Song Exploder - alt-J - In Cold Blood

Episode Date: June 2, 2017

Alt-J formed in Leeds, England in 2007. Their debut album won a Mercury Prize and their second was nominated for a Grammy. Their third album, Relaxer, came out in June 2017. In this episode, they break down “In Cold Blood,” from their new album. songexploder.net/alt-j

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 Rishi-Kesh-Hirway. This episode contains explicit language. Alt J formed in Leeds, England, in 2007. Their debut album won a Mercury Prize, and their second album was nominated for a Grammy. Their third album, Relaxer, came out in June 2017. In this episode, they break down in Cold Blood from that album. It's a song they'd written years earlier, but when they tried to record,

they couldn't get it right. The problem was the tempo. Coming up, you'll hear how they solved it, and more. It's Alt-J on Song Exploder. I'm Joe from Alt-J, and I sing and play guitar. I'm Gus. I play the keyboards. The first memory I have of the early writings for In Cold Blood, that was in Leeds University, that was when we were in college, 2009. I was basically just at the front room of this shared house. the house is empty and there's no distractions. And I just had this guitar riff that I was working on. Often with Gus, when I write a guitar part, you react quite quickly to what I'm doing.

And it's almost like a rally. Yeah. Like it's as quick as me serving you a ball and you're hitting it back. I do remember writing the keyboard part very quickly. I bought this Cassiatone 405 from eBay for one pound and five pence. Like, amazing deal, you know, ludicrous. What I really love about the cassiotone is it's got a really warm kind of old sound because it's made in the early 80s.

It's not a synthesizer, it's a basic keyboard, really, with about 24 sounds. And I particularly love that organ sound that I use that. I think it's the pipe organ sound. I mean, it sounds nothing like a pipe organ. It's just great in its own way. Which then Tom drummed to. Tom's minimalist. approach to drums was...

One of the things that give Walt Jay quite a recognisable sound, maybe. He didn't need a grand drum kit to create great beats. When he was setting up the band, and we were playing in Gwill, our old guitarist's bedroom, Tom was gradually bringing in piece after piece of percussion. Every week, he'd go home for his Sunday lunch with his dad, and then he'd come back with a different drum. So he was building this kit sort of piecemeal in Gwil's bedroom.

And so first he brought the snare drum, and then he brought the kick drum, and then he bought Cal Bow. He didn't want to bring his toms, so he brought his bongos and started hitting him with sticks. There's some cowbell in there as well. We're not like a music school band, and had we been a music school band, we probably would have booked, like, you know, a practice room, and there would have been like a full drum kit with, you know, all the racktoms and floor tombs and cymbals and high hat and whatever. But because when we started out, we were doing it in a DIY way, that became our drum sound.

For the years that we had this song and didn't record it, we occasionally, just like break it out in a sound check or something. But we were naturally slowing up and speeding down. Sorry, speeding up and slowing down. When we were playing it without a click, you know, just jamming it together. You know, like, why does the verse seem to want to be like a hundred? And the chorus just really wants to be 105. Usually when that happens, you can find the tempo that's acceptable for the whole song.

So we were just like, we've got to, let's just do it at 103, come on. For some reason, it just didn't work. So in this case, we decided to change the tempo in the different sections. I remember being in the studio with Charlie Andrew, our producer, and we had to do a number of takes to go through each section to find the right tempos. So once we acknowledged that, then the song worked. So that was a real breakthrough, actually, was figuring out the tempos. So once we had the intro guitar and Cassidy tone thing going on,

Then it goes quite quickly into another section, like slowed down sort of bluesy section. That was the moment where I remember thinking we're onto something here, because you were doing some really cool things with the keyboard. I have another really basic keyboard. It's a Yamaha. It's basically the keyboard that secondary schools buy in bulk and put them in, like, the music rooms. So it's got about 100 sounds. Again, the whole orchestra is on there.

So I think I was using the trumpet setting on this and we really liked the sound actually because it sounded so fake but so good. We sent over a version with Yamaha Brass and I think it might have been the head of our label came in and was like we should use real brass on this but we've all kind of convinced ourselves

that actually the Yamaha Brass sounded really great and we didn't need real brass but then we had this day booked at Abbey Road to do strings. So as we had that room booked it made sense to get a little brass section to come in just quickly knock the in cold blood brass pot out in half an hour. We'll just see how it sounds.

