Song Exploder - Wolf Alice - Don't Delete the Kisses

Episode Date: June 6, 2018

Wolf Alice is a band from North London. Their second album, Visions of a Life, was released in September 2017. In this episode, singer Ellie Rowsell and drummer Joel Amey tell the story of how they made the song “Don’t Delete the Kisses.” The album was produced by Justin Meldal-Johnsen, and coming up later, you’ll hear some of his thoughts, as well. The song went through a lot of versions. A home demo that Ellie made, another demo with the full band, plus studio versions they recorded in LA with Justin. There were a lot of ideas that were created and then scrapped. In this episode, they trace the path through those ideas, as well how the song was influenced by Father John Misty, PJ Harvey, and the film Frances Ha. songexploder.net/wolf-alice

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. Wolf Alice is a four-piece band from North London. They've been nominated for a Grammy and England's Mercury Prize. Their second album, Visions of a Life, was released in September 2017. In this episode, singer and guitarist Ellie Rousel and drummer Joel Amy tell the story of how they made the song, Don't Delete the Kisses. Their album was produced by Justin Meldell Johnson, and coming up later, you'll hear some of his thoughts as well. Don't Delete the Kisses went through a lot of versions.

There was a home demo that Ellie made, another demo with the full band, plus studio versions that they recorded in LA with Justin. There were a lot of ideas that were created, but then scrapped later. In this episode, they traced the path through those ideas, as well as how the song was influenced by Father John Misty, P.J. Harvey and the film Francis Ha. It's Wolf Alice on Song Exploder. It's Ellie. I sing and play guitar in Wolf Alice.

My name's Joel and I play drums. I think the first idea I had for this song was that I wanted something that had a rolling synth in it, something that was repetitive and didn't change, and everything else changed around it. And I think it partly came from when we had gone to a festival in Spain. We had watched Father Dramasi.

He had one song which the synth was really prominent, and that was... True affection. True affection. It was me, Theo and Ellie watching in the crowd, and it's the whole package for that song, I think. His performance that day, the setting, the way his band looked, and they looked very just unbelievably cool,

but they're making this very powerful, beautiful song. And I love that the since never left, and everything else changed around it. I love that song and it's got that feeling of excitement and romance and euphoria. It moved me and I wanted something like that. I think it's always a telling sign of seeing a good show when you watch something and you need to get to like a guitar or a keyboard quickly to try and get how you feel out now.

I definitely fight a lot after that performance, but A. just beat me to it. You know, I had wanted to write a love song, and I had wanted to write that cinematic rolling synth song, so I just put them together. I had made a garage band demo in which I just clicked on arpeggiators because I guess arpeggias kind of do it for you. An arpeggiator is a feature in a lot of synthesizers.

If you play a chord while the arpeggiator's on, it'll automatically break up the chord into its individual notes and then plays them back one at a time in sequence. Okay, back to Ellie. I had made a garage band demo in which I just clicked on arpeggiators because I guess our pediators kind of do it for you and just looped it. I wrote the chorus and I was like, okay, this is very simple but that's fine, it's a chorus. It was just what if it's not meant for me? Love.

I had one verse and I wasn't trying to squeeze out lyrics. They were just coming. I was just messing around with melodies and I think I realized I had so much to say that, I wasn't going to be able to fit it in to any melody. So I kind of spoke it and the drum beat. Again, it's just some garage band. And it just like plays along for you. So it's a really lazy way of making a drum beat.

But the feeling was right. You know, sometimes you go into your demo, you're trying to really produce it and get all the fiddly bits down. But, you know, this one just needed chords and lyrics. And then we would do all the rest together. I remember hearing the demo for the first time, We played it through really bad PA speakers. And even then I was like, oh yeah, I understand the feeling from this demo.

I think it was just one of those songs you just wanted to get into a rehearsal room and start mucking around me straight away. And we wanted to make sure we could perform these things later on. But we didn't have any access to keyboards or anything. So instantly, I was thinking like, well, how are you going to do this? You don't want a garage round loop in there. And it's cool to try and recreate it using your own sounds. So Jof had the task of playing all the synth parts via his guitar.

