Switched on Pop - Harry Styles and the Sledgehammer Horns

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

As we hit the dog days of summer, the artist that’s started to soundtrack pool parties across the country is former One Direction bandmate and contemporary sex symbol Harry Styles. In May, Styles released Harry’s House, an album propelled by the number one hit “As It Was.” Despite having critical and commercial success, a barb often thrown at the album is the idea of it being inoffensive: pleasant, “easy listening” music apt for an elevator, grocery store or, perhaps, a sushi restaurant.  Fans of Styles have warmly accepted this, and have come to love his sly appreciation of different decades of pop music history. This latest album reveals an interesting connection to one era in particular: the 1980s and the percussive, full-bodied horn sections that came with it.  The first track on Harry’s House, “Music for a Sushi Restaurant,” offers a whole chorus of just horns, in an homage to one of Styles’s musical touchstones, Peter Gabriel. These 80s “sledgehammer horns” connect to a deep well of 80s grooves—from Lionel Richie's "Up All Night" to Janet Jackson and Herb Alpert's "Diamonds," —as Styles's strives to achieve the same effortless funk and propulsion of his brassy icons. MORE Sledgehammer Horns playlist Every Olivia Wilde reference Vulture found on Harry’s House   Songs Discussed Harry Styles - As It Was, Music for a Sushi Restaurant, Daydreaming Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer Lionel Richie - Up All Night Donna Summer - She Works Hard for the Money Sheila E. - The Glamorous Life Steve Winwood - Higher Love Janet Jackson and Herb Alpert - Diamonds Herb Alpert - Rise Notorious B.I.G. - Hypnotize  We need your help. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm songwriter Charlie Hurting. And I am musicologist Nate Sloan. I'm excited to share with you today one of my favorite summer hits. It comes from the artist Harry Styles, the former One Direction bandmate and contemporary rock star sex symbol. He has a third album out from May 22. It's called Harry's House. Tisabap.

It is. You know, this record came out a minute ago back in May, but we're midsummer now. And I think it's a good time to think about some of the songs that have had staying power. Honestly, I think I've been sleeping on Harry's house because some early critics, called the album a little bit, easy listening, maybe not too challenging. And I think I let it pass by, unfortunately, without any meaningful interrogation, which was a mistake because this album is full of earworms. And its songs continue to do very well, even months after its release.

If you were to start on the surface, you could say, well, it continues his themes of lyrics with sexual innuendo, largely about food. He loves to talk about cherries, strawberries, and watermelons. But this time around, he takes us to a sushi restaurant. We've got fried rice. We're cooking an egg. Later we get some green tea.

We've got bubble gum. The culinary double entendres remain strong. Yeah, but I don't want to dissect the images and lyrics here, especially not for all the references of his famous actor, partner, Olivia Wilde. If you want that, Volter has already tracked down all of those illusions. Find them. We'll link to them. Instead, what I want to do today is look at the performance and try to understand why this song in particular, music for a sushi restaurant, is so steeped in horn sections. Basically, why is Harry Stiles so horny? Finally, someone is asking the question. Thank goodness for your intrepid.

journalism Charles I love hearing that percussive full-bodied 80s era horn section on the very first track of this album it seems like a statement of sorts buckle up this is what you're getting into here and it makes me excited about what else is to come but that's just me Charlie what was your reaction when you first hit play on music for a sushi restaurant man well listening back now I realized the first time I hit play clearly I was completely wrong because I think all of my analysis of elevatory music is wrong unless you want to be dancing an elevator. I don't know, man. These horns are amazing

and I think what makes them so powerful is what leads into them. Because the song starts so simply. We get this simple synthesizer arpeggio and then Harry's vocal crescendos in. A Phil Collins-esque drum fill and a slinky baseline. What a way to kick off an album. It is to continue the food metaphors, kind of like dumping everything in your fridge into a pot and just being like, this hopefully we'll work together. It's a fried rice dish of sorts,

yeah. It's a diverse sonic menu that somehow goes together. My favorite thing about this opening moment is that it's missing one essential ingredient, which we have to wait to get until later in the song. It's the horns. Because that introduction is also the instrumental, chorus hook that really hits when the horns come in. I have sat and studied this horn line for like the last two days. I love it. I like picturing you hunched over your desk, quill and parchment in hand, as you transcribe by candlelight, the intricate horn and arrangement of Harry Styles.

