Song Exploder - The 1975 - The Birthday Party

Episode Date: August 12, 2020

The 1975 are a band from Manchester, England, made up of Matty Healy, Adam Hann, Ross MacDonald, and George Daniel. They started playing music together in 2002, when they were teenagers. Since then, they’ve released four albums, won three Brit awards, and gotten two Grammy nominations. Their most recent album, Notes on a Conditional Form, came out in May 2020. In this episode, Matty and George break down how they made the song “The Birthday Party.” songexploder.net/the-1975

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. The 1975 are a band from Manchester, England, made up of Maddie Healy, Adam Han, Ross MacDonald, and George Daniel. They started playing music together in 2002, when they were teenagers. Since then, they've released four albums, won three Brit Awards, and gotten two Grammy nominations. Their most recent album, Notes on a Conditional Form, came out in May 2020. In this episode, Maddie and George break down how they made the song The Birthday Party.

My name's Matthew Healy. My name's George Daniel. I guess I'm the primary producer and he is the primary songwriter. We've been together since we were children, so we just try and support each other. The song started in L.A. I spent a lot of my 20s in LA. Normally, either I'll start something on my laptop or Matthew will come to me with an idea and want to record it.

But this, actually for the birthday party, we were all playing in a room together. That was the first time in years that we'd sat down to work out the arrangement of a song because we don't do that when we're writing songs normally. It was a product of something Mattie wanted to try. The very first thing I heard was him, playing the guitar and sitting on the sofa.

I like simplicity of form and conceptual ideas built on top of that. It was an acoustic guitar, but I had the idea that I wanted to play a C-shape and to have the bass line just move around that. And then I got the guys in the room to see what it felt like. I'm pretty sure I have a recording on my phone of us kind of figuring that out. George, just start the drums. Ross was kind of just playing that repetitive bass line. And I played the drums.

I remember it needed to be really light. Like we were using brushes. We just realized that the harder you played that beat, it just got more and more void of emotion. And that kind of became a little bit of a blueprint for the way we were going to approach most of the sounds. It was like to keep them kind of soft. I wanted this record to be quite simple or quite pure in its expression.

I knew that the song was just going to be the same thing looping round again and again and again. It didn't feel like a big statement, you know, like a big reaching statement. And it felt like quite humble and it kind of set a pace at the way that I wanted to talk. And then I wrote to that. The first thing that you come up with is normally the best. The stuff that I want to leave out is probably the stuff that I should put. in. So if something comes out and then I want to edit it to preserve my own ego, I try not to do that. I was going through a tough time. I was definitely re-evaluating myself and my behaviours and stuff

like that and I kind of lost a few things. I relapsed for like the first time after coming out rehab around about that time and my relationship was kind of slowly coming to an end and everything felt like it was drawing to an end in a kind of natural way and I think that like you put it into a song and stuff and it becomes romantic and exciting but all those things are just like boring and sad in reality you know I mean you know I try and make art out of the boring sad parts of my life because it's better than them being boring and sad the song was kind of me at a party like a house party

it was very conversational almost like about a series of conversations that I was telling you that I was literally having. I've seen Greg and he was like, I've seen your friends at the birthday party day were kind of fucked up before I even started. It's like a play about my experiences, a fictionalized version of reality. It's kind of about being my age, which isn't old,

and it isn't a teenager. And just reflecting on the nuances of what it's like what it's like being that age where some people are still emotionally immature, some people are moving way further into adulthood than you are. I don't know, I'm just, I'm a bit socially, not socially awkward, just not really up for intimacy with strangers. This ain't going well, I thought I was stuck in her, in a boring conversation with a girl called a male.

About a friend in Cincinnati called Maddie as well. My favorite part in the song is actually the girls, or the fake girls. That line I was going to get girls to sing it. So we made a demo version of it to send to them, which is actually just me. And then we kind of like formanted the vocals. Basically you can make your voice sound like a girl without kind of changing the pitch. And then it was funny. and then it was kind of just the best thing.

And I've seen the girls and they were all like, listen, I got myself a missus, there can't be any kissing. It wasn't until, I think, the end of that L.A. trip where it kind of started coming to life and becoming a way more kind of strange and psychedelic thing. Like the way that we used the piano arpeggio is from the OP1, the little teenage engineering synth. And it's a sample of a piano.

We just recorded like three octaves. So you just go boom. And then that's all in one sample. And then basically when you play chords, it plays this really clumsy arpeggio that's free time because the way the sampler works is the high. the pitch, the speed of the sample is different. So you get this completely changing, ever-evolving arpeggio that is imperfect.

And that became like just one of our favorite things ever made. We wanted to have all these layers, but also keep quite a lot of intimacy. It's full of a lot of like country and western kind of like sounds really, so a lot of like slide guitar. I like country music because I like its authenticity and its aspect and it's quite beautiful. This song, like, it's not like a country record at all. It just has like a kind of a twang to it.

Yeah, that was mighty playing the banjo. The banjo doesn't really sound like any other instrument, so it really like cuts through and it is pokey. And then if you kind of juxtaposed the banjo with like a bunch of synths or like weirder stuff that's like, it just made it trippy. That's a synth called Omnosphere. Omnisfair. It was like two sounds blended. One of those thumb calimburs and like a music box. Even though we added loads and loads of production and it became this really weird trippy thing,

we were trying to make this song feel like you're in a room with us playing a song. People talking kind of is a cool way to place somebody in a space. It was actually really difficult to finish this song because there was this whole idea that we weren't serving the song without it going somewhere different vocally at the end and it needed to have like this aspirational chorus. We tried a couple of things and it was just not what the song was. It didn't have a chorus in it. It wasn't moving towards the chorus. Like that's not how like art works sometimes, you know. A chorus is just a repeated section and the song just wasn't about repeating itself narratively. It was about this kind of never-ending stream of consciousness.

And you know, sometimes like your instinct is your art. to try and kind of massage it into something more palatable. It's just, you know, people would smell a rat, you know, if you're trying to give them something that you think that they want. So instead of that, the ending is this like kind of big instrumental finale. That is our best friend and saxophone player, John Worf. And he did the brass arrangements for the other brass players. The main thing, like I said, was to record things played softly,

But that didn't really apply to the sacks because we wanted that to be kind of strangely aggressive. I depend my friend to stay clean. As sad as it seems. I always finished with that line about the friends, depend on my friends to stay clean. It's just a sad line, isn't it? But I said, like, that's not where it's going to end, you know? That was always like the placeholder end.

And then we just realized after a world that it was the end. I depend to stay clean, sad as it seems. But it's like the ending to the graduate. You know what I mean? It's like there is no ending. Life doesn't work like that. And now here's the birthday party by the 1975 in its entirety. SongExploder.net to learn more about the 1975.

You'll also find links to buy or stream the song. you can watch the music video for it. 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, 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 Noss, Rat, 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. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.