Song Exploder - Warpaint - Love Is to Die

Episode Date: March 3, 2015

In 2013, Warpaint starting working on their sophomore album. They retreated away from their home in Los Angeles to the nearby desert oasis of Joshua Tree, California. There, they wrote the song "Love Is to Die," and it was decided that it would be the single from the record. Now, with over 6 million plays on Spotify and nearly 3 million more on YouTube, "Love Is to Die" is by some measures their most popular song. Designating it as the single was a decision that was easy to make early on, but it was also carried unforeseen consequences for the band. In this episode, three of the four members break down the sounds in the song, and weigh in on some of the difficulty they faced getting this track from the initial idea to the finished recording.

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. This episode contains explicit language. In 2013, Warpaint started working on their sophomore album. They retreated away from their home in Los Angeles to the nearby desert oasis of Joshua Tree, California. There, they wrote the song Love is to Die, and it was decided that it would be the single from their upcoming record. Now, with over 6 million plays on Spotify and nearly 3 million more, on YouTube, Love Is to Die is by some measures their most popular song.

Designating it as the single was a decision that was easy to make early on, but it also carried unforeseen consequences for the band. In this episode, three of the four members of Warpaint break down the sounds in the song and weigh in on some of the difficulty they faced getting this track from the initial idea to the finished recording. This is Warpaint on Song Exploder. The song actually was probably my favorite thing that we'd ever done. It started off, in my opinion, in such a magical, amazing place that was written in like five minutes.

We rented a house. We rented a dome. We set up in the living room, put our amps, mics, all of our instruments, and we had a little home studio. Basically just press record for like 12 noon and stopped record at midnight. Hi, I'm Jenny Lee from Warpaint. I play bass. There's a chorus, just bass chorus pedal. That's my standard.

tone. How I found chorus was my first amp that I ever got was a PVT and T-150. It was my first amp. It was when we started our band and we were playing in the garage and it had a course built into it. So I always had that on. That was my sound. And so when I stopped playing out of that amp, I missed that sound. So I then went and bought a chorus pedal and decided that that's what I'd be using forever. And I'm Stella Mosgawa from Warpain. I play drums and drum tampes. You started playing along to my loop. That's an 808 sound that's triggered from my sampler, that I play live. Yeah, I'm playing the rim of the tom as well as the sample of the room shot.

Also, when we play live, I'm triggering a keyboard loop that Emily played when we wrote the song in Joshua Tree. That's like... Gz-e-e-e-e-l-ch-w... It was basically her just flipping through the different sign and square waves and frequency. He's on a Nord Electron. Nord lead maybe. Nord lead, yeah. Nord lead.

Yeah. Yeah. And Emily just looping, just pressing that same button on the Nord. And then I remember that was when Teresa was just riffing. And she started singing Love is to Die. I remember that. Love is to die.

Love is to not die. Love is to dance. Love is to dance. I'm Teresa. in from Warpaint. We were just playing a song, we were jamming it, and I was just improvising, singing, and kind of doing gibberish, and then I got that melody, and the words kind of really just came out right away. After that, I took the recording that we made and listened to what my gibberish was kind of saying, and plucked out a meaning from all of that.

I think sometimes a person can say things in their art that they don't realize or even necessarily mean to say in a rational way at the start, you know, but it actually is a very cohesive idea. Love is to die. Love is to not die. Love is to dance. Love is to dance and dance and dance. It's just saying love is the full spectrum from life to death. Love is being alive and love is also dying and surrendering and being nothing. It's sort of a stating that love is all encompassing. It's everything. I'm in a pretty challenging and beautiful relationship with my bandmate. And we're constantly having to figure out the best ways to operate with each other, you know,

and how to be there for each other, how to love each other, but also how to have our own space and be our own person. I mean, that was probably what was spurring the idea because we were in Joshua Tree and we were spending a lot of time together and it was just us in this house and us and our creativity and our music. And I think it probably has a lot to do with just what I go through and being in our band. It was a bit difficult to, I guess, figure out what guitar sounded best over Trees' vocals

and I think that it was just, there was not a disagreement, but it was a little slightly hectic figuring the guitars out for lack of a better word. It took many months. Yeah, it took a while. The vocal was there, the drums and bass were there, but what was added on top of that was kind of hard to find. Emily always had this kind of like Latin guitar part that's that doonga ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Guitar changed. She didn't know if she was playing keys or guitar, so she kind of switched back and forth with that for a while to try and find her pocket. Yeah. I think with this song with Lovers to Die, it kind of had the kiss of death in some way, because when we wrote it, everyone went, that's a single. And that's always a really bad kind of thing to focus on. Even if you don't want it to be that way, and that's the last thing that you want to kind of think about. It does tend to dictate certain decisions that you make, or the focus gets pulled into this one song. It turned into a song that was quite different

to the way that it started. There was a lot of over-analizing, overthinking. being, I think, maybe slightly harsh or too critical or just hard. Hard on the song, hard on oneself. And I think we weren't agreeing on certain things. People wanted to take it in slightly different direction. It was one of the songs where there was a lot of tug-of-war going on. And I think after a while it was just like that much tug-of-war, that much resistance, that much fight, that much struggle.

It's not good enough, or it needs to be better, it needs be better, but slowly needs me better, needs me better. you just, you start making it worse. And there was also an outro to the song that I was pretty married to. Nigel, who mixed the song, he... He just cut it. He just thought, you know, that's not necessary. The song doesn't need to go there.

It definitely takes a U-turn or just a sharp left turn. It comes out of nowhere, but that's kind of our trademark in a way, our stamp. It was just the one thing in the song that I was shocked and at least at first didn't agree with it and was pretty disappointed. It was one of my favorite parts of the song. When a band and a label and producers and people start to go, oh, this could be your single or this could be your hit or something. Sometimes when that thought gets in there before a song is done,

that it can really mess with the way people make decisions about the song, that it's got to be right or it's got to be all it can be. And if it can be that, then how do we do that? You know, it's just kind of a mind. Fuck. And now here's Love is to Die by Warpaint 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 of full length.

And this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Keish Sheerway. 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 Weinrobe. 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 other. city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, 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 song, Exploder.net slash live. Thanks. You can find all the past and future episodes of SongExploder at SongExploder.net or on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts. 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. Autopia.