Song Exploder - Bakar - Hell N Back

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

Bakar is a singer and songwriter from London. In 2018 he put out his first release, Badkid. A year later, he put out the EP, Will You Be My Yellow?, and this September, he’s releasing his second full-length album, Halo. One of Bakar’s tracks from the EP and the upcoming album is a song called "Hell N Back," which went platinum, and hit number one on Billboard’s Triple A Charts. For this episode, Bakar told me how he wrote "Hell N Back," and all the unexpected twists and turns it took before it became a hit. For more, visit songexploder.net/bakar.

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 Hirwe. One note before we get started, this episode contains explicit language and also a mention of suicide. If you or someone you love is having thoughts of suicide, confidential help is available for free. You can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988. You can also text the crisis text line. Just text hello to 741-741. There's also a comprehensive list of international crisis lines on Wikipedia,

and we'll link to that in the show notes. Okay, here's the episode. Baccar is a singer and songwriter from London. In 2018, he put out his first release, Bad Kid. A year later, he put out the EP, Will You Be My Yellow? And this September, he's releasing his second full-length album, Halo. One of Bacar's tracks from the EP and the upcoming album is a song called Hellenbach, which went to number one on Billboard's triple A charts.

and eventually went platinum. For this episode, Baccar told me how he wrote Helen Back and all the unexpected twists and turns it took. Could you tell where my head was at when you found me? Dang, I was lonely. Now you're my head. My name is Baccar. The story starts in 2018.

I think there was this a longing in my life in general. Basically in London, like around that time, my friends were coming out of a period of like, like a pill epidemic, down the pills, you know, like Xanax, Valium. And we start shit so early in London, like, by the grace of God, hopefully you're out of it by a certain age. And so I think at that time, we was kind of growing out of that. I'd done a painting called Will You Be My Yellow? It was like one of two or three paintings I've ever done in my life.

I'm no painter. But I had a friend that I'd done the painting in his studio. He actually passed away. But he would always encourage me to paint. and I just covered the whole canvas in yellow and then with my fingers I just wrote Will You Be My Yellow? It to me expressed that want for like for light

and then like I got a phone call to come work in LA on another arts project and so I went and I was full of energy I was jet lagged but like I was so excited about being flown to a whole other place to work on music and beach noise they were the engineers in the sessions so after a long day of like songwriting and stuff

I'm like on a cheeky one like have you guys got any beats and Matt one of the guys from Beach Noise he was engineering me at that moment and he's flicking through a couple beats and one of the ones he plays is the loop it was like bare bones of a loop it was just me and Matt in the studio

and I sung the chorus like I had it straight away about Could you tell where my head was at when you found me Just a fine piece Man I thought I had everything I was lonely Now you're my everything I was on me

All of that I didn't want Yeah The words could you tell where my head was at When you found me, me and you went to hell and back Just to find peace They weren't written down They were just in my head I want my hook to be as natural as possible

but I don't want to have to think about a hook. The hook phase of writing is what comes more natural to me. And that feels like the more subconscious part of me. Could you tell where my head was at when you found me? Me and you went to hell and back just to find peace. It's like, did you know how fucked up I was when you met me? Like, because I know that I was putting on the front that I'm okay. But I'm not.

Me and my friends, we'd been through a lot, man. we had lost a dear friend of ours to suicide that same year, maybe just a few months before I wrote that song. Is that the friend who you mentioned, whose studio you were painting in? Yeah, exactly. I got a great group of friends that come up together, but we got to go for a lot just to get to a space of calm. And I still, in moments, felt alone.

Man, I thought I had everything. I was lonely. Now you're my everything. I mean, honestly, like, that whole thing took about 30 minutes, you know what I mean? Did it, moved on to the next beat. Felt good about it because I thought it was a good idea. But like I said, I'd gone there to write for someone else. So I was more thinking about hope they like what I've been doing on this other stuff.

So I wasn't even focused on it. And then I went back home. Maybe a month later, one of the members from Beach Noyes sent me a text and had sent me like the snippet, but over like a Coca-Cola advert and they were like, yo, this feels like an old kind of style advert. I was like sick, yeah, that's cool. And then they were like, now you should do this, bro. Like, you should actually come and finish this.

Because honestly, at that moment, I didn't really know what to do. I think I was just fucking around. I was honestly just like enjoying the tiny little fruits of my labour that I was getting from Bad Kid, which was my first record. You know, like Elton John had shouted me out and like was singing my song off bad.

kid on his radio show and like those are just like cool things happening to me but I can honestly say that some of those moments made me a bit complacent and so when he's sending me this stuff it like is sparking something in my brain now and then I got myself back out there I'll come back out to LA just thinking I'm going to be working in that same studio I'm in some right shitty hotel in Santa Monica and they're like yo we're working at this studio come up like it's going to be a vibe whatever not telling me where I'm going they send me you your dress, I get there, and I'm like, I recognise this place. And it ends up being Shangular, Rick Rubin's studio, and I'm a massive Rick Ruben fan, so I'd

watch everything about this studio already. So I'm like, oh my God, I'm a Shanglar. And I walk in and I'm like, you lot are pieces of shit, like, and they're laughing, because they know what they just did kind of thing. So they're laughing like, yeah, we're in Shangular, we just didn't want to gas you, you know what I'm saying? So I'm just like, this is amazing, cool. I wrote the second verse first, and I put that down as the first verse.

