Song Exploder - YACHT - Plastic Soul

Episode Date: February 1, 2014

Claire and Jona of the band YACHT deconstruct their brand new single Plastic Soul, a fun pop song about human suffering. They explain how technology inspired them musically as well as lyrically, and how they recycle bits of their old recordings to create new songs. 

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. In this episode, Claire and Jonna of the band Yacht will play us their brand new single, Plastic Soul. They explain how technology inspired them musically as well as lyrically, and the secret to getting the best sounds from your software. By just clicking on everything. Here's the exploded view of Plastic Soul by Yat. Hi, I'm Jonna. And I'm Claire.

Together we make something called Yacht. T. We always start with these points of reference that then when you hear the finish song, there's no bearing on it whatsoever. But Amanda Lear is this like sort of disco, deeply baritone-voiced, sexy lady who made these kind of spoken word disco songs that are so good. The song that this is the chorus is modeled after is called Never Trust a Pretty Face. Never Trust a Pretty Face.

Sounds like Nico a little bit. Yeah. Never trust a pretty face. But on that song, there's a chorus, a harmony of maybe like three or four men. And I loved the way it sounded as her with this baritone voice, but then also men backing her up. We should have hired a choir, but we did it with software because I wanted it to sound a little bit fucked up. You think you're losing it because you see the things your mother dies. So there's an octave in a fifth.

You see the man your father was. It just sounded wrong in a fun way. Trouble that your brothers cause. We always wanted to play with technology, and that's why we think we chose to use the plug-in harmonizer and why we used a vocoder for the majority of the track too. We wanted it to be about technology and served by technology. Yeah, like the human voice sort of drowning in and bathing in this amniotic reality

of connection and technology, which is why the vocoder is there. I think my favorite part of the song is this synthesizing. on the chorus. And the thing I love about it, yeah, my mom heard it. And she was like, oh, the organ on the song is so great. Yeah. And a couple people have said that, like, emailed and been like, oh, what's the organ part? And I love that people hear it as an organ.

It's an ARP-2600 plugin. I can't afford a awesome vintage $10,000 synthesizer like that. But, yeah, I don't know. It doesn't register as an organ sound to me, but I love that other people hear it as an organ. I think that that makes it, like, romantic in a special way. It sounds to me like a cartoon mouse. I futzed with it for hours and hours, and I think that's when we really got to a point

when I was like, oh, this song is going to be something that we're going to love. One big thing that I love to do and that I've been doing since I've always been making music is really recycling. And the first thing that we started with, I was like going through all of these old files on a hard drive that was just about to fail, and I found this drum loop that I made.

But yeah, this drum loop was the first thing that we started with. and then I added the drum machine on top of it. Once we had the drums and the organ together. But yeah, I think I listened to like this whole progression on loop for an hour straight. Do you remember that? Yeah, I mean, everything that you make you listen to on loop. When you first wrote that, you would just sit here computer listening to it. Like, so happy.

We record at home in like John's office. I don't know, there's something about like living inside the music that you're making. I'll be like cooking dinner. and this will be playing a loop for like an hour and a half. And it becomes a domestic thing. Yeah. Just like, I'll be folding laundry. I like to just tweak everything just a tiny bit

so it gives it some character instead of just playing through. For instance, that baseline slowly modulates the entire time. Like, yeah. I love kind of misusing the software, getting interesting results by just clicking on everything. Yeah, it's fun. We've only been in proper studios twice. Claire and I just went in and basically rented out the place without any engineers and we

just engineered each other. We didn't really know what we were doing or how to use any of the equipment. We were just kids. It was the first time that we really got to get a drum sound that we loved. The drums on this song that come in at the last chorus are recycled from one of those sessions and they come in like this. It's funny too. They sound pretty shitty now that I'm listening to them soloed. This song is a lot about the difficulty of modern life and the superficiality of modern life not to be too highfalutin about it. How easy it is to be stuck in momentary trends and impulses and how much broader and more universals with human suffering is on like a massive scale and also on just an interpersonal scale.

Like the course is all about family and it's maybe saying something a little bit different, which is that maybe technology also helps us articulate our suffering as well as it does help us forget it. It's a pop song and no matter what we do, people will be like, oh, what a summer jam, you know? And now here's the full recording of Plastic Soul. Visit SongExploder.net for links to more info on yacht. You'll also find a link to the Amanda Lear song that influenced them. 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 ink. 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 Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin, Clion, 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 of the past episodes of the podcast and subscribe to future episodes at iTunes.com slash songexploder. You can also find Song Exploder on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I send out mixtapes on Fridays on my newsletter.

You can find links to all of these at SongExplotter. SongExploder.net. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.