Song Exploder - James Vincent McMorrow - Get Low

Episode Date: October 19, 2016

James Vincent McMorrow is a singer/songwriter whose first albums fell somewhere on the folk music side of things. But his sound has changed over the years, incorporating elements of R&B and electronic music. On the album We Move, James worked with the producer Nineteen85, whose credits include tracks by Drake and Nicki Minaj. In this episode, James breaks down the song "Get Low" from that record and how it was inspired by Clipse, minimalism, and Los Angeles. songexploder.net/james-vincent-mcmorrow  

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. James Vincent McMorrow is a singer-songwriter whose first albums fell somewhere on the folk music side of things. But his sound has changed over the years, incorporating elements of R&B and electronic music. On the album, We Move, James worked with a producer, 1985, whose credits include tracks by Drake and Nikki Minaj. In this episode, James breaks down the song Get Low from that record, and how it was inspired. by Clips, Minimalism, and Los Angeles. My name is James Vincent McMar.

I tend to base everything off a rhythm initially. So, like, this song was based on a drum pattern. That was the inception of the song. And it was its whole Neptunes thing, like, with the little, like, bongo on the conga hits. It was, like, totally me doing, like, a silly little Farrell thing. Like, grinding by clips. I'm going by the name.

I'm your best, yo. From the Neptunes. I wouldn't go so far as to call that like the perfect song. He says it's like, there's no music in it until this tiny little thing comes in at one point. It's such a perfectly executed track, isn't it? You know what's crazy about that song? The first keyboard I ever owned was like Cork Triton. And if you go to, I think it's percussion bank one on the presets that come within it.

The first four keys on the left-hand side are the entire beat for grinding by clips. And that was like a huge thing for me when I was a kid because, Because it was just like when you want to produce or you want to like make beats and you grow up loving hip hop production, it's such a harder thing to figure out because like there's so much gear you need to buy and there's so much learning you need to do. But it was just like, I don't need to own an MPC or be super proficient in how to cut up a sample. So I just liked the energy of the drum pattern. And then I had the chorus pattern.

It was like a right-hand part on like a Rhodes thing that had written one day. It was like, okay. a song there. I decided to get out of Dublin for a while and see something different. And I really liked it. It was just, I'm sitting in an alien environment with not like my full range of gear. It's a good way for me to like find a different way of working. That put me in an uncomfortable position and I had no choice but to face it because when you're at home and you've got your studio, it's comfortable and it's nice and I can pull up anything that I need within five minutes. It was like, let's see what happens when you're just working on a one octave keyboard and

and you've got a guitar and a crappy mic. When I started writing on the guitar, it was all based around this, like, A minor, E minor, F major thing. And it got busier and busier. I was in that vein of just, like, doing what I do historically, which is just, like, adding a lot of ideas. Like, what else can I fit in this song? What else can I do?

Which was grand, but it just wasn't what I wanted the songs to ultimately be on this record. I knew I couldn't produce this record myself because I just wouldn't, like those demos, that's where I had it. And I would have gone in a studio and I would have probably kept it quite similar. So that's how it sort of came to be. 1985 produced this song. I knew 85 through his work on the Drake record on nothing was the same. And when I sent the stems to 85, I actually left the guitars out of what I sent him. There was a part of my brain that thought, like, I don't think that 85 will be into the guitars.

he was listening to and he was like, yeah, it's cool, you know, but something else needs to be there. And I just pulled them up and was like, well, I had this. And he was like, yeah, that's the song, that's it. The guitar is the beating heart of the record until the 808 comes in. Drums are what 85 does incredibly well. Because I had written the bass line on the Prophet 6 and it kind of had this sort of, I guess, West Coast almost like Bay Area feel to it. but it needed something more aggressive

underneath it. When I used to hear like tuned 808s on tracks I'm like, how do people do that? The 808 is 85's world and we just like added some distortion to it and filtered it out a little bit and then he tuned it so it just follows the baseline. 85 was great.

They really like brought it down to like the bare bones of what it needed to be which is like a singer-songwriter song with an 808 underneath it which is the thing I've been going for my entire life. My process on the two records previously has been work on music and then work on lyrics. I wanted to try and force myself to get in the rhythm of writing lyrics quicker. I love the way your heart had no room.

Loving what your heart becomes. I love the way your heart and no rules, loving what your heart becomes. The thing with songwriting is like you always tell yourself every time you finish your record, you're like, I'm never going to say the word love. I'm not going to say the word heart again. because I've probably got three or four songs where the word heart has like a pretty prominent role in the chorus. And you just think I'm never going to use that word again because it's played out to me. But there's no better word to use for that what you're trying to say there.

So it just was a thing. I wrote it down and was like, oh, I'm going to write another heart song. I can't do that. But I just couldn't find a better, you know, sometimes you just can't replace the thing. Sometimes it just needs to be a heart lyric. So it just, that's what worked. When I love the way you hang with no fools, loving what your heart becomes. When it comes to reverb and how dry a vocal is,

my experience has been that the better I've gotten, the less reverb I've used. And I have gotten better as a vocalist, and I'm more at ease with my vocal being front and center. And I've worked a long time to get to that point. So the idea of then, like, wrapping it up in reverb seemed redundant to me at this point. I wanted the lead vocal to be very unadorned. I heard you getting married.

Everybody says. But I still wanted these harmonies to be in the song somewhere. So the idea I had was to have like a call and response. So they are the response to the lead vocal. So they cut in really harsh. I heard you getting married. Get the low. Everybody says, get the low.

Oh, you never show, you never show. Get the low. In 1985, when we were first talking about working on the records, and we were sending ideas back and forth, and then he had this guitar thing buried really deep in it. And I was like, what is that? And he mailed me back and he was like, oh, it was kind of a joke. Like, I just had this guitar that I'd recorded,

so I just cut it up in Ableton and like flip the notes around to fit your song. I was like, that has to be the thing. It's a lean section and having like a screaming electric guitar over it. it will elicit reaction. Like when people hear this song, everybody first reacted to them. It's like, that guitar part, though, like, where did that come from?

That's great to me. Yeah, we found it funny when we first heard it, but it does have a very, like, visceral reactive sense to it, which is something that it's hard to get. It came to L.A. Because L.A. was like the place I'd always wanted to kind of hang out to make music.

Get Low was very much about my L.A. experience. When I first wrote the title then, it elicited quite a funny response because obviously Getlow has like connotations with like being in the club and obviously this is a really famous Lil Jon song from a few years back which I love. But I had watched as a Robert Duval movie from like 2007, 2008 called Get Low, which is about a man that like he organizes his own funeral and Get Low to him is dying. I love that movie first of all. I think it's really great, But I really just love that saying and that idea, you know, I'm not saying that like being in L.A.s me was like dying or anything. But the idea of growing up and moving and change is part of this record.

It's in its bones. And now here's Get Low by James Vincent McMorrow in its entirety. For more on time, pay, keep a song. You can get you so far. I just stay in spite. You can get you so far. It gets old, and you left with no one. I love the way you're hard.

For more on James Vincent McMorro, visit songexploder.net. James brought my band Moors out on tour to open for him a couple years ago. It was great to talk to him again for this episode. 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 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, 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. You can find all the past and future episodes of SongExploder at SongExploder.net. This episode was edited by Christian Coons and me. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.