Song Exploder - Raphael Saadiq - Kings Fall

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

Raphael Saadiq is a Grammy-winning songwriter, producer, and artist from Oakland, California. He was the lead singer of the legendary ‘90s R&B group Tony! Toni! Tone!. As a producer, he’s worked with D’Angelo, TLC, Mary J. Blige, Whitney Houston, Solange Knowles, and John Legend. In August 2019, Raphael released his fifth solo album, Jimmy Lee, which is named for his late older brother. In this episode, he breaks down a song from he made with his nephew, Dylan Wiggins, called “Kings Fall.” songexploder.net/raphael-saadiq

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and, piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. My name is Tau Wyn. This episode contains explicit language. Raphael Sadiq is a Grammy-winning songwriter, producer, and artist from Oakland, California. He was the lead singer of the legendary 90s R&B group, Tony, Tony, and as a producer, he's worked with DeAngelo, TLC, Winnie Houston, Solange Knowles, Mary J. Blige, and John Legend. In August 2019, Raphael released his fifth solo album, Jimmy Lee, which is named for his late older brother. In this episode, he breaks down a song from the album he made with his nephew, Dylan Wiggins, called a King's Fall. My name is Raphael Sadiq.

Ashley wrote his son with my nephew, Dylan Wiggins. Raphael's my uncle, but I call Raphael Ray. Everybody in my family, they all call him Ray. What's up? I'm Dylan Wiggins, aka Sir Dylan, from Oakland, California. He's been living in Los Angeles now for maybe six or seven years, and we work in a lot of music together, and he actually brought me to track King's Fall. The first idea that came to me

before I made that song was just this idea of these chords I had on the guitar. I was going for, I would say, Otis Redding vibe. Something that just sounded like my grandfather's music or just something from back in the time, you know, chords that were going to draw emotion.

and then I ended up recording like a solo guitar to it and then reversed that lead guitar I did. That's just to create the feeling of like falling. After the chords came the drums, I have like a loop folder that was given to me by Ali Shahid Muhammad from Tribe Called Quest, The Legends. And it has a lot of drum loops that sound spectacular and it's just hundreds of them.

And I think they were sampled from vinyl, so I chopped the sample of. and then just try to make it feel as real as possible and as human as possible. Just really slowed it down and made it sound like old school. And then the electric guitar. It strung up like a regular guitar, but at the bottom they have these pickup things. It rubs the strings against the metal, and it kind of creates this tang sound. And that was the last thing that was on the song.

When Dylan brought me the track, it was called King's Fall. I don't think that's ever happened, but... I don't think that's ever happened before, where I like named the beat before the lyrics. But to me it just sounded like something at the end of a, I won't say a movie, but like the end of something where the king is like, you know, I've done all I can do, but like this shit is going down.

And even the chords are all going downwards. So he played it for me. And you know, it was right up my alley. I was very excited because my record is a little darker than most records and a little eerier feeling, little vibe. And my record is titled Jimmy Lee. So Jimmy Lee is my brother who had drug addiction. So my record is about addiction, and so it fit because it shows like very strong people in the beginning.

But, you know, drug addiction is something you can fall from, you know, no matter how big or strong you are, beautiful you are. So I was like, yeah, I got to work with this. We got to do something with this. It took me maybe one week before I started writing melodies and thinking about what I was going to talk about or sing about, because I really love storytelling. And it had a lot of things in mind. I was sort of talking about a friend of mine who has some addiction issues, too.

So I sort of had a guideline to read into when I was singing a song. I wake up, I call a man to see what's in the man's hands. He comes by and drops it off to let me know how much the pills cost. The song is really about not the guy who's on drugs. It's about the dealer, the person around you that makes it available. You know, just like wants to keep you high and wants to keep you down. And it's about the supplier. To supply my provider and all those things.

The person that provides and supplies can sort of hide in the dark a lot and not be mentioned when everybody's getting high. They come in the middle of the night. They're always smiling. They're always sneaky. So I just wanted to give the attention to that. That was my thing. So my play on words was just to say,

I want you to be, but that's what you are anyway. But we're just exposing it. I want you to be my, the supply, my provider, my provider, and supply in all those things, and all those things. I want you to be. He will literally be cutting vocals at like 2 o'clock in the morning with no engineer at all and nobody at the studio by him. My vocal session was just one session.

I knew that I wanted to be sort of gritty and direct and like a lot of edge on it. The lyrics are I could see witches flying everywhere. Just talking about the state of mind you're in when you're indulging on chemicals or whatever kind of pills or whatever your drug of choices. When you're high and you're hallucinating, you're seeing things. You think people are chasing you, people were following you, and you wish it in that it was a bad dream. The breaths in the song, the panting is, you know,

waking the body of sleep in a cold sweat and just being scared. You don't know what happened. You know, just what's going on in my life. So I wanted to put those breaths behind the dope theme reference. Even when I'm clean, I'm still a dope thing. I'm also talking about people who are not on an actual chemical drug. Maybe it's food. Maybe it's sugar.

Maybe it's sex. Maybe it's anger, you know, just something that you can't get away. So I'm not leaving out the regular human, you know. We all have addictions. At the very end, it cuts off with this doorbell. So when you hear the doorbell at the end, it's like the supplier ringing the doorbell to bring your drugs, bring you pills. I wanted to sort of subliminally remind people, you know, every time your doorbell rings doesn't mean it's a good ring or somebody there to help you. The providers sometime there for, with bad intentions.

When I did that, I knew I was done. After I sent it to him, I was just kind of like, who knows what's going to happen? And then one time I come to the studio and he's like, did I play this song? And I was like, nah, and then he played it for him. And I was like, wow. I wasn't hearing that on there. I was hearing something a lot softer, but when he came with that energy, I was like, dang, this took that super sad song to like a level of emotion that it needed to go to,

to really be something. You know, for me talking about addiction, I've been around. growing up with my brother, Jimmy Lee. He was a bit older than me, so from the time I knew him, he was already addicted to drugs. He was pretty much Curiosity kills the cat. He tried a chemical, and he never was able to relieve himself from it. It's been laced in my music for some time, but this is the first time I went 100% directly to it. And, you know, that was my take on it.

And now, here's Kingsfall by Raphael Sadiq in its entirety. Visit SongExploder.net for more information about Raphael Sadik and Dylan Wiggins. You'll also find a link to buy or stream this song. A song Exploder is made by Rishi Kesh Hirwe, producer Christian Coons and me, Tao Wyn. I'm guest hosting for the year, sitting in for Rishi Kesh. Carlos Lerma is our illustrator. You can see his portrait of Raphael Sadek on the Song Exploder website or Instagram. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of creative, independent podcasts.

You can learn about all of our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can also follow Song Exploder on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Song Exploder. And you can follow me at Tao Get Stay Down. I'm Tao Wyn. Thanks for listening.