Song Exploder - Moses Sumney - Quarrel

Episode Date: February 14, 2018

Moses Sumney is a singer-songwriter based in Los Angeles. His first album, Aromanticism, came out in September 2017, but before that, he’d already worked with an impressive and diverse list of collaborators, from Sufjan Stevens, to Solange, to Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, to Skrillex. That spirit continues with the song Moses takes apart in this episode, which has contributions from producer Cam O’bi, Paris Strother, and legendary bassist Thundercat. songexploder.net/moses-sumney

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. Moses Sumney is a singer-songwriter based in Los Angeles. His first album, Aromanticism, came out in September 2017. But before that, he'd already worked with an impressive and diverse list of collaborators, from Sifian Stevens to Solange, to Karen O of the Yayah Yaz, to Scrilix. That spirit continues with the song Moses takes apart in this episode. It has contributions from producers Cam O.B. and Paris Struther and legendary bassist Thundercat.

Here's Moses Sumney, breaking down his song, Coral. Moses Sumney. When I was making my album, I was looking for a manager at the time. And one of the managers I was meeting was suggested, like, oh, you know, you should get in the studio with this guy, Cam O.B. And I was super reluctant to do it because it's such an L.A. thing for, like, songwriters to go to sessions with random producers. or other songwriters, but I hated that. Cam's a brilliant producer, but most of the stuff he's done

has been either hip-hop stuff or R&B stuff. And so typically I would have said no, but I think I was just curious about what could happen. I ended up really loving Cam. The first session that we had for this song was in 2015. We had met for the first time,

and it just talked about music for like two hours. and we're just showing each other stuff back and forth. And he showed me Stereo Lab for the first time. And I showed him some radiohead stuff I liked and just went back and forth, playing each other's stuff for like two hours. And that inspired us to go out into the world and make something. He started making this beat,

this kind of drum machine. The like tic-du-du-du-tick-tick-tick. I was very intrigued by the kind of of a vintage vibe it had, you know. I started messing around on the guitar, just messing with a few chords. He had a keyboard. He's a really great keyboard player,

and he just started laying down this keyboard part, back and forth on these four chords, lullaby. At that point, I was pretty inspired. I was listening to the drum machine and the keyboard. And I really just started singing in my head and trying to make a feel for me. melodies. And then I just went into a booth and freestyle. I typically find melodies by going in and just singing forever until something emerges.

So I came away from that with the Rhodes sound recorded and the drum machine and one of those gibberish takes. And there's a little columbus sound in there too that cam recorded. It was the first day. And then I didn't see him again for a very long. long time. The next time I remember working on the song is when I went on a cruise, I got a random email. I was just being like, hey, do you want to come on this TED Talk cruise for seven days and sing two songs? So I went on this cruise where they got the top marine biologists in the world and the patrons who would fund their work to go on a trip across the Pacific Ocean and talk about oceans, which was like a really beautiful time, but also incredibly strange. It's just like

surrounded by people who are just very different from me, you know, scientists and very, very rich people because they would say some bizarre shit. They're true environmentalists. Like, we have to save the fish. We have to save the coral reef. And then at dinner time, they turn around and say, like, all the black people who do social work that I've come in touch with her, they're so out of touch or like they're pushing for like racial rights, but we're all just one human race. So why are they trying to make things better for people of color and it's like they should be thinking about everybody, you know? That was pretty bizarre to me, just thinking like, oh, you could see the ways in which the

environment is oppressed, but you can't see the ways in which other human beings are oppressed. That's when I started thinking about the like themes in the song. I had this little cabin on the boat and that's where I wrote most of the lyrics for this. I was thinking about the distance between people of different social groups and this one inspired a lot of the tune. The song is about power, and it's about two people in a relationship who are from different backgrounds, and so that could either be race or class or gender. Looking back in my life at relationships that I had had with people from different backgrounds who saw us as equals and didn't realize that. in the broader scope of the world,

their perspective was appreciated on a wider scale, shared on a wider scale, and elevated. And so they were coming to the table with a social power that they were discounting in the personal relationship. So the song, essentially, quarrel, is about the

idea that you can't call a disagreement between two people simply a lover's quarrel, because that would imply that they are equals, and you have to recognize that we're that no two people come from the same background. And so I spent a lot of time just in my cabin writing

and demoed a lot of the first vocal ideas. And so the lyrics in the pre-chorus, with you half the battle, is proving that we're at war. I would give my life just for the privilege to ignore, you know, just trying to get you to realize that there's an issue here that goes beyond me and you. And so if you have two people in a relationship And one of them comes from the group that holds the most social power in society.

They have to account for that privilege and that relationship or recognize that it ain't going to work out. The next step just became letting it sit for a while. I like to make something and then sit with it, like put it away and then revisit it to see if I still like it and if it's good enough. And so I would just drive around LA listening to that demo. And we didn't really work on it until almost a year later. I knew I wanted to change it in a lot of ways. I didn't want it to be just a beat-based song, and I was listening to a lot of Duranah Newsome.

