Switched on Pop - Billie Eilish is a Different Kind of Pop Star (ft. FINNEAS)

Episode Date: April 9, 2019

On a trajectory to be one of the biggest pop stars for this generation, seventeen year old Billie Eilish is not, however, your typical pop star. Her music speaks to the real anxieties of young people without any veneer. She sings from the perspective of monsters and villains. Her hushed voice, baggy style, and direct demeanor subvert the norms of the pop princess. And her music is dark, but still catchy. Billie co-writes and produces her sound with her older brother Finneas O’Connell. Together this family duo have crafted the second biggest selling album of 2019, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”  On this episode, we examine how Billie and Finneas crafted a cultural phenomenon, why their message speaks to this generation, and we speak with Finneas about the creation of their hit song “Bad Guy.” Songs Featured: Billie Eilish - Ocean EyesBillie Eilish - BoredBillie Eilish - You Should See Me In A CrownBillie Eilish - Bad GuyBillie Eilish - Bury A FriendMarilyn Manson - The Beautiful PeopleThe Doors - People Are StrangeNine Inch Nails - CloserBillie Eilish - ilomiloBillie Eilish - All Good Girls Go To HellBillie Eilish - XannyFrank Sinatra - Dream A DreamBillie Eilish - I love youJohn Carpenter - Halloween ThemeBillie Eilish - Bellyache Watch Billie Eilish and Finneas break down “Bury A Friend” on The New York Times Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Nate, have I told you about my superhero theory of pop music? No, I definitely would have remembered. What's that? Okay, so it's basically this idea that super pop stars are like superheroes. And they have a similar story arc of superheroes. Uh-huh. First you get like the origin story.

You confront some major thing. Eventually they team up with other people and get featured. on some kind of big team of other superheroes. And then eventually, like, things turn around. You get the anti-hero story. You get, like, the dark side of them. You know, you could look at someone like, Ariana Grande where it's like,

you get Disney Princess, who then, like, teams up with producer Zed, and eventually puts out this dark record. Thank you next, right? Like, the whole arc of the superhero. Interesting. Okay, so in this analogy, being bit by a radioactive spider is, like, kind of equivalent to getting signed to a major label.

Your extension of this analogy is, perfect because the other thing that happens in superhero narratives is that every couple of years they get rebooted. How many Spider-Man's have we had? Like 17? Okay, I'm with you. I'm with you. Superheroes have to have a narrative that sort of speaks to their time and their generation, and eventually they age out, and there's a new audience that needs a superhero that speaks to the issues of the moment. And in pop music, I think we're going through a transition. And there's no better superhero, super pop star to look at than Billy Eilish. She just perfectly captures this moment.

I can't wait. All right, a new pop hero emerges. Let's do it. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Okay, so Nate, I feel like there's a couple of things that we need to do here. This is sort of an atypical switchdown pop piece.

For an atypical artist, yeah, appropriate. Exactly. It's like generally we're going to just take like one song. and break it down. Right. But Billy Eilish is kind of bigger than any one song. And so I think today what we need to do

is figure out who is she? Where did she come from? Why is she so essential to this cultural moment? And of course, we need to dig deep into her music. Word, right. I like it. The appetizer platter approach.

I went around and asking a bunch of our friends if they had heard of Billy Eilish. Guess what the response was? Ooh, I'm going to guess a mix. I'm going to say some were like, love her, some were like never heard of her, some were like, kind of.

What was it actually? I was with about 15 friends yesterday, and all of them said who? Oh, okay. I stand corrected. Which says maybe a generation gap happening here, yeah. Yeah, this is a generational gap. And so what I want to do is for those of us who might be in a

generational gap, you are missing out on a total phenomenon. And so just very briefly, Billy Eilish, who is she? She is a 17-year-old, homeschooled singer-songwriter. She's from Los Angeles, and after three years of putting up music, released an album. She makes all of her music with her brother, Phineas. They do it independently. They mostly record it in their bedroom at home. She was discovered on SoundCloud. They released a song called Ocean Eyes. I think she was like 14 at the time. Oh, wow.