He's really good at making sounds with his guitar that don't sound like the guitar. And he had this new guitar pedal that sounds like an anime character. It makes your guitar sort of, it's like a filter. And he just muck around with that. And it just sounded a bit like the rolling synth line. So we'd just hit record and everyone could play live. But the pedal's slightly funny. For me, the second demo, I was excited because it's cool to try and recreate it.

But I always think a true test of a song is how much you listen to the demo and I never listened to it. I wasn't doing it for me at all. Kind of took it to a kind of indie realm, like indie rock. But it hadn't captured a feeling. It wasn't right. I'm Justin Melville Johnson, producer and musician. When Justin came over for the pre-production and he was hearing us play it. I had the band demo.

I was like, this is cool. But you kind of hit it wasn't necessarily clicking with him. The guitar motif, I got a sense that that was just not going to fly. There was something about it I think the band felt was too saccharin. It was supposed to be more kind of cinematic or dancey. We were like, have you heard the original demo? He was like, no. So he played the original demo and it was just like, uh.

There was something about it that was just like, wow, that's the launching point. That's where we need to begin. I think the first thing to get back to the original demo was probably to strip away a lot of what we'd put in. Not to like bin those ideas, but just to remember the starting point. So for the drum part, I was really hoping it would be all digital or processed at one point. In my head, I was like, I just want to have it like as a dance track, like samples. But Justin was a big believer in you should try and blend an organic element in. So we did the drums in East West studios and whatever kit we had set up for another song at

the end of it would get a sample and the pattern that we'd potentially use for Don't Let the Kisses. So we had all these sample banks built up and we went through and we ended up finding the nicest-handing kick that would fit, the nicest-sounding snare. And we just built the drums into the track like that. And he's right, you know, it adds room and, like, it's more solid. Everything became like the same hit, but with the feel of someone playing it. Ellie's demo, one of the most important things it has going for it is this arpeggio. So we then went on quite a long quest to recreate the rolling synth line from garage band. Justin had loads of synths that had arpeggiators.

I remember actually coming in and seeing him in Studio B, which was like a shed. And he was surrounded by synths. He looked like Doctor Who and Tardis, like some kind of wizard lights flashing everywhere and making all these arpeggiators and speaking the language that I didn't speak. And Justin had an old Lind drum, one of the very first drum machines, like an actual old one. And it had like all the original sounds. So we had one of those set up in the B studio.

And yeah, I think we and you just started. Piecing things together from the ground up. That was the one we called the EDM version. We all got kind of excited and we were comparing it to like an emotion of when you're like at a music festival. And you can hear the band you're waiting to hear like this playing a song you love, but it's in the distance and you have to like run towards it.

We had that emotion at one point. For whatever reason Jof wasn't there. And me, Theo and Joel were bouncing off the walls and we were dancing, we were hugging. You know, it was a really embarrassing, cheesy moment if anyone had seen it, would have cringed. And then Jove came in the next day and was like, no. No.

He just came back, I was like, this is quite bad. We had to start again. The only problem we found with Studio B was everyone would go very deep. into Don't Luke the Kisses themselves and come out like, listen to this, and then we'll be like, nah.

You're like, damn. You hear it afresh it is and you're like, oh god, nah, it's still not got it. It was almost like the upherjia. It was too good. It didn't sound like us. So eventually we just found a really nice sound and just played the arpeggiaeate to ourselves,

you know, like literally going diga diga-d-d-da-da-do like with our fingers really fast. Then we did the Conga sound. And that was actually one of Ellie's art. I stole it from PJ Harvey. I'm, you know, not stolen, but inspired by. She has this song in Let England Shake, which is one of my favorite albums. The drum beat is like, boom.

