DJ Shadow - Mutual Slump

Introducing DJ Shadow

0:00You'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 Hirwe.

0:11I'm going to be on tour playing some shows this fall. I'm going to be in London on Wednesday, November 18th. I'm going to be performing solo at Rough Trade Records on Denmark Street, and I'm going to be in conversation about my music, moderated by one of my favorite actors and writers, Matthew Bainton. And a ticket to the show also gets you a copy of my album on vinyl or CD. And in December, I'm going to be on tour supporting S. Carey. We're going to be playing a bunch of shows in the Northeast U.S. So I hope to see you in one of those places. You can find all the details and get links to tickets at songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live.

0:50This episode is sponsored by LinkedIn. Anyone who's ever had to spend money on marketing knows how tricky it can be to feel like you've spent that money wisely. Well, with LinkedIn ads, you can be sure that you'll get a great return on your investment. You can target your campaigns by company, industry, job title, and more. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash songexploder. That's linkedin.com slash songexploder. Terms and conditions apply.

1:29Thanks to Quince for sponsoring Song Exploder. I have this Quince cashmere sweater that's become my go-to in the fall. And it's one of those pieces where, as soon as I started wearing it, I couldn't really remember what I used to wear before I had it. It's the Mongolian cashmere quarter-button sweater in black. And those kinds of staples are what Quince is known for. Jeans, t-shirts, jackets, sweaters, and actually a lot more, too. And everything at Quince is priced 50% to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality, not brand markup.

2:06Their 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters start at just $60. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. It's now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know that it was Song Exploder. You'll be supporting the show. 30 years ago, DJ Shadow released his debut album, Introducing, and it changed my life.

2:36I listened to it so much. And when I first started Song Exploder, he was on my list of dream guests. And then 10 years ago, that dream came true, and I got to make an episode with him in honor of the 20th anniversary of the album. Well, now it's the 30th anniversary, and DJ Shadow is on tour this fall, celebrating it with a set that just focuses on songs from Introducing. And there's a special edition of the album on vinyl. So in the spirit of all that, I wanted to go back to this episode of Song Exploder from back in 2016.

3:08Here it is. In 1996, Josh Davis, a.k.a. DJ Shadow, released his first album, Introducing. It's been hailed pretty much universally as one of the best albums of the 90s, and Time magazine included it in its top 100 albums of all time. It changed the face of hip-hop and electronic music and helped define the trip-hop genre. Now, for the 20th anniversary of the release, DJ Shadow breaks down the song Mutual Slump.

Building the drum break

3:45This is Josh Davis, a.k.a. DJ Shadow. The record store on the cover of Introducing, called Records, in Sacramento, California, that record store was my muse. If I felt like I ever was kind of hitting a creative brick wall, I would get in my car, I would drive to go to that record store once or twice a week for the entire duration that I was working on the album. And just spend a few hours looking at records, listening to records, and generally without really even trying very hard, I would chance upon something that inevitably unlocked whatever jam I was in creatively.

4:26And that's where I found the drums, which come from a, well, a European prog jazz record. I think the only part of the original sample that I kind of left pretty much unchanged was the noisy intro, the kind of drum fill with the guitar feedback over the top. I don't like to just loop, you know, a one bar break.

5:06The rhythmic basis, the breakbeat, has to be the strong foundation upon which everything else is built. If you chop a breakbeat and there's five or six different kicks you can use, five or six different snares you can use, what I like to do is alternate between the three or four strongest kicks, the three or four strongest snares, until you've reassembled a kind of super version of the original.

5:42The secretive component of sampling and crate digging and looking for beats, looking for samples goes all the way back to the very beginning of hip hop culture. DJs who discovered breakbeats that made the audience react had a secret weapon and DJs used to cover up the artist name and song titles to protect that knowledge. But again, that culture, as much as I contribute to it and aspire to it, can also be a little bit pretentious.

6:16So I always felt that you have to balance the kind of secretive beat digger philosophy of sampling by sampling just, you know, something almost intentionally really obvious. The Bjork album had come out maybe six months prior to me starting work on this track. She was kind of a big presence in the UK when I was living there in the summer of 95. I liked the record and I liked the idea of taking what is kind of an obvious sample and putting my own spin on it.

7:08One of the things that I liked to play with a lot is taking samples and slowing them way down.

7:15For samples that are prone to melancholy anyway, they seem to become even more so when they're slowed way down. At some point it crossed my mind, oh, I wonder what the Bjork sample would sound like over these drums. Realized I would have to pitch it way down, which I was happy to do. And then realized, oh, you know, there's something here. Between the drums and the Bjork sample, I mean, already the song had a certain feel.

