Song Exploder - Kelly Lee Owens - On

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

Kelly Lee Owens is an electronic music producer and songwriter originally from Wales. She’s released two critically acclaimed albums and done remixes for Björk and St. Vincent. Her most recent album is is called Inner Song. It came out in August, following what Kelly described as the hardest three years of her life. In this episode, she takes apart her song "On," and explains how its tone and shifts mirrored her journey processing her own trauma. songexploder.net/kelly-lee-owens

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. Kelly Lee Owens is an electronic music producer and songwriter, originally from Wales. She's released two critically acclaimed albums and done remixes for Bjork and St. Vincent. Her most recent album is called Inner Song. It came out in August 2020, following what Kelly described as the three hardest years of her life. In this episode, she takes apart her song on. and she explains how the song's tone and tempo shifts

mirrored her own journey processing her trauma. My name is Kelly Lee Owens. The last two or three years before making this album I'd been through quite a lot personally. And I would say, you know, suffered a lot of losses, which involved a lot of grief. The day I made this song was the day that Keith Flint from the prodigy passed away.

And the prodigy I've loved my whole life, and I think actually it technically counts as having been my first CD single. Yeah, I've loved them for most of my life. So when I heard that he'd passed, it really affected me. And the song, in a sense, was born of that energy initially. But even though this song was inspired by the passing of Keith Flint, you know, which is a very emotional thing, I often start songs with inspirations from samples that I take.

So anyone that knows me knows that I'm obsessed with capturing sounds. One of the samples that I had laying around on my iPhone was of a train that I recorded. Like a year earlier, it was at a London station and I was on my way to an airport. It sounded so high definition. There was a specific rhythm. And so, you know, I just whipped out my iPhone and recorded that quickly. So I'll bring those little samples to the studio. and often that can spark an idea.

And that sample as a percussive tool as a hi-hat really stood out. And so I thought that would be a great starting point. But the original sample was quite slow. And this track wasn't necessarily going to be that. I wanted to find a BPM that felt good and then sped up the train sound to sound like a high hat or a Maraca.

It's just way more exciting to me, at least. to find a sample that sounds like a Maraca, then actually use a Maraca. So we started with that sample and then built up the percussive ideas around that. Initially, this track was called for a very long time, spirit of Keith. Because I genuinely felt partly like his spirit was coming through

and there's kind of like that slight breaky, prodigy influence with the percussion as well. I knew I wanted a kind of crazy, kind of, you know, quite hard section, but wanted to go into the more kind of melodic stuff. The chord sequences came out very quickly. I feel like they're quite emotional, tinge with sadness, but also, you know, quite euphoric. I work with James Greenwood, who co-wrote and co-produced on this record, and it's his synth. It's a synth from 1984 and analog, and I just fell in love with it.

Once the main chords have been established, there's always like harmonies, usually on the same synth, just to kind of like enhance and build like a wall of sound. Kind of like a sonic hug. I wouldn't romanticize, you know, feeling low or depressed as being the only way that you can access good art. I think we're kind of moving on from that cliche, you know. But I had a body trauma release therapy session and I became a. It came very low a week after that, and I was able to really feel all of these things I'd been suppressing, and so I could access things more truthfully. And it was actually that week that I happened to be putting aside to write lyrics for the album. And so it was kind of like the floodgates opening.

The words like, this is how it must go. Now I am moving on. They're quite open. They're quite simple. but it definitely felt like when initially I was singing over the music that that was just what needed to come out. The emotions came through, and I really needed and wanted to be very direct and very honest.

It was cathartic for me. When I find a melody that really works and lyrics that really work, I then start to build harmonies around that. When it actually comes to the recording, I can't have anyone in the room. It's really important for me to be able to have that time and space to be able to do that freely. It's a real, like, intimate experience for me that I really treasure. There's a simplicity in the melody where it sometimes feels like a... Not a lullaby, but it has that quality to it, you know,

where it's, like, kind of holding a dreamy emotional space for you. My favorite lyrics in this is can only love as deeply as you see yourself and this was something that like going through therapy and my personal situations that I've been through is like I realize like someone can only love you as deeply as they're willing to see themselves we all have that responsibility

and the deeper you go into that the deeper I feel you can actually truly love I don't think I've written a breakup song before. Sometimes, you know, you feel like that oversimplifies it because actually, you know, there can be things that come like that a derogatory with that in a sense of people like, oh, another breakup track. But it's more complex than that. The losses I experience, the most devastating loss I experienced that was the loss of myself. In the chorus, I just keep going with the harmonies and the layers until I get to the point where I feel like it's emotionally connected. That moment

when you can kind of just go like all out, you know? After the second chorus, I mean, I was aware that it's quite an emotionally heavy song and I wanted to almost free myself from what I'd created, you know? So while it's important for us emotionally in life as well to like lean into those cracks, I think it's important to have hope. I wanted to create that sonically and sort of transmute pain and the sense of loss within the sounds of the first half and create this whole other second half that just allows you to move on. As the second chorus ends, this is synth, but purposefully made it sound

like a siren as a claxon like, okay, here we go, we're moving from one state of being to another. We're moving from one phase to the next phase. And then the kick comes in and it just becomes quite in your face, just being like, right, here we go, we get on with this. So the chorus is saying, now I am moving on. The second half was the moving on bit. And celebrating that with movement, I believe we store traumas in the body, and it's well known that kind of movement can shift a lot. So I wanted it to be like a dance floor moment.

There's like a synth line. And sometimes it can feel like the synths are lining up, But then, wait, are they? It's kind of like the back and forth of, can I move forward? Like, can we do this? Yes, we can. Okay, right. That's what I needed in that moment myself.

The notes in the outro change, but that is just simply the beauty of working with analog scents and sequences. They have a mind of their own. And basically, they're technically mistakes, but I always leave the mistakes in. Those last little few notes really made me chuckle, so they had to stay in there. And that was representative of nothing's perfect and the mistakes sometimes are actually not mistakes at all. The vocals that come in in the second half, they don't happen very often.

And they were one of the last things to be placed in the track. It was completely instrumental. And then it felt like, okay, I need to knit in something that connects to the first half. For me, it just made sense that at those moments in particular, that we connected back to the initial feeling, because actually in life you can move forward from stuff, but of course, like, we all have memories and we feel like we're always going to be connected to the things that have happened to us. It's what makes us, and I think it's important to acknowledge that. And so I'm just acknowledging that sonically. There would be times where James and I were working on it, and I'd just say, oh, sorry, crying again.

And I know that can be an amazing sign, right, when something is moving you. But it happens so often that it wasn't a problem, but it was like, okay, Kelly, like pull yourself together and I'll focus, right? So this one in particular hit me hard. What I experienced was so deeply traumatic. And, you know, it was a situation that zapped heaps of my energy to the point that I didn't know if I could create anymore. So just the fact that this album exists is like a testament in itself to my spirit, I think. There's something about when we go into the pain and we access those feelings of

sadness or melancholy, I think there's, it can be transformed, transforming that pain and finding the blessings within it. Here's On by Kelly Lee Owens in its entirety. SongExploder.net to learn more about Kelly Lee Owens. You'll also find links to buy or stream the song, and you can watch the music video for it. 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 Manzuchas, 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. Rishikesh.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploder is made by me, Rishi Kesh Hirwe, along with producer Christian Coons, production assistant Olivia Wood, and illustrator Carlos Lerma. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of creative, independent podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at

Radiotopia.fm. You can get a SongExploder t-shirt at Songexploader.net slash shirt. You can also follow the show on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at Song Exploder. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway.

Thanks for listening.