Hrishikesh Hirway made an album about running out of time — in no time

AT&T Sponsorship

0:00Support for this show comes from AT&T. Summer. It's when we share more time, more memories, and more photos. And at AT&T, the iPhone 17 Pro is your summer essential. It's center stage front camera auto adjusts the frame to fit everyone into group selfies. You don't even have to turn your phone. And AT&T makes sharing those pics with everyone easy. Right now at AT&T, ask how you can get iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible iPhone trade-in, any condition. Requires trade-in iPhone 15 Plus or higher, excluding iPhone 16E and 17E. Requires eligible plan. Terms and

0:34restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit AT&T.com slash iPhone for details.

LIMPY Introduction

0:40Support for this show comes from LIMPY, the Lillehammer Institute of Music Production and Industries. LIMPY is a one-year program in Norway built by hit songwriters where you learn music the way music actually gets made, in the studio every day, alongside the people doing it professionally. LIMPY believes that classrooms don't create artists, studio sessions do. So rather than pitch you LIMPY, I'd rather introduce you to one of their graduates, a songwriter who went from a childhood dream to a billboard number one. My name is Haley Joel. I'm an artist and songwriter.

1:11Haley knew from an early age she wanted to be an artist. I think I just loved being a storyteller and I loved being able to express myself. Probably in middle school, I was like, yeah, I really want to do this for the rest of my life. But wanting a career in music and knowing how to actually build one are two very different things. I think I've always dealt with like a little bit of imposter syndrome. But at the same time, I will say like, I always knew that it would happen. I just didn't know exactly how or when. My plan was to move to LA and just like see what happened. I had a few contacts, but

1:47I stumbled across LIMPY. It was just not being in a classroom that was so attractive. And this seemed like exactly what I wanted to do because it was only one year, not even. And I just didn't want to waste a minute. So it kind of felt like a no brainer to me, but it just felt like a fever dream. A fever dream about to drop her in a tiny town in the Norwegian mountains. If you're interested, you can apply now at limpymusic.com. That's L-I-M-P-I music.com. Applications close May 31st

2:19and stick around to find out what Haley did at LIMPY and how she became a hit songwriter after in a little bit.

Switched On Pop Intro

2:26You're listening to Switched On Pop, where musicians take apart their songs piece by piece and tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi K. Sherway.

2:36Welcome to Switched On Pop. I'm songwriter, Charlie Harding. I'm musicologist, Nate Sloan. And we're joined by the amazing Rishi K. Sherway. Rishi K. Sherway, you are a musician. You're a songwriter. You're a producer. You're a composer. You are a maker of podcasts. Of course, the great music podcast Song Exploder. But we want to have you on today to reveal some of the most important lessons about making records through your very own music and your new album, In

3:09the Last Hour of Light. Here's your song, Things Change Even Now. Welcome. Thank you so much. So great to be here, especially with both of you at the same time. This is such an honor. I was also thinking as you were listing all those nouns, I think I often hover over nouns wondering at what point you get to call yourself the noun. I feel much

3:48more comfortable with the verbs. I can say like, I make music or I have a podcast that I make or yeah, I am trying to learn pottery. But like the idea of then saying, you know, I am a composer. I have composed a score for films like three times in my life. But I don't know at what point you get entry into the club where you get to put the blank or on your name. Yes. I like adjectives myself. You know, handsome, talented, hyper intelligent business come to mind. That's I'm good with

4:20those. Well, I feel like this is a great place to begin because you talk so much about processing creativity. And I want to do that around your projects. Before we get into your music, I want to

Song Exploder Discussion

4:33talk Song Exploder for a minute. Could you share how you introduce your podcast each week with us? Yeah. At the top of every episode, I say you're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. Why piece by piece? Well, one of the things that I was most excited about when I started the show was the idea of sharing people's stems, sharing how a song looked from the person's perspective who made it.

