Song Exploder - Rostam - Bike Dream

Episode Date: September 14, 2017

Rostam Batmanglij is a songwriter, producer, and composer, who first rose to prominence in 2006 as one of the members of Vampire Weekend. He’s produced songs for Frank Ocean, Solange, Carly Rae Jepsen, and more. But his September 2017 album ‘Half-Light’ is his first as a solo artist. In this episode, Rostam breaks down his song “Bike Dream.” He explains how it was influenced in part by bands like T.Rex and Coldplay, but “Bike Dream” began very differently from how it ended up. songexploder.net/rostam Song Exploder listener survey: surveynerds.com/songexploder

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 Rishikash Hirwe. Rostom Batmanglish is a songwriter, producer, and composer, who first rose to prominence in 2006 as one of the members of Vampire Weekend. He's produced songs for Frank Ocean Solange, Carly Ray Jepson, and Moore. But his September 2017 album, Halflight, is his first as a solo artist. In this episode, Rostom breaks down his song, Bike Dream. And coming up, he explains how it was in. influenced in part by bands like T-Rex and Coldplay.

But BikeDream began very differently from how it ended up. Here's Rostom on how the song started. Before there were any lyrics or any vocal melodies, there was a beat and a song title, a beat that I named Bike Dream. It must have been around 2007. I had just graduated from college, I think, and I was on my bike a lot.

I remember writing the verses to this. song in this apartment that I lived in in Brooklyn Heights and I had a couple roommates and they all worked and I was mostly on tour but when I wasn't on tour I had the whole apartment to myself and I would go into my friend Tim's room because his room had a huge window that faced the garden and I would just go in there to get a sort of change of scenery and it inspired me to write so just bring my laptop in and I would play the beat on loop and I would just sit in front of the laptop and write different verse lyric ideas.

You wake up a place, you're a hot, and I'll have a beautiful, and I have all the stuff of course in the cabaret. Bike Dream, that was just a name. It was just two words that I thought had some kind of power when you put them together. And usually when you name a beat something memorable, it tends to last.

And the song title is with us to this day. The original beat, however, is nowhere to be found. But it birthed the vocal melodies and the lyrics that I wrote. I wrote most of the lyrics of the song over that original beat. And then I kind of thought, like, there's something about this beat. I don't think it's right for the song. So I had this other beat that was this kind of like T-Rex vibe. I was trying to do this idea, this ambiguous idea of future.

T-Rex. This boogie-wogie, like, da-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-mar. Mark Bolin was interested in the idea of boogie. Like, what is boogie? What makes something boogie? It's groovy. So I'm playing the things that, like, people who are, if they were to play piano and guitar in a band that was doing a boogie-wuggy, would do. It's a boogie-wug-googie chord progression. The piano is just playing simple chords like and then the guitar is playing that and then they're layered together with some crackle that just like sampled from vinyl

to make it sound old. What is it they say about punk music? It's three chords in the truth. Well, what are the three chords? It's one four and five. So this song is basically just different forms of one four and five. But I put a lot of care into making it

rise above those simple chord voicings and doing things to make it more harmonically dense. All the chords are being pitch shifted. What I was thinking about was this idea of like if you're trying to make futuristic T-Rex, what makes it sound futuristic? I like the way that things sound when they're pitch-shifted. They sound better sometimes. It's like you're sending them through a piece of glass and the light is refracting in an unpredictable way. This was the intro beat.

So those are kick and snare samples. I'm using volume automation on a snare to do the work of a drum beat. I was trying to use the snare dynamics as a source of building up excitement without giving you a groove to fall into. After making that beat using samples, Rostom added live drums. Those drums were played by Garrett Ray, who used to be in a band called Foreignborn. And my friend Ariel, Rekshide, who helped produce the song, he brought Garrett in, and those drums were recorded to tape. The pattern that they're playing is exactly doubling the drum pattern that I had programmed. So when you play the program drums and the acoustic drums at the same time, you shouldn't be able to hear a difference.

It should all just sound like one really precise drum performance. I was pretty proud of that drum beat because if you listen to it on its own, it sounds like it was made by a crazy person. And when we were in the studio and Garrett was trying to play it on real drums, he had to write out measure by measure. And we even recorded it measure by measure because there was no way he could memorize it in the time that we had in the studio. And I'm glad that we did that because I think it added an important element of life to the song.

So I had this T-Rexi beat And I was like What if I'd take the lyrics and melodies From Bike Dream And put them together with that T-Rexi vibe And it worked because the original Bike Dream beat was about the same tempo As the T-Rex beat

And when I put them together It wasn't a dramatic shift You wake up late You feel your heart begins to work And now you're all dressed up of course And hailing caps out of your door On 14th Street, I feel my head between my knees And orange swimming through the trees

And orange swilling through the trees The buzzy synth is a synth sound that I made in reason The volume would modulate in time with the rhythm This song was mixed by Dave Friedman He'd been responsible for producing or mixing or producing and mixing So many songs that I loved That I knew that I could trust him So one of the things that Dave Friedman did

was that he put that buzzy synth together with the drums, and he sent them to a compressor to make them all get smashed together. And as a result, it creates that liquid feeling. It enhances the groove is a very simple way to think of it. People think of distortion as something that is out of control. But Dave Friedman is the master of being a heart. 100% in control of distortion and getting the most out of distortion. Already there's distortion on some of the tracks that I was sending him, and then he was taking it

to another love. At the end of the song, the guitars come in. It's two guitars with delay. That guitar line was kind of like the cold play element of the song. It was guitar with delay, just stepwise motion. Shout out to Johnny Buckland. I think every song needs some cold play. I'm a big fan. That Trident is a synth from the 70s that it's like one of the few old synths that I own. What is special to me about that synth is that it's not using computer chips. It's using circuitry and voltage. So it's unreliable. You know, the waiver of the pitch isn't something that a programmer is adding in after the fact.