That's crazy. Okay. It was remixed a bunch of times. It went viral. Song placements on Netflix's show 13 Reasons Why. I just wanted you to think of that right now. As I said, she's just released her first album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

It's the second biggest album drop of this year. And I think we can't move any further. along without hearing Billy Eilish claiming her crown. Okay, yeah, let's spin that. You should see me in a crime. There's nothing to think about what do you think of that? I think she makes a strong case for royalty. We'll get into it.

But something I love about her music is this sense of like sharp contrast. And this song is such a perfect example. That element of surprise is like such a pleasurable. and exciting part of her music, I think. I think it's really stunning how she is really self-aware at a young age and recognizes that she's stepping into a spotlight that is enormous, and she's doing it with sort of an awesome power grab. And I mean this in the best way, where she's like,

oh, you think I'm pretty? You think I'm yours? You should see me in the crown. I'm going to make people bow. It's a potent lyric. No doubt. To me, this track and so much of her music is all about, dynamics. Yeah. Dynamics being maybe a fancy term for saying soft and loud. Yeah. You know, fortissimo,

pianissimo. I think she and brother producer Phineas are like just such masters of like creating these soft, you know, this song is a great example, these soft, quiet textures that suddenly erupt into like loud, rough, surprising sounds. You know, pop music is not a place for a lot of dynamics. Things tend to just be kind of loud and steady, but I think it's such a key part of her song, and like, you really get the sense that, yeah, she's earned that crown because the music supports it and it delivers that power from silence to deafening loudness. It's very cool. I also like that it unites so many different styles where I feel like we have in the sort of quiet, whispery verses the sort of electronic singer-songwritery thing going on. and then in the chorus, it's trap music and wobble-based dubstep and everything. But, you know, kind of as I was saying earlier, I felt like I really like her music. It speaks to me.

But I also know that as the next generation of mega pop stardom, I feel like her work wasn't maybe made for me and maybe I'm missing something. Billy Eilish is an icon. She's essential. You can't go anywhere without bumping into her. And yet, you know, we're a bit older and just we, it seems like some of our friends weren't really in on the message. And I thought to really get a sense of what is Billy's music about? Why does she feel so culturally important to this new generation? So I asked my cousins, what do you think of Billy's music?

Yeah, I love her. I love her. I just like the feeling of her songs. When I heard like Billy's, it was so different from what I was used to, and I really liked it. Our songs are different and like each song is like new. I don't know. It just, it felt different from most of like the, I was hearing like the same thing on the radio over and over. I guess just very different.

It's not cookie cutter, like pop songs just to be pop songs. What do you think of these kids? I think they're coming for our jobs, honestly. Yeah. I think we, just by dint of our age and distance from this music, like, maybe come at it from a sort of anthropological perspective a little bit. And for your cousins, it's like this music so clearly resonates in a deeply personal way with them. And so I definitely want to explore that more. Yeah. And if there's one thing that really stuck out, what did you hear? This is new. It's different. Yeah,

this is like, this stands out. Yeah, it's different. And really, what I'm hearing under difference is this idea of contrast to what came before. When we use our superhero narrative, we've kind of had like a couple of generations of different heroes in pop music. If we just sort of went very big picture, you know, in like the 2010s, there was this like bubblegum pop thing that was happening, right? And then he sort of bled into a EDM sound that then I think now has sort of molded into primarily a trap music bass aesthetic. And what's a sound reaches its faddish heights? Right.