5:03Because as a bedroom musician for so many years, I knew that I would spend so much time working on just like one little part, one section, you know, the mix on these three guitars that we're going to all be playing this one interlocking finger picking part. But then that just becomes one small layer within the entire stereo mix. And there's drums and there's vocals and there's all these other things going on. And that's the goal. That's the end result. But I just felt like people would

5:38really appreciate hearing the individual pieces as well. I sort of thought of it like when you get to try the individual ingredients that go into your favorite dish and then you start to understand what you're actually eating. Like here's the cooked meal. Here's the cooked final thing. But that little hint of this thing, that's ginger. And here's what ginger tastes like on its own. So you get a sense for both what went into it and how it transformed to become the thing that you're experiencing. So one of the reasons I love listening to Song Exploder each week is that it is so clearly made by

6:12a musician. So tell us a little bit about how you got your start in music. Yeah. Well, I have been playing in bands since high school. I was playing drums in bands. And by the end of school, I started to learn guitar and started to try writing songs of my own. And then when I got to college, I really wanted to find that again. Then I did. I found some bandmates and we made our first album. And I started touring and one of the guys in the band was a year ahead. So when we were

6:46seniors, he was gone. And so I started just playing shows on my own, just playing under my own name and then changed to the name, the 1am radio. And I, I did that. That was sort of my moniker for the next 12 years.

Music Career Background

7:13I love that you were the 1am radio because I feel like 1am radio has a very particular voice. Nate used to do late night radio hosting when he was back in college and you had a different radio voice at that point. Yes. Joe flowers after hours spinning you the best in jazz and blues from 2am to 530 in the morning every Monday night. Wow. And does Joe flowers exist in any form these days? No, he's sort of transformed into the character Joe treble, who is a forensic musicologist investigator

7:48who has made, have made a few appearances on the podcast, but no, he, she just, he just lives in the, in the archives at this point. Yeah. But you guys, I feel like you have many voices. I love listening to your various shows because depending on who you're chatting with, different parts of your personality emerge. And when you're on your own and doing the narration for song exploder, I think we really get that 1am radio voice really hushed. It draws you in so much. It's like, I want to listen closer because when someone talks more quietly, this is important. And with 1am radio, you had

8:21some sync placements, you were releasing music, but then you go off and begin the podcast. Why did you start song exploder? The 1am radio kind of felt like it, it fell into a ditch or I drove it into a ditch or something. I was stuck somewhere around 2012. The last 1am radio album came out in April of 2011, actually almost exactly 15 years ago. And that was my fourth album and I'd been doing it for over a decade.

Starting Song Exploder

9:12And it felt like the project and my music had kind of grown in this slow, incremental way and maybe that was normal. And maybe that's fine and healthy, but, but I really got in my head about it because for the last few years, I had finally kind of achieved having music be my, my living, what I had dreamt of being a musician full-time. I'd gotten there a few years ago. And as exciting as that was, it also changed my relationship to music and what my expectations were and sort of what

9:43the pressure was, because now I'm just trying to pay my bills with it and not just like the bills today, but also could I pay the bills tomorrow and the month after that. So I felt like I really needed this to work beyond just from an artistic level. I was like, well, this is now my job. How am I going to do this? And I put a lot into the fourth album in terms of expectations of like, okay, maybe this could be the one that goes, maybe this could be the one that, that changes what tier of artist

10:14I am or something like that. And then that didn't end up happening. We got to do cool things and I got to play some great shows, but it felt like an incremental change as opposed to an exponential one. So that just felt like I couldn't see a way forward after that. I couldn't see a way forward rather to that exponential changes. Like I just put all of that. It took me four years to make that album from the previous album. Maybe that's it. Like maybe I can't do expect anything else. Maybe I can't do any better than this. And it's just going to continually be just like an inch forward, an inch forward.

10:47But meanwhile, the rest of my life is moving much faster than that. So I kind of felt like I needed to take a break. Every time I would try writing songs at that point, I felt like nothing could live up to those expectations, you know, and I wouldn't even let a song breathe, you know, like I would play a G on a guitar and I'd be like, derivative, you know, I like, I couldn't even get started. So I was feeling kind of stuck and trying to figure out what I was going to do. And I think in the

11:18meantime, I was exploring like, what other ideas do I have if I'm not putting my foot on the gas as hard as I can just on music and just on this project, what else might I be open to? And so in those next couple of years, I did a whole bunch of different things. I scored a couple of movies. Those my first chance scoring films. I started another band called Moores with Lakeith Stanfield, where I didn't have to write lyrics because that was the biggest part of the pressure for me. I was just making the beats.

