One Song - Miley Cyrus' "Flowers"

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

This week on One Song, Diallo and LUXXURY frolic through "Flowers" -- Miley Cyrus' smash hit from 2023. Along the way, they discuss the track's importance as an self-love and empowerment anthem, its connection to Bruno Mars' "When I Was Your Man," and pose a very important question: Can Diallo say “I can love me better than you can” without sounding narcissistic? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Coming to you live from the Sirius X-XM studios here in Hollywood. This is one song. I can buy myself flowers. Write my name in the sand. Talk to myself for hours. Say things you don't understand. Oh, so go. Walk out the door.

Turn around now. Because you're not welcome anymore. It's a beautiful life. Oh, oh. Oh, it's a beautiful life. Oh, oh. I'm a Barbie girl in a bobby world. Life in plastic.

It's fantastic. Fly me to the moon. Let me play among the stars. No, I will survive. Oh, as long as I know how to live, I know I'll stay alive. I've got all my life to live and I've got all my love to give. I will survive. I will survive.

I can take myself dancing and even hold my own hand. And I can love me better than you can. You can brush my hair and dress me anywhere. Imagination, life is your creation, baby. Welcome to one song! Luxury today's song was a massive hit. Huge. Let's be clear.

It spent eight weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It won two Grammys for record of the year and best pop solo performance. And it was the best selling single around the globe in 2023. Yeah. Like this is the song technically a 2023. It went number one in 37 countries. That is crazy. It should have gone number one and more.

One sixth of the countries. Listen. Venezuela, get your act together. We know it didn't go number one there. How embarrassing for Venezuela that they did not want number one there. I get it. You're not going to make it go. number one. You're going to choose one of your own songs.

Understandable. Understandable. But this is a huge, huge hit. It was a huge, massive song. It dominated the airwaves in 2023, especially the summer, where a lot of people considered it the song of the summer. But it was also on TikTok. It was in bars. It was ubiquitous, if I may use that word. For some people, it's a song about empowerment and teaching us that it's okay to take ourselves dancing and that we can hold our own hands. And talk to ourselves for hours. We can talk to ourselves. You know, there is another meaning behind some of these lyrics when you say

like that. But I'm going to go with the empowerment meaning. Absolutely. Don't forget that I can love me better than you can. Just plain. It sounds oddly narcissistic when I say that. In context, it makes sense. And today we're going to provide all the context on one song when we talk about Miley Cyrus and her song

Flowers. I'm actor, writer, director, and sometimes DJ Diallo Riddle. And I'm producer, DJ, and songwriter Luxury, aka the guy who talks about interpolation on the internet. All right, luxury. We both know Flowers blew up last year. You couldn't avoid it. All right. We're still hearing it in restaurants on the radio in that sad Uber car ride home after a long night.

But when did you first hear flowers? Well, speaking of the internet, I was on TikTok. I do a lot of videos, which some of our listeners may know about, about interpellation. Hopefully they know about them by now. And that Friday that the song came out on my inbox, my DMs were flooded with mostly strangers who follow me saying, what is this? Tell me about this song. It sounds like Bruno Mars.

It sounds like this. It sounds like that. You know, can you do a video about it, basically? So I found out about it because the internet was telling me that they wanted my take on it. So I actually did a video like two days later after it came out that popped because my take on it, which we'll be talking about in more detail and get both of our opinions and put some facts in context. My opinion, though, still stands, which is that this song, which as we discussed today, does have some connections to other songs. It does have a connection.

Which we're going to call intertextuality. We are going to introduce that term on this show today. the intertextuality word is going to come up, the I word, if you will. We're going to talk a little bit about that. And the fact is that it is connected to Bruno Mars' song when I was your man. It has a little bit of a connection,

I would say, to Gloria Gaynor's, I will survive. And in the moment that I made the video, those questions were swirling around like, well, is it plagiarism? Is it interpolation? Well, I mean, that's the reason why we did the song at the top of the show. Right.

Because we wanted to show that these chords pop up, you know, in various periods, in various genres of music. You use the term circle of fifths. Can you tell us what that is? The circle of fits, the circle of fits, is a way to visualize the 12 musical keys and arrange them in a convenient order

based on the number of accidentals, which is sharps and flats. When you're learning how to play piano, when you're learning any instrument and you're reading music, you need to understand. When you see the key signature, it's got three sharps on it.

What key is that? It's got two flats. So the circle of fifth is just a learning tool to understand that. But it has this secondary element, which is that when you learn the circle of fifths, you learn that there are certain chords that go well together. And they are a fifth apart, or sometimes they're a fourth apart. I'm not going to go too deep down this music theory rabbit hole,

but the bottom line is we hear these chords a lot in pop music a certain way. And what we were demonstrating at the top, some people may be familiar with the Axis Awesome, does a similar thing, where they play a whole bunch of songs like Journey and a whole bunch of other things that go well together because it's the same chord. It's that same principle, but this is another group of chords that go really well together. So all those songs have the same chord changes, relatively speaking. And that's going to come in to play a little bit later when we talk about why this song sounds similar to other songs.

That's so cool. I've already learned so much just this episode. So you found out about it on the internet. I found out about the song on the internet the day came out thanks to strangers DMing me, wanting a breakdown, wanting an explanation about it. That's not too different from how I found out about it. I was actually, yeah, so I was working one week on the Daily Show in New York when Marlon Waynes was hosting and sort of like us to know at the end of a long week, everybody goes out

for drinks afterwards and so we're at a bar and like the DJ was, you know, spinning songs and like everybody was cool and then with a DJ threw on this song that I hadn't heard before, but I sort of, she's got a really recognizable voice. He starts playing flowers and I swear to God, all the 20-year-old white girl interns like they went nuts like the way that they ran to the dance floor you would think it was like you were on Crenshaw Boulevard at midnight

and they threw on Nipsey Housel Like it was like it was literally They heard it before and they loved it already Dude they already knew it Like the second that the first note hit Like they were like Like I'll never forget I think I've told the story on the podcast before

But like the very first time I heard All the girls standing in the line for the bathroom By NERD Like similar reaction Except that was like a crowd of like young black kids. And so like, I can sort of relate to it, even though I was older than I was like, oh, this is like the first time they've heard it in like a loud setting.

