Song Exploder - Phantogram - You Don't Get Me High Anymore

Episode Date: October 6, 2016

Sarah Barthel and Josh Carter started Phantogram in 2007. They’ve worked on crafting a particular sound and they’ve had a particular way of making their dense productions since the beginning. But for their new record, Three, things changed. The song "You Don’t Get Me High Anymore" took the band outside of their comfort zone. And, in this episode, Sarah and Josh break down how they made the original demo, and how outsiders like The-Dream and co-producer Ricky Reed influenced the way the song ultimately turned out. songexploder.net/phantogram

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 Hirway. Sarah Barthel and Josh Carter started Fantagram in 2007. They've worked on crafting a particular sound, and they've had a particular way of making their dense productions since the beginning. But for their new record, three, things changed. The song, You Don't Get Me High anymore took the band outside of their comfort zone. In this episode, Sarah and Josh break down how they made the original demo, and how outsiders like The Dream and co-producer Ricky Reid

influenced the way the song ultimately turned out. My name is Sarah Barthel. My name is Josh Carter when we play in the band Fantagram. The first idea for the song was the drum break that I found. It was Eddie Bow, Hook and Sling Part 1. I love sampling things. It's a big part of the Fantagram sound. I thought it was just real funky and I liked it.

The way that I chopped it almost sounded like there was like a cool. crow kind of chirping like on the one. And then this too, this sound. I took a bit of the Eddie Bowhook and sling and just pitch corrected it. Because at the beginning of the song, he kind of says it like an oh, and I just pitch corrected it and added reverb in it through an amp. I remember I love the song and I told you to name it. So you wrote, dope yo, exclamation point, parentheses according to Sarah.

He didn't love it at all. at all. I mean, he thought it was funky. I thought it was cool. But like the moment I heard it, I was like, this is going to be a jam. I give it to me immediately. Josh gives me these beats that I don't let anyone else touch until I can figure them out.

And that was one of them that was really excited about. I'm just a huge fan of dirty, gritty, analog bass. You can really do a lot with a bass sound, a bass synth, especially. I always go for a specific gritty, grimy, soft synth. soft synth on my laptop. When we're cooking up demos or just writing, we will

ad-lib and sing gibberish over something and just see how it flows, see if it sounds cool, and try to make sense out of the gibberish that we're singing. And normally when I write melodies along the lines of just like the gibberish,

I'm alone and nobody's even in the house, no one's allowed to like even be able to hear me. It's a very emotion. kind of state of mind that I go into. I can't even do it in front of Josh, but when we were in Atlanta, visiting Tricky Stewart and The Dream,

the dream, I mean, he's a master songwriter. And Beyonce put a ring on it, and Rihanna Umbrella is a really cool artist. He was doing this cool thing, just like, okay, doing kind of the same thing that we do, yeah. There was a really cool vibe and energy there that I was definitely feeling. It was the first time ever doing that in front of anybody else. It did just kind of come out of me.

We've kept adding the layers. We've always added stacks on stacks. the layers and layers and layers to give a heavy moment or even just a song, a heavier sound. And we were super excited about that. But then again, we were also, I think, covering up the charm of the beat. Why am I covering it up with so much bass and so many layers? And so we wanted to subtract. We wanted to, I think, challenge ourselves in a way because we always, that's just always how we did it.

We got into this tendency as part of our sound, always have this synth base that almost never ends. You know, there's like never any space. It's always just going along to the music, which I find very cool sounding, but we're like, well, let's try to switch it up and just let the song breathe a little bit more. And we're like, that's a cool vibe.

When we talk about songs in a very visual sense, and we were just kind of picturing this state of urgency and paranoia, just this feeling of having to crawl out of your skin. Walk up stone in the backseat from a dream when my teeth fell out of my head. Woke up stone in the back seat from a dream where my teeth fell out of my head. Josh always has dreams about his teeth falling out, and we always talk about it, because it's supposed to mean you have anxiety and you have all these issues. And I had a dream about my teeth falling out during this time.

Even though you're dreaming and it's not waking life, does that necessarily mean that it's fiction? In so many different aspects in your life, it's so easy to overdo it, you know, and when it's not doing it anymore, it's a very scary feeling. And that's why we wanted this song to be so heavy and just scary in a way. I mean, it's a pretty scary sounding song. Desperate. Desperate, yeah. There was that charm in the demo for the vocals that just spit it out. It's just like, nah, manana.

And we didn't want to lose that. So as chopped up as the idea is in the lyrics, we wanted it to feel choppy too. My head shakes, elephant, landscape, manikin, and faking it the best I care. Nothing is fun, not like before, used to take one, now it takes four. You don't get me high anymore. It was great for that element to come in and make it feel kind of unreal, unrealistic, or inhuman.

This is not in your mind. It was a little extra amount of haunting that I felt like we needed. My name is Ricky Reed. I co-wrote and produced, You Don't Get Me High anymore. That was more Ricky's idea to use a synth that sounded like that. We would never have picked it.

And I struggled with that a lot internally because I was like, is this the right sound? Like, do I really want to use this? So I had to sleep on it a lot. That was a big thing for me, honestly. You know, I knew in that section that we really, really need. to give the listener a moment, you know, a deep breath between the angsty breakbeat and that buzzing

bass and synth line. I knew we needed some space there and I intentionally wanted to do something clean. I felt like it could have been dirtier. That was, that one was discussed, you know, management and label and everyone weighing in. That was actually a very, very hotly debated thing. And I fought for it personally because I was like, this is what makes the song unique. One of the compromises that we made to give that sound a little bit more grit was we ended up combining the horns, the keyboard pad, and the bass, and ran them all into a tape machine.

Let's crush all this in an old tape machine and put it back into the system. So it almost had the sound of a sample as opposed to a purely clean sound. That's why we loved working with Ricky because he showed a different light. It was very different because it's always just been the two of us. And we've been best friends since middle school. So it was very, very foreign. We like to kind of be in the pilot seat, you know. It's hard when you want that.

control. Between the two of us, I feel like we're kind of psychic twins half the time. In one sense, you have to step into their world and get comfortable with the form of communication that they've had since they've known each other and try to anticipate what they will like, what they won't like, and really get inside the sound and the emotional heart of the band. at the same time, as a producer, it's also my job to challenge them and to push them and present them things that they might not be so comfortable with. This song took the longest amount of time to figure out for us. For me, the hardest part was grappling with my own demo-whitis, like the original intent or idea of the song. We got stuck.

I'd call Sarah in the middle of the night and be like, yo, are we, like, should we just go back to the demo? You know, like, but we were aiming to make something special and I've made peace with it. For the time being. Yeah. And now here's You Don't Get Me High Anymore by Fantagram in its entirety. Visit Songexploader.competor.net slash Fantagram to learn more.

You'll find a link to buy this song 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 Wine Robe. 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 Manzuckus, 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 Sliqashogesh. Song Exploder at SongExploder.net or wherever you download podcasts. Follow Song Exploder on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for news, updates, and giveaways. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary cutting-edge shows made possible by listeners like you, The Knight Foundation, and MailChimp.

Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. Special thanks to Brendan Baker for his help with this episode. It was edited by Christian Coons and by me. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.