Song Exploder - RJD2 - Games You Can Win (feat. Kenna)

Episode Date: April 1, 2015

RJD2 has been making music since 2002. His song "A Beautiful Mine" was turned into the opening credits music for Mad Men. He's a producer and beatmaker, but also a singer and songwriter. But for the vocals on the song "Games You Can Win," he tapped Kenna, a Grammy-nominee whom Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in Blink. In this episode, you’ll get to hear the parts that make up the track, as well as the unreleased demo vocals that RJ originally recorded himself.

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 Rishikesh Hurway. RJD2's been making music since 2002. His song, A Beautiful Mind, was turned into the opening credits for Mad Men. He's a producer and beatmaker, but also a singer and songwriter. For the vocals on the song, Games You Can Win, he tapped Kana, a Grammy nominee who Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in Blank. Coming up, you'll get to hear the demo vocals. that RJ originally recorded himself and sent to Kenna as a guide.

They've never been released. Here's Games You Can Win on Song Exploder. My name is RJ Crone. I make records under the moniker RJD2. The first thing that came to mind when I pulled up this session and I started thinking about it was the drum pattern. That's a recording of me playing in a basement. It was a pattern that I would play.

a lot to practice, you know, practicing drums. The verses, they only have the high hat on the one, two, three, four of the bar. It's a very simple, basic high hat pattern. And I know exactly where it came from because there's this drum break that Pete Rock used. The song is called Soul Brother Number One. The hi hat is just doing straight quarter notes. And everything kind of rotates around that. So for whatever reason, it's stuck in my head.

And so I know that that drum pattern was, to some degree, a nod. to that drum break. So getting back to games, you can win, the CS80. How a synth sounds very often dictates what notes get played on it. It's actually a very limited instrument, because you could be playing, I don't want it for release or something, and it would just sound stupid. It all depends on the patch and the sound. It's a very distinctive sounding synthesizer.

I really fell in love with it. There's two kind of main parts to do. of main parts to the verse. There's the bass line, which is done-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun followed by a very high whole note. It's the tonal opposite of the baseline part. I was a mathematics major in college, and I've always loved numbers.

One of the ways that I made sense of numbers was as fitting together in a spatial means. Oftentimes when I'm constructing the parts of a song, I think of things like Tetris. Imagine a game of Tetris where you could dictate the shape of any of the pieces. You know, decide how those things fit together. Kind of a crude analogy for how I often visualize how music the parts of a song can fit together. What this song is personally about is I realized that when I was young, I would open my mouth about anything.

There was no subject that I was not eager to pontificate on, regardless of how informed I was. And as I got older, growing out of my 20s was learning to not do that and learning to just be quiet when it's time to be quiet, to temper my instinct to open my mouth haphazardly and randomly on any subject. I wrote the lyrics and demoed the song myself. Keep your mouth shut till you get an end and only play the games you can win. Play your hand close like you had a glass chin Now let's begin But I just didn't think that I was the right singer to execute the song And then I sent it to Kenna because he's the kind of guy that when I hear him singing a song

I don't have doubts about the sincerity I reached out to him and said, hey I have this song I'd like to see if you'd be interested in singing it I sent it over It's probably one of the only times in Actually it's the only time that I've sung a song that I had nothing to do with the lyrics on. But I love the song so much.

You know whatever he's going to give you is going to be brilliant. His musicality is insane, and you've got to put it down if it's that good. My name is Kenna. Keep your mouth shut till you're getting in. And only play the games you can win. Play your hand close like you hide a glass chin. Now let's begin I mean it was one of those things where the song was there.

He'd already written a great deal. I just adjusted the arrangement vocally so that it made sense to me in the sense of crescendo. I wanted to make sure that it lifted up. The proud in the show Make the song yours as much as you want was basically. That's how I approached these things. And then he cut it and had it back within a week.

Now we're far along into the song. Oftentimes, what will happen for me is I'll work backwards from a later point in the song for things like intros. You know, you've got these pretty beefy synth parts and the drums are kind of gritty. You want something that can provide a contrast. So the Glock and Spiel and Viborphone parts were pretty drastically different. I had the vibes in the Glock in the laundry room. So I just run the mic cables underneath the door and, you know, little headphone line. and then go in there and hit record, and boom.

A song builds momentum to the point that then it's just rolling, and then eventually it's at a point where you just think of it as a keeper, and then it's kind of the less it feels like work for me, the more it feels like I'm just watching something happen. It feels like being an inactive participant, the further in you go, like you're listening to someone else make a song, as opposed to making a song yourself.

And now here's Games You Can Win by RJD, featuring Kenna in its entirety. 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 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 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. You can find all the past and future episodes of SongExploder at SongExploder.net or on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts. Next time on Song Exploder, Toroimois, explodes the song Halfdome. 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.