Something needs to come in and take its place. I think Billy, she's here representing something, which looks different, sounds different, feels different. And I was just sort of like digging into this thinking about what are some of the ways that she is. Different. One thing that stuck out to me first was that she feels a bit like a rejection of the perfect shiny feminine pop star. Yes. She wears baggy clothes. She actually refuses to smile and talks about that publicly about how she doesn't, like, you haven't earned my smile. She feels like rather than like the story of the anti-hero coming towards the end of someone's career, it feels like it's the very beginning. There's a song that I think captures this really well. It's her

song, Bad Guy. So you're a tough guy, like you really ride away so puff. I'm the bad guy. Duh. Well, this is fun. She is taking on the character of the bad guy.

And there's some sort of salacious lyrics, perhaps, but it's also kind of putting on a character and being really goofy in it, right? That, duh, it's like, I'm the bad guy. And her voice has been manipulated to sound, it almost sounds like one of those machines that you see in heist movies

and they put it over your voice so you can't tell who it is. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, like you've done that to her voice and then she's like, duh. So there's, she's like playing with all of the ideas of is she, does she have to be the good girl or can she be the bad guy? And it's humorous too. Like there's, there's satire as much as there's commentary. It really feels very smart. It also reminds me of, well, someone who's kind of doing a similar thing back in the 90s. Interesting. I should have a guess you. Your shame.

Your nine-inch nails devotion is shameless. I love it. I love it. No, and I totally see the connection. It's true. You know, you had in the 90s, you had Trent Resner from Nine-inch Nails with a similar sort of vocal quality, this whispered, dark sound over these dark electronic beats coming out into a period of culture that was not ready for something that might be so

explicit and dark and exploring some of the underbelly of the human experience. I mean, I'm hearing obviously a similarity with Billy's music. She has this interesting way of acknowledging the dark sides of life. There is a certain almost like nihilistic quality to some of her music, and she does it by taking on all of these different characters and roles. I think another great example is in her song, Barry a Friend. What do you want for me while asleep? Where do we go? Ooh, what do you think of that? Oh, that is just delightful.

It's hard to stop it, honestly, because it really draws you in. It's swung in the sense of, like, you know, think of a jazz drummer a little bit. It's got this kind of loping feel. The melody has this almost like inevitable precision to it. Her vocal tone, like you were saying, is so crisp and intimate. I like it. Yeah. Here again, she's taking on a dark character.

She's actually playing the role of the monster under her bed. Isn't that great? I get it. I get it. It's spooky. It's totally spooky. And the song is complete with horror screams, again, modified. vocals that make her sound like a monster.

There's a real teenage introspection on the darkness of life, but from a childhood-like character, the monster under her bed. Right. It's a very creative lyric. It's also, again, harkens to other music that I've heard in the past that deals with

darkness and strangeness that is unseen. Let's go back to the 90s again. Okay, yeah, dig it's there. So here you've got Marilyn Manson's beautiful people. And really, this just the shuffle feel, the da-t-da-da-t-t-t-toddut. Totally. Right?

It reminded me of that. Right? Oh, and that jazz drumming is going to come back. I'm really excited to share this with you. But we're going to come back to your jazz drumming because, you know, professor of physicality. I'll put the jazz. Put the jazz back in my pocket. Keep it there for later.

Keep it warm. It'll be ready. Whatever you need. Just say the word. Jazz. So like Marilyn Manson in the 90s and Trent Reznor in the 90s, there is this, like looking at some of the darker elements of life. But actually, I'm hearing things that are going all the way back into the 60s as well, into someone who is known for their poetics of some of the stranger parts of life. People are strange.

When you're a stranger, faces look ugly when you're alone. Women seem wicked When you're unwanted Streets are uneven Huh Just to get it in your ear Let's play that back to Next to bury a friend again

Yeah What do you want for me Why don't you run for you There's a total melodic similarity there Who knows if it's intentional Yeah But I like you drawing that connection

There's melodic overlap And there's a certain Yeah like alienation that you hear in the doors that you also hear in Billy Ilish. Doors, people are strange. Marilyn Manson, beautiful people. And here we have Barry a friend. She has this way of looking at some of these harder things in life.

