Switched on Pop - Freaking out about songwriting with Nile Rodgers

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

There is no contemporary pop music without Nile Rodgers. Born in 1952, Rodgers grew up playing classical music on flute and clarinet before picking up jazz guitar. And at age 20, alongside bass player Bernard Edwards, Rodgers formed the band Chic. They wrote the biggest disco hits of the 70s, like: “Dance Dance Dance,” “Everybody Dance,” “Le Freak," and "Good TImes," which formed the core of Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper's Delight”. In his music career spanning six decades, Rodgers has produced and played on some of the biggest pop songs in history, for artists like Sister Sledge, Diana Ross, David Bowie, Madonna, Daft Punk, and Beyoncé. He is also the chair of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, so with the Songwriters Hall of Fame ceremony taking place this June, we invited him onto Switched on Pop to talk about the making of a great song. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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from the first instant and he has a wella. Good Girl Jasmine Absolute, hypnotica, irresistible. Discover it today and let you involve for its essence. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm a songwriter Charlie Harding. I cannot overstate this.

There is no contemporary pop music without Nile. Rogers. Now Rogers was born in 1952. He grew up playing classical music on flute and clarinet before picking up jazz guitar. And at age 20, alongside bass player Bernard Edwards, Rogers formed the band Sheik. They wrote the biggest disco hits of the 70s like dance, dance, dance, everybody dance, and famously La Freak, which was inspired by one fateful night at Studio 54, the hottest disco Club in New York City when Nile and Edwards returned away at the door. So they went home and wrote a song with the chorus,

Ah, F off, Studio 54, which they cleaned up until the freaks, Ah, freak out! Many of Sheik's songs became essential hip-hop samples, like Good Times. Which was sampled on Sugar Hill Gang's Rapper's Delight. I said, the hip-hop, the hemip, the hip-dibbit of a hip-hip-hop, you don't stop. In his music career spanning six decades, Rogers has produced and played on some of the biggest pop songs in history for artists like Sister Sledge. Diana Ross. David Bowie.

Madonna. Daft Pump. Beyonce. Now Rogers is also the chair of the songwriters Hall of Fame. With the Songwriters Hall of Fame taking place this June, I invited Niall Rogers onto the show to talk about the making of a great song. Hi, Niall. My name's Charlie. Hey, how are you?

I'm doing great. How are you doing today? Good, Charlie. Wonderful. What are the components of a great song? That's very, very subjective because everybody relates to music differently. But the one thing that I believe is that there's a primal aspect that sort of kicks in well before we listen to the lyrics. Most of the time, it's groove, it's the vibe.

It makes you feel good. And then you start to decipher what the song is all about. Do you have moments of your time in the studio and something you either wrote or produced where you can recognize that shift from the subconscious to, oh, this is a thing? Not really, because when I'm writing, I am always moved by a couple of things.

Typically, what happens, and I hate to say this about myself, is that I try and do something that's intellectually, theoretically based, and is cool. Right? So that's how I start. And then I try and make that accessible

to the public at large. I can't help myself. I just try and do this overly complicated, theoretical, mathematical stuff, and then rewrite it into everybody dance. Do-da-doo-doo clap your hands. Could you give an example that we might all know, that maybe started from this place of theory and analysis

that then was winnowed down? I think I just said it. Everybody dance. So when I wrote Everybody Dance, the very first pop song I ever wrote. The chord changes, I mean, who the hell would write a song like this that goes A minor 7 with a flat 13, with voicings that aren't thirds?

They're all fourths. So it's just... Yeah, this is some like B-Bop stuff. Yeah, well, it's just some crazy, jazzy thing that sounded great to me. because I wanted my bass player to play a chromatic bass line. So in order to get away with, doon, doon, doon.

I had to write a transitional chord that would get me to, how do I say, pretty and relaxed and normal, but I had to do this wacky jazz transitional chord to get there in order to just. just have my guy go do, do, do. And so that being my first pop song, and the fact that it wound up being a hit, was really crazy to me.

