Song Exploder - Nite Jewel - One Second of Love

Episode Date: June 2, 2014

In this episode, we'll get a deconstructed view of the song One Second of Love by Nite Jewel. I spoke to Ramona Gonzalez of Nite Jewel and her partner and producer Cole MGN in their home studio in Los Angeles as they took a break from making a new record. Coming up, they'll talk about the process they undertook, including recording to tape as a creative restriction, and collaborating with their friends and each other.

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. In this episode, we'll get a deconstructed view of the song One Second of Love by Nightjul. I spoke to Ramona Gonzalez and her partner and producer Cole MGM in their home studio in Los Angeles, as they took a break from making a new Nightjul record. Coming up, they'll talk about working with friends like Julia Holter, who sings backing vocals on this, and their own collaborative relationship with one another. I'm Nightjul, and I'm very much.

also called Ramona by some people. My name's Cole, I'm GN, and I'm a producer and part of Nitro. So in 2010, yeah, we started tracking the instrumental ideas for what became one second of love. Well, when we started out recording, the idea was just to record ourselves improvising in our friend's studio that they built. That's incredible, called Brick Factory. And so we were like, cool, let's just go up there, bring some synths and jam on synths and just no expectations. Have fun. One of the stipulations for us, because we like to work under certain parameters when we're

like working on a record, was we have to record on tape. Yeah, we just took the opportunity. We could only afford one reel of tape, which afford us about like 30 minutes or something like that. But we turned it into an hour. We split the tape in half. We said, okay, it was a 24 track machine. And so we said if we do 12 tracks, you know, we have effectively twice as long, you know.

And actually we recorded from literally the first second that the tape started to the very But then it was a long process before that, before we even realized that what we needed to do was to take those sessions, sample from them, and then really go back and sort of write songs sampling. So that's what we did with this song is we sampled like a 12-minute jam. Cole got this MS20. A corg MS-20. And he started to mess around with it and get really familiar with how to make these really cool sequences because he had also the accompanying sequencer with the synthesizer. We realized that a lot of the songs could be formulated from creating a sequence on the MS20 and using it as sort of like a metronomic Cool sound

Right, something it was rhythmic and melodic at the same time. We wanted something that was Rhythmic melodic and also sort of noisy I just kind of had a rhythm in my head Something that was like don't don't and I just kind of set about Fiddling with it for five or ten minutes until you got that Because it was all very spontaneous all this, you know? Yeah, even though I had this spark of an idea in my head it was just something that came out really fast Yeah, we just let this sequence kind of go, it ended up being a fundamental backbone of the song for the whole process. We were trying to also do this thing, I think this was like really important where it's like

taking the time to be inspired by something. Like, you know, sit there for as long as you need to dial in a certain tone catching those moments. The aesthetic of the studio, the brick factory I was talking about is very much this industrial sort of like almost German aesthetic of recording or something where it's big sheets of metal in there. So we just created sort of these weird rhythm. I love the shelf. It just sounds like, I mean, it sounds like a shelf. It was like a big industrial shelf, like a big piece of that.

And then we started playing, and then we were like, oh, it's almost in the pitch of the song here if you very speed the tape machine, because that's one of the amazing things about tape is that you can change the pitch of it. Yeah, and then it took us a while to get the tape transferred to digital, because we were really working with like on our own budget and everything. So finally when we got the multis from the tape back, we were like, wow, okay, that's when we discovered, the vibe that we created there was really intact on this. It sat in our house for a while.

Like, we didn't open the sessions mainly because we moved to Topanga Canyon. Cole got a job working for Beck. So our whole life just, like, changed very drastically. And we were, like, working to set up our studio, all this stuff. And then so, like, we opened the sessions, and it was like, oh, oh, I see what to do with the song. It, like, it all just started to make sense. Cole had the idea, because we had this amazing drummer named me.

Gavin Salman, who is performing with us. And Cole was like, I think we should have Gavin play drums on One Second of Love. I think we should double the MS20 loop with drums, which was a great idea. And Cole had an idea for the drum pattern. Peter Granite recorded these drums, actually, and is our friend's dad and a seriously accomplished engineer producer. You know, he's worked as people like the Jackson 5, Van Morrison. And that's just our friend's dad.

And so I was like, Corey, come on, please. Like, can we bring him to him? He served as like inspiration at times, like talking from the control room like, Romona, get closer to the mic and like think about these lyrics and who you're talking to and stuff like that, which is like never what I ever do. And he had this idea that you're speaking to your audience. It's a different sort of approach to singing. And do you think it affected the way you sang? Absolutely. I sang much more passionately than I'd sang in the past.

I think it helped a lot. Yeah. They talk all the time, but nothing gets done. I played the bass part and did the vocals, which is normally sort of like where I find the core harmonic structure in a song is like how the vocal and bass interact. The work begins with the setting of the sun. They'd advise me how to play or how to look that way. This song has to be like really harmonically simple and that's kind of how it works is in the simplicity of the bass and the vocal. Because that the melodic idea thing, I mean we didn't articulate this verbally at all,

but it was clear that it was like this beautiful melody on top of this harsh, noisy, sort of electronic backbone. And that was the contrast that, you know, I think that's why we initially liked how it sounded in. See, life goes on and on and on and on and on. I think I was like really used to like writing music and melodies within like a sort of dissonant, detuned structure. And so it really didn't bother you. Oh, who has one second of love? I wrote it for my voice, and it just sounded sort of like, especially the high, high vocal. I couldn't get that pure tone.

I used more vibrato in my voice. I couldn't get that, like, pure tone, and I was just like, Julia, do you think you could help me with this? And she's like, oh. Julia's and Ramona's voice just compliment each other really well. One second of love. One second of love. One second of love as of that phrase was something that I thought about because I was thinking how interesting it was that people have these like very intense but short relationships and connections due to like internet speed. So you can exchange email, exchange a post or something and you get this like momentary just like, feeling.

And it's very intense, but it's it's very short. that's too bad, basically. Not in the sense that I think it's wrong, but just that there's more than that. The first two verses actually are centered around sort of like the drawbacks and the issues that arise because of that. And the last verse is sort of about

how I attempt to overcome that. Basically, for this middle section that splits up the two parts of the song it needed this drastic change. Well, okay, so it was created by, friend Harley Burkart who's a longtime collaborator of ours and I've been Harley and I have been working on stuff together since I was a teenager since I was like 15 and I and I was like I'm gonna give all the stuff to Harley and just say do

something but so then you get all these like crazy things like harmonized reverse reverbs and he uses you know the same stuff anybody has you know just I feel like with the people that inspire me with like software and all that are, they don't have anything special, you know, they're just, they just make something amazing out of nothing, you know, out of this is the most basic reverb plug-in or whatever. Cole and I met in New York through a friend when we were both going to college, and I sort of fell in love with Cole, but then we just started working on music, not going out or anything. We were just sort of collaborating on music, living in this horrible apartment in Harlem.

Did you know that you were living there? Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. But you weren't going on. No. Then we played in bands together. And at that point we were going out, played bands together in Oakland.

That's where we met Scott and David, who recorded these sessions. And we've been playing music together since 2004. And I'm so grateful for it. And now here's One Second of Love by Nightjewel in its entirety. SongExploder.net for more info on Nightjul, including the music video for One Second of Love, and a link to buy the song on iTunes.

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 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. You can find all the past and future episodes of SongExplored. at SongExploder.net or on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts. Find the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary, story-driven shows. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.