Song Exploder - Phoenix - Ti Amo

Episode Date: July 25, 2017

Phoenix is a Grammy-winning band from Versailles, France. They started putting out music in 1999, and in June 2017, they released their sixth album, Ti Amo. In this episode, singer Thomas Mars and guitarist Laurent Brancowitz break down the song "Ti Amo," the title track from that album.  songexploder.net/phoenix

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 Keishish Hureway. Phoenix is a Grammy-winning band from Versailles, France. They started putting out music in 1999, and in June 2017, they released their sixth album, Tiamo. In this episode, singer Toma Marz and guitarist Laurent Bronkowitz break down the song Tiamo, the title track from that album. Practical details are very important in art.

A few art critics get it, but the one that do, they understand that Renaissance is linked to the pigment, you know, the oil they were using, all those things, they make a difference in the end. I'm Bronco, Lauren Broncovitz, and I play the guitar, usually. But this time on this album, less guitar, more keyboard. Our process is based on a stream of consciousness. So we are all sitting in a studio. It's a place called La Gieteliric in Paris. It's an old operetta theater.

This song, it started with a percussion loop. This album is the first one we did with Ableton Live. We wanted something new because the routine is what we are trying to escape. So when you learn a new software, a new instrument, you have this genuine feeling of being a... beginner and we love this feeling. We always looking for this emotion I think, this teenage emotion of being a semi-professional. That's our motto I guess. So we have three occurrences of Ableton that are linked a network. It's not a centralized brain. It's like three brains,

which for us is very important because we hate, you know, the monarchic structure. We are more democratic, chaotic. So I could, for instance, this song, I would launch a beat. This is a sample from music from the Sahara from North Africa. We listen to a lot of music from this part of the world. There's an influence that is very strong, actually. A Somalian band called Dur Dur Durban. They are a very funky jazz influence.

influence and for us it's a field of pure beauty. So I started with this loop and I remember Deck, who was synchronized, he launched another beat on top of it. Like a straight drum beat. And this is actually a beat sample from ourselves. It's from a long distance call. So yeah, we sampled this actually from the record. It's not the stems.

If you hear carefully, I think you could hear the resonance of the crash. We love the beat. They're the mystic, you know, in the loop. We've been raised with samplers, so we love those very mathematical, endless repetition of the same. And then I played this bass line. I have a little keyboard for bass. It's connected to Ableton and it's a sample of a Vorlitzer. Plus, added to a sample of a very cheap mini keyboard.

The PSS series we love, it's the mini keys from Yamaha. We sample a lot of our keyboards. Like every note, it's a very long process, but it makes it possible for us to play all our keyboard on stage, which is amazing. When we write, we do not judge. When we listen back, that's when the brain kicks in. But the first moment, we really do not know what we are doing.

We know that often our first instinct is wrong, So now we do not judge at all. We always record everything during the process of inventing it. We have this huge network recording technique that allows us to record everything we do in kind of multi-track. There's also a voice recorder that's there for ideas that Chris handles in the band. My name is Thomas Mars and I sing in the band. They had this quality that's almost like, to me, like a Mediterranean disco type of feel.

Like something to the drums and the bass. That sounds like you're on a Greek disco, imaginary Greek disco. What is that like? I've never been to a Greek disco. Me neither. That's why it's, you know, it's the fantasy. I've been to Greece and I saw those disco during the day. I went there when my kid was a baby. So I would stay at home

And I had friends that would go at night And would come back in the morning And tell me how great it was So it's the fantasy of going there So the Greek disco Those themes were starting to appear As we were going That's synthesizer

That's the Greek disco to me Yeah It's true There's a Greek vibe So we would play it for maybe one hour Played around this vibe And Chris had a it all on tape.

And if there's something we liked from that voice recorder. Then we pick up the parts we love. And then we try to turn all this mess into a song. In the finished version of the song, it begins with just these bass and drum elements, but there's an EQ effect on it that filters out some of the frequencies. The filter came very soon with Ableton live. I had just a button with a filter on it. At first, it was to replicate the lo-fi speakers you would have in a supermarket.

But then we used it more like a kind of EDM tool, you know. We loved the fact that it was such a cheap trick that brought us back to when we were beginning to play music. Chris bought a fender 12-string guitar that ended up being on the record a lot. And then there's this pedal like harmonizer. pitchfork, electro-harmonics. These pedals are really cool. The sound of the harmonies is weird. It's almost like synthesizers.

The fact that he had the 12-string plus the harmonizer, I couldn't tell what was doing what. So I think when you see in your other bandmate, you know, like, what is that? I think it's always motivating. It sounded like he came up with some crazy harmonization, you know, on the spot, with weird fingering. But no, it was just,

one a few notes and a pedal. And it's from the original take. For some reason, we ended up using a very small cheap amp. Something we bought for small acoustic sessions on the previous tour. And it was bleeding a lot. The muted guitars, it's kind of a trademark. So we get a bit tired of it.

But with this pedal that was harmonizing, and suddenly it sounded fresh. And then the rhythm, that's more like triplet. That's one element that we felt was something that was new to our ear. It's like a question and response between the dan-dan-dain-d-d-d-and-and-the-and-more-rhythmic, clink, clink. The lyrics on that song is such the unconscious talking. I love the fact that I'm foreign to the English language. And when we write songs, we cherish those things.