It's that excitement you hear. Is there like a different pitch and different frequency when the white girls are screaming it about my life? Dude, I'm telling you, it was like they had rolled out a keg of pumpkin spice latte. Like, they were getting, white girls getting loose to flowers, man. And all I can think was like, oh, this reminds me of not saying it's part of the circle of fits because I don't think it is, but it reminded me of Cardigan's love fool just because it's like sort of like a no you're right like sort of like a fleetwood mac era

disco drum hi-hat combination it's like dude yeah there's a lot of factors in play that make it sound so yeah right about loveful by the cardigans that's actually another in the verse it's also the circle of fit i i'm just saying it was like and i was almost envious because i could immediately tell oh this song is an anthem this song is going to remind them of 2023 the way that like you know for a guy my age like my boo by ghost town DJs like if I look at that video I can hear that song and remember like what it smelled like in like 1995 absolutely it was just you know that's the power of that was that was that was that was my song and now I knew I was fully in this era I was like my lady's got a huge hit on her hands yeah no it's funny you say that about the evocation based on like the chord changes and the beat and all these

other things because these things have a life that are beyond the song so when a song uses something that you've heard many times before, like a drum beat, unlike a melody, that has its own sort of category or a sample. These are all intertextual things, to be clear. A melody and a sample, those are very specific, but the sort of vagueness, I would say, of like a 118 BPM disco beat. We've heard that millions of times. And the reuse of that and the reuse of the circle of hits, those chords, it still evokes

something kind of strangely specific. There is something about its reuse where it's related to the songs that reused it, that used it previously. That's very interesting. I will say, is it 118? Is flowers 118? Yeah, roughly 117, 118. And I will survive is also 117, 118. I don't know why. I was getting more of 115 vibes. Not to get too into the DJ. No, no, no, no, this matters to DJs. No, it does. 115 is like casual disco. You do five more and do 120 BPM. Like, it's barnstormer time.

Well, I mean, when you get down to like BG's disco is like 103, 104, like, that's like slow-o-off disco. That's strut disco. But if you get it until you should be dancing, you might be at 127. Or 131 when you're at when you're in. Uh-oh. Oh, remember last time we were talking about Blondie's Atomic, that's 135. And you were right that that's when you're Sylvester. That's almost like sort of past.

That's like crazy past disco. That's like, you know, you're on uppers in the Paradise Garage. You're definitely on Poppers listening to Sylvester right before it because that's 131 or 132. Well, let's get into why we pick this song and why folks should care about it. Well, you know, I like the song for our show because. Because, look, sometimes we're talking about songs that we absolutely love and we have, like, shared experiences when they came out. Right. Personal songs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's really important to both of us that we talk about current songs. Yeah. And it's like, well, shit, what was the number one song of last year? The number one song of last year was flowers. So also, that's just taking a step back. That's quite the accomplishment, given how balkanized we are in terms of, like, what we're hearing and what we're listening. Like, you know, there was a time when, like, okay, so the pop.

radio station, you know, in your city, sort of determine what the hits were. Now I feel like they're just recycling whatever the big hit on TikTok or whatever that song that was in that movie that everybody watched. And you could definitely go through 2023 and not have heard this. Like as insane as that sounds, the Balkanization, as you mentioned. Like you can live your life in different bubbles or your musical. What you're getting, what you're receiving musically, you would miss this, which is crazy to think about, but it's possible. We were joking that, you know, one of the few artists who sort of breaks through every time is Dua Lipa, and she's literally from the ballons.

So she was born and raised, ready for the environment, the musical moment that we are living in. Absolutely. Aside from female empowerment, I see this song as yet another bit of evidence that disco took over pop and that sort of dance music took over pop again. Like there was a time in the 2000s all pop,

and I'd argue R&B was trying to be hip hop. You know, even Miley is a symbol of this. If you go back and listen to early Miley, it's all, you know, like Mike Will made it tracks. I'm thinking about that Bangers album that had, I think they had 23 on there, and we can't stop, which also had like those 808 drums, like driving. Oh, and she's like twerking and wearing grills. Oh, absolutely.

Debatable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I actually forgot about that. She's had many periods. I mean, you have the first period, which is like party in the USA, which is a DJ. Hannah Montana before that. Don't forget as a teenager. That's true, man.

I mean, like, it's easy. I mean, we're going to go back into Miley's history. But I will say between Dua and Miley's flowers and a bunch of songs out right now, I do feel like disco is back to being king. Yeah. No, it's been king for a minute too. And it really wasn't until I realized that this song in 2023 dominated. And between her and Dua Lepa, I think, in the last five years,

I got so used to saying, oh, man, disco demolition, really disco went underground in the U.S. and the rest of the world. It didn't. It did go underground, but it's been. back for a while now. But you know, we've talked about this before, and I think you agree that, like, disco didn't really die. Never die.

Like, white record, it just changed. White record label executives decided, oh, we want my Sharona. We're going to go back to the blues. Yeah. You know, like, we're going to do these older. White guys with guitar. But the disco sound, like, if you look at some of the top R&B songs, after Kamiski, after the, you know, the disco sucks movement, you've got, take your time, do it right,

by the SOS band. Great song. You've got Gimme the Night by George Benson. Yeah. Like, there's so many songs, I need your loving by Tina Marie, I'd argue. There are so many songs that are fully identifiable as disco, but they are, it's just back to being like black dance music. It's a marketing thing, too.