11:49I loved working with him. And so I would just, you know, pass him instrumentals and he'd, he'd write to them. And then that was a really fun project. And one of the other projects was this idea for a podcast where I could interview somebody and using their stems, get the inside story. What was their perspective on making the song? And while they tell that story,

12:22people could hear all of these parts that led to the final thing. 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 Hirwe. So this is something of a return for you. This is 15 years since your last album. And this new one, In the Last Hour of Light, my favorite time of day. We want to explode this

In the Last Hour of Light Album

12:51album a little bit with you. Let's start with the opening track, Stray Dogs. Maybe we can take it apart piece by piece. Sounds great.

13:18Beautiful stuff. Thank you. I just heard all these new things I had not heard before in the track. Like I heard this, like, there's like some background synth. It's really haunting and beautiful. Yeah. Okay. So to get into your record, I spoke with a friend of yours. My name is Philip Weinrobe and I'm a music producer living in the Hudson Valley. Philip Weinrobe is your producer of this album and he's produced many of my favorite records by Adrian Lenker, Tom Berlin, Theo Katzman, Billy Martin, so many great things. He's one of these

13:51producers with a very unique process on how he makes a record. These are my standard working parameters. Basically, we're going to get a bunch of musicians together who you don't know and who have never heard your songs and they won't even like necessarily know your name. Like they're just going to show up and be like, hey, who, yeah, nice to meet you. What's your name? And then you're going to like literally play them your song on the piano or on the guitar. And then we'll like spend two or three hours and like figure it all out together. And then

14:22that's going to be the record. Why on earth would you expose yourself to this method of writing? And how would we hear that being revealed in a song like Stray Dogs? When I first reached out to Phil, it was because I was a fan of his work. The Adrian Lenker records are so important to me and I love them so much. All I knew was the final product.

14:47I had no idea how he actually got there, but I asked if he'd be interested and sent demos and got word back saying, yep, super into it. Let's get on a phone call. And so I was like, great. Okay. Hey, this is a big deal for me because I'd never worked with a producer like this before. I'd never made an album with a producer on all the one name radio stuff. I produced everything and I was excited

15:18about that idea. I was excited about the idea of sort of getting out of my head and letting collaboration in because inside my own head, you know, like before, like that was the danger zone. I had already learned that within the confines of my own head, I could get paralyzed and, you know, just start to feel really bad. But if I brought in other people, I could rely on their enthusiasm, even if I lost my own. Okay. But this is crazy to me because what Phil told me when you had those conversations,

15:50it was not one conversation. He said it was hours of processing before even getting in the room because, you know, this method of making stuff is a bit uncanny. And he says that, you know, there's a whole purpose behind it. I just have always found that like, that's where in the creative process too, so much of the good stuff is. It's like in the beginning and in the initial excitement phase of something, as opposed to the like highly detailed, combed over phase. It also like involves creating like

16:24a sense of like danger and like high stakes for the people involved, because that's, what's going to like make you feel like awake and alive in that creative performance. You had used the word danger, like feeling that it was even approaching this. And yet he wants things to make, be even more dangerous. Yeah. Um, when we spoke, I said, you know, okay, so I have those demos you heard, you know, and I actually had taken those demos pretty far. They were, some of them were very fleshed out,

16:55had a lot of production and stuff behind them, partly because that's just what I need to do in order to wrap my head around what the song is and what it means and, you know, what I'm going for. So they had full arrangements with me playing lots of instruments and harmonies and things like that. And I said, like, do you want to work the way that I had worked before? Where it was like, I'll give you my recordings and we can add to them and maybe edit from them and turn them into the final recordings. Or would you rather start over? And he was like, oh, no, no, we'll start over. And I was like, oh, okay, that's fine. And then he told me this idea that like, we'll have,

17:31you know, session players come in and we'll record everything in a matter of hours. I was like, in a mat, what? Like I have songs that I've released that I spent literally years on that had lived in some version for years as I tweaked it over months and months and months. So the idea of the actual commitment to the recording taking just a few hours felt, yeah, dangerous is a good word. Reckless, maybe.

