Switched on Pop - James Blake & The Return of Harmony

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

For a decade James Blake has crafted an idiosyncratic sound. His early work as a minimalist electronic producer fused lush R&B chords with lyrical collage and unfiltered synthesizers. He describes his hit 2013 song “Retrograde” as apocalyptic yet also romantic. This single was in stark contrast to the bubblegum pop of the early 2010s. But other artists recruited him to spread his subversive sonics. He produced on three of the most seminal albums in recent history: Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN and Frank Ocean’s Blonde. Before Blake, it sounded like pop was caught in the same four chord loop. But gradually Blake’s vision of harmonic melancholy has infused popular music. On his new album “Friends That Break Your Heart,” Blake has written his most compelling songs yet, but underneath are those his familiar wandering chords and emotional suspense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Attention Spotify. It has arrived the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Carolina Herrera, a fragrance intense with character gourmet and addictive. Imagine a jasmine emvolvente, toffee caramelized, and tonka-tostata. A combination that seduce

from the first instant and he has aweller. Good Girl Jasmine Absolute, hypnotica, irresistible. Discover it now, and let you involve for susentia. Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan.

Nate, there's a lot of things I admire about you. Thank you. I sense a butt coming. There's no but. I want to say one of the things I most admire about you is your beautiful piano playing. Oh, wow, that's just a genuinely nice thing to say and you've made my day, so thank you.

You've earned it. You've got the most beautiful chords. Like a little bit of this? Is that the kind of nice piano playing you're referring to? That's exactly what I'm talking about. Nate Sloan Cocktail Hour. You know, as a guitarist, I'm just so jealous because all I have were these, like,

chunky chords. You're like... Yeah, but you can do the one thing that every pianist wants to do, which is take a note, play it, and then bend it. That's not very pretty. It could be in the right context. I'll work on my bends. I'm pretty jealous of that ability. Really, all I want to be able to do is play those big, lush chords like you've got on the piano.

You know, you have an amazing language of emotion through harmony. and it's this part of music that I love so deeply, but has felt conspicuously missing at the top of the Billboard charts in the last couple of years. Yeah, I think that's basically right. If you're looking for thick, lush, extended, crunchy chords, probably the place to find them is not at the top of the charts. I feel like I should clarify that, of course, pop is full of amazing vocal harmonies. That's not what I'm talking about today.

I'm talking about the underlying chords. And I'm wanting to get outside of the sort of basic chord progressions into things that are more roaming and winding and lush. And so, yeah, I've been in a bit of a harmonic funk. That is until just the other day that I heard the song, Famous Last Words by the artist James Blake. Wow, that was a harmgasm. Oh, God. I dig it because it has the...

this feeling of the chorus just keep on moving and stretching and expanding and weaving into new places and you're in this suspended animation like Blake can't get out those famous last words. He's not actually willing to say it because he wants to stay in that emotional place. And for me, that is the power of harmony. It is such an important emotional vocabulary in music. Yeah, I totally agree. It's a very kind of ineffable and elusive. musical quality, but you can't deny that when you hear a certain chord, a certain set of sonorities, it hits you in this emotional way that is undeniable. Definitely.

And if we've been in a bit of harmonic dark ages, so to speak, I do think that maybe we are starting to move out of that phase partially due to artists like James Blake. As a bit of a refresher, James Blake has been on the music. music scene since the early 2010's, releasing music at the intersection of many different genres, blending dubstep with soul sounds, and underneath everything is his lovely piano and synth playing that is rich in harmonies. We can hear that on songs like his famous hit retrograde. You know, his idiosyncratic sound led to becoming a very, you know, his idiosyncratic sound led to becoming a very in-demand producer for artists like Beyonce

Kendra Kumar 30 millions later notice watching Auntie on my telegram like be cautious I be hanging out of times I be on stocked in. And Frank Ocean I'm tired of dancing by myself

gone off tabs of that acid for me a circle watch my jagger might lose my jacket and hit a solo one time. I feel like you can really hear his harmonize. chordal sensibility on his solo piano cover of Frank Ocean's Godspeed, which James Blake helped produce on the album Blonde. Now, James Blake has a new album called Friends That Break Your Heart, and I'm really loving this single, Say What You Will, which is built around this circular chord loop with beautiful falsetto vocals and, I'm really loving this single, Say What You Will, which is built around this circular chord loop with beautiful falsetto vocals and,

throwback vocal harmonies. Hearing those stacked background vocals just, it's like you're getting enveloped in the sound of his voice. Very cool track. I actually got to ask him about the making of this music. I spoke with him in the second half of our episode. Before we hear from James Blake himself, I thought we should explore this overarching question which got my ear into the music, which is basically, first, what is harm?

