Song Exploder - FKA twigs - Mirrored Heart

Episode Date: April 8, 2020

FKA twigs is a singer, songwriter, and producer from London. She’s released three EPs and two albums. Her most album, Magdalene, came out in November, 2019, and was named one of the best albums of the year by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Time, NME, and more. For this episode, twigs chose the song "Mirrored Heart" from Magdalene. She wrote and produced it in Los Angeles with a few collaborators, but it’s an intensely personal song. songexploder.net/fka-twigs

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. FKA Twigs is a singer, songwriter, and producer from London. She's released three EPs and two albums. Her most recent album, Magdalene, came out in 2019 and was named one of the best albums of the year by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Time, NME, and more. For this episode, Twigs chose the song Mirrored Heart from that album.

She wrote and produced it in Los Angeles with a few collaborators, but it's an intensely personal song. This is FK Twigs. The lyric Mirrored Heart was something that I had had written in my phone for a while. I'd heard this saying

that your greatest love will be somebody who will truly reflect who you aspire to be and can mirror. It doesn't mean that you have to do the same thing or like the same things. It's more to do of like morals or like a kind of deeper understanding

of life or sort of human values. Somebody who's going to give what you give, put in what you put in. It's like an equal meeting of two loves. I write a lot of things down. Sometimes they turn into songs or sometimes they turn into things that I write to myself.

So I didn't know necessarily that it was going to be a song at the time, but it presented itself. I wrote Mirrored Heart with Ethan P. Flynn, an amazing musician and songwriter. And it was just Ethan playing on the piano. He came to visit me in L.A. I had this house and I invited a few of my friends to come and work on the record and write and eat together and wake together.

and Ethan and I wrote Mirrod Haar on a very sort of lonely morning, I remember. Everyone was in bed or out or, you know, just doing their own thing. I think we'd maybe even said that that day was like a chill day and we weren't really going to work, but then Ethan and I just found ourselves at the piano just playing around and we just have something really special when we're together. and it's very melancholy but easy and there's a real sort of deep blue joy to the music that we make.

He just has all these deep, amazing feelings and unusual chords. It felt really unusual and quite strange but also it felt like something that I knew really well. It felt like a very old song, something that I would have heard my grandma playing or something like that had a very old feel. in a really inspiring way.

It was very calm and very quiet and very sensitive that moment. But you could play anything and I'll just start singing. It's a nightmare. It's like compulsive. It's all for the gain. It's all for the lovers trying to take their breath away. I sometimes make music and images.

For Mirrored Heart, I saw an opium den and loads of lovers on top of each other and then me as like a singular person that couldn't find an inn on the situation. And then everybody had mirrors on themselves in different places but where my mirror was I couldn't find anyone that had it in the same place. And then everybody held hands and then walked off the horizon together

like they were falling and then I was left without anybody to fall. with. During that time I was like furiously dating without much luck and I think I was feeling kind of lonely and unseen. For me anyway I mean I'm quite a sort of relationship person. I just feel more comfortable knowing where I am romantically I've never enjoyed dating if I'm honest with you. It just doesn't suit me. I hadn't been single for a long. long time and it just felt like I was there dating to like, don't say it boost people's egos, but it just felt like not genuine connections. Like everyone's trying to be grabby just to kind

of like fill a hole to gain something. Find that high, get that fix, get their heart racing, like get that text, feel good about yourself for those 10 minutes while someone's paying you attention. And so I was feeling quite vulnerable and just wondering, like, was I ever going to love again, you know? Was I ever going to be loved again? Like, what was that going to feel like this time around? But I'm never going to give up. I'm probably going to think about you all the time. And for the lovers who found a mirrored heart, they just remind me I'm without you. And then Sion, who's a very old friend and collaborator,

came in and played the guitar, and I remember singing to him a little riff, like, dung, gung, gung. During, like, LP1, you know, I was just really into the laptop, you know, I was really into Ableton and, like, finding the cool sounds and how many effects can you put on something, whereas during Magdalene I started to feel the need to actively get out of the computer a bit

and I have more acoustic instruments than I've ever had before. The ploddiness of the guitar, that kind of sounds like a kid walking with lazy feet. It's like a reluctance to get to like the destination. That's something that was just really important to me and conveying in this piece of music is like a reluctant march to an unknown destination. I had this new drum machine and I didn't know how to work it and it has all these different settings of different types of music but I couldn't get out of the hip hop and trap setting

because it was my first day of having it. So like it was just these weird voice samples like, yep, and like 200 bands, 300 bands like that. And so like actually in the song it says 200 bands. Which I thought was really funny. Sometimes in my music I have little jokes to myself. like that. I'm not a traditional musician.