7:53To me, the song had a foreboding, it had a melancholy, but it also had an anger. During the kind of intense drum break section, there's a little sound and it just kind of felt like this disoriented, almost kind of a warning sound. And to me, it just fell in line with the energy of the song. I mean, I felt like the song was approaching this kind of almost unhinged place. And that sound inserted in the way that it was between the drums, on one hand, was kind of a slick production moment, like something I was proud of on a producer level.

8:29But it also touched the right kind of foreboding that the track was conveying already anyway. I wanted to make instrumental music because, to me, it seemed like a challenge. I wasn't just making beats that sounded like they needed a vocalist on them. I was trying to make arrangements that worked in an instrumental form and kept your attention and evolved. To me, it was almost like a more difficult task.

Recording vocal samples

9:01But I didn't want the album to be devoid of words. I was scared, I have to admit, at first. I never had a cat before. The female voice on the track is actually my wife. At the time, we were dating, and her name is Lisa. For this part, you kind of have to use your imagination because I recorded the album at Dan the Automator's studio at his house that he was still living in with his parents at the time. The studio was actually contained within an unincorporated part of the house.

9:35So you actually had to climb up a ladder. You had to open a hatch. And then you were in this extremely small space that was really only big enough for a mix board, some outboard gear, and a rolling chair. And you couldn't stand up. You would hit your head on the ceiling. And the person who was recording something, whether it was a rapper or, in this case, my now wife, she was in a pitch black area below where I was. And you had to close the hatch again, and they would have to sort of feel where the microphone was and talk.

10:12Five feet under. But it actually lent itself really well to her just sort of being in a space in her own mind. And I recorded her for probably about 20 minutes. Do you feel like Darth Vader?

10:25And I'm Princess Leia. She was raised in Japan until age eight and then came to America. And she talks about literally seeing the movie Xanadu, which would place it at 1980. And she lived in Southern California. So roller skating was a thing. And she's seen people do it in movies. I didn't give her any kind of direction because I knew that the more I said to her, the more it would be contrived. And she just kind of steers herself in all these unusual directions and finds herself saying things that, you know, they're odd.

10:58I just wanted to try to capture some of that. And then I just sort of sampled the pieces from her dialogue that I felt somehow made sense in the track. Then we came to America. South Xanadu. South Xanadu. And that's all I wanted to do. Rollerscape.

11:19The saxophone that kind of runs through the end section, to me, there's a despair and unhinged quality to it. It's kind of a free jazz expression. And with a little bit of needle dropping, it made it even more unhinged. I mean, there's a point where literally I'm picking up the needle and dropping it at random almost.

11:58And then the pullback right at the very end before the track rides out. The flute exists in a natural state in the same note structure, but the vibes do not.

12:24So I kind of bent the vibes to match the flute. Putting samples in tune with each other was something that I really wanted to achieve in my music. And this is before time stretch technology and pitch bending and stuff like that. It was a factor of luck and a factor of will. I didn't want it to be simple, you know, there's new things happening every eight bars, every four bars, changes and bridges and places where it kind of goes abstract.

13:02And then there's time signature changes. And I didn't want it to be intellectual by any means, but I just wanted it to feel different.

13:10I wanted other producers to listen to it and be like, how did he do this?

Mutual Slump in full

13:15And now, here's Mutual Slump by DJ Shadow in its entirety.

13:45Let's get started.

14:15Let's get started. I abandoned you, that's all I wanted to do, rollerskate.

15:15Five feet under.

15:45Do you feel like Darth Vader? I was scared, I have to admit it first. I've never had a cat before. I'm not scared, I have to admit it.

16:18I've never had a cat before. I've never had a cat before. I've never had a cat before. I've never had a cat before. guitar solo

17:05guitar solo

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Credits and closing notes

20:34Song Exploder is produced by me, Craig Ely, Mary Dolan, Kathleen Smith, and Tiger Biscop. Carlos Lerma makes our episode illustrations, 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 subscribe to my newsletter, which you can find on the Song Exploder website. You can find out about live events at songexploder.net slash live,

21:07and get a Song Exploder shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi Keish your way. Thanks for listening. There's a great show here on Radiotopia called Only If You Get Caught. It's a podcast that's dedicated to taking a closer look at cheating scandals. This season, they're covering stories like the rise and fall of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried.

21:41Plus, they investigate why people keep cheating at marathons, despite getting nothing out of it. What can cheating scandals teach us about the world? Listen and find out. Only If You Get Caught, hosted by Patrick Redford and produced by Alex Sujong-Loughlin, from Defector Media and Radiotopia. They're releasing episodes all fall, wherever you get your podcasts, including on YouTube. I'll see you next time.