If I have to ask her to like a larger question of why is Billy essential to this moment? I think it's that she speaks to not just teenage angst in general and every group of teenagers needs a new pop star. but I actually think she's speaking to issues of this moment. And she tackles things that are challenging. She looks at questions of teen suicide. Oh, wow. The friends have had to bury that keep me up at night. It's very dark.

Wow, yeah. This song reminded me actually of something that you told me about, something that a student said to you. Do you remember the story of when a student said, hey, you should listen to Gucci gang. Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Gucci gang, Yeah, yeah. I was teaching piano lessons to a college student,

and we got into a discussion of, you know, what do people of his generation sort of respond to in the music of people like Little Pump, Little Zan, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, temptation. Because I think for us, it's like, like we were saying earlier, there's a certain distance we have where we're like, oh, this is interesting, but I don't know if I really understand it on a visceral level. And he was saying, you know, a lot of the violence and the darkness in this music is actually sort of comforting for members of his generation who feel like

they live in a very violent world, a very dangerous world, a world in which they can go to school and not know if they're going to make it home because there could be a shooting in which their, you know, suicide is rampant among not only, you know, you. you know, the artists themselves that they listen to, but their peer group, that was a really shocking but also powerful moment for me where I realized, like, what to me is like a kind of overwhelming darkness in this is actually maybe a sort of a source of comfort and sucker in a way for these listeners. Yeah. And particularly something that stuck out to me about that story was that when I heard Gucci Gang,

I was like, this is a stupid song about conspicuous consumption, which isn't to say it's not, but it's like, it's got a very silly lyric. I didn't emotionally connect to it. And yet the production, especially the predominance of trap music currently, it often feels like, even if the lyric is about conspicuous consumption, say, the sound of the music

is almost like the monster running to catch up after you, right? You have these like sub-bases, and the hi-hats. It's almost like there's a horror movie monster chasing after you is the production. And the lyric is... It tends towards minor keys for the most part.

Yeah. And then the lyric is like the distraction of all the things that we pay attention to to stay, keep ourselves alive and happy despite the monstrosity that's behind us. Right, right. Okay, I'm with you. Billy tackles, I think, one of the hardest realities of this that the next generation is constantly concerned about, which is climate. Huh.

Hills burn in California. My turn. to ignore you. Don't say I didn't want you. All the good girls go to hell. Because even got herself reasoned once the water starts to ride. Living that aside. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I mean, the hills are burning in California. And you and I both live in Los Angeles. And we watched basically the city on fire. There was smoke everywhere. You could see fire on this on the skyline. It was absolutely. Oh my God. Ash, ash in the air. It was really, yeah. Yeah. It was very, very, setting, yeah. Billy lives not far away and is experiencing the same thing as a young person. And she,

in her song, all good girls go to hell takes on a sort of biblical, apocalyptic imagery in which she flips the script and basically says that, you know, when things go wrong, even God herself is going to need a friend, her friend Lucifer, to hang out with. But in using the imagery of the oceans rising, like in Noah's Ark and the hills burning, like in revelations, I think she's just talking about the legitimate fears of any studied, anyone who's paying attention and as a young person is concerned about what is this world going to be. Oh my God. Yeah, no, it's, it's wild. I mean, it's, it's so interesting because in some ways to confront something that already keeps me up at night in pop music, I'm like, oh, I don't want to

listen to that. On the other hand, yeah, it's, it's kind of powerful to hear that actually manifested rather than swept under the carpet. Totally. Yeah, so I'm hearing like she's different because She's not conforming to normal expectations of feminine pop stardom. She has a somewhat nihilistic approach to her music that we hear from other artists of other decades. But she's also confronting the issues of today, issues of suicide and climate change. And I think that Billy musically does deserve this crown of tackling different issues, sounding different to this young generation, speaking to what matters to them. and being the superstar, the superhero, who represents a new generation.