Of the early 80s. It's a marketing categorization. Yeah. It's just not calling it disco, but it's still there. But it's still disco. It's almost like we. It's Earthland and Fire. It's cool in the gang.

Celebration is a huge hit. Even early Prince and Michael Jackson, like, Thriller has, those are, beats that would have been disco beats but what you do on top of it, how you package it is the difference. It's like when they started calling parts of Harlem Morningside Heights to make it. That's what

the term disco was because it's like disco wasn't invented you know in 1977 and it didn't die in 1979. You know like it's just you know there's a much longer path there. And there's a long tradition of renaming genres based on changing taste

or changing marketplaces or changing... Which I'm glad you bring that up because in relation to flowers, the song that we're talking about today, it's the longest charting song in the history of the adult contemporary chart. 46 weeks at number one on AC. Okay. It's insane. Again, the number 23. So it was... Twice 23.

It was... Two 23s. Two Michael Jordans. She did a song called 23 about her Jordans. She went to number 23 in Nigeria. She held the adult contemporary chart for 46 weeks. If I'm her, I'm playing this number. And this podcast was number 23 in the Atlantic magazine.

No! Best of 2023! Okay, numerologists, what does this all mean? What does this all mean? This means Q&N was right. Can I say I hate the adult contemporary chart? I have hated it my entire life. I have never liked the adult.

You know, it didn't surprise me in researching this episode. The adult contemporary charts was originally called the easy listening chart. And at a certain point, that just wasn't cool anymore. Yeah, well, it was never cool to me. I always thought easy listening. Like, that's not what I go to music for. I want music that's going to make me want to jump up and punch somebody in the chest. Not that I want to punch you.

But I just want to go. You said somebody I didn't think me. But now that you mentioned me, I think maybe you do think me. No, no, trust me. Our relationship is cool. But my relationship with the adult contemporary chart is not cool. I always thought the AC chart was an insidious plot to get me to listen to crossover country and Christian artists. And they have a lot of crossover Christian artists.

Like, I just found out that six pints none of richer is a Christian art. What? Yeah. Yeah, the people who did kiss me. And now when I listen to that song, I'm like, oh, I hear it. It's not that I have anything against country artists or Christian art. I will say most of the artists on Adult Contemporate aren't even Country or Christian. I think it's actually just like it's Beyonce's irreplaceable.

It's, you know, Narls Barkley's crazy. It's almost like a catch-all for pop songs that will not offend anybody waiting in the lobby of a dentist office. I think it's like an age range and maybe it's females from like baby boomers or something. I don't know, man. It might be females. It might just be dudes with soft taste. I have no idea. But like, I just, I can't listen.

The line is between those two groups. Yes, it's true. A lot of overlap. These are the worst Lionel Richie songs. Like, I don't know what's up with a dog to tip. When you said easy listening, he was the first face that popped into my head. He literally did a song called Easy Like Sunday Morning because he knew that that shit was going to land at the top of the charts. Kings of Easy Listening.

He's the king. Dionne Warwick. I love these artists, but they just picked the softest songs by all these artists. So all I'm saying is fuck the adult. fuck the adult contemporary charts unless my song is on it. And with that, should we talk about the making of flowers by Miley Cyrus?

100%. Let's get into it. So I wanted to start this song by talking about the people who made the song. As we longtime listeners of the show know, we like to get into some names that maybe aren't as prominent. And the songwriters and producers

in this case, Michael Pollock, Gregory Hein, also known as All Day, are the songwriters with Miley Cyrus and the producers are Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson. Now, for those of you who don't know, and I'm going to talk about Michael Pollack first, because he's, the beginning of this story is him on the keyboard, on piano. And in fact, there's a demo I'll play for you in a second. The earliest version of flowers is just his roads playing along with Miley singing. In fact, the earliest form of this song was it sort of was a ballot to begin. But before we get into that, there's a really cool story about this young writer, Michael Pollock. He's now been in the industry a few years and he's got a few hits under his belt. But he started out just a few years ago he was a student at Vanderbilt University and Billy Joel came to talk to this crowd of college kids and he boldly raises his hand and during the Q&A period and says hey Billy Joel can I play a song with you in front of his entire

group of friends and here's the reaction I've been very fortunate I was able to play with her Chicanada many times in New York City and I was wondering if I can play with you I would accompany you that is okay I think that's It's so adorable. The little, okay, and he gets on stage. He plays with Billy Joel. He's incredible, incredibly talented musician, piano player. And he gets signed.

And his music career begins in this moment of bravely asking Billy Joel. He can play a company. That's cool of Billy Joel to be like, yeah, sure. I love that. I love that. Billy Joel seems like a chill, chill dude. So he gets a publishing deal. He starts writing eventually over time.

It takes a few years, but he gets in the room and writes with Bieber and Celine Dion and Katie Perry at Sherin. He has a song on Renaissance, Beyonce's record. It's Pure Honey. He co-wrote that. I love Pure Honey. Ends up Songwriter of the Year at the 2022 BMI Pop Award. So given Michael Pollock his flowers because I just love that story.

I thought it's pure slash honey, right? Pure Slash Honey. Yeah, I love that song. I think that song is fantastic. Also speaking of Beyonce, I thought that their song with Miley was also super cool. Two most won it. I'll be a shotgun rider till the day I die. Smoke.

the window flying down. I saw my reflection. The snow-covered hill. It's so landslide. It's so landslide. But that doesn't make it bad. And I will speak on the behalf of some because I know that our listeners listen to everything.

