Song Exploder - Unknown Mortal Orchestra - Multi-Love

Episode Date: August 10, 2015

Multi-Love is the title track from the 2015 album by Unknown Mortal Orchestra. In this episode, Ruban Nielson tells the story of how he made the song with help from his brother Kody Nielson, and how it was influenced by Romeo and Juliet, Questlove, and a broken synthesizer. This episode is sponsored by Hover, Lagunitas Brewing Company, and Simple.

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. My name is Ruben Nielsen. I play a guitar and sing in a band called Unknown Mortal Orchestra. If you have, like, different relationships, say if you have a bunch of people that you fall in love with in your life, and then you start to wonder whether you're continuously in love with the same part of different people, that's, to me, is what Multi Love is about. Multi Love is the title track from the 2015 album by Unknown Mortal Orchestra. In this episode, Ruben Nielsen tells the story of how he made the song with help from his brother Cody Nielsen

and how it was influenced by Romeo and Juliet, Questlove and a broken synthesizer. That song, my brother had a lot to do with because he was playing this chord progression. I just started singing over what he was doing, just kind of ad-libbing. I have this Baldwin piano in the basement and so he just played that and I just walked around in circles ad-libbing for like two or three hours you know just put a mic up

and I just recorded what I was ad-libbing and then we sifted through it later and then we went and we did it again and then we sifted through again because I found that the longer he played the chord progression over and over again the more I would sing the same thing the strongest melody would stick

so it wasn't like I was ad-libbing different stuff every time It was like I was slowly finding the real melody. I believe that there's one true melody that you're mining for, and it's a process of eliminating all the things that aren't that true melody. But I'd never use this technique to get there before. So it was really interesting. We recorded all the instrumental stuff,

and just to guide vocal with no lyrics. It's weird because I kind of felt like I had some connection to gospel for some reason, not musically or anything like that. It was just kind of like a vibe or something. Like, do you remember that movie, Romeo and Juliet? There's this kind of gospel thing with it. It has like a choir going, everybody's free. You know?

It reminded me of that, and I hadn't seen that movie since it came out. So I was kind of trying to take the song all the way home with that feeling intact. Because that's the thing is I didn't go back to that song. I wanted to have my feeling of what I thought that song was, rather than get caught up in the specifics. I was Cody on this, playing drums on this. And the main reason I wanted to work with Cody on this album was for his drumming. I saw an interview with Questlove,

and he was talking about how that was this drum fill that he liked playing when he was a kid, and his dad didn't want him playing that stuff. I was obsessed with this particular fill. This feel. My father just wanted his music, dry and in the pocket. If I ever did a feel like that, I just ran the risk of him turning around and giving me that look. So I just thought it would be funny to have that fill on the record somewhere.

We build a drum track and then I play bass on it. Playing bass is a big part. I kind of need the bass line to be perfect. It's like because the bass line is one note at time because it's a melody, I'll just keep doing it until it's right. I just knew that the song is going to be called multi-love. That's all I had. Because I had come up with that, wrote that phrase down in a notebook. And as soon as I wrote it down, I have this notebook where it's kind of like I circled it. I had written

album title, question mark after it. And so I kind of had that phrase in my head for some reason. And when we were working on this song, I thought like, oh, this is going to be the first track on the album. And so that's really all I had. And I sat on that for a long time, because I was, because I didn't want to rush the lyrics. Checked into my heart and trashed it like a hotel room. Checked into my heart and trashed it like a hotel room. I wrote that down in my notebook and I thought that it was cheesy, but the cheesiness is made up for by just being kind of dramatic and catchy.

Does that make sense? I thought like, oh, this is, no, I like it. It's just, it is over the top, but it's kind of a pretty dramatic song. I don't know why this happens, but I get really into this stuff, you know. And if I have a phrase that I think is important enough to be the name of the next album, then it starts to take over my whole life. But what multi-love is supposed to be about is like some kind of modern version of like love with a capital L from the 60s. You know, things like gender or sexual orientation or race or all those things start to kind of,

they're not like part of the transcendent value of love. We should evolve past that. That, to me, is what multi-love is about. If we would evolve beyond the specifics of the organisms that we inhabit, then we would still probably need love. Love would still be a useful concept. I was not really a synth guy, but I started buying broken scintzance that people were selling fairly cheap

on Craigslist and stuff like that. And then I had a screwdriver, so I just started unscrewing everything and looking inside it and trying to figure out what's going on. And I mean, everybody that knows what they're doing didn't know what they were doing at the beginning, I figure. So I started trying to fix them, and that's what I did. And then I had a synth, and that sounded really cool, so I started playing it on stuff. It wasn't really a guitar-driven track. It was piano-y.

I didn't want to get in the way of the piano and the synth and stuff. I tried some different sounds because I didn't want it to sound too much like a guitar. I put down sitar. It's not a... real sitar. It's called an electric sitar, but it has the same fingerings as a guitar. So a lot of the times when you hear a satar on old 60s records, that's what it is. It feels funny because if I feel a little bit pretentious, like talking about how into my music like when I actually have to explode it and I'm talking about it, it feels like, yeah,

but you know, it's just a jam. Like I just want people to listen to it and when they're like making their coffee in the morning and have it improve their day a little bit. That's really what it's for. It's just that I get really into it. Now here's Multi Love by Unknown Mortal Orchestra in its entirety. 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, Rishykech, 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 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. You can find all the past and future episodes of SongExploder at SongExploder.net. Stitcher or wherever you download podcasts. Next time on Song Exploder, Health.

Find the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary story-driven shows. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.