Boom, bum. I find it quite strange if a drum beat gets in your head, you know? And that drumbeat's always in my head. I just really wanted to use it at some point. I then had a loop of just white noise, which I just made by mistake. That's from the original. demo. I think I had plugged in my guitar to make a guitar line over the top. It didn't work and I guess all the feedback made that noise, which then I just looped. It fills a hole and makes it get the

effect of perhaps like far as a distortion but without shrouding your part. We actually used the white noise from that demo in the real song. Something's you can't really recreate. Then we just let Joph let rip in Studio B. He literally went over there for a few hours and came back with these sounds. That's Joff's guitar, yeah. We were calling it the Seagulls because it sounds like, well, sea girls. He's really good at, again, like, it's a guitar, but it's not a guitar. That actually is one of my favorite bits of the whole album.

I'm kind of having like goosebumps moment because it just bounced off the existing chords and just became very like orchestral. You know, when you're trying to think, like, what is it missing? What other synth can we put in? can we put in and he just came back and was like,

ah, it's done now. There you go. He's cracked it. This is a song about me being 25. I'm a true believer that teenage thoughts and feelings

are not exclusive to teenagers. Especially when it comes to a romance. That feeling of crushing on someone is not exclusive to teenagers. And it's a great feeling. But then the verses I was really scared about doing

because for me, it's quite close to being quite cringy. The soppiness of the lyrics, so I was nervous about doing it. I'd like to get to know you. I'd like to take you out. We'd go to the hell, Mary, and afterwards make out and said I'm typing you a message

that I know I'll never send. Rewrite and old excuses, delete the kisses at the end. People don't really like to listen to their talking voice, do they, regardless of you're a singer or not? Lyrically, it's quite self-conscious, so I kind of want to mirror that. in the way the vocals are recorded. And then, you know, it was a fine line of being so shy

that you hide your voice in effect, so I didn't want to do that because it's such a lyrically heavy song. But we did put something on it. The romantic side of me again, it's quite nice to imagine it was the phone call. Want to see you the whole world reduces to just that room. The line, when I see you, the whole world reduces to just that room,

I had watched that film Francis Haram. and that's something she says. It's that thing when you're with someone and you love them and they know it and they love you and you know it, but it's a party. And you're both talking to other people and you're laughing and shining

and you look across the room and catch each other's eyes but not because you're possessive or it's precisely sexual, but because But because that is your person in this life. It was one of my favorite scenes in a movie. I really struggled with me. And so I stole it.

I want to see you the whole world reduces to just that room. And then I remember and I'm shy that gossips I will look too soon. And then I'm trapped. If you have a monologue spoken word situation like this, you have to commit to it wholesale. You can't be embarrassed about it. You can't self-edit too much. You know, it has to be real.

And that requires a very specific frame of mind to get into. There's this moment that she has in the second verse at the end of the verse. And now I'm home, a little bit drunk. Something's not changed. I know now. I'm amazed at how she delivered that. And I remember looking at the lyric sheet and then looking back and forth to her as she was singing it on the microphone. and I knew that we had the song

and then immediately is followed by this massive exultant chorus. And that's when I then changed the last chorus to be an optimistic one. From what if it's not meant for me to you and me were meant to be. So I wouldn't have been nice to have ended it on a sad question. Then probably wouldn't have been a love song, you know?

Don't believe the kisses went through many iterations. Three months, we were kind of spent in Los Angeles working on visions of a life and I think that time benefited this song the most because it went through so many different versions and really had to get to where it ended up

and it took a while. But it was just an important process to figure out what we wanted from this song. This whole song is about letting go to love and it's a diary entry for me as well so it's nice to look back on and remember how I once felt

and what was once going on. And now here's Don't Delete the Kisses by Wolf Alice in its entirety. Visit songexploader.net to learn more about Wolf Alice and for a link to buy or stream this 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 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, Vagabond, 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 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. Rishi-kesh.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. If you heard about a sponsor in this episode and you want to learn more, you can always go to songexploder.net slash sponsors to find all of the current offers available to song Exploder listeners. This episode was produced by me, along with Christian Coons, with help from intern Olivia Wood. The illustrations for Song Exploder are done by Carlos Lerma. Song Exploder is a proud member

of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of fiercely independent podcasts. You can learn about all of our shows at Radiotopia.fm. Let me know your thoughts on this episode. You can find Song Exploder on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Song Exploder. My name is Rishi Keish Heirway. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.