The pitch is wavering because it's relying on electricity and how that electricity is circling. around a coil. To me, that sound always makes me think of planetarium music, and I had some formative experience as a kid going to the Air and Space Museum and watching some planetarium film strip that I just want to keep recreating that stuff in the music that I make. The key is important. If you write a song in a high key and you need to sing loud or have a certain kind of energy in order to hit certain notes and different parts of your voice are going to access different moods. The second chorus is very low. Two boys, one to kiss your neck and one to bring you breakfast, get you out of bed when. And then it jumps up an octave. Two boys, one to kiss your neck

and want to bring you breakfast, get you out of bed when. When I was writing that chorus, lyric, two boys, one to kiss your neck and one to bring you breakfast, get you out of bed, when. I like the fact that you could interpret it differently and you could see different things in it. You could see it from a perspective of any number of relationships, gay or straight. I like that there was an ambiguity to it. At the time, I had not come out in press. I mean, it's contextualized by the fact that I am out now, and I have been out now since.

since 2010. So that's the greater context for the song. Two boys want to love you sweetly, one does so discreetly never really meet me. I think the line, two boys want to love you sweetly, one does so discreetly. That one I think is kind of one of the most important lines in the song because I think it reveals that it's not literally two different boys. It's wanting the person that you're with to be two different kinds of people. Maybe wanting a boyfriend who is devoted to you and affectionate. And then also wanting one who's discreet.

And maybe there's an impossibility to that. When the song came out, it came out with a press release about the album. And I did use the word queer in a statement about the experience of, you know, feeling like you have two lives. I always was thinking that the musicians that I connected with were the ones who were proud of who they were, you know, whatever that might be, whether it was gay or whether it was their ethnicity

that was something that they presented as part of their identity. That was certainly something that I respected in artists that I loved. And I felt like if I had the... opportunity to make songs and make music in the world that people would hear, that I would also want to be part of that tradition of being transparent about who I was. I knew that I wanted this album to be connected by every song, having strings. And so I had two friends come in and play those kind of chugging chords. It's cello and double bass. Yeah, it's funny.

because some of those sound like a little off, but I wanted them to not be too perfect. I'm very careful to make sure that there's some looseness in all my recordings. I mean, that's what groove is. Groove is defined by imperfection. I find that I just have to trust my ears as opposed to my eyes,

because a lot of us who make music with computers, we get attached to recognizing how it should look on the screen, how the waveforms should line up with the grid. And I think you've got to get away from that if you want to make the music of your dreams. And now here's Bike Dream by Rostom in its entirety. I feel your heart begin to work, and now you're all dressed up, of course, inhaling cows out of your door.

On 14th Street, I feel my head between my knees, and orange swilling through the cheese, and orange swilling through the chees. Where could I go? What could I do put in this state? My lips and eyes could meet away, and now there's nothing. I can say no. I pulled away, I see another of myself.

It's found true love and happiness to sit and smoke down the jet board. Two boys, one to kiss your neck, and want to bring you back, just get you out of bed when your soul fell a number four from knocking at my door, you're hurt against the floor, was Someone to love you sweetly Wander so discreetly Never will Catch your breath You're sleeping to the day

To wake up with sunlight it caused you I want to try to go back in time For just that moment in my life I should have spoken As I sat there with my jaw open And I smiled he pulled a sweater off And tried to explain that I'll be giving up all I'm pulled away I see another of myself

He's drawn to love and happiness happiness to sit and smoke there on the chair beside the bed I read this past week's New Yorker and watching pain Antarctica and watch him paint Antarctica Two boys want to kiss your neck and one to bring you breakfast Get you out of bed when Your soul from the night before

From knocking on my door You head against the floor boards Sweetly wonder so discreetly Never will they need me, But I have a new album of my own I should catch your breath You're sleeping into the day To wake up with some matter to cross for who

Visit SongExploter.net For more on Rostom, including a link to buy this song. 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, Vagabond, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine, 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 Manzuchas, 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. If you love Song Exploder, please leave a review or a rating over at iTunes.com slash Song Exploder. And if you want to show people how much you love Song Exploder, you can get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash merch.

Next time on Song Exploder, Lord. Oh God, I'm clean out of air in my lungs. It's all gone. Played it's a nonchalon. It's time we dance with the truth. Song Exploder is produced by me, along with Christian Coons, and 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. Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder. You can find all the past and future episodes of the show at songexploder.net or wherever you download podcasts. My name is Rishi-Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.