I think sometimes you can say, I'm not the biggest fan of this artist, but objectively speaking, that voice is incredible. Yeah. You know? When I listen to Miley, like, I hear like the best of like those raspy singers, everybody from like you know mama cass and janus joplin to freaking you know stevie nix and

big mama thornton there you go hound god there you go big mama thornton perfect call it's january two and milie is meeting up with michael pollock and his writing partner gregory hind who goes by alde the three of them are at sunset sound recorders in hollywood standing around the piano and pollock had this idea about flowers sort of a concept a lot of times when you're co-writing with somebody you get in a room it's like what should we do today and it's like well i was thinking this morning in the shower about flowers. Okay, they just started talking about Miley's life, and it all started to coalesce. It's like, okay, going to bring in the storytelling of her actual life experience, maybe around this metaphor of flowers. So they sit around the piano,

and the story goes according to Michael Pollock, the co-writer, that they had it all piece together. The bare bones of the song come together really quickly in just about an hour, and they record this demo, which I'll play for you now. It's interesting hearing that. Dude, that was amazing. I kind of like that version. It's so different. Right.

Like, why? It reminds me of the theme song for the show Taxi. Like, it sounds like a 1978 Bob James song, which, by the way, I think the theme. The same road's keyboard. The theme from taxi is technically called Angela. Yeah. Here's the theme from taxi by Bob James. Bob James, man, is the king.

He really is the king, but if you weren't asleep already. put on the show called taxi. Just one more thing I wanted to say about the demo is that it was very conscious and effort on Miley's part and by all accounts Miley had a real vision for not just the song but the entire album. She really wanted it to be incredibly real and authentic and her voice and her storytelling.

She did not want to bake it in production. A lot of times, especially with pop co-writing, you'll start with a track and everything sounds really bouncy and produced so that you have inspiration as a singer to maybe come up with, you know, excited by the track. But that's really how the demo, the song was just a very bare-bones, unproduced, raw, Rhodes, and vocal. That was the demo because Miley very consciously didn't want all the bells and whistles of production

to affect the songwriting. She wanted to be very pure. But we're going to get into the bells and whistles because many bells and many whistles were added later when we get into the stems coming up next. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So listen, after the break, we're going to deconstruct Miley's answer song and figure out how this empowerment anthem, gives a nod to a disco legend.

Stay tuned. All right, welcome back to one song. Okay, luxury, we've come to that moment that we love. Walk us through it. Tell us how the song gets made. Let's do it. Well, we mentioned the songwriters, Miley Cyrus, Michael Pollock,

and Gregory Alde Hine. They brought the song, or the song then went to, I should say, the producers, Kid Harpoon, whose real name is Tom Hull, and Tyler Johnson. Now, these guys, if you don't know their names, huge producers in the game,

especially in that moment in 2022, when the song is being written, because they had just done Harry's house, the Harry Siles record, and that included, like, as it was, the, like, biggest song of 2022. It was number one for 15 weeks. Yeah.

It was the most streamed song of 2022. So these were the guys. Yeah. So this is, like, the dream team, the songwriting, the production. It's all coming together. They're at Harpoons, Mr. Harpoon, Mr. Kid Harpoons,

Laurel Canyon Studio, and they decide to jam on the song Flowers that they have this demo that we just listened to. They decided to, like, work on it and see where it goes. Because originally, again, the thought was this is going to be a bit of a ballad, more of a sort of slow, sultry, maybe like a cocktail jazz kind of number, which is what we heard in the demo.

They haven't had the idea yet to beef it up and discoify it. But that comes a little bit out of this jam session where Kid Harpoons's on bass, his producing partner Tyler Johnson is on keyboards, and Miley is singing. And they're just jamming on it. And 30 minutes later, it evolves into the disco E, Gloria Gainery, Fort of the Flood. kind of disco country number that we now know the song to be. So without further ado, let's start listening to the elements of the song, starting with the drums. Now, one quick note about the drums.

I read an interview where Kit Harpoon talks about how they, quote, played and programmed the drums. So what I'm about to play you, based on what I know about his process is, I think he played the drums just to get the feel of like how certain fills are going to be sounding natural and then replaced some of the sounds. but I can't tell to my ear what's real and what's replaced because as somebody who uses splice all the time, I know that you can get a lot of these sounds as 10 cents samples. But let's just listen and here are the drums. So one thing, I don't know if you notice, but there's this funny like mouth percussion.

That's Miley doing kind of a bo-qu-qu-c-oh. Oh, that's cool. Weird like, who, yeah, it immediately reminded me of got to give it up by Marvin Gay. Yeah. And, you know, people who listen to this show know how we feel about the blurred lines. verdict. We think it was wrong. We think let the artist freaking create as long as it's not egregious. But yeah, that's that's really cool. I was going to ask you about that. So that's a little myly beatbox going on. A little mildly beatboxing going on there. There's a phenomenon in this

song that it's when the drums come back in, they kind of enter on the two instead of on the downbeat. I'll play that for you in context. It's kind of cool how they did that. Here it is with the baseline. I'll play it with the vocal just for some context and I'll count it out too. One, two, three, four. One, two. I mean, we're big proponents of James Brown's. You know, everything has to happen on the one. But when stuff doesn't happen on the one, it's kind of nice because it's like it creates

this tension where you're like, oh shit, do they forget to play? What's happening? Oh, there it is. Yeah, it's true. In many ways, the disco rhythm is very different from the funk rhythm because you're really spreading it out very evenly. The forward of the floor makes everything kind of gridded out. Yeah.

And you're not really, all the syncopation and sort of interesting, rhythmic moments happen outside of the drums. No. Or maybe with the fills, I suppose, or percussion, but not the kick drum. The beat doesn't come exactly when you think it will. Oh, I see what you did there. Yeah, exactly. And so I'll play some bass for you.

This is Kid Harpoon, aka Tom Hall, on the bass. So just basic kind of disco funk, riding on the downbeat, little fills in there. You know, driving in this morning, I listened to flowers on my sound system. And then I listened to the song that I thought it had some similarities with Cardigan's Love Fool. Let me just say something about how songs are mastered now. Like hip hop definitely took over the world in one sense, which is like every song, even this song has like the damn throatiest deep hit hard hitting bass. You know what I'm saying?

