Song Exploder - Kimbra - Top of the World

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

Kimbra is an artist from New Zealand. Her first album came out in 2011, and in 2013 she won two Grammys for her collaboration with Gotye, the multiplatinum hit song,” Somebody That I Used to Know.” In this episode, Kimbra breaks down her song from 2018, “Top of the World,” a song she also made in collaboration - this time with artists Skrillex and Diplo.For more, visit songexploder.net/kimbra.

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. Last month, in January, 2003, Kimber put out her fourth album. I was listening to it, and it made me want to go back and revisit her Song Exploder episode from 2018. It's one of my favorites. Back then, she told me about the making of a song from her third album. So if you miss this episode the first time around, I hope you'll enjoy it. And if you heard it before, I hope you'll enjoy it again.

and as much as I did. Kimbra is an artist from New Zealand. Her first album came out in 2011, and in 2013, she won two Grammys for her collaboration with Gautier, the multi-platinum hit song, Somebody That I Used to Know. In this episode, Kimbra breaks down a song of hers from 2018, called Top of the World. Collaboration is a big part of this song as well.

Coming up, Kimber traces how musical experiments she made with Skrillix and Diplo ended up getting transformed into parts of this song. My name is Kimbra. The start of this song happened at Skrillik Studio. We met backstage at Coachella and then, you know, we talked about hanging out because we were both living in the same part of town in LA. He invited me over to a studio and we were just like listening to beats together. I was playing him some of my demos. He was playing me things he had and pulls up this beat.

This almost seance like trance beat. I'm like, yo, this is really sick. And I started, you know, just moving along to it. And I guess I just started singing along. along. Won, won, won, won, won, won, won. Just kind of made this noise in my mouth, like a kind of low, I guess, almost didgeridoo or something, you know, quite textural.

And he's like, that's sick. Let's record it. The beauty of Skirlik's working with him is he so fast. And he just presses record. And I'm singing it into the mic at the computer. And we start layering it. At that point, I wasn't really thinking about what the song would be about or even if it would be for me.

I mean, a lot of the time when you're writing, especially with DJs, you don't know where that stuff's going to end up. So it didn't get very far in terms of arrangement that day. We decided to kind of sit on it for a bit. He had it on his computer, so he pulled it up with a bunch of people who were coming through his studio. I remember him texting me being like, yo, Anderson Peck really digs it. Like, he's going to put something down. And I'm with Vic Menser and he's going to try something. And I was like, oh, that's dumb. Like, just I love that idea of making something and just letting it kind of go out into the universe and see where it flies. But I think it was always assumed that if a rapper ended up taking the track that I would be involved. You know, I love to work with artists and collaborate.

So considering I kind of already had this presence on this song with this ominous backing vocal, I assumed that I would write some hooks and maybe someone would take the verses. But nothing had really developed with any of the other rappers. And so I started to kind of experiment with it myself in my sort of home studio and trying different approaches. And I started to feel like maybe this was a moment that I could try to, you know, go all the way on. And Skrillix, he was like, Yeah, man, you should go for it. Because I knew there were a lot of rappers trying ideas on this song, it sparked an idea in me to kind of try my hand

at a more rhythmic way of singing. You know, I've done a lot of cathartic, full-voice singing on my records, but with a beat that's so hypnotic and so sort of monotonal, it didn't really feel like the right song to get highly melodic and sort of flourishing and kind of doing lots of trills. It felt like it needed a very urgent, almost protest-like approach in the vocal. I wanted to find a way to meet that energy of where the track was going.

So I approached it more like a spoken word, you know, but there was no real lyrics at that point. So I did gibberish vocals over it, kind of mapping out certain pockets. John Congleton is a producer from Texas. He came on board when the song was just drums and a drone. And me kind of doing gibberish over the track, I consider him to be the person that kind of helped me pull all the puzzle pieces together into something cohesive. He was the first person to put a drop on the song, like add the 808 and a snare,

which totally changed the feeling, because now all of a sudden you could like really bump to the song in the groove. It was heavy, you know? Blasting it in the studio, and we were like, this is hot. I had a habit on this album of taking bike rides through New York City

and learned it about myself on this album. I need a sense of danger, I think, to tap into my spontaneous lyrical. brain. You know, I'd be sitting in my studio in Manhattan and sort of mulling over lyrics, sitting, listening to the track, trying to decipher my own gibberish. What is the song about? And I just couldn't, you know, I was hitting walls, like right and center. But I got on a bike and, you know, my mother would be terrified to know I'm not wearing a helmet, you know, and I'm just going through New York City with my iPhone in my hand, right, with the beat playing

and kind of, you know, sort of hanging in there and trying not to fall off. But I start to sing to myself, right? Start to get the groove in my body as I ride through Manhattan. And it's crazy, man. So many lyrics came that way. It was something about putting myself in that place of mild anxiety, you know, the traffic of Manhattan. There was a sense of being really immersed in the city. And, I mean, it's the city of ambition. So that innocent place of striving started to come out of this song, you know, this kid who dreams of getting out into the world. And little by little, the song started to piece itself together, this kind of ascension to the top, the top of the world, or this kind of striving for power. And it's like a film, right? You need your beginning, middle,

and end. So I wanted each verse to represent a different stage of the journey. It starts with an innocent ambition. And then a little bit of sinister influence starts to edge into the song, something feels a little darker as someone becomes more and more besotted with this feeling of power, this lust for success. it to be a character that was now sort of drunkenly delusional on this ascension. You know, I really wanted to actually take on the feeling of what it might be like to become kind of drunk on your own sense of self-importance and kind of falling into that space of blindness, you know, where you've led people to believe one thing and you're not sure

if you believe it anymore. And there's a moment in the song where the vulnerability kind of comes through and it asks, you know, and it's crazy I'm defined brand new. It's amazing I got high on a view, but tonight I'm feeling tired and alone. Dear Lord, I hope we didn't go wrong. And it's crazy, I'm defined brand new. And it's amazing I got high on a view. But tonight I'm feeling tired and along. Lord, I hope we didn't go wrong. When you're at the top, do you look back and wonder, you know, was it all worth it? And by the fourth verse, this character is now close to losing its mind, you know, it feel like a god. I think I'm winning. Feel like I might. Feels like a minute. Feel like a god. It's really fun to use vocal effects to play into the theater.