Actually, like, I play instruments horribly, but I'm good at working things out on mirrored heart. Like, I played drum machines and stuff like that. And I have my personal touch on it, but really it's me relying on people that can play chords beautifully to just listen and be able to, like, execute my vision. It's different being a male producer to being a female producer, female producer. You know, it is a very different vibe and I feel that I have to work with men that

really embrace their feminine energy for it to work. I don't want to be trapped inside a clever boy's laptop. So it means often that like I work with someone very closely and explain to them in great detail what I want and how I need things to sound. And I write this way with an artist called Callas as well. Callis actually produced the song and Nicholas Jarre being another person like, you know, that allowed me to create through their

well of skills you know and be able to explain that things you know like, okay I hear a synth here, it needs to be deep, it's playing these notes, it has this amount of sadness in it, it sounds like a wizard's crying. You know, you just tap into

each other and you can figure it out. I'd done that sound that was like, uh, and then callus did this crazy sound that goes underneath it, which is like this whirring, it just sounds like what pain is. It sounds like the end of a cry and he just layered it under my voice. That's the marumbo of hope right there. There's a sign that maybe things are going to be okay, but probably not. Actually went to Rick Null's studio in Santa Monica.

That's Rick Knowles, the Grammy-winning songwriter and producer. He's worked with Madonna, Lana Del Rey, Stevie Nix, and a bunch more. And he has a lot of really amazing amps. So we were able to play with a lot of his toys and run a lot of the sounds through his amps and re-record them just to give it extra grit, you know, like extra grunge and feeling. To me, like mirrored heart at its best, it sounds like it's just really hard to like squeeze out. really like compressed and stressed out. And then there's these moments of just relaxing this kind of glittery like release.

When we were at Rick Null's studio in Santa Monica, I recorded the vocals there with him and Mirrored Hart was one song that I just really wanted to go in on and warm up properly and drink lemon and honey. tea and do my breathing exercises and go in knowing that I'm a vocalist and that's something that in my earlier work I just didn't care about. Like I just didn't care. I was like I'm an artist, my voice is an instrument, you know it, or sound how it sounds, drown it in reverb, put loads of effects on it, put me in the back because actually that synth is way more important than me right now. Whereas now, like, I just wanted people to hear my lyrics. Did you want me? Oh, no, not for life. Did you truly see me? No, not this time.

Were you ever sure? No, no, no, not with me. It was a very weird time in my life. In my mid-20s, I really thought I had it all sorted and together. And then in my late 20s, I really realized that I 100% did not, you know. I just realized I did not have a scoobie. do what was going on and I think for me like mirrored heart it was really like at the peak of me feeling very alone and just like intense heartbreak like keep you up at night

heartbreak during this time I called my manager like it must have been 4 a.m for me and it was in the early morning for him in London and I called him and I was just crying I was just like completely inconsolable. And he said, what's the matter? And I said, I don't want to make a heartbreak record. I don't want to be on stage singing these songs. I don't want to feel sad. I don't want to have to carry it with me.

Like, I don't want to make a sad album. I'd made LP1 and I felt like so strong. I felt like on top of the world. I felt like I had it sorted. I felt like I would make this next record. And I would be, like this strong Nubian queen

and I go and take the world and it would be amazing but then that just was not my truth at all and I think at a certain point I had to accept that in a lot of the interviews I did about the record

like you know everyone was kind of like this must have been so healing for you like this must have been such like a healing process and I'm kind of like absolutely not like you're kidding me I said I've no idea. I just fix one thing and then another thing comes up. You know, that's life.

There was just nothing that I could do. Then ride it out and try and get on with my life. And that's what I was trying to do. But it was a great time of self-discovery, genuine, real, like, gut-wrenching self-discovery. Here's Mirrored Heart by FK.A. Twigs in its entirety. All the gain. Love is trying to take their breath away.

Visit. For the gain, it's all for the lovers trying to chase the rush again. But I'm never going to go for too far. Did you truly see me? No, no, no, no. The gain is all for the lovers trying to push the pain away. Visit SongExploder.net to learn more about FGA Twigs.

You'll also find a link to stream or buy this song. I have a new album of my own coming out on Abrecht 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, 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 art

including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, 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 Malina, 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 songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploder is made by me and producer Christian Coons, with production assistants from a Olivia Wood, and illustrations by Carlos Lerma. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of fiercely independent podcasts. You can learn more at Radiotopia.fm. You can find Song Exploder on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at Song Exploder.

My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.