Like you listen to the Cardigans like it's like do do do do do do do do it's a little more polite. Flowers is like, boom, drum, drum, like it's like everything has to. to come out of your sound system. And I think that's because everybody's listening to stuff in our ear pods. Every car, I always say cars nowadays, like every car. It could be any car. It has a better sound system than, like, the most souped up Cadillac driving down my street growing up.

You're completely right. We would have killed for this level of base. You know, like nowadays, you can pick, I don't want to throw any car name out there, but I'm saying, like, you can get a random car. It has more base than the most souped up, you know, lower. writer from the 80s. I mean, like, we have really spoiled ourselves on base. The technology has come a long way. And you're right, the loudness

war, this is what it's been called, in mastering. There's a name for this? I didn't know that. If you look at the waveform for a modern song from a 2024 song. Oh, no, but that's, yes, exactly. Versus a 1990 song. I'm telling you, when you play those songs and you thought were like, dance floor killers from like the 90s,

like, those wavelengths are like this thing. Like nowadays, like it's just a solid wall of red. They compress everything within an inch of life. It can be, yeah. It could be a man with a guitar. I guarantee you there's just a solid wall of red over the entire... You're right that that's in mastering

where they just boost it so that it's literally a black line instead of a waveform. And honestly, sometimes I want a little bit of variance, y'all. I want a little bit of variance. But, yeah, I just had to point that out. That baseline is chunky. It's chunky, as we say in the South. I'm going to list the credits because there is some overlap.

I'm not positive who played what, aside from... It sounds like Kit Harpoon did the bass and drums, but when we get into guitar and keys, both him and Tyler Johnson have some shared credits, and Michael Pollock, also the songwriter, gets a credit for Rhodes. All this to say that we're going to play all of these parts, and they're going to sound awesome, and one of those three dudes probably made it. We'll start with the guitar. It's just doubling the bass as you can hear.

Solid groove. And that's still mildly doing that. Yeah, you can still hear it doing like a little pop-in and clicking sounds. It's like Timbalin-esque. It's very Timbalin-esque. There's some more fun guitar parts here in the Love Me Better part. I'll play that for you now. I'll play with the vocal for some context, but that's what he's doing in the Love Me Better.

It's really cool how it's mirro. I hear a remix. I'll tell you what. Do me a favor. Play what you just played, but give me the drum kick. kick. Okay. With the vocals or no vocals? The vocals. Okay. Am I bringing the bass? Here we go. No, no, no. No. No. This is what makes it the remix. But you know what I'm saying. Like, if you take out the base and just leaving that guitar that I've

never heard before because it's so covered up in the mix. Yeah. It's deep in the mix. And her vocal part too, that harmony is really, you wouldn't have no. It's awesome. Just say, Emily, if you want to pay us, We've got a killer remakes. You could go number one in 38 countries. Just hire us. Get those Venezuelans. We're affordable. They love it, Nigeria with that.

We're grown-up Parpoon. At the very end, there's these really cool guitar bands. Again, I would never notice this in the mix. They're pretty buried. But this is happening at the end. I'll play it isolated, and then I'll bring back some more elements of the song. And you're like, what is that? I have never heard that.

Well, it happens in this part of the song when she's singing that long last note. I like it. It almost sounds Rod Temperton-esque. It could have gone with boogie nights and off the wall. With that sort of like atmospheric opening. Yeah. Oh, I tell what you mean.

A little jazzy intro, right. Exactly. But that's at the very end. And, you know, now next time you hear the song, you'll be listening for that and you might not find it because it's pretty deep. But it's cool that they put it there. That is super cool.

What can you tell us about the keys? Let's listen to some of the different synthesizer parts. Actually, there's one that I forgot about in the bass. there's a moment where it's just a brief moment, but the baseline is doubled by a synth bass, and I'll play that for you, which is just cool little detail. I mean, for the record,

let's take one step back from Even Flowers and just as a lay person who play the drums and does not play any instrument with notes, so to speak, with different notes, I should say. What do we appreciate as bass? Like when I say, like, obviously there's the 808 bass drum, but like when you hear like do-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d- like

is that typically a synth bass like in some really low register I feel like I'm not talking about like what's obviously like guitar bass I feel like what we typically think of as bass in modern pop music it's usually like synth bass, isn't it? I would say it varies

certainly if you're doing something do a Lipa for example first of all the sound of a bass guitar has a very specific sound which you can recreate using samples or synths. So I was going to say Duolipa, I know some of what makes her songs sound disco is the use of not a synth bass, but a bass guitar. Sure.

But it's very possible that she's either using because there's VSTs where you can use somebody's playing the bass as a keyboard synth. So it's all kind of merge together. But I think that like when I think like DJ Magic Mike, when I think of like two live crew and a lot of like people who. do hip-hop and a lot of R&B, like, that bass is primarily synth-based, is it not? Like, DJ Mustard, that's a synth base, right? It evokes a different era. I'll tell you that much. There are different synth sounds.

There are different synth patches, and then there's bass guitar with certain effects, treated in certain ways. They will all kind of evoke different, I would say, eras and genres. Sure. So it is possible to do a hip-hop song with a bass guitar. You might end up sounding like, you know, 1970, hip hop you don't stop if you're not careful but if you're if you're going for curtis blow that could be it could work out to your advantage yeah again i think that anything curtis blow sample

would come across his disco and i would assume it was like a slab bass but i think that most base that we hear today is probably synth generated an awful lot of bass on the radio is synth generated if for no other reason than sonically even if you take what was originally a sample of a bass player playing base and then it gets it becomes part of a vst in a in a program and a da like ableton or pro tools or something like that. If it's part of a production environment, basically, the sounds will be bigger, will be emphasized in a different way, will be enhanced for the production process for modern music making. We hope you guys are like literally, I feel like we're giving a lesson in music production on this episode, maybe more than we do on a typical episode,

and I love it. I think it's super cool. Let's get back to the keys. So there are some other keys at work in this song. Yeah, there's one I found also that has a little fun glitch in it. Kind of reminded me of when we talked about umbrella in the Rihanna episode, it's nice when you hear these little imperfections because it's a reminder that even though there might have been some back and forth between a live human performing it and then later on

cleaning it up in editing or maybe midiating excuse me. Midiing. Yeah, yeah. We get you. Maybe. Mediying. Quantizing it in MIDI so that the timing is perfection. There's a lot of ways you can mix and match between human and robot perfection. And I like it when they leave little glitches in. So there's a little

glitch in this part. I'll play it for you. It's glitch. Let's glitch in the synth. A little glitch in the synth. There it is. So you laughed because it's funny. I was just at a music recital. For children.