But it wasn't inspired by the primal concept of groove. It wasn't inspired by trying to make people dance. It was inspired by trying to be intellectual, satisfying to my guitar teacher. But this can be a lot of problem for musicians, writing music that satisfies the musician in us. You obviously have made more hits than anybody on planet Earth, and you have a concept of where there is music that satisfies that musician intellectual urge, and then what actually

works for an audience. How do you know about winnowing that down to the thing that is the groove that is going to work? Because at the end of the day, after I intellectually lay it out, then I go back and figure out how to make it feel good. So it's interesting that I don't ever look at myself as a songwriter. I always call myself a song rewriter, right? Because I start with a concept that intellectually satisfies me. and then I try and make it into something that primarily satisfies other people.

So you grew up on jazz and classical music. How did you transition into the world of pop music? And why is it an essential musical form for you? The main thing that happened to me was I was taking a guitar lesson from my jazz teacher one day. I was playing a song called Sugar Sugar, which I thought was the silly pop song. And basically at the end of the lesson, he held me behind my head,

looked me right in my eyes, told me that Sugar, Sugar was number one for three weeks. And he said to me, Nile, don't you understand that any song that's at the top of the charts is a great composition? And I said, how could you say something so ridiculous

as, honey, do, do, do, do, do. Oh, sugar, sugar, you are my candy. How could you call that a great composition? And he looked at me and he says, because it speaks to the souls of a million strangers. And I started crying.

And two weeks later, I wrote, Everybody dance, do do do, clap your hands. Because I wanted to speak to the souls of a million strangers. He actually defined with Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, what artistry is all about. Artists, we give from our hearts to people that we will probably never, ever meet. So we look to the depths of our souls

and we say, this is what I'm going to give the world because I want you to enjoy something that is spiritually rewarding to me. And maybe that'll be the same way. to you. And I cried when I understood that understanding of an artist. Because at first, I thought an artist was just some person who just does all this crazy, wonderful, amazing stuff that makes you go, oh, wow, look how cool he is. Oh, wow. Oh, my God. Oh, man, he's the coolest dude in the world. Oh, man,

he's outside the changes. Oh, wow. Listen to that. He's like the son of the lonious monk. Oh, my God. He's like, you know, Albert Eiler. Oh, he's like. like, you know, whatever. And then I realized that, yes, they are artists, but guess what? They also want to speak to the souls of a million strangers. There's a barrier between musical virtuosity and what can speak to millions of strangers.

What are the things that are required to speak to everybody? It's different. It's really different because I remember hearing a song that when the first time I heard, heard it, I disliked it because I compared it to other artists that I loved. What was that? I hate to say it, it was Betty Davisized by Kim Carnes. And I said, she's trying to be the female Rod Stewart or she's trying to be the

dun-da-da-da-da-da-da. And then all of a sudden I heard it three or four or five times. Guess what? I wound up doing a record with her. That first impression may not be the thing that makes the music internal to you. I look at it like a roller coaster ride. So like the first time you ever go on a roller coaster, you may be thinking, oh, my God, I'm afraid.

Oh, my God, look how high up we are. Oh, my God, look at this. No, no, no, no, nah. And you ride it and you get through it. And you go, I want to do it again. At least that's what happened to me. So that's the thing is that everybody is not the same. And even though maybe the net result is that we wind up feeling the same way at some point in time,

but it may not happen sequentially the same way. Some other thing may hit you first and then the other thing hit you first. Whereas with me, usually I hear groove first. If I feel that primal thing first, I don't even care what they're saying. It's funny, my own mother, my own mother used to tell me what the lyrics of my songs were. And I would say, Mom, that's not what I'm saying. I just wrote this song about Studio 54. I'm not writing a song about Come on Down to the Fifth Floor.