That's basically what happened. And what I've found in all of my meditation is it's one of those magical moments of something which is so simple and yet totally tasteful. To see how all the pieces fit together, let's break them down one by one. The first is Harry Stiles' acapella. All of the chords that he's singing are coming in before the downbeat, but the horn section is coming in after the downbeat. And so when you put them together, they're locking in and filling opposite spaces and

creating some really exciting syncopation. Not only do we have this great syncopation where some things are happening before the beat, some things are happening after the beat, they're dancing around each other. We also have some very colorful chords. The notes that Harry Stiles sings and those bupah moments, those are just this descending major chord going from F-sharp major, down to E-major, down to E-flat major, then a D-major, and that descending major chord, something that we think of as bright and half,

The further down it goes, it gets a little crunchy and strange and dark and starts to feel almost minor. And the melody that the horns play over that at moments become quite dissonant. Like, check out what happens over that E flat. And this melody has just had my head spinning. It's this one basically simple riff that folds and permutates and comes in on the different parts of the beat every time that you hear it. It's so simple yet so rewarding. A Mobius riff, as it was. This is a really fun song.

We hear it in the production, and we can hear it in the way that Harry performs his vocals. He is scatting about music for a sushi restaurant. kind of like, scuba do, it feels like a self-nag. He's like, this is just music for a sushi restaurant. It's totally pleasant.

It can be played in the background, but it's also for whatever you want. You can make this whatever vibe you want it to be. And he is having a heck of a lot of fun. I mean, I always get uncomfortable when grown men scat, but I think he pulls it off here. It's almost like he's being the horns, right?

I'll give it to him, yeah. He's clearly, inspired here. So he's studying some of the great rock vocalists in their awkward attempts at scatting from Robert Plant at the very end of what is and what never should be to perhaps the most famous awkward scatting, Paul McCartney at the end of Hey Jude. I hadn't thought of those as the places that he was studying from. I was actually thinking more of the horn lines and general vibe of this song. Our friend at Vulture Alex Susskind called these Sledgehammer horns.

And I was like, what do you mean Sledgehammer horns? Like they're like hitting really hard. He's like, no, you're an idiot. Peter Gabriel, Sledgehammer from 1986. Sledgehammer. Sledgehammer horns. I hear it. And then even those vocal interjections.

Exactly. It's not just the horns. It's that vocal performance because go back to sushi restaurant. It's a triple H, a high harmonized ha. It's not just the horns. It's not just the H. Triple H. It's also the really bad food metaphors.

For the record, that was very much on the radio. Yeah. Hearing these songs back to back, there is an undeniable lineage here. And Harry would admit it. Sledgehammer is one of his better performing covers. He actually played it live on Howard Stern. He's deep in the Gabriel Juju. He really is.

And like I was saying, that I think music for a sushi restaurant is really more about vibe than it is about lyrical sincerity. Stiles says more or less the same thing about Gabriel's sledgehammer. Why do you love that song so much? I love it because, well, I think it's like the best mixed song ever. It just sounds incredible. You mean the record itself? The record itself. He likes the sound.

of the record. It's not about the fruit cakes metaphors. That's not what's driving it. It's about the mix. And he actually went and recorded a bunch of songs for his record at Peter Gabriel's studio. So he's very much channeling those sledgehammer horns.

And music for a sushi restaurant isn't the only place that we get these Peter Gabriel sledgehammer horns on the record. Though there are a lot of quiet, melancholy acoustic tracks, a real standout for me is the song Daydreaming. Same deal.

Sincopated, stabby, funky, sledgehammer horns. Yeah. I feel like thanks to you and Alex, we've coined a new term here. I feel like Harry is singing sledgehammer horns. There's almost two horn sections here. There's the horns themselves. And then there's Harry doing his bop, bha, b kind of things. Stacks of him singing in conversation and in between every moment that the horns hit.

It was these horns that made me love this record because. it shows the attention to detail. You can hear it in the harmonic construction of the songs. You can hear it in melodies that are these hooks that just get stuck in your ear over and over again. And it's in these little details like horns that are backing elements that are happening in between beats that give so much life and energy to a song. 80s horns know how to do energy. So what I want to do when we come back is take a listen to some of my favorite pitch. of horny 80s songs.

I'm talking about like horn, heavy. Sure you are. You get the point. Yeah, all right. I'll catch you in a minute. Convierte your passion in a business with Shopify and bathe records of ventas with the form of Pago with a better conversion of the world.

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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 do love the idea of sledgehammer horns, but the reality is Peter Gabriel's sledgehammer from 1986 was not the first to give us those great kinds of horn sections.

There is a sound to that 80s brass that is so recognizable. And one of my favorite places to start is Lionel, Richie's all night long. Again, I didn't listen closely enough to the details because right in there from the very beginning are hints of orchestra string sections.

