Song Exploder - Lorde - Sober

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

Lorde is a Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, and producer. Her second album, Melodrama, debuted at number one on the charts in June 2017 – five months before her 21st birthday. In this episode, Ella breaks down her song “Sober.” You’ll hear how it started, with the original demos she made with her co-producer Jack Antonoff, and how the song changed over the course of working on it for months and months.Thanks to Sonos for their support of the podcast. Check out sonos.com.For more, visit songexploder.net/lorde.

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. Lord just put out a new song and announced that she has a new album coming out this June. She's also touring in the fall with some past Song Exploder guests like Blood Orange and Empress of his support. And so hearing all of this news these days, I thought it would be nice to revisit her Song Exploder episode from 2017. She came over to the studio, and I have a very very... cute photo of her playing with my dog from right before we recorded the interview.

Here's her episode on Sober. Lord is a Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, and producer. My full name is Ella, Maria, Lani, Yell at Shokona. So it's a whole thing. Her second album, Melodrama, debuted at number one on the charts in June 2017, five months before her 21st birthday. In this episode, Ella breaks down her song, Sober. You'll hear how it started with the original demos she made with her co-producer, Jack Antonoff and how the song changed over the course of working on it for months and months. My name is Lord, I'm breaking down my song's over.

I remember I had spent the summer in New Zealand and I was reeling from this summer which was very much like wild and fluorescent. That first summer on the cusp of being an adult, I'd just come out of a relationship and was just like drinking all the time. I'm just like either like sleeping or getting ready for like what we were going to do that night. When you come out of a relationship, you just want to fill the quiet as best you can. You know, you're like, I just don't want to deal with this quite yet. So I'm going to make every moment full and social and busy and loud.

And then I won't have to think. about it. So this song in particular was set at a party, but there's such angst to it. I have this very distinct memory of standing in the corner of my lounge having like a very tense conversation with somebody and people on my back porch dancing. The DNA of Sober is wanting to tell someone how you feel and knowing they feel the same way and needing the evening's theatre to come and have all the characters going. then you can let your guard down.

That was kind of the spread of the night, which became sober. I worked on this record with my co-producer and co-writer, Jack Antonoff. People sort of tell you you have to come to L.A. They send you to all these, that fancy studios. And I think when you're beginning a project that can be terrifying. So there's Westlake recording studios, which is like very fancy. And Michael Jackson recorded there, and I couldn't make anything good there. And then we discovered this room down the back, which is like a production room.

We called it The Rat Nests is like this tiny little room, very dirty. And that room really was the room where Sober started to take shape. And the whole thing started on the Juno 106. And I just recorded these vocals. Oh God, I'm clean out of air in my lungs. It's all gone played. It's so nonchalant. It's time we dance with the truth.

this slow kind of droning version which existed for a long time just like this moody emotional journey I knew exactly where the chords had to go I was literally pulling jack's sleeve going no no here can you do it like this so play through a lot of this process

you know I had such specific ideas about all of the stuff I knew exactly what it was so early and he was very open to me playing God over the writing session in such an intense way with that, which is cool. And a lot of people, you know, I think would not be so good at doing that. For a long time, Jack was like, I like the song. I don't know if I quite, you know, visualize it like you do.

And I was like, trust me. This is my passion project. Like, so it does the verse and then it goes, but my hips of misjibs, so let's get to know the kicks will you swear. with me go astray with me and it's an uneven number of bars it's just this weird thing that my brain absolutely needs and like props to jack this why i love jack so much he was sort of trying to get his head around it when we were writing it and he was like oh there's an extra bar and i said is that wrong he was like no if jack had been like no we can't do that i think that would have really

changed the course of like what we ended up doing for this album but the fact that he's like no it's cool can make it work. So April 2016, we go to Coachella, Jack and I. We get a studio and we can work in the day and go to the festival at night. So we went to the studio and I was like, I love the idea of it just snapping into this little groove and I sung Jack the rhythm of the groove that I wanted and he made it really quickly. Jack is always just like going around, hitting a bunch of shit and the main sound and this is like a little bongo he like hit with a drumstick. And then And then I went, it's a vocal sample. It's me going, night, midnight, lose my mind.

I midnight, lose my mind. As soon as I heard that first loop, I went, I really clipped it, kind of princey or MJ-ish and just put it over the top. So the song was like really intense and drony and serious. And then right at the end for like 20 seconds, it just flipped into the funnest groove ever. and you know it felt like changing the radio station or something which I was into it was cool and it stayed like that for a really long time so flash forward New York November 7th my birthday

we're at a studio we're at that stage with the album where we needed someone to take us out of our zone a little bit and we meet Malay who is very wonderful works on Frank Ocean and realized he is my favorite type of producer. He wants to hear you talk about the genesis of the song and the emotional energy. And like, I'm sort of used to clipping my language for technical people,

you know, because people don't want to hear about the color of an evening or the way a light looked on a wall or whatever, but he really does. And it really helps him do great work. And so with the song, I was like, I just met him. And I was kind of just looking at the floor

and telling him the story of the song. And he was like, okay, cool. We booked the big room downstairs and electric lady for him to muck around in and we went down there the next day and Malay has taken that groove that groove that came in right at the end of the song that 20 seconds and underlade it

underneath the whole song and he's taken out these really serious minor chords that were like the chords of my fucking dreams and replaced them with these buoyant, urgent, insistent party chords. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. The song feels right for the first time in almost a year. It was incredible. We was just flawed by, it had the movement that it needed.