Feel like a god. And that is a big part of this song. So in the second verse of the song, when it says, euphoria, I missed you like a new treasure. I pitched up this book. lyric a fourth and you get this kind of new harmony that enters. Euphoria, I'm just like a new treasure. And even though I'm not really singing, it's sort of suggesting a note which isn't really in the scale at all of this song, which creates this alien feeling and a sense of kind of subtle invasion and it's a little sinister, you know, it gives a kind of a tonality. Euphoria, I missed you like a new treasure, we go so good together, search on my life to find better.

I was definitely super aware of the political climate when I was writing this. And as a New Zealander living in America, watching how people rise through a campaign, right? How they start with just like their signs out on the white picket fences. And I even referenced that on the lyric, you know, see me on television, on billboards and banners, on white picket fences. Like, you know, there's something, again, admirable about this kind of journey of ascension and making yourself known to the world. And it was been very interesting to witness how things turn, how things twist, how

things turn nasty once they started with such good intentions, how things warp. At that point, I needed a break from this insistent, spoken chant of the main character. I wanted to contrast the spoken word with something a lot more melodic. I was doing a few demos for Diplo at the time, and me and Diplo had this song we were working on for a Korean artist called Seale, and I wrote this vocal, and I had this really hooky little section. I remember texting one day and being like, hey, I'm listening back to that demo and it's like, is C.L. going to use it, you know? He's like, she's kind of going down a different role with the album,

and I think for now it's just in limbo. I'm like, is it cool if I use it? I think it could really work with the song I'm recording at the moment. He's like, go for it. I had to do a bunch of repitching, like to get this kind of vocal chant into the right key. But the great thing that happens when you're doing basic pitch shift work is it starts to take on the quality of a sample. You know, terrible sounds all over it and pops and everything, which is totally an aesthetic. It kind of became something that sounds like a kid's chant. And I really liked the contrast of like a heavy, tough beat with this euphoric chant of youthfulness. So I had all these melodic aspects now, which felt good.

But I needed the music to follow that. You know, I needed the chords to actually speak to that. Right now, everything was droning on one note. So this is the fun part, you know, where I started to call in favorite musicians of mine, Lars Honfet, who plays in a band called Jaga Jazzist from Norway, and it was in New York, and we were working on the song together. He was the first person to kind of suggest a chordal movement under the song. That progression you hear is something that Lars first played out at my place in Manhattan. When the vocal chan is going, oh, my knees are, we have chords that

actually sit underneath that and move around that so that you kind of get more emotion from these words. And then we got on the Prophet. That's a synthesizer from the late 70s, the Prophet 5 from sequential circuits. We got on the Prophet and played around with kind of a sound that would be really

ferocious on the song, right? Something that would jump out of the speakers. We're just flicking through presets and we found this insane Prophet preset that goes Brow! So finding the sound gave us this like new character that would kind of

burst out of the speakers. When we got to the end of the song, we both agreed that it would be so fun to kind of give it one final climax, you know, take it to some chords that suggested an arrival, or I guess the final ascension, you know, if this is the story about a character who rises to the top and is eventually blinded by its kind of singular pursuit of one thing,

but we have to do that musically. So he started playing along these chords and moving the bass line underneath the vocal. and it felt really exciting. I think it would be Dumb-dun-dun-b-b-b-b-dum-b-dun-d-dun-d-dum-d-dum-d-d-d-d- And instead of the bass line just moving on the downbeat of every hit of the drums, it now started to be preemptive.

That makes the whole thing kind of feel quite urgent and exciting. The bass is now jumping ahead of the beat and it's doing these new flourishes. That's when the chords come in at the end over the final vocal chant. We prayed from the gutter. Like martyrs, we followed you. So to me, this is the crowds of people who invested all their trust in this idol, you know. So it needs to be emotional.

It's my favorite moment of the song in a way because the production gets so thick and wide and then comes right back to that very kind of micro, primal place of just the drums and the vocal. The sense of urgency is pushed onto the song before it all collapses and falls to pieces. You know, they built me out to be beaten. That's the final sentiment.

of the song. Bad up hill I'm winning, not concerned if I'm cheating. They built me up to be beating. They build me up to be beating. The song's a cautionary tale. We wanted to be, of course, empowering, but it's a warning too, you know. It's a siren. It starts from a place of innocence.

It winds up in a space of delusion. It's a space where we have to ask a few questions. Like, am I really fighting for the right thing here? What price will I pay to attain it? How far will one go? I like to ask those questions because I see it in myself. I see my own desire to be larger than life, to exceed my wildest expectations. But I also see like a disconnect that can emerge from that as well.

We've all tasted power. We've all tasted that feeling of being able to be above others. And God, it's enticing, isn't it? And now here's Top of the World by Kimbra in its entirety. Or visit SongExploder.com. Kimbra. You'll find links to buy or stream top of the world, and you can watch the music video. 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, 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 artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Winerobe. 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.co, or just go to SongExploder.net, slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. This episode was originally produced by me, along with Christian Coons. The reissue was made by me, Craig Ely, Kathleen Smith, and Mary Dolan. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Rishi-Hirway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder.

You can also get a SongExploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi-Kesh-Hirway. Thanks for listening.