Harmony. Why do I love it? Where did it go? And why might it be making a comeback? I mean, to me, Harmony has always been my kind of like light post in music. I'm Bryn Bliska. I'm a musician, composer, and producer based in Brooklyn, New York. So Bryn Blisca is this producer I really admire. She's currently touring as the keyboardist for Jacob Collier, the absolute music theory savant, who we interviewed back in April. And basically, she's just a total beast on the keyboard. I spoke with her because, as I was saying earlier, like honestly, my own harmonic knowledge as a guitar player could use a bit of upgrade. And so I asked her to explain harmony to me in four levels of complexity. So sort of the star of our show here is going to be, you know, a chord. And there's sort of two basic flavors of chords that we hear

a lot in pop music. It's a major and a minor. So I'm going to play a super basic progression that you would hear in a lot of pop songs. It's on something like this. That's basically the simplest level of harmony. Chords put together into a progression, plain and simple, but maybe a little vanilla. Let's up level to level two. A next level of complexity would be kind of shaping the chords together in a way to smooth out the progression and just adding a little bit more voice leading to sort of make them work together in a way that feels less jumping around. So at the same level of complexity, you could think of a song like James Blakes, where he's using these same chords, but in a different order. And that would sound something like this.

These are the chords from James Blake's say what you will. And even though they are in a loop, I feel like they're getting somewhere harmonically. Like, one thing I notice is how James Blake doesn't start on the home chord. We're kind of unmoored. So I asked Bryn how this level two harmonic choice changes the same. song for her. Core progressions that start not on the one have an element of kind of suspense and like they're going to take you somewhere. You kind of feel that you're not where you're going to end up at the beginning, which is really powerful. That's continued in the second chord of this. And then you

kind of arrive where you think you're going. But then he goes to a very related chord that feels much more sad. So it's kind of like you were on this little journey to get to one destination. you arrive there sort of in the middle, but then there's another chord and you find out that that wasn't actually where you were going. But that's not where harmony ends. Just to pull our ear even further, I asked Bryn to imagine what would happen

if the progression from James Blake's, say what you will, went to a third degree of harmonic complexity. So if we were to take James Blake's progression and kind of bring it to another level, that would be really adding some other color to the chords to kind of give them a different sound and vibe. So that could be something like this. She's adding more notes onto the chords, making them bigger and more lush.

I asked her, well, what happens if we take that up to level four? Level four would be sort of taking us into the realm of passing chords and chromaticism. So this means that we're taking notes that are not in our original chords and kind of in that original key and introducing them in between chords. So adding some chromaticism to this progression, we might hear something a bit like this. What I find it interesting here is that as you add layers of complexity, it actually really changes the nature of the music. One of the beauties of his original progression is that it leaves a lot of space for you to kind of imagine what else is happening. There's a lot of space within the progression.

It's very much open to interpretation and there's kind of just room for us to feel into those spaces. Whereas when we add sort of that chromaticism, we're being brought on a really, specific journey where there's less room for us to kind of think in the spaces in between. So we're really just kind of going on this ride that's a little bit predetermined and kind of all-encompassing. Man, it is fun to hear that progression evolve with every harmonic level you take it up. But I also come away with the strong sense that it's not like we're making better chords or better musical decisions with every one of these higher harmonic levels we ascend to.

We just introduce a different way of expressing these musical ideas. But I definitely have the strong sense that it's like that first chord progression is beautiful and legitimate and a wonderful thing that does not need any extra sauce or dressing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But these are just options that you have as musicians. Yeah, totally. And it made me think about how every era and style of music really emphasizes a different part of, of musical vocabulary, often changing up the level of complexity within harmony.