I think once we even heard them just rehearsing it before we even turned on the tape, it was just like, wow, this is amazing. This is obviously going to sound absolutely incredible. I'm totally convinced then. They give that section a really kind of like ominous, sinister presence. With this song, essentially the story is a guy jumps into a pool, he's at a pool party,

everyone's having a good time, they're all bros. beer kegs, howling, six-packs, your classic pool party. And a guy jumps in, the time he resurfaces, someone's been stabbed. My poor summer, summer vibes killed in gold blood. There seems to have been an old jac fascination with pool parties. It just seems to keep propping up the pool party. I don't know, because we're not particularly big pool party people. Oh, no, no, no.

You know, growing up in England, I don't know. You watch a lot of American TV and films and stuff, and it always seems to involve, you know, a pool party when you're watching, like, American Pie or something, these films that we watched growing up. Yeah, or like the OC or something. Yeah, exactly. You grow up watching these programs,

and you're like, oh, of course, every episode they have a pool party. You're kind of half, like, fascinated and jealous, and then you half think it's just, like, ridiculous. Like, oh, yep, there's the pool party, there's the guy with the keg, you know. Token Paul Party coming up. Yeah, yeah. So that's the general idea. Often I will fill space using my voice.

When I'm in a booth on my own and no one's looking at me, I can kind of like act out of character maybe and doing the song justice by making an attempt to add something extra that could work. But I do it on my own when no one's looking because I look like an idiot doing it. In go black. We did a lot of takes and Charlie Andrew was just basically like, I don't know which one I like. And so we were like, well, why don't we just use them all? At the end of the song, there's a very simple synth lead, which, again, comes from my Yamaha, my sort of school keyboard.

So it's me playing it, but it's kind of arpeggiated in its structure. But I did experiment with using an arpeggiator on a real synth, but it sounded too perfect. I think it's the fact that it's not quite perfect is what makes it good. I always really enjoyed playing that part, but it's hard, because it really knackers my arm. Like I'm doing it live now.

It's a real punisher, but it is worth it. And then the keychanges well at the end. And it just really sounded cool over the top of the brass. You, Joe, I think you just sort of thought that we just needed one more thing to happen, really, didn't we? Yeah, just something to finish it off. We haven't had a song that key change, and I felt like this was the song to get that emotional with.

It's the final push, isn't it? And you want to have a big exit. We do like using sound effects in songs And I think that they're just little gap fillers So there's a big woo between verse one and verse two That was the London cheerleaders London cheerleaders, I think, yeah There are a bunch of cheerleaders

Literal, real cheerleaders And just for hire Yeah, I don't know I don't know if they have a particular team No, I don't think they do I think we just googled London cheerleaders Yeah There was a group called the London cheerleaders

So that is the sound of somebody's diving off a diving board and then making a big splash. We initially actually used a library sample for that. Online, there's sort of like various uncopyrighted sound effects you can download. But funnily, like at the last minute, I think the label got cold feet about what was the actual legal status of these sound effects. So there was a very panicked day where Charlie, our producer, had to recreate all these sound effects.

And I don't know how he did that. Did he build a springboard? I think what happened was there was some construction work going on outside the studio and he found a big bit of plywood and he put two of them together so they had some kind of like almost like rigidity to it and then just sprung it and it made the right sounding noise to fit with a springboard and then with the splash he just said he threw a stone in the pond something like that.

I don't know it's just we've always just done it when it comes to recording just kind of like when you finish a piece of work and then you put stickers all over it just to make it look extra pretty or something like that, isn't it? It's the bay leaf in the curry. Yeah, yeah. Do you put bay leaves in curry?

You should put curry leaves in curry? Yeah, sure. There you go. And now here's In Cold Blood by Alt J in its entirety. Visit SongExploder.com.com. track and to watch the music video for In Cold Blood. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out of full length, and this is the first one

that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast,

like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Weinrobe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each single. like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more.

They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexplore. Thank you.net.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploder is produced by me, along with Christian Coons. Song Exploitor is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary cutting edge podcasts made possible by the Knight Foundation.

Learn more about all the shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can find Song Exploder on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder, and you can find all the past and future episodes of the show at songexploder.net or wherever you download podcasts. My name is Rishi K. Shareway. Thanks for listening.