It instantly felt like we were in the vignette that we'd been chasing for a long time. He was like, yeah, I had to sacrifice your perfect chords. I was like, it's okay, because it worked so well. And that was really exciting to me. So it really needed to just be pushed off the edge by him. Yeah, it's so far. Funny that that didn't come from me, but sometimes even when you do know what something deserves to be, it takes somebody else's good idea to get it there and for there to be fresh years involved. I think in that session I also came up with the little stop. It goes, just kicks down for a second and then goes back up.

More with Lord after this. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out of full length. And this is the first 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 Weinrobe. 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. We recorded the vocal for this verse with Kukhorel.

Kook is a legend. He just records vocals. That's all he does. He does all of Rihanna's vocals. And in a song like this, especially this verse, the timing is like very syncopated. We're sleeping through all the days. I would kind of let days go as long as it can and then it would have to snap back and go to the next part. And my favorite thing to do with vocals is get so specific,

just this drop more of regret or anger or lust or this tiny smile on this word which you rip away on the next word. You know, I'm really into, it's like emotional molecular chemistry. And getting this vocal bouncing off the walls perfectly, could not have done that without Cook. We're sleeping through all the days. I'm acting like I don't see. Every ripping you used to tie yourself to me.

Second verse to the song is one of my favorite things I've done with vocal production. I'm a big fan of thinking about the characters that my vocals are playing in songs. I always think about that. And there's always those moments in a party we were sort of throwing your head back and forth and being like, what is this, like, fun house of terror that I'm running around?

And, you know, especially if you're drunk, who knows what else is going on, you know. And I love this idea of there aren't people in your house. There are just bodies walking around and you only care about one person at the party anyway. And it's like these little kind of voices pinging out. Maybe they belong to these detached bodies. Oh, God, I'm clucing my teeth around this licker wet,

Lime, night loose my minds, I know you're feeling there too. We basically recorded straight harmonies through the verse and then chose little moments for them to ping out here and there. And certain harmonies only exist on a certain word. It's like all those little voices in your head that are like telling you someone's bad news. There's like so many different vibes that the vocals in that second verse take on. Can we keep up with the roos?

It just these little brady kind of shouts in the back of the song so I feel like the lead is you saying what you want to say and then sometimes those are what slips out. Imagine this narrator like trying to keep those voices in and just ah! And you said, oh shit, cover him out, you know,

ah! It's just like popping out all over the show. There's always an element of strange feedback ticking away at the back of a Jack Antonoff song to really like give it body and I love that. This is some classic Jack Antonoff shirt right there. Jack's always doing a lot of that,

taking a sound and pitching it and distorting it and pulling it to a weird place. Oh, and then I had the idea for the horns. Do you remember all that great Hudson Mohawk? Looted stuff, I mean, it was the best. I was raised on tonight. Like, that's 10% of why I make the music that I make. I was like, we just need, like, a ton of brass, you know.

our engineer Laura, Laura Sisk, who is the greatest engineer in America. I sort of let her take charge of this horn part. So the first line which eventually was played on a horn, but was first on that juno, was the do-do-do-do-do. I was like, we have to just get triumphant there. So we started with tenor and Barry Sacks. I was like, we definitely need trumpet. We were sitting there and we just kept telling them to play harder and harder and harder.

And they were like, it sounds like our instruments are breaking. And we were like, yeah, yeah. That's 100% the vibe we're going for. Play it kind of inappropriately. I want to hear the edges of your instrument. And then, can you hear that? That's a fucking Tigers roar. There is low-key of Tigers Raw starting that bridge,

which was just the kind of like ridiculous, dramatic flourish that it needed to be. were in one of the last two sessions for this song. And Jack was just like going through. He just has these endless banks of bizarre samples. And we just find this Tigers Roar, which I thought was so cool. I love the way it swells the top of that part. That's like one of my favorite sneaky things on that song. So next time you're listening to Soba, please enjoy the Tigers Roar at the top of the bridge

because it's our baby. We love it. New Zealand is so beautiful and every day I just found myself kind of so moved by the light and like all of these bodies and the water and people on my back porch dancing. It really does feel like a very specific vignette from two years ago. It's a very specific beautiful image to me but it definitely feels like the past. Coming into, you know, early adulthood and every party felt so monumental. and so endlessly inspiring and intoxicating and interesting. And there's a reason I wrote an entire record about partying.

But it's very interesting, like, you finish the record and that door really does close. My research trip ended, essentially. I did all the exploration I needed to do. And it's funny to look back on remembering these evenings and taking so much from them and injecting so much meaning and then being so transcendent and feeling a lot of a feeling. And feeling a lot of affection for that time, but also like, you know, it's a little more chill now. I'm like, I'm not making every drink, like, it's the last drink I'm ever going to make, you know. And now here's Sober by Lord in its entirety.

On a nonchalone, touch our rush. Well, we're sober. I'm a dream with a fever. Bet you wish you could touch our rush. Games of the weekend. We pretend that we just don't get. or visit songexploder.net slash lord. You'll find links to buy or stream sober, and you can watch the music video.

This episode was originally produced by me and Christian Coons, with production assistance from Olivia Wood. This reissue was made by me and Mary Dolan. 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.fm. You can follow me and SongExploder on Instagram, and you can get a SongExploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi Keishyerway. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.