She says, no, sweetie, you're going, just come on down to the fifth floor. Fifth floor. I said, no, I'm saying, just come on down to 54. Find your spot out on the floor. I freak out. And she'd argue with me. Just because we're there, I have to ask, you know, I teach about the history and the creation of dance music in my course at NYU. And one of my students asked me, why did you get turned around at Studio 54? That was just one night. Believe it or not, The only reason why I tell the story like that is because, as Nora Ephron said, everything is copy. Prior to that night, I had been in Studio 54 many times, but I went there with my girlfriend, who was popular because she worked at a store called Fia Rucci and all the girls were beautiful,

blah, blah, blah. It was only that one particular night, which was New Year's Eve. It was a big night. And Studio 54 was the center of the universe. and I went without my girlfriend. I just went with Bernard Edwards. They didn't know Bernard Edwards. They didn't even know me, but they knew my girlfriend.

But Grace Jones had invited us personally. I thought that that had way more juice than my girlfriend, and she invited us to the back door. So we went to the artist's entrance, and obviously the guy didn't know me because I wasn't an artist. Normally I had gone in the front door with my girlfriend. who was all popular. And also I was trying to be professional

because Grace Jones was considering hiring us for what would then be her next album. So I wanted to be professional, I wanted to be on time, the last thing I wanted to be was late. Well, guess what? Grace Jones is notoriously late. I thought she would be there well before midnight

because I thought she would sing at midnight because that was, you know, New Year's Eve, and now it was the new year. Grace Joan showed up at three o'clock in the morning. I got there at like 10 o'clock. You had no alibi. Right. So she hadn't gotten there to say,

oh, this guy named Nile Rogers is coming and he's my guest. You know, so that, I mean, that's the real story. You know, we thought we were going to get some incredible great opportunity. But as I say, by not getting what we wanted, we got more than we could have ever wished for. Best example of Lemon Into Lemonade. We get LaFreek. It's the biggest selling single in the history of Atlantic Records,

bigger than Bruno Mars, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, some song that just goes, Aw, freak out. Sold more than anything in the history of Atlantic. Man, who knew spite songs could be such a hit? Back to songwriting. You have a theory of songs, the D-H-M.

Yes. What is the D-H-M? And when do you usually recognize it in the process of writing and producing? We know it all the time. The D-HM is called the Deep Hidden Meaning. And really what that means to me as a songwriter, if I don't understand what the song is about,

how the hell can I expect you to understand? Right. So when I wrote it, just come on down to 54, and my mom sings, just come on down to the fifth floor. Do I care that she has it wrong? It doesn't make any difference that she has it wrong. I need to know that I have it right

so that when I explain to her or anybody else, they go, oh, it's a song about Studio 54. Every single song I write has double Lentandra because it wouldn't be interesting to me. If I don't know what it means to me, how do I explain it to you? Because you may have a completely different perspective. So I just want to be able to tell you my story. You can listen to it your way.

You could be my mom and say, come on down to the fifth floor. Maybe to her, the fifth floor at Bloomingdale's had women's lingerie. I don't know. But if I don't know it, how can I expect to tell it to you? Okay, so most songs are flops, not hits. Correct. Do you have any sense of what can make a song a hit? No.

It's a total mystery. No, I have no idea. I just know if it feels good to me, that makes me happy. I find that there are two kinds of people. There are people that love to agree with you, but I actually think that there are more people that love to disagree with you. When I look at, like right now,

we just did this thing for Apple, and it was the hundredest greatest albums of all time. Now, to me, my greatest album of all time, and to me, nothing can touch it, is John Coltrane's The Love Supreme. Why? Because when I was a teenager and walked into my mother's house and heard that record,

I stopped dead in my tracks, and I just listened to it over and over and over and over again. Somebody else could say, their favorite album is the Stooges, and they had that same reaction. Another person could say their favorite thing is Sunny and Cher.

I got you, It's not necessarily intellectually based. It could be primal. It's all over the place. But at the end of the day, the number one album with this poll that we did wound up being Lauren Hill over Thriller. Thriller is the only album in history that was on the charts for 11 years. How could another album be? Number one, but through the words, number two.

I was like, but you got to understand that as the world moves on, there are people who are younger. Like, look at me, I'm almost 72 years old, right? So when I was a teenager and I walked in and I heard John Coltrane's a Love Supreme, it was almost like losing your virginity. It was like, no, honestly, it's a once-in-a-lifetime thing to me. And I couldn't compare that maybe to having sex with somebody else and blah, blah, blah. And that could have been unbelievable.