Right. So maybe on the superhero spectrum, more like rogue from X-Men than Wonder Woman. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Actually, similar hairstyle to Rogue, too, now they think of a... Yeah, multicolored. You know, I think we've focused a lot on the question of her message, her identity, the things that,

the ways which are maybe more obvious in ways that Billy's stands out, but I want to go deeper into her musicality. Always. And I think there's no better place to start than in her own words. In a conversation recently with The New York Times, she was asked about what kind of music does she want to make? I don't want to be in the pop world. I don't want to be in the alternative world or the hip-hop world or the R&B world or whatever you think. You know, I want it to be like, what kind of music you listen to? Philly Island kind of music, you know, like the other kind. How about that?

She wants to be the other kind of music. Okay, I'm into it, yeah. And when we listen to her first song, you should see me in a crown. I said, hey, I'm hearing trap. I'm hearing pop. I'm hearing songwriter. I'm hearing dubstep.

And I think this is what's interesting about her music is that she's not rejecting what's come before. She's just assimilating all of these different sounds. Sometimes you'll get a whole trap section, which is just a bridge. And then you're going to get almost like a house beat in other parts.

And all these genres become almost more like little parts of her arrangement. They're subservient to whatever the song needs. I do get the sense listening to this that there's a sort of enjoyable disorientation where you're like, wait, what am I? What genre am I in? And you can't answer. But that just makes you want to listen more, I think. Nate, what's in your pocket right now?

Oh, my jazz pocket. Your jazz pocket. I want to open up that jazz pocket. because jazz is a whole other direction that somehow ends up in her music as well. She has some very harmonically rich and interesting stuff going on. And I want to go into one song a little more deeply. I want to talk about my favorite song on the album. It's called Zanny.

What is it about them? I must be missing something. They just keep doing nothing. So intoxicated to be scared. Better off without them They're nothing but unstable Bring us chase to the table Hmm

Maybe it's subtle right now But we have, you know, we've got an upright bass sound We've got some Some symbol work that sounds a little jazzy And most of all, her voice It's, this is the thing that, like, when I heard this song I was like, oh, you're just like, it's a crooner right?

Totally. Yeah. Right? It's not like she's just whispering and like being cool. It's actually, she's in a whole style that has been around

for many decades. And I was like, you know what? This is just like reminds me of like, I don't know, we could like, we could listen to Billy Holiday

or for some reason this one reminded me of a sonatra song. Ooh, okay, which sinatra? Dream a dream. I dim all the and I sink in my chair

the smoke. The smoke. From my cigarette climbs through the air The walls of my room fade away in the blue And I'm deep in a dream of you We have cigarette smoke actually plays a central character in both songs They are in one they are the protagonist in Sinatra and And in Billy, they are the antagonists.

It's very imagistic. You feel like you're in in Billy's song. You feel like you're in a diner with her friends. And in the Sinatra, you feel like you're lounging at home in the living room after a hard day's work. But you can picture it. And part of that, I think, is the, obviously the intimacy. They're singing at such a low volume using mic technique that actually will really the crooners were known for sounding so different because they took advantage of being of microphone

technology they could sing quietly and yet still have an orchestra behind them something that was never available before and similarly with billy here the song starts you know very quietly but surprise surprise the dynamics are going to increase and somehow you can have whispers and you can have 808 beats totally it was really exciting to listen to this song because i was like oh wow this is out of another era but then of course the section you didn't play the chorus of this song is as a total 180 from that sound as well let's go there to feel better jazz right and then all of a sudden it becomes this kind of like loping rock song it's really I love they just go she and phineas just go in like any direction they please and it always works because the conviction in her

voice, I think, ties everything together. Absolutely. The voice does it. And as I've seen before, I feel like there's this genre bending that is always serving what the song needs. So here, if we think about what's Zanny about. Well, it's kind of like an anti-drug PSA in a lot of ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the verse, you basically, she's hanging out with a bunch of friends that are getting high and they're bringing out their ashtrays and going to smoke their cigarettes. And you're not really sure if she's going to like join the crowd from Pure

pressure. Right, right. And then in the chorus, you get, she's just like in this, almost like the drugged out state of their friends is that heavy 808 bass. And her voice is distorting. It's a great example of text painting, right? When she says, I don't need a zanny, which is, of course, Xanax to feel better. She's just, she's fine drinking canned Coke.