What's going to come next? But Lionel Richie makes us wait for it. It takes a whole minute to get into a chorus. But there's something missing here. There's no horns. Sledgehammer horns? Not yet. You know, even when we

get to the second chorus, he still holds back. They're synth brass, but I don't think those are real horns yet. I think those are just synthesizers. Sounds a little synthetic. We have to wait until three minutes into the song to get the hero of all night long,

and that is the horn section. They announce themselves loudly. When we finally get to the last chorus, five minutes into an over six-minute-long song, it's not until the very end that I think we get the full strength of that horn section. So Lion-Ritchie, is doing something very similar to what we heard on sushi restaurant where he holds back. You don't get

all of that bombast of the horn section. When it finally hits, it's like the song has arrived. This is really interesting because when I think of big horn sections, I tend to think of the 60s and 70s as the sort of crowning achievements of that sound from James Brown to Parliament to Earthwind and fire. Right, right. So I appreciate you making the case for 80s horns, the sledgehammer horns. What else might Harry Stiles be casting back to? Another song that is strong in my cultural memory, whose horns I think I have inadvertently ignored, is Donna Summers.

She works hard for the money. I've always thought of this as a very sort of artificial 80s synthi song. The horns kind of peek in here and there. But again, when you get the full final chorus, it's all about those horns. They're doing something really important here. The horns fill in the gaps between every little section. Whenever she's not singing hornstab, between beats hornstab,

I think the sledgehammer horn vibe is all about upping the ante of energy in a song. And on this particular track, which is about working hard for the money, I almost feel like you can hear the horns working really hard. They're doing these tough riffs. They're going way up into their upper register. You get the sense that everyone, I mean, not just the horns, down to summer, everyone involved in this production is just like leaving it all on the floor of the recording studio.

Yeah, they're sweating. And another horn-driven song that I think is pulling on that same kind of vibe, working really hard for it. The Glamorous Life by Sheila E. These are definitely sledgehammer horns. Sticado, explosive, dancing around the melody line. One more iconic example that does this thing so well is Steve Winwood's Higher love.

It's kind of like you could ignore the main vocal melody altogether and just listen to the counter melodies that the horns are doing. It's a whole other way of listening, but you realize the song is just as good, but only the horn section. Not entirely relevant, but for the longest time, I misheard the chorus of this song as Steve Winwood singing,

Bring Me an Iron Lung. And I don't know. I just need to put that out there, because I just need to know if I'm the only person out there in the cosmos that had the same miss. apprehension or if there are others like me who can commiserate bring me in iron lung yeah what's that is there a name for that phenomenon there has to be i definitely had a book of misheard lyrics really in middle school including excuse me while i kissed this guy yeah she loves cheesitts and america too

that's from tom petty's free falling we would be remiss to pass over all the lonely starbucks lovers Mm, Taylor Swift, blank space. What is this thing? Hold on, we're getting a note from our producer, Rihanna Cruz. What's it called? Mondagreen. It's a Mondagreen. I've heard this before.

It's from someone mishearing Mound of Green in a poem. Mondagreen. All right, I think we should get back to the horns. I've got just one more I want to share with you. Okay. It's Herb Alpert with Janet Jackson. The song is Diamonds. Diamonds.

This song confuses me. Why is that? I guess I heard his name, but check this out. Herb Albert has sold 72 million records. Massive. Whoa. Dude is everywhere in the history of American popular music. From his own hits with Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass to starting A&M records,

to becoming a philanthropist to the point that UCLA named its music school after him. And perhaps most importantly, his 1979 song, gave us the sample that begins Biggie Small's hypnotize. Well, that is amazing and another completely unnecessary branch away from our conversation on Sledgehammer Hordes, but very delightful. Yeah, I feel like it's time to bring things home, Harry's home, Harry's house. Listening to your treatise on 80's Sledgehammer Horns, hearing Stiles himself talk about his love for Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer.

It strikes me that we're dealing with an artist who takes music very seriously. And I know that some of the critical response to this record has been somewhat negative, saying basically what you said at the beginning of this episode. It's light, it's easy, it doesn't challenge the listener at all. But at the same time, this discussion makes me a pre-examination. something about Harry Styles, which is the fact that he seems to be, like us, a music nerd. Yeah. Someone who gets obsessed with obscure aspects of music history, like these 80s horns,

and endeavors to sprinkle those references to music past into his current tracks. I find that pretty cool and something worth celebrating. And something that brings this larger-than-life artists a little bit down to Earth. It's definitely worth touring through Harry's house. Switched On Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, engineered by Brandon McFarlane, edited by Jolie Myers, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, community management by Abby Barr. Our executive producers are Hannah Rosen and Ashok Kerwa, a member of the Box Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. You can find more episodes of Switched on Pop anywhere you get podcasts or our website, switchedonpop.com. Hit us up on Instagram and Twitter at Switchedon Pop and tell us.

A, your favorite Harry Stiles track, and B, your favorite Mondagreen, misheard lyric. We'll be back again next Tuesday, and until then, thanks for listening.