We try to highlight them as much as possible. So right there, I think the I love your tea. Tiamu Jetsu Temptekiro, that gimmick came quickly with the words, because that's the hardest for me on the chorus is when you don't have the words. To try to find what you're going to sing the loudest to, has to be genuine. You know, I always think of kids when they draw something. It's always beautiful. It's always innocent.

And as an adult, you try to reproduce a kid drawing. It always feels forced, and it's always ugly, and you'll bust it, like you can tell. In your mind, who's singing these words? Who's the narrator? It's like this Italian bratty kid who's really confident, territorial guy. There's a lot of attitude.

You know, standing by the jukebox, champagne or proscico. I'll be standing by the jukebox, champagne or proseco. Playing classics by the buscocks, by Teato and Lucio. The references are Batiato and Lucho, it's Lucho-Baptiste. And what's on the jukebox is not, you know, Hotel California. It's this Italian classics that felt really appealing to me. The lyrics are always great in Lucho-Baptiste's songs.

There's one where it's a guy who's in love with his girl, and you know that she doesn't want him. You can feel it. The song starts, he describes his motorbike. Motocicletta. Motocitlata. And then he says, you know, the, how many horse powers? Housepower, he described, you know, like Craig's List, you know.

And then he said, it's all yours if you say yes, you know. I give it to you. The lyrics in Italian, it's, Don't Dire, no. Please don't say no. We stole it a bit from him. I mean, when you said, don't tell me no, you know, you know, the guy has already lost. That's what I like.

In this universe of values, of teenage values, the universe of young boys, you know, who are crazy, suddenly crazy in love, and what can they do, you know? It's so powerful, this desire. To us, it's a love song. It's youth, love, confused. It's teenage, in a sense,

with a huge distortion because boys and girls, their world are so different. They're so confused. Well, it's just two worlds that don't communicate, really. That's something I could really relate to worlds drift apart just because of one look or one story that you hear. Then there's a thing that we thought of that could be strange and offensive

because it comes from, you know, visually something we don't really do. So there was this part that was open up your legs that was to me like a really harsh, but I really, the vision was my brother-in-law, Roman. That's filmmaker Roman Coppola. Created a cartoon that's called Sex City. And in Sex City, you have this series of legs opening in cartoon, almost like a fantasy world,

like a pinball machine type of reference. That was a genuine, pure loving, having those fantasy. So I think that's a really visual part for me that I could never dissociate with that. I found interest in more effects that we played with on vocals. So the freeze functions of reverbs,

these never-ending frozen reverbs. Everything that could make your voice sort of a fantasy voice or someone else being character. That was really interesting to me. It felt like it was a new world opening. And also, you know, you get bored of your own voice sometimes. Later on the song, we wanted an airplane sound. So I Google like 747.

And then the first one that came, I thought, was like a KLM flight. Already the flight was good, like, you know, Amsterdam to Rio or something. And the sound was great. And that ended up on the record. There is a Morse code in it. Morse is a self-generator of rhythms. So we use it a lot actually as a tool to create patterns.

We have this software that you know you put like sentences and it transforms it into a MIDI file. So I didn't have to learn and know the actual Morse system which I could and I'm too old now for a lot. We just bought a Morse, you know, key, they call it a Morse key, from the Hungarian army, and we midified it. So now I have a real Morse MIDI generator. It's like the perfect piano key, you know, you can adjust the distance, the best instrument ever, but it just plays one note, like a triangle.

We've played a lot with childhood references of French boogie or you know, remembering songs that we grew up listening to that had this perfectly off, always slightly awkward, playfulness to it. So whenever it was those small bits of spoken French, it's moments that are made to be

the most dishonest. You know, they're almost cliches of themselves. We use them as tools. We treated like something that existed before. We almost wanted to create, something that existed in a fantasy world growing up. Not something that's original, but find footage from our past. We used a Chinese conference mic, you know, like what they have in United Nations.

That's like $30, I think. And it has a really small spectrum. It's high mids. And that's it. It was actually a mic for announcement at this museum. We're always attracted to this weird, you know. They look sexy to us, you know, the weird little things. We used it a lot and we struggled because it's such a bad quality

that during the mix it was a struggle. Let me tell you what it is. What do you mind if I do? I know I can be honest what to you. because I don't like it as it is. That's the Chinese microphone. Something that sums up the way we function is that Chinese microphone is going into the Harrison mixing board

that we bought that thriller was made on. So it's a combination of the worst and the very best. Professional and amateur. That's our life. That's our band. And now here's Tiamo by Phoenix in its entirety. Visit SongExploder.com. link to buy this track and to learn more about Phoenix. I recorded this interview with the band in the Green Room at Jimmy Kimmel Live before they performed on that show. I put up the video of

them playing Tiamo on that day, and you can see Laurent playing the Morseki. So go to Songexploader.net slash Phoenix to check that out. 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 one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh, Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I, 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, 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. Song Exploder is produced by me, along with Christian Coons, with help from intern Olivia Wood. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network. of extraordinary cutting-edge podcasts, made possible by the Knight Foundation and listeners like you. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. Next time on Song Exploder, Grizzly Bear. You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder, and you can find all the past and future episodes of the show at SongExploder.net,

or wherever you download podcasts. My name is Rishi K. Shareway. Thanks for listening.