18:01Is there a song on the album that really exemplifies this dangerous, reckless process of making music? I mean, I think it's really, it's really across all of it because one of the things that was most dangerous and the scariest part for me was that in addition to recording the music this way, I was supposed to record my vocals live as well. And that was unfathomable to me because it's just so vulnerable. You know, to sing and to sing these words, I want to deliver

18:45them the best way I possibly can. And so like, I need several shots at it. Let me do it the normal way. Let me, let me take several takes and then we can put together one comped version. You know, like that's just the way that's normal to me. And the idea that he's like, no, no, we're going to, you're going to sing while the rest of the band plays. And I said, what if I don't get it right? And everybody else is great. Or what if I do get it right, but somebody else messes up? He said, if the thing that we're going to focus on is you're singing. So we won't use a take that doesn't feel

19:16good in terms of your singing. And if somebody messes up or whatever, it's fine. He was like, no. And also, you know, we're not going to play with headphones. We're not going to use a click track. So I can't even like listen to myself as I'm singing. He said, no, I want everybody to hear what everybody's actually doing. I want you to all be tuned into each other. He said, if you think about your favorite records, I bet if you went back and you listened, you'd realize how many moments where the singer is not singing perfectly in tune. And not only do you

19:48love them despite that, I think you might love them because of that. Like all those little moments make it feel like real people are making music in a room together. And so that's what we should go for. That's what you should aim for. And just trust me. So anyway, so I think that Stray Dogs is just as good of an example as all of these on all of these songs. I'm singing with that method. Could I propose a song that I feel like we can really hear that method come through? And I think hear a lot of that vulnerability in the second chorus of The Ocean. You have made it through. You

20:21survived? We're hearing your voice with no breaks, no cuts, no comps, and this very intimate moment of reflection. My favorite part of that recording is one thing that was overdubbed, which is my friend Oide's voice.

20:52I feel like part of what we're learning is that, you know, you begin in this moment of sort of writer's block and you go and you get to learn all these amazing things from all these best musicians in the world. You've spoken to all of my personal heroes. I imagine many of yours. And the entire

21:23time you have been breaking things down piece by piece, listening to stems project is the exact opposite rather than approaching releasing your next album from all of the wisdom that you have learned breaking things down piece by piece. Instead, you are baking the thing whole from the get go. What do you think that that gives the music and what did it give to you? I do have to recognize that like Song Exploder itself was born out of this idea of how I'd made music myself. You know, I'd always done things in this kind of layer by layer way, this kind of like

21:56half electronic, half folk bedroom recording style. And then even when I started working with other folks, a lot of them came from the same kind of tradition. So something built into my understanding of music was just what I brought to it personally. And so when I started Song Exploder, all of that assumption kind of went into it. I was like, well, of course you can hear every single piece on its own. You can isolate everything and hear exactly what's going on with nothing else. Because that was

22:27like the house I'd built for myself. And I'd just been living there. Phil said when I had my first reaction, I was like, this is a crazy way of making music. Like, what are you talking about? He said, it's not crazy, actually, that actually, for the majority of recorded music, that is how music was made. The thing that I was used to was a more recent phenomenon and actually quite a big departure from the quote unquote normal way of working. And he was just returning to that.

22:58It's funny because it just makes me think about there have been times when I haven't been able to do episodes of Song Exploder because someone didn't have isolated stems because they made music in this way. They're really like, yeah, we just put up a bunch of mics. And so here it is. So everything's in everything. And I was like, oh, I'm so sorry that that's not going to work for the for the podcast. And of course, I didn't know because it's not like you can still have great songs and popular songs that are made that way. I just it felt like I had to rewire my entire brain,

23:31not just from my own music career, but then from this whole second chapter of making the podcast. Support for the show comes from AT&T. You know, it's great about summer. All those plans we made, they finally make it out of the group chat. Seems like there's more time to fit everyone in. Whatever you've got in store this summer, capturing those moments is a must. And you can do that with iPhone 17 Pro from AT&T. The center stage front camera framing auto adjusts to fit everyone into group selfies. You don't even have to turn your phone. No awkward cropping or asking strangers to

24:01take it. Just the perfect group selfie every time. And AT&T makes sharing those moments with everyone easy because you got to share the pic or it didn't happen, right? Right now at AT&T, ask how you can get iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible iPhone trade-in, any condition. Requires trade-in of iPhone 15 plus or higher, excluding iPhone 16e and 17e. Requires eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit att.com slash iPhone for details. Support for the show comes from Limpy. Limpy believes classrooms don't create artists. Studio