Them kids. Not going to lie. Eight-year-olds with instruments. Let's replace our kids with robots. That's all I'm saying. Now, let's be clear, because we have laughed at music before on the show. Yeah. In the context of the show and people, when it's a social clip or something like that,

People are you laughing at Britney Spears? We're not laughing at the music making. We're laughing at the fact that there's something in the mix, which is wonderfully imperfect and human, and they kept it on there because it's cool to leave those little glitches in there. Love it. I love it when the glitches are human and robot. The glitches on Princess Let's Go Crazy were great.

They're so great, right? They kind of make the song. I'll play that for you in the mix, and you probably won't even hear it. Did you hear it there? Yeah, I heard it. Oh, you heard it? Now I can hear the little glitch. I'll play it with the vote.

vocals. There's a lot more going on there. So when you add it all back together, that little synth part, you feel it, you feel a little wiggle, you feel a little bit of like in that frequency range, but you're not hearing that moment, which we both kind of laughed at, because it's funny, and I love that they kept it in. I heard some strings doubling up. Miley, let's hear some strings from this. And a little bit later in the track, they're harmonized quite beautifully. I'll play that part for you now. And the credit to the string arrangement on that is Rob Moose. So those are real strings that's not coming from a keyboard and really beautiful stuff and by the way one little thing about the existence of those strings that was apparently kid harpoon after they had that jam that i mentioned

where it was just two producers and myelie cyrus jamming and building the production idea for the song turning it into the disco song harpoon about a week later he says he added the strings and and continue to develop the quote cocktail lounginess sound which i think is part of why we have that gloria gainer feeling in our in our bones about this song All right, now we came to one of my favorite parts of the song, which is, you know, these lyrics, you know, and also our vocals, because as we've said, we love Miley's voice. Like, it's just an outstanding voice. And hearing it by itself, isolated as an a cappella is just a hair standing. Incredible instrument. And we're going to play it for the folks. But just before we do, these lyrics, when people heard it, you know, we were saying how there's, like, probably a Venn diagram of, like, Miley fans who were also Bruno fans. It's like people heard the lyrics to flowers, and it reminded them of this from 2013 when I was your man by Bruno Mars.

Check this out. I should have bought you flowers. Yeah, jean. Should I give you all my hours. Okay. So it's not a stretch to say that there is some intertextuality. There you go. Every time you hear that, take a drink.

Like, you will be, you will be. Don't drive and listen to the podcast. podcast, by the way. If you're driving, don't think a drink. But like, there is obviously a relationship between these songs. Can you play us a snippet of Miley's chorus while we still have Bruno echoing in our ears? I can buy myself flowers. Ride my name in the sand. Talk to myself for hours. You know, I think that young lady has a future of music. She knows how to sing. She knows how to sing. I think, like you said, hair on the back of my neck, you know, you probably get waxed.

But I really think that this is amazing intertextuality because, you know, and you said, she didn't never say, oh, this is definitely related to the brook. But like, how can it not be? It's definitely consciously, unpurposefully done to be a response to evoke the other song. And when we talk about intertextuality, that's like a big, fancy, like, word that's I know. Welcome to college. It comes out of like, you know, French post-structuralist theory.

But like basically what it means is that there's just interplay and interconnectedness between different work. And the reason why this is important. And by the way, guys, that can be anywhere. That can be books. That can be movies. That can be songs. Anything. Right.

If you want to look it up, do a little research, Roland Barth and so sure. And it's a word that was coined by Julia Christava. Shabh, Kristava. Christava in the house. The reason why it's important is because it is, it's generally used, as you talked about, to talk about how texts are interrelated and, you know, poems and stories, et cetera. But it also is musical. And when we talk about interpolation and sampling, it's the same idea but applied to music.

Yeah. Remixing is doing the same thing. Music is formed out of, it doesn't exist in a vacuum, basically. So when we think of these chord changes that evoke other songs, it's coming into our brains for the same reason. But can I just say, you raise a good point because we did a recent episode about beef tracks. you know, beef songs, which is when you're literally replying to something that someone said, and that is a version of intertextuality. But then also, so, you know, we start off this episode with a parody song.

And that's a different sort of homage version of intertextuality. So the basic idea behind intertextuality is this theory, like in the absolutely abstract theoretical, but it makes sense what, it'll make sense in a second, is that no text and substitute the word song for text or lyric for text. No lyric, no song stands alone, but they all have their existence and their meaning in relation to a practically infinite field of prior texts and prior significations. In other words, you can't just take a song and say the meaning is just in the song, in a vacuum. It doesn't exist outside of other songs or other work. That just doesn't exist on planet Earth with humanity.

Everything we done has some reference points, has something that it's similar to something that it's coming from. Technically, every song is a form of intertextuality. It absolutely is. It absolutely is. I love that. I love that. But in a weird way, that is almost not useful for our purposes today. There's something too broad.