Like, she's like, she doesn't need another kind. Yeah, canned, exactly. she is content to find her own happiness in her own ways and I love I think the genre bending serves the larger text the text painting within the song like you need that zanny section to be dark and heavy and manipulated and the other section feels introspective and personal in the verse kind of like the sinatra right but it's also probably part of that sort of ironic tongue and

distance you were talking about earlier where she's taking the conventions of jazz, a music associated with smoky nightclubs and drug abuse, and then kind of flipping that on its head. Yeah. Wait, can we talk about the drums in that verse too? Because that is such a classic sound of jazz, what's known as brushes on a snare drum, where you're literally not playing with drumsticks, but playing with these wire brushes. and you can create that distinctive shh-sh, that like sweeping sound over the snare.

That is like such a characteristic sound. And like you say, something that's surprising to hear in a 2019 pop track. But it's there for a good reason. It's there to create this ironic friction with the smoky sound of jazz and the anti-drug message of the song. Yep. Wow. Fun stuff, man.

Billy, wow, Billy, coming correct. All throughout her music. I think you put it correctly. We are known on our show for sometimes maybe extending our analysis beyond the intention of the artist, which I think we both feel very comfortable in doing so because music is about the musical relationship of the listeners, as much as it is about the intentions of the artist. That said, on this album, the intentionality of the sounds is remarkable. There's this line in another one of our songs where she says, I'm up all night on another red eye.

She's flying around the world And also like her eyes are right from crying And underneath that she has this safety demonstration Like from an actual flight Followed by the taking off of a plane But the taking off of the plane is used to sound like a like a riser In an EDM track to move into the next section And you're like oh dang all these found sounds

That exist within her music They have her her braces coming out. There's an easy-bake oven sound. There's all of these sounds they put in there to evoke. Sometimes it's like horror-like sounds. Other times it's to just reinforce the emotional state. Everything feels sort of uniquely deliberate

in the choices in the sound design. I see. So it's not a case of us over-interpreting like these clues are sprinkled throughout the record for listeners to come find. There's only one way for us to know, which is to talk with the producer who put all of these sounds together. So when we come back, we're going to talk with Phineas O'Connell, the producer and co-writer of all of Billy's music, also her brother. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it.

What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready.

Do not sugarcoat something for me. No. No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have been. demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue.

President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border.

They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. I had the chance to sit down with Phineas during his rehearsals for Billy's World Tour. And I wanted to specifically look at how he and Billy thought about crafting their sound and their characters in one particular song. Bad guy. It seems to be a hodgepodge of genres.

It doesn't really even have a chorus, and yet the song is an absolute smash. And I wanted to know how Phineas thinks about putting these sounds together to be so different and yet so catchy. Here's Phineas on what inspired bad guy. Calling yourself the bad guy. Like, oh, you've made yourself the bad guy. That's like the phrase that comes to mind,

which is like you've done the thing that, like, is inexcusable somehow or is sort of like, Trump's the other person in your nefariousness. You know I'm the bad guy. And I loved that it was sung by a 16-year-old girl. It was awesome. How did a bad guy come about? Billy had made this sort of crazy distorted trap beat

in her bedroom that was actually, it ended up being the outro of the song, and had written that really cool verse. I like when you get mad. I guess I'm pretty glad that you're alone. You said she's scared of me. I mean, I don't see what she sees, but maybe it's close somewhere in Yucal. So when we were messing around with sort of the beat and the base idea of what became the beginning of the song Bad Guy,

