Like that's ten percent of why I make the music that I make.

I was like, we just need like a ton of brass, you know. Our engineer Laura, Laura Sisk, who is the greatest engineer in America. I sort of let her take charge of this horn part. So the first line which eventually was played on a horn but was first on that Juno was the I was like, we have to just get triumphant there. So we started with Tenner and Barry Sacks. I was like, we definitely need trumpet.

We were sitting there and we just kept telling them to play harder and harder and harder and they were like, this is it sounds like our instruments are breaking. And we were like, yeah, yeah. That's 100% the vibe we're going for. Just play it kind of inappropriately. I want to hear the edges of your instrument. And then we're going to be able to do Yeah.

Can you hear that? That's a fucking tiger's roar. There is low-key tiger's roar starting that bridge, which was just the kind of like ridiculous dramatic. flourish that it needed. We were in one of the last two sessions for this song. And Jack was just like going through he just has these endless banks of bizarre samples. And we just find this Tiger's roar. Which I thought was so cool.

I love the way it swells the top of that part. That's like one of my favorite sneaky things on that song. So next time you're listening to Sober, please enjoy the Tiger's Roar at the top of the bridge because it's our baby and we love it.

New Zealand is so beautiful and every day I just found so moved by the light and like all of these bodies and the water and people on my back porch dancing. It really does feel like a very specific vignette from two years ago. It's a very specific, beautiful image to me, but it definitely feels like The past. coming into, you know, early adulthood and every party felt so monumental and so Yeah.

there's a reason I wrote an entire record about partying. But it was very interesting, like you finish the record and that door really does close. My research trip ended essentially. I did all the like exploration I needed to do and It's funny to look back on remembering these evenings. And injecting so much meaning.

so transcendent and feeling a lot of affection for that time but also like, you know, it's a little more chill now. I'm like, I uh not making every drink like it's the last drink I'm ever gonna make, you know. And now here's sober by Lord in its entirety. I'm dying of those. Jack and Jill got fucked up and possessive when it got To learn more, visit songexploder.net slash Lord. You'll find links to buy or stream sober, and you can watch the music video.

This episode was originally produced by me and Christian Kuhns with production assistance from Olivia Wood. This reissue was made by me and Mary Dolan. 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. You can follow me and Song Exploder on Instagram, and you can get a Song Exploder t shirt at Songexploder.net slash. I'm Rishike Shirwe. Thanks for listening.