I remember, I remember I was all alone. Late night you would call my phone Did I check if I was blessed because you knew I was low. Head gone rolling off the front. I remember, I remember we was in the park. Late night made love on the grass with my head in the clouds cutting all my stars. In my ears said the world was ours.

90% of the time that I'm writing about you in the context of a woman, I almost have this woman in my head, right? That is made up of so many women in my life. so many women in my life. And those women could be friends of mine. Those women could be women that broke my heart or I broke their heart. Those women are my aunties.

That woman is parts of my mom. And I just add, and I add, and I add to this woman. It's almost like she's like the goddess in my life, honestly. Went to hell and back, just to hail my wounds because it gets like that. Wrong side of the moon. No tune car moon. You're my Cleopatra.

No sighting. Don't need a back up. Need a real one. Don't need an actor. A lost one's faith. You think you want a bathtub. Yo, just hearing those, like, one of their vocals, like that, it's crazy to me right now.

I remember writing that whole verse on paper. I mixed a lot of love with a lot of drugs, then I found you. She liked petty crime, she had green eyes like Mountain Dew. Those two lines, yeah. She like petty crime, she had green eyes like Mountain. I hated them at first. I actually thought it was a bit of a lazy line

and a bit of a flimsy line. I just thought was it a bit cheesy and I just was like, I'm not even from America so I was just like, we don't even drink Mountain Dew in England like that. But there's something about green eyes like Mountain Dew that just connected with people. They're the lines that everyone remembers from this song.

And would you be my light, be my yellow. PYT, walking down, poor fella, put a smile on his face at the end of the day. MDMA helped us fly away. Who'd have known, who'd have known, you would save my life. Who'd have known, who'd have known, you would fly my kite. Did you tell? Could you tell? So I had the two bursts and I had my chorus.

Me and Beach Noise felt great about it. I was so happy about it that I called my friend Aidan Cullen, who's a director, and I said, this is the single, I want to film a video now. Tonight, he's an amazing guy. He backs it straight away. Let's do it. I'm like, I just want to go to the beach. And we just banged out the video.

The video cost me like $80. I just paid for Aiden's petrol. And now I'm just like, I'm super excited. I'm super excited. I'm super gas. I'm moving quickly. One of my friends, his name is Daniel Chetri, he has a show with Kendall General called Zaza Radio on Apple Music. He's like, yo, we're doing the show up at Kendall's tomorrow.

You should come and play the song on the show. Because I'm telling everyone that this song is coming out in a couple weeks. By the way, it's not done and it's not mixed. It's just the bare bones of the song. I go to Kendall's house, and one of the songs I play is Helen Back. and she loves it. That goes out, right, the next day. And now I put it up on my Instagram.

I've tweeted about it. So now Helen Back's in the world. This is where it's going to take a turn. I get back home only to find out a couple weeks later that the song is a sample. This whole time, Beach Noise have not told me that that loop is a sample. You said he was your cousin.

Caught you in a light by Robert Parker. I found out that he wasn't. I've never put a song out before or after then that has a sample in. And I can't get this sample cleared. We can't get hold of the people that own the rights to this song, to Robert Parker's version. We're going through agents, every way, you know, like label are doing it, management are doing it.

We've even got external agencies working on it. No one can find it. June happens. July happens. We're now at the start of August. I am losing my mind at this point. I'm feeling like I'm embarrassing myself a little bit because I've already played the song.

People already know what it is. They're expecting it. But then they found out, like, who owned it, you know? Okay, they found that it was his daughter. Her name was Maple. And my manager says to me, you know what? Like, you should write her a letter. So I write Maple this, like, blind letter.

I'll kid you not. Within a few days, we found her son. and he was super helpful. And what we come to find out is that they're from New Orleans and they lost a bunch of the paperwork in Hurricane Katrina. Like long story short,

like he ends up helping us clear it, we get it cleared. But what it taught me about sampling was, well, like, I had this attachment towards Maple and her son and intern her dad. And I really felt like I had a connection with them at that point. Like I felt like we'd gone through this process.