Like if we go back to one of your favorite musical eras, the 1930s, and we listen to Duke Ellington, we are just rich in those complex, beautiful, level four kind of sounds. Seducing me with some mood indigo. It's really one of the best. But, you know, if you go just a few decades forward in the 1950s and top of the charts, Bill Haley and his comets come out with rock around the clock,

and it's a totally different musical vocabulary. When I'm listening to this Bill Haley track, the first thing that strikes me, is like, this is a very specific chord progression. It's a blues chord progression. And in some ways it's very simple. It's comprised of three chords, but it's like there's a long tradition that goes way before this Bill Haley track of musicians, especially black southern musicians, taking this particular chord progression and finding a kind of infinite number of ways to introduce nuance and melody and lyric into it. So this is like such a crystalline example of the way that harmony can be pretty simple. but can become the basis for like a really powerful and direct musical composition.

Totally. And that sound dominated for a very long time until, you know, people get bored and want to figure out ways of mixing it up. And so why not play with timbre and introduce rough and distorted sounds like we hear on the trog's wild thing? Again, a really fundamental use of harmony. just like, don,

don, don, don, don't, I guess we have three chords here going up and back down,

and that's exactly the point. We wouldn't want any, like, harmonic leveling up here because it would

take us away from the, the raw kind of immediacy of this rock and roll track. Yeah,

it's a great example of whatever musical vocabulary you emphasize, it's totally valid. Just to bring

our conversation a little closer to the present into contemporary music. Let's listen to the number one hit, hypnotize by The Notorious Vigig. Yeah, when I hear this, I hear these looped samples, this funky low end, not hearing a ton of harmonic movement and complexity, but man, the, the, the, the rhythm. and lyrical complexity from Biggie's flow,

the way all these sounds are layered in. I mean, this is a tapestry. He rhymes hooligan with Brooklyn. Like, how do you do it? This track is a musical tour de force, but in the realm of harmony, it's just not stressed. That's right. Yeah, yeah.

And because hip hop takes over popular music from the 90s on, what we see is that all, other genres start to incorporate this loop-based style of music, we can hear it everywhere from Lord's Royals. We hear some beautiful loops on Rihanna and Drake's

work. Work, work, work, work, work, work. You see me happy work, work, work, work, work. You see me do me there, there, there, there, there, that's all my better work, work, work, work, work, work. Hmm, and even on Camilla Cabezah's Havana.

And as I'm playing my heart is in Havana. Oh, nah. Hey, hey. He took me back to East Atlanta. And as I'm playing this music for you, the one thing which is consistent, other than that they're based on loops, is that your head is nodding. You are into the music. You're having a good time. I'm feeling it.

Just because these songs might not be weaving wild harmonic narratives, they're doing other creative things with music. Lord has this amazing. way of inserting silence between moments and creating new vocal timbers that are so enticing. Rihanna is able to just make hook after hook after hook within one song over the same loop. And Camilla Cabell is taking old genre and updating it into contemporary forms. What's happened is that we've shifted into a very loop-based kind of style. People thought that was really awesome for a minute. And it still is.

It's not like it's going anywhere. But something also happens where once everyone starts to have the same character, then musicians are like, well, we're creative people. people and as a creative person I need to like maybe there's a little too much magic. I'm going to try something a little bit different and try emphasizing another musical language. Musicians get bored. They need to try new things. And what I'm starting here are musicians trying to create loops that sound more idiosyncratic, whether that's through textures or often through more harmonic complexity within the loop to make the loop more compelling. I'm also hearing people who are just completely leaving loop-based music behind.

Yeah, I know what you're saying, Charlie, and I've definitely found myself listening to some big pop hits and find myself thinking, like, wow, I would love to solo over these chord changes as a jazz musician because these are pretty fresh and funky. Songs like, Thank You Next by Ariana Grande. Like, that's a song with the same kind of looping structure we've been talking about. Right.

But the chords with... in that loop are kind of new and surprising and don't always go where you expect them to go and they'd be so fun to solo over. And then take another song that we've kind of dissected at length on the show in terms of its harmony. Silksonics leave the door open. There's not a lot of looping in that. In fact, the chords really are taking you on this journey. And I think if you think about what makes that song so effective, it's the way the harmony builds and arcs. And leads you to these new and surprising emotional states. And whether this is a blip, a trend, or a sea change, I'm here for it.

I love listening to these songs, and I want to hear more about what James and other musicians think about how the language of harmony in contemporary pop music might be changing. You're in for a treat, Nate, because I started my conversation with James Blake with pretty much exactly that question. Right on. 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. Hi, James. I'm Charlie. Pleasure to meet you. Hi, hi, Charlie. How are you doing? Yeah, I'm doing well. Excited to be chatting.