That's why it's like freaking post-structuralist theory. Because in practice, it's like, well, what have you told you, didn't tell me anything. You told me everything and yet nothing. Come for Miley Cyrus, stay for post-structuralist theory. But the reason why it's relevant is because we have all these different ways. You mentioned that distracts and beef are kind of a subset, our one type of intertextuality. making reference to another song by quoting it, by using, you know, when Jay-Z uses biggie lines in his track,

or in this case, when Miley is sort of paraphrasing Bruno Mars by the use of little words, like a flowers here and a dancing there, those are like meant to invoke the previous song by just kind of a quotation, a subset of a quotation. A disc track can be a sneak disc, in which case it would be like a wing. Almost like in between the two. It's an, like you might call that an elusive. You and the listener know what you're talking about, but you didn't explicitly say it.

So these are all the different ways and then going back to what you said about a parody song, et cetera. Totally. And the thing I like about Flowers is that to me it's not a disc track, obviously. It's more of a pure response and reply. Well, it's not even to Bruno. It's more about the concept that Bruno is talking about. So it's not like Bruno is not even the subject. She's not coming at Bruno.

She's coming at technically most of us now believe that she was talking, that she's addressing this song. to Liam Hemsworth, the person who she was dating, there are many references. Like, you know, we burned our house down. Well, technically, they didn't burn the house. The Woolsey Fire, Malibu, burn their house to the ground. Not that that's funny, but like you said,

we know what she's referencing, even though it's very, very subtle. Which I love. And that's one of my favorite things about just as a concept, when we go all the way from lyrics to music, right? When we have sampling and illusion in lyrics, they're all part of this idea of its attention. tapestry of storytelling throughout music.

And what matters is also what we know about her in the real world. So the tabloids and the interviews and the videos and the music all form this story. And when she sings about this, she evokes another song that we all know about from 10 years prior because it was a huge hit. But she's, that's part of the storytelling is that the indirectness of that, which is artful to me. I think it's very artful.

And by the way, to your point, I also want to say that not only is an artful, but typically when we get these response tracks, they break down along gender lines. So here we've got Bruno singing this, and then Miley sings this. And for whatever reason, when I knew we were going to discuss this,

the first reply, the first sort of like response track that came to mind, well, I'll just play them. The first one is a classic New Orleans bounce track by DJ Jimmy, and the name of the song is where they at. And by the way, if you have kids in the room, you know, you might want to skip this part.

because bounce tracks are filthy. Frida would blush if she heard the song. But here we go. This one is Where They At By DJ Jimmy. A Woody at Who, a Woody and Who? A Woody at Who? A Woody at Who? A Woody at Who?

Classic New Orleans bounce track, DJ Jimmy, also put on a very young juvenile. He's got a song on the same album called Bounce for the Juvenile, featuring a teenage juvenile. We're checking out. But that's not what we're here today. We're talking about response tracks. And Dean Jimmer response to himself. We love Rabbit.

The very next track after where they add is, Bitch's reply, I could not find the name of this young lady. If anybody knows, I want to know. So DM me because I was definitely trying to figure out who this is on the female response track. But this bitch's reply, if you didn't send your kids out the first time, you're definitely going to want to send your kids out of the room after this one because this one is even filthier.

Let's go. Bitches reply. And there's like three more minutes of that. It's an amazing track. It's a reminder that whenever we're like, oh, this new generation, that lost, man, they ain't got no morals. Like, I go back and listen to the music.

I was listening to when I was 15 and 16-year-olds. I'm like, I turned out, okay? I think the kids are all right. Bitches replied by DJ Jimmy, let me know who's saying that song. I love a good response track. I even love responses within a track. I know it's a slightly different genre,

but one of the reasons why I always love, don't you want me baby by Human League, is that the man sings the whole verse. he talks about I met you as a waitress of a cocktail bar. We went out for five years, but now you're leaving me. You're leaving me just because success came easy. And then the woman sings the second verse,

and she's like, yeah, I was a waitress at a cocktail bar, and it's five years later. And you know what? I've changed. Yeah. And I'm leaving you. So I think the, just given the nature of means.

You're right. That isn't the power man anthem within the song. Yes. And by the way, I wonder, like, I bet you he wrote it, but like he's the guy being left, so he's being vulnerable. Anyway, I think the, male-female dynamic in the original track and the response? The Human League, Don't You Want Me Baby? Episode's going to be off the fucking charts.

Stay tuned. I love you making the connection that that is like an answer song within the song itself. It's an answer song within the song. It's very efficient. Let's talk some more about some Miley lyrics and some Miley vocals because she is singing her heart out. I'm just curious, can you go ahead and play me one of my favorite parts in this whole song? Try as best as I could.

I could not nail it. It's the end of the last chorus where she hits that really strong, I can love me better than you can. Can you find that and play that for us? Yeah, I can love me better than you can. That's a note. Nailed it. That's belting.

She's belting. Almost sounded as good as I did on the parody. Yeah, almost is good. Almost is good. What other vocals would you like to play for us? Let's listen to those gorgeous harmonies in verse two. regret I forget every word you say

awesome so beautiful and there's one more thing this backing vocals which by themselves are just really you want to talk about is the expression hair standing up on the back of your neck or is it tingling something tingling I can't get the expression I think they all work they all work okay I think you can say like you know hair tingling up your leg okay this is a tingling moment get ready to tingle can love me better I can love me better baby can love me better I can love me better, baby

Is there a man singing on this, or is that just Miley singing her lowest register? Yeah, I believe it. I believe it, by the way. Again, that's my guess. Killer voice. Yeah. Killer voice, you know.

I will say you've been cheating since the beginning of this episode that there's some great connection with Gloria Gaynor's I will survive. I admittedly, I don't know what that connection is. I'm going to ask you, is it the circle of this or is it even something deeper? It's definitely a number of things in the circle of fifth is one of those things. Okay. If you remember early in the episode, the Circle of Fits, it is the four chords that are the only chords in Flowers are the first four chords of an eight-bar loop in I Will Survive, which is essentially the main eight-bar circle of fifths loop that you hear in a lot of other songs. But that's one thing that evokes the same feeling of the song, the same chords.

