Song Exploder - Bonobo - Break Apart (feat. Rhye)

Episode Date: February 28, 2017

Simon Green is a producer and DJ who’s been making music under the name Bonobo since 2000. In January 2017 he released his sixth studio album, Migration. For the song “Break Apart," he enlisted Rhye to add vocals, and in this episode, the two of them tell the story of how the track came together. songexploder.net/bonobo

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. Simon Green is a producer and DJ who's been making music under the name Bonobo since 2000. In January 2017, he released his sixth album, Migration. For the song, Break Apart on that album, he enlisted Rye for vocals. And in this episode, the two of them tell the story of how the track came together. My name is Simon Green and I go under the name Bonobo.

When I first started this song, I was on a flight from Miami to L.A. It was an evening flight. It was a bit of a weird mind space. All I wanted at the time was just to sort of be still and stop travelling. I spent kind of a year just living nowhere, just on tour just kind of in hotels and tour buses, living out of a suitcase. So I was feeling a little more somber, so I kind of, I pulled up Ableton

and I built this patch from a plug-in, a core game one, which is like the classic house piano, and just drowned it in reverb and just did these very slow notes one after another, looking out of the window, whatever was passing down underneath.

That was the opening core progression. And I also had this loop, this little kind of chiming, percussive loop. I never really start out thinking this is going to be something I'm making for the record. It's just going to be like, I'm on a plane.

This is what I'm going to do for the most three hours. I'm just going to tinker around. I love harps. I love kind of sampling them. I love slowing them down. I love editing them. And I went into a studio in Brooklyn and recorded a harpist for the track that ended up with Erica Badu on it.

From the last record, called Heaven for the Sinner. We kind of spent a time. day recording this harpist and there was so much great stuff in there. It ended up not being used in the track that I was recording it for that I've ended up sort of recycling some of that session back into some other stuff. So this was from that same session. That phrase kept jumping out. The harp has sped up six tones.

I prefer to sort of repitch things and slow them down and speed them up because it just gives them a sort of an extra quality. you can get something that sounds a little more otherworldly in a way. I've been using a lot of found sound sound and recording kind of textures and just ambience just to give it some space and give it some air. When I was living in New York, I recorded my journey from my house to wherever I was going in Manhattan, walk down the street into the subway, waiting for a train, getting on the train, the noise on the train, getting off the train.

It was like a sort of 10-minute recording of this journey. From that recording of the subway, the piece I ended up choosing was from sitting inside the train. It's also side-chained, so it dips in and out, it sort of weaves in and out of the rest of the sounds. I started building the drums after that. What I'd started with was the kicks and the claps to sort of accent where the drums would be,

and they were the sort of like the leading parts. And then what I do is I sort of shave, in the space between the kicks and the claps, I'll take a jump break. That was from a jazz player. Those little rolls and little hits shaded in between the kicks and the snares. And so you get one hit that sort of like leads into another via this little roll. I was thinking about the tempo. 125 BPM. It's a difficult tempo. It's traditionally that's kind of like house and techno kind of tempo but this wasn't what that needed. This kind of jazzy thing kind of took it into a more soulful place.

And the bass line, when the drums come, that for me was a real switch where the drums and the bass turn it into something else. After the original piano progression and the drums, I wanted something to sort of like come in into the higher register just to sort of lift the whole thing a little bit and take it sort of into the third part to recorded piano. I processed it the same way, kind of put it through lots of reverb and and a little more sort of ethereal sounding. It's around that point where I know whether this can sort of stand on its own narrative

or whether it would lend itself to a sort of human element and I thought this would be really sort of sweet to bring in a voice. I think that the way that I can tell whether something is a vocal is there's space. I can just hear it, you know, there's a lot of space between those notes. The ideas are really pretty much fully formed before I let a vocalist hear them. I never really kind of initially give too much guidance when I'm sending yourself to vocalists because I want them to be able to not have any restraints when they're kind of writing. I just want to see what their initial idea is.

I just want them to sort of have the freedom and kind of go with their instincts a little bit. It can bring a real freshness to something to have this sort of second idea, which is away from your own sort of frames of reference. Hey, this is Milosh from Rai and I sang on The track. I loved his music. And like a lot of people, I thought that he was a woman when I first heard his voice. And it was kind of one of those moments.

You meet him or someone tells you that this is a dude. I'm like, wow, I had no idea. I sent it to him. And asked if it resonated with me. And it definitely did. Something about it really kind of got me. There's certain. Like right when I hear it, I hear the melodies instantaneously because it just connects with me.

And that was definitely the case with that. I was like, okay, yeah, I can definitely do this. His response to it was amazing. You know, he was like, so he didn't want to sort of do too much. You know, he wanted to let the song breathe. So from the outset, he was very sort of like, I'm going to hang back on this. Any track I'm working on, I get put into an emotional state from the track. and then that connects with something that I am feeling at that time.

I just kind of let the feeling that I have guide the melody, and I don't really think about lyrics off the top. I just start mumbling in the melody that I want to sing. Like, they're literally mumbles. And then I listen back to it an hour later, and I just start hearing all these words that clearly my subconscious was putting out there. I like a take all of this hate.

It's gotta take all of this hate. I like to kind of turn off like an overly intellectual side of myself when I'm writing. I like to be very connected to something that's coming out of me as opposed to trying to construct clever lyrics or something that I think sounds cool. We've thrown apart these pieces. We've grown apart these pieces. We've grown apart. The stuff I was feeling at the time was definitely a deep sadness.

And that song is me letting out. Just stuff that happened, it's just a really long and hard breakup with someone. The lyrics that kind of sum up the entire track to me is, you're my favorite, but we're phasing. You're my favorite. You're my favorite. That's a musical production analogy there. I am inundated with music production, so things like that come to my mind.

What can happen is this thing called phasing. Two, sine waves hit each other, and they create this kind of distorted sound that really bothers my ears. And it's a very distorted feeling. It's like, you're my favorite person, but we're totally phasing. We're phasing, you're my favorite, you're my... It was a very sort of tender subject, you know, it was a very personal thing he was singing about, which I was so overwhelmed that this was being poured into this track. It's shared now and I think it's kind of richer for having a second voice on it.

It's just grown, it was like sort of planting this tiny little plant in the beginning and now it was this sort of enormous sprawling tree. Here's break apart. by Bonobo, featuring Rye, in its entirety. Visit SongExploder.com for more on Bonobo and Rye, including a link to buy this track. Carlos Lerma has been creating illustrations for all the episodes of Song Exploder this year, and you can see those on the website too. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th.

It's been about 15 years since I last put out a 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 Wine Roep. 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 Noss.

Rat, 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, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploder is produced by me, along with Christian Coons, and is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX,

a curated network of extraordinary cutting-edge podcasts, made possible by the Knight Foundation and by MailChimp. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. You can find and follow 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-Kesh Hereway.

Thanks for listening.