Song Exploder - Solange - Cranes in the Sky

Episode Date: January 16, 2017

Solange Knowles released her first album in 2002, at the age of 16. Her third album, A Seat at the Table, came out in September 2016, and debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts. It’s gotten widespread critical acclaim, including being named album of the year by Pitchfork and by Vibe. In this episode, Solange takes apart the song "Cranes in the Sky," which began back in 2008. songexploder.net/solange

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 Hirwe. This episode contains explicit language. Solange Knowles released her first album in 2002, at the age of 16. Her third album, A Seed at the Table, came out in September 2016, and debuted at number one on the Billboard charts. It's gotten widespread critical acclaim, including getting named Album of the Year by Pitchfork and by Vibe. In this episode, Solange takes apart the song Cranes in the Sky. The story starts in 2008 when Solange was in the studio with producer Rafael Sadiq.

This is Solange. When I was actually working on Hadley Street Dreams, which is my second album, I thought Raphael could be the perfect person to try to help me rework some of the production on the songs. You know, we tried, but ultimately it just didn't work. But he was just such a joy to work with. I mean, he's a legend, and I learned so much just being in the room with him. And on my way out, I just asked him, you know, do you have any instrumentals laying around that you might want to give me? And he gave me a CD with a few instrumentals.

But it was clear they weren't going to make it for that record. I don't think I actually listened to... I listened to the CD until maybe like two or three months later. And there was one that was just a sketch, just drums, the bass, and the strings. I immediately had this really strong reaction. I went to my hotel room and wrote the lyrics and the melody, just immediately coming up with the first four lines. first four lines that I tried to structure.

I tried to drink it away. I tried to put one in the air. I tried to dance it away. I tried to change it with my hair. At the time, I was definitely in a transitional place in my life. I was a new mother. I had been with my son's father since we were 13, and so much of my identity was grounded in our identity. And I also had just moved back home to Houston from Idaho.

My son's father went to college there, and so we kind of uprooted and lived in the middle of nowhere. So it was kind of my homecoming. And I had also just signed my publishing deal as a songwriter, which was a huge milestone for me. But it was this really, really hard series of things that were just like delivered that were just like, it's time to grow the fuck up. And there were times that I felt like, whoa, I'm doing what I love to do and what I've always wanted to do. why do things still feel so heavy? What is this weighing on me? What is this that I'm trying to work through?

Actually used to travel to Miami quite a bit. I wrote most of Hadley Street there and also a lot of songs for my sister. Although it's known to be like this super party fast-paced city, it was really kind of like a refuge of peace for me, especially as a writer. And there was a lot of reflective time and it became like my safe creative space.

When I came back there, a couple of years later, Miami was going through a surge just like a lot of America where developers were just creating all of these high rises and there was just so much real estate development at that time. And literally everywhere that I looked around had a crane in the sky and you could not look at a street without dozens and dozens of them. And it just felt really heavy, and that line immediately came to me.

Well, it's like cranes in the sky. Sometimes I don't want to fill those metal clouds. It was very literal. Miami, again, being this refuge for me, this place that I also is just creatively at my raws, at my most, like, pure and honest state. Just the heaviness and the weightiness and kind of even the eyesoreness of seeing all of these cranes be so disruptive in this space that I found peace in. really kind of affected me as well. That related so strongly to the idea of trying to push through and work through

but something interrupting and something being so big in this space that you're trying to move from. I actually reached out to Raphael and told him, you know, I came up with something to this song and I want to kind of further explore. do you have the stems for the drums, the bass, and the strings? And he could not find the stems for the life of him. He went back and looked at this point. It had probably been like two years. And he just was unable to find them.

And there were certain core changes that I wanted to incorporate. Just having a one track of all the sounds together, it just wasn't going to work for me. I reached out again and asked about the stems. He's like, I cannot find these stems. And so I think I got a little bit closer to realizing like, okay, what has to be done will have to be built off of this track. Did you think at all about just trying to recreate it from scratch? I did, but honestly, the texture of every sound

I felt had a sense of warmth and spiritualness to it that I didn't feel like could be recreated. Raphael's baseline still has nuances because he played it live throughout. But I think the fact that the chords do stay the same rings very true to the narrative of the song. It acts as a meditation, really, And I've had an extremely difficult relationship with meditating

and trying to silence my brain, which is what so much of this song is about. That repetition is really able to give some structure to myself and my brain and my emotions. So there's definitely a sense of that, especially with the strings and how they operate on the song. I try to run it away. Thought in my head be feeling clearer.

I travel 70 states. I've lived in, I guess, now, Houston, Idaho, L.A., New York, and here in New Orleans. And there was a certain sense of me traveling 70 states in the physical and literal form to find home and to find home. and to find peace. But when I talk about traveling through 70 states, it's 70 states of mine to achieve this feeling and not really being able to get there. During the hook, I added the piano scales there.

That is so funny because even listening to it, I was about to laugh. I played a lot of piano on this album. I still just laughed. that I'm doing it. That is so funny. I have not soloed these. For so long, I sang piano parts that I heard in my head to pianists.