We mentioned this the same BPM. So those are the four chords. And the also fact of the subject matter being kind of break of empowerment theme is important as well. Yeah. So the BPM, the disco drums, the four chords. And then last but not least, it's this string line, which here it is and I will survive by Gloria Gaynor. Just to remind everybody, here's what the string line in Flowers sounds like. Wow.

There you go. So it's just legato. Damn. Strings playing. And listen, we're not the song snitches. but that's incredible. Well, here's the thing. I was in retrospect a little bit of a snitch.

The funny thing about that TikTok video, I will just say, because when I put it out pretty early, and I have to say that my ideas, my words, it's not that I own them. I wasn't maybe the only person who might have noticed them, but I did see a lot of things in the video, I say that the shape of that melody is similar, and it's a breakup empowerment song in a minor

with the first four chords being identical. And then the string melody halfway through the chord, is similar to the melodic shape. That's me quoting myself from this TikTok video. A lot of that stuff kind of found its way into quotes in other sources. So like if you read about the similarities in Newsweek, for example, they do quote me, literally, but other sources say those things in that order a lot of times. And I'm not always quoted. So it is possible that I might have propagated the Gloria Gaynor connection into the world. The good news about it is that later on, Miley and the Gloria Gaynor writers sort of publicly had a moment where they're like, yeah, this is fine. We give permission.

We don't see anything infringing upon this here. So just to answer your question, the song snitches, we are still technically not stong snitches. Well, I had nothing to do with any of that, so I'm definitely not. I'm definitely like folding myself into a press order to explain that one as well. You're like, we didn't rob that bank. I'm like, what bank are you talking about? I was at home, man. I was sleeping.

Now, that is an incredible similarity. And we've got to be careful what we do with these microphones, apparently. I will say the reason why I had a lot of comfort with that video where I said, here's, the video is basically people saying to me, hey, luxury, he's Miley ripping Bruno Mars off. And I said, no, and here's why. And it's all the reasons we've talked about in this episode, it being the long tradition of answer songs. The specifics not being sufficient to be ownable. Nobody can own the four chords that two songs share, especially when they're the circle of hits. No two songs can own the idea of legato string. So it's all of these things together. I also think there's an X factor, which is that Miley probably intelligently went behind the scenes to Bruno. There's rumors that they talked. I would not be surprised if Bruno gave permission. Last but not least, I want to say, though, is Bruno has done this himself many times.

It would be awfully hypocritical for the man who did Uptown Funk and 24 characters, all of the songs in his repertoire that have such obvious precedence in other music. The whole sting phase, right? The locked out of heaven, which is very similar to a number of songs by the police, it would be the ultimate height of irony for Bruno Mars, of all people, to say, Hey, Miley, a little close for comfort with our interpolations. Yeah. I mean, like, we are very pro-Bruno Mars here at the show,

so Bruno, do whatever you want. And come on the show, because we will talk about any of your songs. I want to do a whole Silk Sonic marathon. You know, I really do. think that those guys are freaking awesome. But he also got a streaming bump after the song came out because so many people noted the connection. They wanted to go back. 20% more stream.

So all of these factors, it's so specific when you talk about these cases. If there's not a hard and fast rule, you can use this many notes or these chords, the specifics of all of the things we've been talking about and the specifics of who Bruno Mars is and the specifics

of maybe them showing a lawyer, who knows in the background. I always say there's nothing more lame to me than when like, you know, especially like the baby boomer bands are like, don't sample my music. I'm like, you realize that like when you get sampled, it actually brings you more people. Yes. You know, those milkshakes bring more people to the art. Intertextuality is a beautiful thing.

It is. Once you're in the blockchain of creativity, if you will, right? I mean, like, once your song is on the matrix of having a connection to this other song, guess what? People look into that other song from which it's sampled or from which it's covered or from which it's interpolated or from which it's having references and, you know, sneak dises, right? That happens every time. So my goal in the world with this show and my videos and the book I'm working on is to like explain this as being what creativity is. Yeah. And make it something that people understand is across all art forms for all of history and is part of the creative process and that it's really cool. It's really cool when songs are connected to other songs and other

stories. I love it. I can't agree more. Luxury, we have given Miley her flowers, but any closing thoughts on Miley's Evolution as an artist? I love Miley's Evolution as an artist. I think going down the rabbit hole and working on this episode, I've really come to be a big fan of her kind of as a person, as a singer. The fact of her being a Disney star and kind of being born into, you could call her a Nepo baby, right? I mean, like, she would be the prime example of like, is she on Disney because of Billy Ray Cyrus who had huge country hits in the 80s? I think with Miley, she started as a child star, And that can be a mixed blessing. Obviously, to be a child star on the outside, it's like, oh, wonderful, there's fame, attention, money.

But on the inside, I can only imagine it to be, like, a lot of pressure for a kid. And for her to take that and turn it into a career, that's how it's twists and turns. And it's like musical experimentation, not all of which, you know, necessarily went perfectly well. But a lot of it, like this song in particular is her coming into her own perhaps and finding her voice, literally her voice, like her actual. voice I fell in love with on this song and on this record. Luxury help me in this thing. Well, I'm producer, DJ, songwriter, and musicologist luxury. And I'm actor, writer, director, and sometimes DJ, Diallo Riddle. As always, you can find us on Instagram and TikTok. On Instagram, I'm at Diallo. And on TikTok, I'm at Diallo riddle.

And you can find me on TikTok at Luxury, that's L-U-X-X-U-Y, and on Instagram at Luxury. And if you've made it this far, I think that means you like the podcast. So please do not forget to give us five stars, leave a review, share it with all your friends, anyone you think would like it. It really helps us keep the show going. And this is one song. We'll see you next time.