And so I was thinking, like, how can we make this folksie? I had cam over, and I was telling him that I liked the Kalimba sound, but I wanted to see if we can bring a bit of folk music to it. And so I was thinking I wanted to replace the Calimbus sound with harp, and then I started looking for a harp player. But I could not find a harp player for the life of me. And then Cam, he remembered seeing this harp player on YouTube seven or eight years ago named Brandy Younger,

and I looked her up on YouTube and instantly became obsessed. There's this wonderful NPR video of her playing with an upright bassist, and it's excellent. I looked her up on Facebook. I like did a deep stock. I was like, I have to get this woman. And I looked at all of her friends to see if I knew anyone who knew her. And I found someone.

He connected me. And then a few weeks later, I flew out to New York and went to Harlem to record her on the song. We recorded her in her home. And luckily, she had a spare room in her apartment in which she was used to rehearsing and recording harp. So she invited a friend of hers over who records her sometimes. and we just took a laptop and an interface and hard drive and recorded her in her spare bedroom. So we had her play a few, you know, like,

strum just play the chords, pluck the chords, play a pattern, and then we did a few takes of just her improvising, and we ended up using a lot of the improvised stuff. Now you can hear the police sirens in the background. Yeah, the streets of Harlem. A few weeks later, I assembled a band to play what became the outtrial. or the reprise of the song.

I had always wanted to make a song that started with a beat and then went live. And I wanted a long song on the record. I wanted a really long song. I just like long stuff. And I appreciate stuff, especially in this era that seeks to hold your attention.

And I knew that I wanted to have a band section on the album where I was like other human beings playing together live. So I just reached out to a few people. there's Paris Strother on the Keys and she is a brilliant piano keyboard player and I'd always wanted to do something with her.

So that day started with me and Paris sitting down and I taught her the chords from the original song and I had told her my vision for like, can you do this? Like, what about this? You know, because I don't really know chords but I can sing what I'm hearing and then we figure it out from there.

So that's her on the roads. So we did that. and then taught it to the rest of the band, and then we would just jam. On the drums, there's Jemeyer Williams, who's a brilliant drummer. That section of the song was incredibly intimidating, because I'm just so not used to working in studios.

I never run a studio session. And so to have professional musicians come in and then be like, all right, everyone, now do this. It was like horrifying, but wonderful, because I learned so much. and we got some beautiful stuff out of it. I just kind of conducted it all live in the room. I'm on a microphone and I'd have to be singing or I'd be like,

all right, now louder, go louder, go louder, okay, now pull it back, pull it back, let's slow it down here. At the end of the song, I was like, bring it down and just go into a looser world, but it still makes sense because, you know, Jamiro's kind of keeping time for everyone. There's a different person on bass in that live trio, but I ended up replacing all of his bass.

his bass with Thundercat. I always knew that I wanted Thundercat on it, but he's so hard to get in touch with. So we had Thundercat come over on a different day to my house, and he played all of his bass parts. The whole section starts with a chord on the bass. And I never imagined we'd go chordal on the bass in that moment. But he did it.

And I was just like, OK, well, we have to keep that. That's brilliant. And then there's that section where it's It's like the do-d-d-d-d-d-d-do-d-do-do. That's my favorite part. That was just a take of Thundercat, like, improvising. Hinted at that, and I stopped and was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, that's the thing.

That's what needs to be in that section, because we've been trying to lift that section even more, like, with the sense. After we did that, Paris came in. Again, I was just like, oh, can you just play the piano over that outro and just improvise? improvise. He ended up doing his fading in that piano track and then fading out the band. The other person that worked on the song is my friend Joshua Halpern, who worked on a lot of my album in various engineering or production capacities. He plays the electric guitar that comes in in the second verse. The song was too pretty. And I was just like, we need to fuck it up.

And so I was like, I want a guitar thing, I want it to be electric, I want it to be really low, I want it to be dark, and I want it to be biting. In context, it doesn't actually sound that menacing, but on its own, it's very like, which I really like. Towards the end of high school, I joined choir, and that was my first time really singing in public. And so my interest in investment in harmonies and choral music really came from that. And I've always wanted to try to be a choir, a one-man choir. I spent a lot of time in solitude when making this album.

So many people were a part of it, but I went away and wrote alone and tried to be as alone as possible. And when you're alone like that, you realize a lot about yourself and you realize that you're not as simple, or at least I realized that about myself. And vocal arrangement became a way to communicate that. That I couldn't really just boil myself down to one thing. And now here's Quarrel by Moses Sumney in its entirety. More about Moses Sumney, visit SongExploder.net. 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 will be out on, 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, Vagabond,

Fen Lily 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. Song Exploder is produced by me, along with Christian Coons, with help from intern Olivia Wood. Carlos Lermott creates original illustrations for each episode of the podcast, which you can see on the Song Exploder website and Instagram. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of creative, independent podcasts, made possible by listeners like you.

Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. If you want to share your thoughts on this episode, or on the podcast in general, you can find Song Exploder on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Song Exploder. My name is Rishi Kshirway. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.