24:35sessions do. It's a one-year program for songwriters, producers, and artists built by hit songwriters set in one of the most beautiful towns in Norway. I've been there. It's real. And when we left off, Haley Joel had just stepped off a train a few hours north of Oslo. And so it was like cloudy, kind of misty, but such a beautiful, quaint town. And I was just like, wow, this feels very European. Beautiful, sure. But also remote, which turns out is exactly the point. It was beneficial because you don't have any distractions. I think everyone should

25:07be stuck in the middle of Norway at some point in their life. Stuck in one of 20 studios with 70 other students from all over the world making songs from scratch. We were in the studios pretty much all day from 12 to late. I think I collaborated with close to 50 people. And every week, Limpy flies in professional mentors. We're talking Grammy winners, Billboard number one songwriters who provide insight into their process and help you in your session on your song. And then they would be around coming in and out of the studio,

25:38giving you real concrete feedback on your songs that you're working on. That direct exposure is exactly the kind of experience that helped Haley stop playing small. Before the program, I was really shy in songwriting rooms. And then after the program, I was able to really hold my own. She got there the only way that great songwriters actually get made. Lots of reps. I've recorded close to 100 songs. 100 songs. And that's not the only thing that she walked away with from Limpy. What I mostly got out of the program was kind of finding

26:09my voice. And just having the knowledge of pop songwriting always in my back pocket has been such a priceless tool. A priceless tool she'd soon use to write a billboard number one. More on that after the break. Apply now at limpymusic.com. That's L-I-M-P-I music.com. Applications close May 31st. Support for this show comes from AT&T. You know what's great about summer? All those plans we

26:41made, they finally make it out of the group chat. Seems like there's more time to fit everyone in. Whatever you've got in store this summer, capturing those memories is a must. And you can do that with the iPhone 17 Pro from AT&T. The center stage front camera framing auto adjusts to fit everyone into group selfies. You don't even have to turn your phone. No awkward cropping or asking strangers to take it. Just the perfect group selfie every time. And AT&T makes sharing those moments with everyone easy. Because you gotta share the pic or it didn't happen, right? Right now at AT&T,

27:13ask how you can get iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible iPhone trade-in. Any condition. Requires trade-in of iPhone 15 Plus or higher, excluding iPhone 16e and 17e. Requires eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit att.com slash iPhone for details.

Recording Technology History

27:30In preparing for this conversation, I thought it'd be fun to think of some other great records that were made in, as you said, the way that records were made for the first half of recorded music. The first track that I thought of in that classic style of recording is Chuck Berry's Maybelline. It's Maybelline. Why can't you be true? Oh, Maybelline. Why can't you be true? You done started doing the things you used to do.

28:01So Maybelline was recorded in 1955. That was Chuck Berry's first time in the studio. And it is a full take all the way through. I think you can hear the roughness of his guitar playing. You get all of the imperfections, but it was the 36th take. I don't think you got that same amount of takes when you were working with Philip. No, no. But that just sounds awesome, right? Even just listening to that little clip, you're making me have a thought that I don't know that I've

28:32articulated to myself before, which is this album, so much of it is about memory. Like the reason why it's called In the Last Hour of Light is because it's about time and it's about my relationship to time and feeling how much has gone by already and how little might be left. And so much of what I was writing about was about looking back on my life. So there's like a nostalgia sort of built into the content of the songs. And one of the reasons I started making music in the first place,

29:03one of the reasons I got excited about music was because of the first music that I used to listen to, which was old Bollywood recordings that my parents would play in the house. Stuff from around this time, from like the 50s and the 60s. It's a huge orchestra and singers, but I believe it's also all recorded live. And there's something in the sound of the recording, you know, it's the quality of the tape that makes it nostalgic, but it's also the quality of the playing and the performance and

29:35those, I think that hearing those imperfections and just that bleed. And it's not just that it's an old song or it's old tape. It is about the way it was performed that I think lends itself to that. Right. So I was just thinking that maybe actually the way that we made the album is actually really fitting for a bunch of songs that are about memory and were about reaching back to the earliest parts of my life because the earliest parts of my life were so influenced by music that was made and sounded

30:06this way. Maybe going through a bit more music history and some of my own influences, uh, in contrast to, uh, we heard about 36 takes. I want to play a song for you that happened in just one take. Well, shake it up, baby, now. Shake it up, baby. Twist and shout. Twist and shout. Come on, come on, come on, come on, baby, now. Come on, baby. Come on and work it on out. Twist and Shout by the Beatles was recorded in basically a one-day session at EMI, now Abbey Road,