and we decided that it would probably be a song called Bad Guy. We were like, oh my God, that thing that we didn't really know what it was, that has to be like the outro of this song. And I think then it was just sort of a question of like building that kind of concept and the character of, you know, what we were trying to say about like Billy. being the bad guy in that song and what like saying you're the bad guy is. Okay, so you start with the outro and then you move into what comes next. Started with the outro and then sort of didn't abandon it but sort of put it on hold,

put it on the back burner for a long time and then had this just this four on the floor, kick drum and then this bass layered over it. B'an-na-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b- which just already, I was like, I already want to like do something to this. And then the next component was like, in order to try to come up with like the rhythm and melody of the vocal, I was just playing the chords on the piano, which is like a one three five of like a g minor chord. And then instead of sort of like coming up with the different melody than that, I thought, oh the melody, the sort of components of the melody is that it's all three of those pitches at once. It's this like cluster harmony and the rhythm

is really staccato and that those aren't really shifting. It's the chords underneath them they're shifting. I thought that would be really just fun to listen to. There's never a chord in that song. It's only bass and her vocal, which makes chords. It's all just sort of monophonic patterns, except for her voice, which is chordal. So there's this bad guy character, which is tending towards the minor, yet the song has a certain irreverence to it. Yeah. Well, the song, you know, the song's pretty tongue and cheek, and I think that nothing seems kind of more ridiculous than having no sense of humor about something. Like if you're just being serious and dramatic and humorless in your music, especially if you're trying to seem like evil in any sense like it's just so like heavy-handed and pretentious that

I think the only times we've ever gotten really serious in our music are like love songs or like songs about the loss of somebody but yeah and this song especially we were like it's way fun I mean every every great villain in every movie is funny because otherwise you'd be they would be so uncharismatic Like an uncharismatic villain is like sort of worthless in storytelling. You have to have a villain that has some level of charisma, which sometimes is even like a cool outfit. You know, villains always have the coolest lightsaber. But yeah, I think funny villains, that's like, that's my bread and butter. And that's also like, even if you go back to like kids movies, the villains are often like very funny.

And so I think we wanted to have a villain that was like funnier than the protagonists. I think the most villainous thing that you do in the song is that you killed the chorus. I'm the bad guy. Duh. Yeah, yeah. And then the duh was like, you know, I think we were just like, well, duh, I think. I don't, I think it took a couple takes to get a duh that we didn't think was contrived either. We were like, it's like, there's things like a breath and like saying stuff like duh, like where you think it's going to be the easiest thing to do in the world.

And then you do it. And you're like, wait, wait, wait, I have to do that again. because you're like, you've never, like, heard yourself say it. And then, like, when you're sort of acting, you have to, like, recal, like, circle back to, like, how it would sound if you were just, like, throwing it away, which, like, if you said, duh to something, like, it would be a throwaway. You'd be, like, on your computer and someone asked you across and be, like, duh.

And so I think, like, when you, like, go to record it and the beat drops and you're just like, duh, like, it's this very, like, just sort of comical thing that Billy was like, I don't know, that's lame. I want to, like, really just, like, make it sound like, you know, this kind of like shoulder shrug. The song to me is almost like, it's almost like the Joker. It's got a sense of humor in that way. Yeah, man.

I mean, like, the Joker's the best example of like a funny villain and like a weird charismatic. I mean, like you, you care more about the Joker in the Dark Night than you care about Batman. Like you're like, oh my God, this dude is like just so fun to watch, you know, even though he's like doing evil, unspeakable stuff in those movies. I think that, I think the song sort of borrows a lot of thematic. from movies like that. You take on these great characters, and the thing that really astounds me about the song is the way in which you blend stylistic genres,

moving between, you've got gospel sounds. I like it when you take control. Halloween John Carpenter kick drum. You've got blues, it's all in there. And I think that taking on this character of the bad guy, it feels like, again, this is sort of my interpretation of it, of it, but I love that you sort of get rid of a section that I expect to be there. And you also throw in a trap beat that I don't expect to be there.

