Song Exploder - Bat for Lashes - Kids in the Dark

Episode Date: November 27, 2019

Natasha Khan makes music under the name Bat for Lashes. She’s released five albums, including Lost Girls, which came out in September 2019. In this episode, she breaks down the making of the lead single from that album, called “Kids in the Dark.” But just before she started writing it, she wasn't sure if she would make another album at all. songexploder.net/bat-for-lashes Right now, Radiotopia is holding its annual fundraiser. You can help support Song Exploder and the network that makes it possible. Make your mark. Go to Radiotopia.fm to donate today.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. My name is Tao Wyn. Natasha Khan makes music under the name Bat for Lashes. She's released five albums, including Lost Girls, which came out in September 2019. In this episode, she breaks down the making of the lead single from that album called Kids in the Dark. But just before she started writing it, she wasn't sure if she would make another album at all. I'm Natasha of Bat for Lashes. I had been living in L.A. for six months and I moved from London

and basically decided that I was never going to make an album again. I'd come off a 10-year major label deal and was a feeling a bit cynical and fed up. And I just decided to move to Sunny California to pursue script writing. I was developing a script called The Lost Girls, which was essentially about this renegade vicar gang of vampire witches that were trawling around L.A., you know, like possibly murdering people. And at the time, I was doing a lot of late-night driving around L.A., listening to electronic music like Comtrus.

I was driving to Death Valley at Joshua Tree, up to the sequoias, you know, just sort of absorbing these pastel sunsets, you know, feet on the dachshunds, you know, feet on the Dachau. hands out the window and I was just imagining this biker gang of witchy girls that come from the desert and what it might feel like if I saw them following me on bikes or creeping in my yard or if I bumped into them in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery or something. Also I was falling in love at the time and falling in love with LA so it was sort of a heightened romantic time of freedom for me where I had really no expectations of ever made. making music again. So lo and behold, I get a phone call from Bad Robot, who's JJ Abrams company, and they were making a new series called Castle Rock. We got together and their sort of brief was, look, we're making a Stephen King series, can you write a song that sounds like it's from any

era, but just that it would have like an identity of being from a specific era. sort of like they could be long-lost hits that for some reason no one ever heard or, you know, something like that. And Bad Robot weren't aware of the fact that I was writing this script and had been gathering all this inspiration and information. They just wanted me to come and write a song for their TV show. But I guess synchronicity or coincidence,

it just worked out that the decade of the 80s just felt so natural and it almost felt like the soundtrack to this film that I'd been thinking about so much. And I've learned through my career and sort of over the years of doing this to say yes to things because sometimes it's almost like the universe orchestrates meetings and opportunities and people. And when I started making the music, I didn't even realise I would ever make an album, but I guess I was ready, whether that was conscious or not. They asked me to go in and work with their music producer who covers all the film music and stuff, Charles Scott.

who I ended up making this record with, essentially. I'd never met Charles before and he had never met me. And, you know, you never know how those things are going to go. But I think we quickly realized that we bonded and gelled over a lot of touchstone artists of that era. That whole kind of new wave lost romantic 80s era. And so he was like, oh, well, let's get the profit out. and I started to play this chord sequence on quite a soft sound. To me, music is really visual.

And the image I was holding in my mind when I started playing those chords was driving at night in L.A. in my car and holding my boyfriend's hand, like in the middle of the seats, and the red lights of the highway kind of shining on our hands. And it was just, how do I put across this fuzzy, romantic feelings? of being in the womb of a car, because in LA, as opposed to London or New York where I've lived before, and you're out in the elements and walking everywhere, I was really struck by how the inside of your car becomes like your second home. And you're just in there all the time, kind of looking out this windscreen, it's almost like a cinema screen,

and watching the movie of L.A. go by and all these locations that were so cinematic and nostalgic to me. Charles, you know, he's like the mad inventor in the studio. He's like the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory sort of Willy Wonka guy that will bring out sounds and say like, pick from this box of chocolates. And I'm like, oh, I like this one. And so it was nice because he knows the exact location, the machine, the ear, the year to go to. When I'm saying, you know that bit in the Goonies where they drive on their bikes down the hill and Cindy Lauper comes in with that like weird Coto sound? Oh yeah, here we go. Like, you know, it's that sort of thing.

So it was like being a kid in a sweet shop. That gets my creative fire going because it's very immediate and it's fun. You know, you're not like pouring over ideas and stressing about anything. I was speaking a bit about driving around LA and how this sort of like deep electronic, fuzzy, sexy sound was something that had been on my mind. And Charles helped me get this kind of deep sort of squelchy bass sound. The filter kind of opens at the end of each note, so you get that like, like a lion roaring kind of sound.