There's really like a thread that is magic. But essentially it's like, knowing that it was a sample made it quite 2D to me, the feeling is already in there, but we want to add ourselves onto it too. And the loop remains throughout the whole thing, so it does stay quite linear. And so it needed sections. And then in that moment, Beach Noise, they send me another version with this whistle on it. Andrew Boyd, one of their mates, had come in and came up with that whistle line. I'm just like, oh my God, this is magic.

So after the whistle, I still feel like it wasn't done. I always thought it had this Amy Winehouse feeling about it. I just heard horns. And so I hit up a friend called Isaiah who plays in a band called Onits Collective in New York. And so I told him the idea he went and done it and wrote a line. I got to give so much props to Isaiah, man,

because for him to just interpret it, how he interpreted it and get on the same wavelength as us and add his thing to it, I just can't believe that he was able to do that and it be as special as it was. I added those at Shangular. Those I did because I felt like they felt like a sample. So that's why we took the low end out of my voice

because we wanted it to feel like an old radio. Just like a train. This was also like a gateway into me, like, exploring harmonies. Could you tell where my hair was that? Me, you went to hell and back. So the three members of Beach noise, Jake, aka Jake the Snake, it's Matt and it's Johnny. Those three guys are amazing. And the way Matt had gone about, like, treating my vocals, people had heard my voice,

but they never heard it like that. Because I remember coming home and playing a song to my friends and one of the first thing they said to me was, you sound like a pop star on this. Like, you've been recorded really well and this is how you could continue to sound. Yeah. We Be My Yellow comes out late September, right?

For me, Helen Back is a smash. It's streaming more than any of my other song. It's doing really well. In my head, it's a smash. By the end of 2020 to 2021, it's like picking up on US radio and it became a bit of a COVID song it goes to number one AAA in America

Billboard AAA and it comes to summer and the songs are still going now TikTok have caught hold of it and now it's like going bananas on that app and then I'm like okay I want to work on a new record and that new record is not in the direction of Helenback and Hellenbach the sound of Helen Back was never really in the direction I was ever going to go in anyway

to be honest not that I'm restricted to one sound but I just knew that weren't going to be that and I really did not want to become Mr. Helenbach. I start like shunning the song, man. Like, I'm getting all kinds of offers to go on TV and play it and I'm like turning them all down. It saddens me to say what, like I kind of become anti-Hellenbach.

And then I think at some point in 2022, I had this realization of man, like, my friend passing and all of the DNA that had gone into this song and all of the like stuff, like, how could I not love it? I had this moment. where I kind of did it in my head, but I wrote a letter to Heller Back, as if it was a friend of mine, basically just saying, I love you and I'm sorry for treating you like that.

And I just wanted to apologize to the song. And I had to get that out of my system in order to acknowledge the song and then move forward with it as this, like, proud thing. I think I needed this, man. I think I needed to talk about, I never really, like, I've spoken extensively about this song, and ultimately I think it's the best song I ever wrote. So I'm just so proud of what this song.

coming up, you'll hear how all these ideas and pieces came together in the full song. 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, Rishi Kesh 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, Vagabond, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. 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 city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, 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, Rishi-kash.co, or just go to Song You Exploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. And now here's Helen back by Bacar in its entirety. You tell where my head was at when you found me. Man, I thought I had everything. I was lonely. Now you're my head. Found you. She like petty crime. She had green eyes like mind you. And where she go, I'll never know her friends bounce to. I guess it's their loss But I'll never know what we'll mount to Be my life, be my yellow

PYT walking down put a bell up Put a smile on his face at the end of the day MDMA help us fly away Who'd have known, who'd have known you would save my life Who'd have known, who'd have known you will fly my kite Could you tell, could you tell? Could you tell? Could you tell where my head was at when you found me?

A look back just a fine piece Man I thought I had everything I was lonely Now you're my head Check if I was blessed because you knew I was low Head gone rolling off the throne I remember I remember we was in the park Late night made love on the grass Got my head in the clouds cutting all my stars

In my ears said the world was ours But to hell and back To hail my wounds cause it gets like that Wrong side of the moon No tune car moons You're my Cleopatra No side thing don't need a back off Need a real one, don't need an actor

A lost one's made Think you want a baxter Come and be my girl Could you tell where my head was at When you found me Just to find peace Nine I thought I had everything I was lonely

Now you're my head Visit songexploader.com slash Bacar To learn more You'll find links to buy or stream Helen back And you can watch the music video That Bacar made with his friend on the beach for $80.

If you liked this episode and you want to check out another, maybe try the Imagine Dragons episode for the story of another song that was recorded at Rick Rubin's famous Shangri-La studio. You can find that and all the other episodes of the podcast at SongExploder.net or wherever you listen. This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, Kathleen Smith, and Mary Dolan,

with help from Theo Balcom. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma. I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member, of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts.

You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Rishi Hereway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploader.net

slash shirt. I'm Rishi-Kesh-Hirway. Thanks for listening.