Song Exploder - How to Dress Well - Pour Cyril

Episode Date: March 25, 2015

In an interview with Belgian filmmakers the Dardenne brothers, talking about the kinds of stories they tell, Luc Dardenne says, "Human suffering; that interests us very much." It also interests Tom Krell, a songwriter and producer who goes by the name How to Dress Well. After seeing one of the Dardenne brothers films, The Kid with a Bike, he was inspired to make the song "Pour Cyril." In this episode, he'll dig deep into that where that inspiration led him, from transformations within the song, to within the film, and within himself.

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. This episode contains explicit language. That was from an interview with Belgian filmmakers the Dardan brothers, talking about the kinds of stories they tell, saying, human suffering, that interests us very much. It also interests Tom Krell, a songwriter and producer who goes by the name How to Dress Well. After seeing one of the Dardan Brothers films, The Kid with a Bike, he was inspired to make the song Poor Cyril. In this episode, he'll dig deep into where that inspiration led him,

from transformations within the song, within the film, and within himself. Now, here's How to Dress Well from an interview recorded live at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco. My name's Tom, and I play music as How to Dress Well. The backbone of the song is a sample of a Beethoven concerta. It's sampled from a film The Kid with a Bike by the Darden Brothers. They used the music in the film to signal chapter changes. This boy, Cyril, he is living in a foster care contemporary orphanage, and a woman, for no real kind of rational calculation, decides to take him

and bring him into her life and try and give him a love which would remedy the wounding he's sort of living out as a young boy. He's been abandoned by his family and has become quite violent. And then the movie is quite simple. It's just what unfolds when this woman tries to do this quite courageous moral thing for this already quite damaged child. People are forced to do either morally courageous things to try and help him or morally compromising things when they're exposed to what happens when we live in a world with abandoned children. The film just blasted me.

I couldn't stop thinking about it for like three or four days after I saw it. The whole song kind of like flows out of my experience. of that film treating the sample kind of ruthlessly, setting up distortion channels, and then playing with the gain structure on the distortion channel, trying to bring something novel out of very simple sample. Yeah, it continues like that. It becomes progressively more distorted, and sonically I really am attached to those swells and distortions, things going into the red.

I think that when something goes into the red on a recording, it can be like a really powerful metaphor is not the right word, because it's more like visceral than that. But like, when you're listening to someone's sing and it goes into the red, it feels intense. You know, lyrically, this song is like direct to the point of almost being, like, didactic. I sing this sort of like fairy tale intro of a love with no pain and no shame. And then I go into the main verse and I sing about this boy, like just literally describing the film. And I sing, there's no world with a broken child.

So it's not like ambiguous writing. Just hold her hand all this sweet little eyes. No, no more. One of my best friends quite unexpectedly had a baby. She's very young. And watching her care for this child kind of was pretty. revelatory for me. At a certain point I don't even care who her parents are, even though I really love her parents. It's just like the fragile child laughing and farting and crying and stuff.

That's like the source of a possible new world. I like to think about what would the world be like if it were a good world to live in and not a terrible world. I made a midi scale of a trumpet blast that plays in a movie called Bo Travi, a Claire Deney film. The trumpet is played in a funeral ritual in that film. And so the first sequence of brass that comes in is me playing MIDI on keyboard. And then that's replaced by a real brass quartet. By the end of the kid with the bike, Cyril is a completely different thing. You know, he was like this sort of dangerous to himself and others, very pained creature. at the beginning and then through love, he's transformed and he becomes fully human in the

deepest sense of that word. And so the idea across this section was to try and perform musically that growth from the death trumpet MIDI synthetic to the rebirth trumpet. I used to be like a really aggressive dude was kind of like a bit of a dick and the music I made was like pretty harsh noise stuff like played in like some different kinds of metal bands and did solo stuff that was just like sweltering harsh noise just to basically make you feel bad a lot of shit changed in my life over the last six years just really important relationships like losing some people quite close to me i had a confrontation sort of with like my own

arrogance and hubris and shit and i just realized i needed to like figure out how to take better care on myself so that i wasn't such a negative force in the world and then i started listening to a lot of different kinds of music and one song that had a huge influence on me in terms of understanding the value of sentimentality and understanding this like direct approach that I was talking about earlier is this song by Janet Jackson called Special she sings like the beginning we need to remember that love lies deep within ourselves it's a cool so that's a good sentiment I think everything I'm saying I'm not like conscious of this in advance of the work

I'll have like a hunch, more like a feeling. Be like, man, that movie was like beautiful. I think I want to be a better person. Maybe I'll write a song. You really learn about yourself in retrospect. And so I'll do these acts and record these songs. And then I spend about two years talking about the songs to strangers. And then I learned like, oh shit, okay.

I was pretty obsessed with that for like three weeks there. And oh yeah, like I never realized how important. that person is to me. And I learn an enormous amount about myself through my music. I mean, that's the most compelling reason to keep doing it. And now here's poor Cyril by How to Dress Well in its entirety. I said there's no shame in this love. Yeah, there's no pain in this love.

I got the world to gain. with this love and there's no pain this love that was from How to Dress Well's 2014 album What Is This Heart? There's another version of the song that Tom recorded live with an orchestra. Here's an excerpt from it.

Visit songexploder.net for links to both versions. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last 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 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, rishikash.cosh.c. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. You can find all the past and future episodes of Song Exploder at SongExploder.net or on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts. Find the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder.

Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary, story-driven shows. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.