30:40in 1963. They recorded the entirety, more or less, of Please Please Me in three-hour sprints. And Twist and Shout was recorded in one take at 10 p.m. After playing all day, John Lennon had blown his voice out. He'd had a cold. And to help his cold, he was like sucking on lozenges and drinking warm milk, which any vocal coach will tell you, you do not drink dairy when you need to record. And so they play that. And George Martin, the producer, says, you know, I don't know how they do it. We've been recording all day, but the longer we go, the better they get. Lennon remarked that

31:14the last song nearly killed me. My voice wasn't the same for a long time after. Every time I swallowed, it was like sandpaper. And I think it is that sandpaper-like quality, that imperfection, everything feeling broken that we can love in a recording. That's so funny. Yeah. I also got sick during, um, during recording. And so, um, I was, I was drinking so much tea and also, you know, um, yeah. Shout out Throat Coat. Yeah. Throat Coat tea and lozenges. Shout out Ricola. Yeah, exactly.

31:45Oh, Fisherman, yeah. Uh, just trying to, um, trying to get to someplace where I could sing. And, uh, yeah, on, on some of those songs, I'm definitely, you know, um, just barely out of the, like creeping out of congestion. I mean, I think that the, the imperfections in the voice can lend so much emotion. Uh, you also talked about the process of basically making the songs live with these session musicians. And so one other classic track that I found in my research that did just that was James

32:19Brown. When he was recording Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, you're basically hearing him instruct the band how to play this song. I got to catch it where I can swing and I can't swing, you know. It's a lot of wood here, man. That was good, though. Yeah, it's a thing. I'm very good. Preach it, man. This is a hit! That song was like seven minutes long. Wow. And so to speed it up, they literally sped it up and cut it down to a two minute single.

32:53Wow. Just because you do something in a take doesn't mean you can't manipulate the recording afterwards. That's true. Actually, we did speed one of the songs. Did you really? Yeah. What is the effect of doing that? Why would you do that? I think after the fact, we just felt like, you know, let's try it. Like, let's see if

33:25this just how it might change it a little bit, you know, just just bumping it up a tiny bit. And I think that's what we ended up using that for the album. We have some examples here of records that went from being, you know, 36 takes to one take to things that are slightly manipulated afterwards to make them a little more radio friendly. I also wanted to share some of the history of how we got out of making records as they always used to be made. Your assumption making Song Exploder and having been a musician making

33:56music in your room was like the way that we've always made things as you just put them apart together piece by piece. Like it makes the most sense, especially if you're like of the one man band variety, right? Where you're playing almost everything and you're singing and you're layering yourself on top. I was really surprised to learn that one of the earliest multi-tracked recordings was all the way back from 1941. Sidney Bechet has a track called The Sheik of Araby. And the way that he did this, this is a one man band. He plays everything. He would take a lathe recorded acetate disc, play it in the room and then record the sound

34:31of the acetate disc and him playing another instrument. So this is Sidney Bechet in 1941.

34:40There were so many artifacts, sound and noise in that way of recording. And so it's not until we get magnetic tape, which is first developed in Germany as a cleaner medium, less noise, less hiss. And one of the earliest recordings of multi-track magnetic tape is made by the guitarist and producer Les Paul. In 1949, he modifies an early Ampex tape machine so that he can do sound on sound

35:17recording, basically layering himself. And his song, How High the Moon, recorded in 1951 in his Jackson Heights Queens apartment home studio. It has him playing 12 parts on the guitar, him doing everything. And Mary Ford singing 12 different layers of vocals.

35:43Obviously, he's known for his name on the Gibson guitar, Les Paul, but he's probably much more important for having put together one of the first eight track tape recorders and helps develop music technology where we can start layer multiple tracks on top of each other. By the 1960s, it becomes commonplace that studios have at least a four-track machine, so you can do four different tracks. And that gives us tracks like Good Vibrations, which is one of the most expensive songs in history. Once you have more options, you spend more money and more time. Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys

36:14cost $50,000 in its time, which is about $450,000 today. It took place over 17 recording sessions, 90 hours of tape compiled down to three minutes and 36 seconds of music. The entire album of Pet Sounds was only $70,000 in comparison. So they basically spent the same amount of money making one song as they made making an entire album.