But losing your virginity happens once. Right. A love supreme walking into my mom's house happened once. And it was, oh, my God. And I had to listen over and over and over and analyze and try and see where these musical geniuses were coming from. And I also heard for the first time in my life, John Coltrane go, I love Supreme, I love Supreme, I love Supreme. I was like, oh my God, I just heard John Coltrane.

train's voice. I mean, here I'm hearing giant steps and it's incredible virtuoso, but I'm hearing him now sing. To me, this was like, I landed on the moon. This was like, like, like I said, it's like losing your virginity. It was like, wow. 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. 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 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. I had known that you had grown up studying jazz and had loved Coltrane. I had never made this connection, though, that Sheik has so many chants in your music. And I feel like the chant from a love supreme has snuck its way into all of the very very chance that you do as a group with audiences chanting along with you. Whether it's dance, dance, dance, ah, freak out. Like that is its own little love supreme.

I never thought about it like that. It's funny when you go to a sheet concert, now even 40-something years later, I start playing the guitar part to La Freak. I can depend on this. What? Two. And the audience goes,

aw, freak out. Still feels good. It's amazing. It is absolutely, it's absolutely amazing. It's 100% predictable. I can't help it. They can't help it.

I mean, how many songs have started with a count, but there is no that I could think of, there is no more powerful calm at the beginning of a record than one, two. Aw. And what else? It's like, what's the Beatles?

It goes, one, two, three. One, two. Taxman, right, right, right. At the very beginning of tax man. We get a little bit of a count. But not the same. We get a real. No, it's not the same.

No, no. Navy, we go, one, two, three, four. Can I have a little. But it's not because you actually have to do it with that vibe. You can't just go one, two. You got to go, one, two. And they go, aw. So it's like you are all getting on the roller coaster ride that you're so excited to ride together each time.

It's like you've been on that roller coaster, but you want to keep going on it because it keeps giving the thrills. You can't help it. The only thing I can really compare it to because I've lived this life, even though I've not had a drink or a drug in 30 years, music lovers are addicts. Music lovers are addicts. I see it all the time. I just came back from Sweden.

And when I checked into my hotel, all these people were checking out, and they were all swifties. The whole hotel were filled with Americans. It was actually cheaper to buy it. ticket to Sweden and see Taylor Swift in Sweden that it was the seer at a concert in their own home country. Right, right.

And it was just, it was phenomenal. And I hate to say it, we're addicts. Those girls are addicts. And it was like, like, I'm selling crack. Okay, come over here. It's cheaper in Sweden. They couldn't help themselves. They had to be there.

You know, I grew up, my parents were heroin addicts, and I used to watch this ritual every day. And people think it was sad, but it wasn't sad because I didn't know any difference. But I'd have to watch this ritual. My parents going out every day and getting heroin and cooking the heroin and blah, blah, blah. And it was a triphasic thing. The last part of this was the actual ingesting of the heroin. The whole concept of having to go out and get it, find the dealer, get the right price, hopefully get good stuff. That's what the Taylor thing was.

They had to fly to Sweden, get the hotel, blah, blah, blah. The last thing was showing up at the concert and hearing the show. My producer buddy Jesse Cannon talks about music like a drug as well, where he says that it's often there to either enhance how you're already feeling or to change how you're currently feeling. and we use it as a way of it's an emotive drug. Yes. And the thing that's great about it, it's a wonderful one. I don't know too many people who died from listening to a Sly and the Family Stone concert. I mean, I have cried.

I remember the first time I heard Johnny Winter play Highway 61. Yes, I cried. Yes, I cried when I heard Albert King for the first time. Yes, I've cried at Hedric shows. Yes, I've cried at James Brown shows. But I didn't die. I didn't have to go to the hospital. The ambulance didn't pick me up.