I want to start with a big question. Why is the language of harmony so important in your work? That's a good question. I think it hits on a almost a cellular level harmony. that there's a kind of physical and spiritual component. For some reason, harmonies in vocals and harmony in keyboard playing has resonated with me almost more than anything else. Maybe we could dive into an example. Like if we look at your single, life is not the same.

It's sort of a more limited palette for James Blake piece. it's a four-cord loop, and yet there's still a lot of chord-richness. When I went to the piano and actually tried to play at the piano, I was like, oh, really? Because I hadn't even noticed. You're starting on the chord four of the key. Already you're kind of in motion, you know, as soon as you start. And then you're going straight to the fifth, which is kind of wants to resolve somewhere. It does resolve on the next chord, but then it immediately goes into a leading chord, which is the seven, makes it feel like it's opening up to somewhere else.

And that somewhere else is the start of this chord sequence again. So that's how you end up in a never-ending loop. How do you feel this never-ending quality that you've created is working with the meaning of the song? It reminded me of the world of retrograde, actually, this song. The piano and the humming and the chord. world that it lives in reminded me a lot of retrograde. So it felt like revisiting a feeling. What is that retrograde feeling?

It's kind of apocalyptic. It's kind of slightly leg night and it's deep. It's sort of, it's a bit misty. It's a little bit romantic. Your friends are gone. It's hard to describe it in words, but that's the feeling the loop gave me. I played the ones you know. I took you all the way.

It kind of deserved that big chorus moment, you know. Life is not this. Life is not the same. I could I just just had that. What about that moment in the bridge where there's this deviation and the music modulates into a major key, there's like a little glimpse of hope in that melancholy. Yeah, I think it's a moment of understanding, because they're the chords I added, right, to create a variation.

You know, there's a lot of, there's a little bit of finger pointing in this song, you know. So if you loved me so much, why'd you go, keep yourself bad? If you like me so much, why do you, why do you go? You know, keep yourself back. keep on lying, oh, I can only be what I am. It's like in that, keep yourself back, keep on lying, there's a little chord change towards the end where there's like a little bridge.

And I could play you at a moment on the piano, so it's like the chords normally are. And then in the next part, it's a little revelation. There's a major result. There's a kind of like feeling of beauty that creeps in there in the harmony, like a event of the clearing and it's like this moment. I understand why. You know, I sure forgive you.

I get it. I think that's something that always delights me in your work is that where there's an ongoing repetitive part, you're not afraid to interrupt it and take us in an unexpected direction, even if just momentarily. So there's a way that these songs are on one level doing what you expect and then on a whole other, bending the rules. and I can hear this in another song of yours like Funeral where there's this continuous progression

that keeps moving and pushing with the melody almost all the way through the entire chorus It takes us the whole length of that section to get us the whole length of that section to get us to where we're going to land. What is happening there? The chords was improvisation from start to finish. And there would no, I didn't write,

I traditionally sit down and write a bar of that. It was just one improvisation that I chopped up. The improv would have just been based on feeling and how my fingers just naturally move around the keyboard and what I was feeling at the time. And then I started to. singing around it and constructing it. I think that I know this feeling too well.

Blind probably came first. And then I would have added verses. But it feels like the entire song is just leading up to that. The best I can be. Blind. Please I'll be the best I can be. be the best I can be when that comes in people go oh you've written this well like and it I did I did it

felt that is one of the moments of that song that I think tie it root it and make it feel like a song like a good song so it begins as an improvisation your fingers are just doing what they're doing It feels almost like your fingers are allergic to resolution. There has to be constant propulsion. We have to keep on moving. What do you think that is? It's funny because, you know, some of the covers I choose, I'm not like that. Like, the first time I ever saw your face is not like that at all.

It really, that's why I feel like if you do resolves. The first time your face is like that shit lands probably more than any. someone that they were written. But yeah, in terms of chords, you know, I remember when I was at university, I did this improv in class and I remember the teacher. He was like,

it's very nice. What he did was very nice, but can you just stick to like, can you just stick to one chord progression? Can you just like sit on one? Can you just stay there? Because you've found this beautiful place. He was being very encouraging.

