Song Exploder - Slowdive - Sugar for the Pill

Episode Date: July 13, 2017

Slowdive formed in 1989 in Reading, England. They put out 3 albums between 1991 and 1995, and their sound helped define the shoegaze genre. In 2017, the band released a critically-acclaimed self-titled album, their first in over twenty years. In this episode, singer and guitarist Neil Halstead takes apart the song “Sugar for the Pill.” songexploder.net/slowdive

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. Slow Dive formed in 1989 in Reading, England. They put out three albums between 1991 and 1995, and their sound helped define the Shugays genre. In 2017, the band released a critically acclaimed self-titled album, their first in over 20 years. And in this episode, singer and guitarist Neil Halstead takes apart the slow-dive song, Sugar for the Pill. I'm Neil Houssted from the band Slow Dive. We live by the coast in a place called Newke in Cornwall,

down by the sea, and we have a lot of seagulls around here. This song, it has elements of where I live and the first line. There's a blizzard of gulls drumming in the wind. It's inspired by walking around the coastline here and the very noisy sea gulls. have. The song originated from the sort of ascending guitar motif. I was just playing it on an acoustic guitar. I started playing it in some sound checks and then I added a delay onto it. The songs start that way. They're often led by the kind of effects that are on them. Even like the first

song we really had as a band, it was the song Slow Dive. It was the effect on the guitar, kind of provided the inspiration for the song almost, because it allowed something quite simple to sound somewhat more interesting. Here's a little bit of that first song they ever wrote, Slow Dive by Slow Dive. Okay, now back to Sugar for the Pill. I liked the resonance of those notes, you know. The initial guitar riff was something that had an emotional content for me.

And I think that it then fed the rest of the song, and it fed the lyrics. We were in a rehearsal room just jammed through it. And Nick came up with a great bass line for it. Nick's really good at coming up with these bass lines that really add something to the song. He doesn't just hold the bass end down. There's something melodic happening there as well.

So he came up with a really nice one. Two months later, we went to Exeter, which is where Rachel lived. We recorded a version up there. It had Simon's drums, it had the bass line, and it had me singing the melody but not a complete set of lyrics. And it had Christian's guitar, which was the other guitar on the track. I'm not sure what he used, his pedalboard is a mystery to me. He does his thing, making these crazy noises, and I know not how he makes them.

With us getting back together and doing a new record, we wanted to do something that was different. to what we've done in the past. We'd recorded the song to a click track, and I wanted to clean a drum sound for the track, so I replaced Simon's drums with electronic drums, which are the main drums that you hear. But then when we mix the record, we kept some of the live drums just in the background,

and so some of the skip beats you can hear are Simon's live drums. I used to have a problem with guitars feeding back because we play very loud. Neil plays an epiphone casino guitar. It's a hollow-bodied electric. And I always like the sound of the casinos, but because they're hollow-bodied, and they're quite cheap guitars, but they're hollow-bodied, I realized that if I filled it a little bit with something,

you could stop it feeding back and it would still sound the way you wanted it to sound. So it has bubble wrap inside it to stop it feeding back. After experimenting, I found that bubble wrap was a good filler. It's not really rock and roll, but it's somewhat controllable. Without the bubble wrap, it's way out of control. We can hear Rachel's doing the harmony on the chorus. I'll get Rachel to sing on everything. We'll just decide between us which vocals to keep

or whether it's a song that she sings by herself or whether it needs my vocal on it. With Sugar for the Pill, Rachel sang the lead and she sang the harmonies as well, so she did quite a lot of vocal takes and we just made decisions down the line as to which bits to keep. It seemed to work with Rachel coming in on the first chorus.

Sugar for the pill, you know, it's just the way things are. She sings like a really beautiful harmony in the second verse. There's backing vocals that kind of pop in and out. What I tend to do when I'm working on a track is I try and create situations where accidents happen. And Pro Tools is brilliant for this. It's an amazing sort of creative tool, as well as being quite a sort of. sensible editing machine, it's also just brilliantly insensible because you can create situations that are really spontaneous, you know, because you can literally just chop a track up and

throw bits of it all around the room and just see what comes out of the chaos and occasionally you get these really sweet little moments. So I'll just take a vocal track. I'll just move it somewhere further along in the song and I'll just see what happens when I play it back. But that's actually, it's a lead vocal that's just been shifted on the timeline. Sugar for the pill, you know it's just the way things are. It was trying to create accidents. I was reading Wuthering Heights in 2014, which the first time we'd ever read it.

And I think some of that made its way into the song. There's a feeling of that kind of wild Heathcliff quality in the song. a little bit. The doomed romance of Heathcliffs and Kathy's involvement, and it's very connected to the nature they live in. You know, they live in this up on a moor, wild, windy moor, and it becomes, I suppose, a metaphor for their own relationship. There's a line, Only Love is Alive,

which actually my girlfriend told me was a Jim Jaramouche film. But that for me connects more with the Heathcliff and Kathy scenario. For Sodaive, it's always been quite impressionistic. A lot of the lyrics are just snatched. It's almost dreamlike. Sugar for the pill, you know it's just the way things are. As a child, I was given medicine on a sugar cube. You know, it coughed medicine or whatever it was, it would be dipped.

Sugar cube would be dipped in to make it more pleasant. It's the idea that this unpleasant thing that could make you feel better, needs to be sweetened. And now here's Sugar for the Pill by Slowdive in its entirety. Visit songexploder.net for a link to buy this track and to learn more about slow dive. 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, Rishikesh, 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, Clion, 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, rishikesh.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, Phoenix. You can find Song Exploder 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 Kesh Your Way. Thanks for listening.