I left that show feeling like a million dollars. What are you turning to right now when you need a change of mood, musically? A love Supreme. It keeps coming back. I can't help it. Wow. It's the greatest thing that. ever happened to me. As I said, I get to lose my virginity over and over and over and over again.

That's magical. Going back to some of the songwriting conversation, to write songs is a type of labor. You're a professional. You have done long sessions, translating a song for somebody else if you're the producer, building a song if you're also the songwriter. It's not just inspiration. It's also work. But it also requires you to bring your full emotive self to the work because you need to be you're dealing in emotions. How do you balance bringing your full emotive self and your full professional self into a session? It's different every time

because I'm also feeling the vibe of the artists that I'm working with. So even when I'm doing music that I composed, I write ensemble music. So when I make music, I'm in a room full of people. And it doesn't make any difference with I'm with a symphony.

in the orchestra, or if I'm just with a rhythm section, we're all trading off of what we hear the other person too, because I've never had a bad band in my life. Wow. Since I was a teenager, I mean, we used to open for the stooges. And please believe me, I'm not saying this with ego, not at all. We smoked them because we, no, we were, we were, We were a jazz fusion band.

We were playing our butts off. Yeah, but we were playing this new music that was by John McLaughlin and Miroslavitas and, you know, and Miles Davis, a new direction in music and things like that. So while Iggy was going, Bum, bomp, bopo, bong, do you feel it

when you cut me to, Bum, bum, bum, boom. We come out and go, pachia, you know. But the audience still loved it. They didn't think like we were weird. They weren't like going, you know, I can't wait through these jazz guys get off. And Iggy comes on.

They actually loved us. We were the opening act. We were the opening act for a group show, another sort of country act. And those were the days where this hippie culture sort of brought everything together. But what was really the natural progression in my life was because I used to be a Black Panther

and I believed in community organization, nothing brought people together like disco. I walked into a club one day and I saw Asian people, Latin people, black people, gay people. It was in Greenwich Village, which is where I'm from. I had never seen anything like that. And I was like going, I want to be where people love people.

I don't want to be where a bunch of snobs going, I want to see people go from Iggy Pop to my band, which was called New World Rising. I want to see that. I want to see Woodstock. I want to see people go from band to band to band. to man, from Santana to Crosby Stills and Next. I want to see that because I loved it all.

For you, what is the difference between a great song and a great record? Wow. A song is something that, to me, is people write and participate, and they actually believe it's just going to happen when they're doing it. A record is something to be captured for all time to be listened to over and over and over and over again. So in a strange way, records are constructed because you know that they're going to be listened to over and over and over again.

When we're playing songs, we make mistakes, have fun, we laugh, we joke, we do all sorts of things. Now, sometimes those songs wind up becoming records, but then we go back and we fix little things and we make them into products that will be listened to over and over and over again as opposed to that once in a lifetime experience that when those musicians first walk in and I laid out in the paper and they look at it and they go, uh, and then we got to read it and play it. And I was explaining yesterday to my engineer, I says, can you believe this? Here we are. It's like midnight. Do you know that the day that I wrote this song, we recorded five songs. But last night, it took us all night to recreate this

thing that has to go in this movie and they wanted to sound like the thing that we did like that. But now we got to go back and get everything right because that thing was crafted to live forever. But when we were playing it, we were playing it from our hearts. And if it happened to be good enough to be a record, it would be a record. If it wasn't, it was just a fun day with a group of wonderful musicians that were having to time of their lives and laughing and joking. So I guess then this interview has been a great song and that when I release it and edit out all of my ums and fly in some musical examples, that will be the record. Thank you, my friend. Thank you, Nile. Nice talking to you, Charlie. It's been a real

pleasure. Same here. Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, engineered by Brandon McFarland, edited by Art Chung, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, community managed by Epi Bar, executive producers Nashat, Koura, a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and a production of Fulcher, which is part of New York Magazine. You can subscribe to New York Magazine at nymag.com slash pod. Find all of our info at switch to on pop.com, including a link to subscribe to our newsletter. And we'll be back again next week when we talk to another legend of dance music, Bootsie Collins. Until then, thanks for listening.