Like the bad guy is happening in the way the song is being written. That's cool, man. I'm so glad that is the interpretation that you're taking from this. And I wish I was clever enough to think that when we made it. I was just like, yeah, I guess, I guess doesn't need a chorus. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think the way that we deal with cross genre is that in our time not, not writing and recording music, we're listening to everything. We're listening to all genres of

music and new music and old music. And then it all just sort of gets synthesized and boiled down into this sort of broth that we, you know, make. And I think very rarely are we like pulling up a song when we are making a song to reference it. We're almost always just like, you know, like making it as it comes and any influence is sort of like subconscious, even though once we've, once we've recorded it, we go like, oh, this sounds like, you know, that, right? But it's all subconscious going in. And then when we listen back, we're like, oh, that's definitely where we can point to that as a reference. Do you think that collaborating outside of the typical song pop machine where it's just the two of you, does that give you more liberty to go across genre? Yeah, probably.

I think we come from a place, like, even though now we do, we're friends with a lot of of contemporary musicians that we admire and look up to, I think, like, looking at it as kind of outsiders, because we're still in, like, our childhood bedrooms, like, making music. There is a kind of a sense of, like, sort of, like, yeah, we're just going to make this today and drop it on SoundCloud, like, this sort of, like, pirates thing. It's not even, like, rebelling against something. It's just, like, we're going to do it anyway. Like, when we're in the creative process that we forget that we have, you know, a label that is promoting Billy's album ultimately. We're just making it together, you know. And I think that sometimes when you're working with five people,

it's impossible to forget that there's a whole world outside of you because you're all from different places. And when it's just the two of us and we're in like the bedroom we've been in for 12 years, it's like it's pretty easy to forget about everything else. When I was researching this piece, I wanted to talk to some younger people because I'm getting to the place of like aging out of pop music. Sick. And so I interviewed, I interviewed my cousins. And they all said the, exact same thing. They said, I love Billy. She's so different. And her music is so different. Do you like being different? Different's all you can be. I think like the first song we made that to me felt different was the third song we put out, which was the song, Belliache.

To me, bellyache, although there are songs that it, you know, can be compared to, putting a regga tone beat with an acoustic guitar and then a bass drop was just like, I hadn't heard that done before, production-wise. I hadn't heard a verse written about the things that we were writing about. I remember playing the song for friends of mine before it came out, and before anyone said anything that was like, nice, man, they all were like, I've never heard anything like that before. And that was like, I'd never had anyone say that to me about something I'd made before,

and I was like, I want that feeling forever. I only want to make stuff that people are like, I've never heard anything like that before. That was like the most exciting thing about that song to me. And so I've just been chasing that since then. How do you cultivate it? Trying to do something and then realizing that the thing that is on your way to trying to do that thing is more interesting

and then going that way. If I hear a sound in my head, oftentimes it's like, I love the way the drums. sound on that new light John Mayer song and I'll be working on drums and they'll sound kind of halfway there and I'll think like these are pretty sick and then I go that direction and I double down on that and I go further that way and by the end of it I don't think anyone would like be able to tell what any sort of like reference point is and that's like true of like all my favorite songs I think like if you are inspired by something and you try to do a little bit of it and it sounds

kind of like a mistake. Like if you double down on your mistake, do something different. Like stuff's really exciting. Oh, thanks, man. Thanks for having me. Switched on Pop is a production of Vox Media. We're produced by Julianne Byemberger,

edited and engineered by Brandon McFarland. Our community manager is Sarah Terry and our executive producers are Nashat Kerwa and Allison Rocky. You can find more episodes at switched onpop.com, the Apple Podcast app, Stitcher.

Anywhere you find podcasts, there we are. You can also reach out to us at contact. at switched onpop.com or Twitter and Instagram. We'll be back again in another week. And until them, thanks for listening.