Song Exploder - Tycho - Awake

Episode Date: December 8, 2014

Tycho is the project of designer-turned-musician Scott Hansen, along with guitarist Zac Brown and drummer Rory O'Connor. For this episode, which was recorded in front of a live audience in San Francisco, Scott breaks down the title track from the 2014 Tycho album Awake, including a note he misplayed, and a vocal part you aren't really supposed to know about. songexploder.net/tycho

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. Coming up next time on Song Exploder for the final episode of this first year, The National Deconstruct their song, Sea of Love. Don't miss an episode, subscribe to the show on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts. 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 Malina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin, 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. Tyco is the project of Scott Hansen, along with guitarist Zach Brown and drummer Roryo For this episode, I spoke with Scott in front of a live audience in San Francisco. Coming up, he'll break down the title track from the 2014 Tyco album, Awake, including a note he misplayed and a vocal part you aren't really supposed to know about. I'm Scott from Tyco. I think I was really intimidated by music. Like, you know, a couple of my friends had guitars and like, I don't know, it just seemed like

you had to be the guy who had the guitar to play guitar. You can, like, get into it. For me, it was just like, that's not something I do. I do. You know, I was a visual artist. But I've always had a really close relationship with technology and computers. And so it took a piece of equipment like a drum machine for me to realize like, oh, this is something that at least I can just approach this from a technical perspective

and just learn this machine. And there isn't some attached meaning to it like, oh, you have to think you're an artist or you have to think you can do anything good with this music that you can actually just figure it out. And so that was the jumping off point, though, is because once I started learning that, interesting things started coming out, I was like, okay, I feel like this is something I can do, you know? The first thing that was written was by Zach, who plays guitar and bass. We went up to Tahoe and we were in a cabin for a few weeks and just recorded all sorts of material. I was going through these stems and at the end of this one song, we'd stopped recording and I found just Zach was just sitting there messing around.

And I was like, wow, that's amazing. And so I cut that out and just started looping it. And then I picked up my bass and started recording the driving bass line. That's when I first got an electric bass because I'd used synth bass up until then. But the weird thing is I was always trying to make my synth bass sound like a guitar bass. So I realized why don't you just get one? And that take is, it just sounds nothing like the original, but that's pretty chopped together.

Most of everything I do is the result of cutting every individual note and then rearranging in some way. I always like things to be very robotic almost, because then I try to put things that aren't so robotic over the top and have those juxtaposed, and I feel like that makes for a nice relationship. Once I had that down, the whole thing kind of came pretty quickly. So that other guitar track is me playing.

I tend to play like a more muted-picked sound. picked sound. I like round sounds. I usually play acoustic guitar on the songs, but that was one of the first electric guitar parts that I did. This song is an instrumental, but there is a track in here that's called vocals. You weren't supposed to get that one. I used to always hide vocals in my songs because I worked with this girl, but I wanted to try like a male vocal and I didn't have one, so I did it. So this is you? Yes, yeah. Okay. Unfortunately, no. You know, I'm always using different sense. I have tons of sense, but I make them all sound exactly the same.

I got a new synth, man. I got this mini-mogue. It's gonna be totally different. No, it's the same damn sound. So everything's kind of in this mid-rangey space where they're very round, and a lot of reverb, a lot of echo, and I realized there's a note on every measure that's out of time that got played wrong, and I accidentally left it in and copied and pasted it.

You hear that? The second to last note was early. Listen. You can't unhear that. You'll always hear it from now. You'll always hear it from now on. That's the problem with editing that way by copy and pasting and not just doing like full takes is that if you screw up,

it's in the whole damn song. I let the edit dictate the flow of things. You just kind of follow the path that starts to appear before you. And that's the same way I approach design. There's like a precision and a textual element to it that are common to each. You know, like my design always has a very analog, noisy, textured, yellow, aged. layer to it, even though the things below it are very digital, very modern, and very, like, clean, but you're looking through this lens almost.

That's how I approached creating sounds for the records as well as, even though it might be a modern synthesizer, I'll spend a lot more time working on the filtering and the processing of it to make it feel like this memory or something like that, you know, like through a yellow lens or something. Interpol was like one of my favorite bands, and particularly just these really specific moments in their music where they really like to do. to break things down and turn them into an instrumental. And PDA is one of the best examples where at the end,

the song basically stops and then becomes this whole other thing, and it's just really pretty, and that's what really influenced me. You know, it's really hard to find, especially for instrumental music, something that encapsulates the idea of it. But for this, I felt like an awakening or like a moment where I felt for the first time, like this is what I was supposed to be doing, or this is what I wanted to be doing and what I was going to pursue.

Because with dive and all that stuff, it was just, you know, I was a graphic designer by day and messed around with music at night. And this is the first time I'd ever put this much of myself to anything and I felt like this was the moment where it all came together and so it was like awake. And now here's Awake by Tyco in its entirety. Learn more about Tyco, including a link to buy this song, visit songexploder.net. My thanks to the folks at Noise Pop, who organized the event where my conversation with Scott was recorded.