Isolated, they sound pretty harsh, but combined with those chords, there's an alchemical reaction that happens when they meet each other. It gives you that fuzzy television snow kind of feeling where things are, waves are kind of working against each other. And then the next thing we brought in. in was the beat. I love my drum sounds to have something elemental.

I want it to sound sort of crumbly, sandy cliff distortion and like a rainstorm or, you know, like we're sort of falling into darkness. And there's actually a thunder sample that we use as part of the beat. This song is so womb-like

in its sound to me and it's so vibrational and it's almost this place sonically that I wanted to go to that was this protective layer, this cave or, you know, this sonic egg or something that I wanted to be inside. And someone said once, like, storm makes sense of shelter, you know, like, you only really know you're sheltered when you can hear the storm outside. So once I had the chords, the bass and the beat, I think Charles went to get like a Coca-Cola and a sandwich or something, and I sat in the room with my notebook. And I composed the lyrics within the session,

from scratch. Starting off with lying next to you, we could be on the moon. Lying next to you, we could be on. Tell me your... It's just like this pining, innocent sort of childlike love song to me.

It was sort of the idea that when you really closely bond to somebody, you start thinking less about your life just from a singular perspective and you start to think about living as a duo or a team or a couple, you want to live for both of you. Lying next to you and I want to live for two, I tell you I'm there. That vocal that you hear is what came out on that day and I didn't change it.

I just added layers behind it. That to me was sort of the LA location, the Malibu fires and the bush fires that we had last year happened after I wrote this song but I do remember coming out of my house and seeing all the ash floating in the air and finding it so sinister and there was sort of almost this silence. It created like a dead air sort of feeling and in this song there was sort of this foreboding idea of danger like the danger of being hurt or the danger of darkness coming. Because you're always on my mind. It's been such a hard. That's an exciting time when the vocal's down because that's like the architectural structure is built and then I can go about decorating.

Charles is a great guitar player and so he was kind of in charge of a lot of the guitar staff. And we both discussed that we wanted that sort of early 80s new wave guitar sound. You know, that thing people did a lot which was really holding the strings. down and using that percussive kind of muted electric guitar sound, which to me brings up a lot of romance. When I was a kid growing up in England, it sounded like American highways and dusty roadside bars and gals and guys like dancing around playing music out the jute box or something. You know, like I guess maybe I was just a teenager and really hormonal and had major crushes on people and would listen to those sorts of songs at night on my own and be like, my heart hurt.

So in the very beginning there's sort of this siren It sounds like a siren call I played that on a synths It was like a distorted synthetic cello sound To me it sounds like driving down while Holland driving The car's like winding around roads Trails of lights are going past you It was sort of this careening

Almost off the edge of a road sound The next day I think we created the arpeggio That you hear in the introduction To me the arpeggiator Even though it came later it sort of is like the trademark of the song. It's the sound that I love to hear the most. Charles had been fiddling around with some different arpeggios

and suddenly on top of these quite robust architectural sounds, they're started to grow this idea of, okay, this is layers of washes. Sometimes I liken it to a painting. You'll paint a layer and then you'll paint over the top of it. But because that layer's been there, the next layer sits ever so slightly differently. in the dark came about in one day. You know, and you see Bambi Dears being born, they just stand upright immediately. Some songs, they just sort of, they're an egg for a long time. And then you

see a crack and you're like, oh, thank God. But this one was just like a fully fledged, beautiful, vulnerable, you know, knock need thing that just suddenly appeared in the studio. But it was for the Bad Robot Show. And I remember leaving that day and thinking, oh my God. I hope they use it, but at the same time, there was this conflicted feeling of, oh, do I want to give my child away so quickly? And they never ended up using this song for the television show and I got to keep it and use it.

It just gave me the bug of making an album again. It sort of opened up that portal for me where I realized, oh, I'm in trouble. I think another one's coming. The idea of the chorus for me was I was realizing that like all relationships, this relationship was complex and was going to probably be difficult. And the kids in the dark thing, the motif for me was, I remember someone saying, you know, when you watch anybody sleeping, you see that these people were children once and they were innocent once. And in dreams, we're all just kind of these soft breathing beings, you know, like in our unconsciousness.

So the chorus for me was very much about stripping away all of the angst or the worries or whatever your heart is going through at the time and just look at the child within each of you you could just be little children lying in the dark playing why can't it be that simple? And now here's Kids in the Dark by Bat for Lashes in its entirety.

Visit SongExploder.net for more information about Bat for Lashes. You'll also find a link to buy or stream this song. Song Exploder is made by executive producer Rishi Kesh Hirway, producer Christian Coons, and me. I'm guest hosting for 2019, production assistance from Olivia Wood and illustrations by Carlos Lerma. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated collective of independent creative podcasts. You can learn about all of our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can also follow Song Exploder on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. at Song Exploder, and you can follow me at Tao Get Stay Down.

I'm Tao Wyn. Thanks for listening.