But sometimes rhythmically, it wasn't exactly how I heard it in my head, or it was just really hard to describe that and articulate that. And so on this album, I was just like, I'm just going to give it a shot. But every single time, I probably chuckled. I guess it's kind of just a nervous mechanism. Like, it's literally me just kind of establishing I'm not a pianist. That piano actually I got really, really connected to. There's a little, like, dance hall space here in New Orleans.

They have Zatikos and cookouts. It was a place called Tiger Men's Den. And they had this old, really janky, out-of-tune piano in there. And I just really love the space and I asked for a couple of days if I could just, like, work on edits for the songs. Every single time, I would say, I'm just going to lay this piano part down. Like, I'm going to lay down, and then I'm going to have

whoever redo it, and I actually kept every single one of them. Cranes is the only song on the album vocally that I recorded in New Orleans. Once I was finished with a lot of the production of the song, I went to Jamaica actually and I have my own little Pro Tools portable rigs, so I just packed up my little setup. got a little house there to record all the vocals. And the house was really invested with roaches. I know you didn't think I was going to go there. And, I mean, it was bad.

They were, like, coming out of my shoes and out of covers and everywhere. It was paid for, so I was like, I've got to make this work. But my vocals were so fucked. They had no peace. They had none of the things I was yearning to deliver with the record. And I actually live in a really noisy place here in New Orleans, so I'm not able to record from home. And a friend of mine who has a place in a really quiet neighborhood

who's like, my neighbors won't care. You can just come here and set up shop for a little while here. They were giving me like seven days. And I just couldn't find a really. Some roaches came out there. I think we took some of them. But Cranes was the one song that I actually really loved my vocal performance of. It was one night there that I just caught a rhythm and really caught a vibe

and was really able to get out of my head and do this song. Whatever got into me that night, I wanted to keep it. I wanted to keep it. I started with the backing vocals, which I often do. The ones that are just like... Harmonies are probably the thing that I'm most confident in. Don't you cry it, baby, yeah. I think that the don't you cry it,

it's almost to feel like this sense of community. For me, specifically, don't you cry it, baby. It's like, your auntie rubbing your back, telling you to step up, get up, put your head up, you know, walk through this. My mom always has this thing about the third day getting up, you know, and your sadness and existing and your shit and your funk. She's always, since we're kids, allowed us two days to mope and stay in bed and have. have our little pity parties, but on that third day, you get your ass up and you ride and you decide like, okay, this is what it is and now I have to exist. And so that line specifically comes from that. That's like my mom, my aunt Bernal and my aunt Janelle in three-part harmony

telling me to get your ass up. Don't you cry it, baby. Even the aways for me was meant to feel like, you know, a group of women relating this awayness. I had been listening to a lot of Alice Coltrane and really wanting to kind of channel her transcendence, just some of those frequencies that really puncture. you and give release. From there, we brought some other musicians in. For the sonic makeup of this album,

there were a few days where different producers introduced guitar. It just did not feel like it belonged on the album. But towards the end of the record at the very end, I went to Taz Arnold's studio. And he had a couple musicians just hanging around, and one of them was like, I want to just try out this guitar sound. And I was like, oh, no, no, no guitar on this album.

And he played it in a way that was so subtle and so rich, and I just thought, got to keep that. So it actually is one of two times that the guitars you on the whole album. The harp sounds at the end for me was this visual landscape that I also had

of just black women coming in forces and their most beautiful, majestic, regal senses. That harp sound is actually a toy from Toys of Us that one of the synth

players brought. I sung him some lines and he started playing on this thing that was probably like, you know, six inches by 12 inches, plastic. We had talked about getting, you know, a harpist in, but after that I was just like, actually no need for the heart player. This is puncturing. A lot of times if I write a line,

I will think to myself, could I have said that better? And on this song, I really did not have those thoughts. It was literally things that I had done to try to fill this void or open this space or reduce this load. And I, you know, at times might have thought within the context of this record, like, could I have said that differently, when it was all sent and done and the answer was really no. It was, that's how you felt. I felt that.

Looking back at that girl, I feel so, so grateful that I'm not in that place. I can still identify with so many of those moments. They're still a part of me, but I am not them. I found myself feeling maybe some of those things more than ever within the last couple of years again, but in a totally different way.

Whereas to, at first, they related to heartache. They related to just feeling unclear, confused, unworthy. Then they actually kind of started to become a narrative of filling these things. through the backdrop of the state of how black women are being treated in this country. So much of that song to me also became a song for community and so many things specifically that I know that black girls are working through and black women are working through. It became a different story.

And now here's Cranes in the Sky by Solange in its entirety. I tried to dance it away I tried to change it with my hair Credit card below Thought a new dress would make it better I tried to work it away But that just made me even sadder Keep myself busy

I ran around in circles think I made myself dizzy I snapped it away I sexted away I read it away, away. My head be filled me. Visit songexploder.net for more on Solange, including the music video for Cranes in the Sky, which was co-directed by Solange and her husband Alan Ferguson. On the site, you'll also find a link to buy the 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 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 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 Wynrope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the 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 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. Next time on Song Exploder, composer Nicholas Bertel breaks down the music from the award-winning film, Moonlight. Song Exploder is produced by me and 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 by MailChimp.

Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. 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.