It was a good point. You know, like you found this lovely place. to land, land. Like, just let us hear it, like, let us feel it. And so I think maybe it's always been a part of my disposition. What do you think that style of playing does? Are there certain emotions that this wandering leans towards? Yeah, I think I have the mind of somebody always searching something new.

It's probably quite a neat. a neat allegory for my personality really. Because I think musicians often are a bunch of habits, do you know what I mean? Like we're chasing new experiences and new eyes and initially chasing spiritual contentment. I think that like I find contentment and bliss in accord progression, but it's fleeting.

These moments of bliss really only, come into your vision for a few seconds at a time. And you experience this incredible, pure feeling of peace. And then maybe there's no point in staying on that chord because it's gone. I don't know. It strikes me that when you started releasing music in the early 2010, it's this era of very heightened bubblegum pop. and years later

I feel like music has shifted to your vision a little darker, more ambient, harmonically rich, you've gotten to work with many musicians along the way who wanted to use that sound but I wonder a decade later

how has your vision around music making changed? Where are you now and what do you want from your music? When I first started I think I sort of, you know, I had it in a thing. because I was copying people.

I was trying to do my version of, I mean, Wilhelm's Scream was my version of Anthony Hamilton's, Charlene, you know. You'll hear it when you hear the beat, it's like completely to rip off. But what would you take, obviously. And, you know, I was also covering songs. I was doing Limitius, you know,

limited to love to spice. Let it die. Get out of my... World Home Screen was my dance. I at the time was also doing all his dance music and I think whatever my style was became the style people associated with me for years after that even when I wasn't really making that style anymore

and I think you know after that people started to copy it and I was just happens to a lot of musicians has not been made. You know, we're at a state of constant, you know, recontextualization and borrowing. That's part of what music is. And I've certainly done it to lots of other musicians. But then I think pop, when I turned on the radio, started to resemble versions of what

I was doing a couple of years before that, a few years before that. and it was hard to not notice that there were people profiting wildly in ways that I didn't when I made that kind of music. That's a bit of a shame. But it's also like, you know, you've got people who are contextualizing it into a pop format. I think that made me a bit insecure. I was just like, fuck. Like, I'm probably never going to be accepted in pop music, really.

And yeah, here we are, like pop music sounds like that shit. and I'm not even doing that anymore. So where's my place in pop music? Maybe I don't have one, or maybe it's always on the outskirts looking in, you know, like looking through the glass. I think that for a while, that was the effect. You had a lot of, you know,

for any reasons as well, I lost a lot of confidence in what my sound was and one of that matters. And I think in your 20s, it really feels like, innovating and having your own sound is really important. Now I just want to write good songs. I just, I like making music. I love making music with other people.

If I can innovate as well, then that's great. But ultimately, you get to a point where you go, well, the most important things, I've had fun. I'm definitely hearing on this record, as much as there is still some harmonic wandering, there's certainly a lot more confidence and command over what you're saying. It's like you're saying this thing and you mean it. Yeah.

I mean, is that just your early 30s? I don't know. I think it might be. It's funny because I did all this, you know, do all this fucking therapy. And then my very remember my mom said to me, I was like, I'm getting, you know, I feel like I'm getting more confident. My mom goes, you know, that happens when you enter your 30s. And I was like, no, it's all this work I've been doing.

What are you doing? You did the work. We did the work. But we're all trying our best on me. So it's like you don't want to think that, oh, it's just because a bunch of brain cells died. And now I feel a bit, you know, my anxiety cells just fell off. And so I feel a bit better. But whenever it is. Thank you, James.

It's been a lot of fun speaking with you. Thanks, Charlie. Much appreciate it. Switched on Pop is produced by Nate Sloan and me, Charlie Harding. We're edited by Julian Myers, engineered by Brandon McFarland, social media by Abby Barr, illustrations by Harris Gottlieb, and our executive producers are Ashott, Karwa, and Hanna Rosen, or a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and production of Vulture. I want to say special thanks to audioshake.a.i for helping us create stems for individual tracks on this episode.

Find more episodes of our show at switchedonpop.com or wherever you get your podcast, and we love talking to you, so please reach out to us on the socials at Switchedon. Pop, what's your favorite harmonic adventure that you've been taken on in pop music in recent years? We want to hear it. Hit us up there. We'll be broadcasting to you a brand new episode every Tuesday. And we've got some exciting stuff coming out. So you don't want to miss it.

We'll see you next Tuesday. And until then, thanks for listening.