36:44Fast forward a year to 1967, the Beatles making Sgt. Peppers spent five months making that album, 700 hours of studio time. I read the news today, oh boy. It literally took 30 times as long as it took to make Please Please Me. As we move forward into the 70s, Bohemian Rhapsody, one of the most overdubbed songs of all time, it's estimated there's

37:16180 overdubs on that song. In the 1970s, we start to have 24-track tape, but even 24 tracks were not enough to contain Queen. Freddie Mercury needed layers and layers and layers. And if we fast forward to today, you know, Jacob Collier had to extend the number of tracks possible within Logic Pro because he had pushed the boundaries with his song, With the Love in My Heart, which had 720 tracks

37:50in it. Now Apple supports 1,000 tracks. You know, he too needs layers and layers and layers of vocals.

38:00And so there's been all this progress in recording technology, and yet there's still a need to go back to how records were made before the 60s, before we were able to easily overdub ourselves. And that's the path you've taken.

Album Reflections

38:16Yeah, I remember this interview that I'd done for Song Exploder with Brandi Carlile, that I think planted some kind of seed that Phil was then kind of encouraging to grow out of my brain, because she'd said this thing. I loved what she said so much that I started the episode with it, and I pulled it up if you want to hear it. Episode 227, February 9, 2022. Brandi Carlile, You and Me on the Rock, featuring Lucius. Did you do a lot of, like, rehearsal pre-production of this song before you started actually recording it for real?

38:46No, I'm very anti-rehearsal prior to recording. Why's that? Well, because I'm superstitious. I believe that every song has a moment. And it's a really fragile moment where you write a song, and you know it, but you don't have it yet. Like, it's still a risk. It could still derail. Anything could still happen. I love the way that she put that, and it's really, it echoes so much of what Phil said, too. When you listen to the album now, do you hear any mistakes that you're glad are there?

39:21Oh, that's a nice way of putting it. There are things that are in the album that are so unexpected in the moment, things that other folks did. You heard that sort of, like, ghostly, eerie lair in Stray Dogs. Yeah. That was played by my friend, Cole Kamen Green.

39:52For that song, he played this thing called an EVI, an electronic valve instrument, where you blow into it, and there are, like, synth parameters that you can adjust with knobs. And so the velocity is determined by how hard you blow into it and have it affect the volume or the pitch or all kinds of different things. And so he essentially just improvised over that whole song. We didn't do a lot of takes, but from one take to the next, it was always different.

40:23And that was, I think, a fundamental aspect of a lot of the players that came in. Shahzad Ismaili is another player on there. He played a bunch of instruments on the album. He's somebody who won't play the same thing twice. One of my favorite things in the whole album is the piano solo that he takes in a song called Home Movies. And there are samples of my wife and her dad from an actual home movie that I'd had in the demo. And Phil, saying, you know, since everything should be live, he's like,

40:54OK, well, why don't you give me those samples? And I'll play them out of an amp in the room. And Shahzad played this piano part that had never happened before that in any of the handful of rehearsals. And it sounds like an accident. I don't mean, like, what he's playing, he's playing accidentally. I mean, it sounds like somebody having an accident. Like, it sounds like a man falling or something like that.

41:25Rashid, you're making me realize that I think you have the perfect album title that perfectly matches your process. This, in the last hour of light, invokes the twilight hour. And there are a lot of songs here about reflecting on your past, reflecting on mortality, those you've lost.

42:00And they're beautiful, powerful songs that need to be treated with a lot of care. There's danger in there. There's a vulnerability in there, as Phil and Brandy have evoked. When we're in the last hour of light of our life, there's not time to spare. There's not time to go do another take. You just have to put it down. I think you've done that. Thank you so much. Charlie, can you play the very first thing we listen to in this conversation, the beginning of Stray Dogs?

42:37As soon as I hear those drums, it's like an announcement that this album is going to sound different than what you're used to. Wow, really? Well, the clarity of it, the liveness of it, it feels like you're in the room where this is all happening. And even before you start singing, I'm already sort of primed emotionally because there's this texture and grain to the sound that we don't hear in a lot of music. And I say that without any shade. I think the hyper-compressed and vivid sound of a lot of multi-track popular music like we've been talking about is really powerful.

43:19But there was just something so organic and so present about even just the first seconds of that song that I found really emotional to listen to. So to me, I think this kind of experiment that you've done is something that I want to keep listening for. And I'll be curious to see what other artists follow that playbook as well. Yeah. The day before I left for the recording, I had recorded with Lizzie McAlpine, an episode of Song Exploder.

43:56And she talked about recording her album live as well. She had actually made the entire thing and then she went back and remade it live. And she talked about how happy she was that she'd done that. And after the interview was over, you know, and she was getting ready to leave, I was like, thank you so much for saying that because that's what I'm about to do. And I am just scared out of my mind. It feels insane. And she's like, no, it's really, really special. And the fact that just other people can see that, the fact that you can hear that really means a lot.

44:28But I'm too close to it at this point to know. And I might forever be too close to it, but I can appreciate it in other people's music. So you're about to take this on the road with like the best special guests on the planet. We've got, just to name a few, Jason Manzoukas, Samin Nosrat, Alison Russell, Adam Scott, Joshua Molina. Lots of fun shows coming up, but you also are going to be continuing to write music, I'm sure of. And you're going to be continuing to make Song Exploder. I'm curious about how making this record is going to change your process going forward with your own music and your own reporting.

45:02I think that the idea of, hmm, let me start again. There's no retakes. Oh, right. Damn it.

45:14Something that I definitely have learned throughout the last few years of working this way is that collaboration is just a relief for me. It lets me go back to enjoying music. And I think part of what I love about it is the possibility of surprise. I used to think that the internal workings of my own mind is where everything needed to come from. And if I didn't somehow generate everything on my own, that was like a sign of like a lack of originality or like weakness in some kind of way or, you know, a lack of artistry.

45:50And I've gotten to the point now where I'm like, actually, the whole setup is a myth. The idea that like you create something entirely on your own, like every single idea, all of those things have been a collaboration of some kind, even if it was unintentional between like, you know, where you grew up and what the weather was and what you read and what somebody said on the bus and that you overheard. You know, like all of that stuff. So the idea of just bringing other people in more explicitly to shake up the things that you think, you know, and come up with something that you'd never expect has been really important to me.

46:27And that's something that I hope that I can keep doing. Thank you for collaborating with us today. Thank you. It's been a blast. It has been a blast for me, too. Thank you so much. The Long-Awaited Crossover. Switched on Pop is produced by Reanna Cruz, edited by Lissa Soap, engineered by Brian McFarlane, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, video by Nick Ripps, music by Jossie Adams and Zach Tenario of ArcIris, a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and Vulture, which is part of New York Mag. You can subscribe at nymag.com slash pod. Reach out to us on social media. Support for this show comes from Limpy, the Lillehammer Institute of Music Production and Industries.

46:59Limpy believes classrooms don't create artists, studio sessions do. It's a one-year program for songwriters, producers, and artists built by actual hit songwriters. When Haley Joel left Limpy, she had over 100 songs. She had relationships that led her to her manager. She had an industry-trained ear. And then came TikTok. Yeah, I started posting on TikTok, and I posted a video of me singing a piano version of my song Addicted. And I didn't check my phone all day because I was just pissed off with the TikTok gods.

47:29And when I came back later that night, it was doing really well. And then it just continued to snowball, and literally my whole life felt like it got flipped on its head. Addicted snowballed into a moment. The internet demanded a dance remix. And so Haley called someone who happened to be Norwegian. And so then we asked Oscar, Medkay, to do a version. And funny enough, he's Norwegian. So we had a lot of mutuals, and he put out a version.

48:01And it's been doing really, really well. It actually hit number one on a billboard chart last week, I think. Which has been awesome. She topped a billboard chart. It was a childhood dream fulfilled. I feel like I've always dreamed of having a billboard number one. It was such a cool moment. And also to have the Norwegian connection was very full circle for me. And it was, like, beyond what I thought could ever happen. That's what a year at Limpy can do. 70 students from around the world, 20 studios, mentors with Grammys and billboard number ones,

48:34and over 100 songs you actually made with your own hands in one of the most beautiful towns in Norway. Anyway, it's the place that Haley got her start, and you could too. Apply now at limpymusic.com. That's L-I-M-P-I music.com. Applications close May 31st.

48:52Social media at SwitchedOnPop. Thanks so much for joining us. I hope you come back sometime. And until then, thanks for listening.