Switched on Pop - Lost & Found: The Drama of Pop Form with Emily King

Episode Date: March 19, 2019

Live from SXSW: Grammy nominee songwriter Emily King didn’t set out to write a perfect pop song with “Remind Me.” Instead, she bent the rules of song structure to fit her message: the magical feeling when you find something you’ve been long missing. Mirroring this theme, the chorus doesn’t come when you expect it. The climax arrives late, after an “aha” moment that fills in the forgotten details. Each instrument fits perfectly together like a lost memory coming into focus. Even after she finds what she’s been missing in her life, she deceived us once again with a diminutive ‘down chorus.’ At every turn, King shows how songwriting mastery opens up immense creative freedom, even within the constraints of a prototypical pop song. Featured Songs:Emily King - Remind MeZedd, Maren Morris, Grey - The MiddleSam Smith, Normani - Dancing With A StrangerTaylor Swift - DelicateSurvey We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than three minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3X6WMNF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Charlie. Switched-on-pop and Vox Media are conducting an annual survey, and it would mean a lot to us if you'd fill it out. It's just two or three minutes, and it radically helps us improve the show and make it all possible. Head over to Voxmedia.com slash pod survey, or just click the link in our show notes to fill it out. Thanks. And now to the show. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm a songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And on Switched on Pop, we discussed the making and meaning of popular. music. Today we're going to be speaking with acclaimed musician, Emily King. She has been nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary R&B album. She's been recognized by the Songwriters Hall of Fame for excellence in songwriting. And she's just released her latest album called Scenery. We're going to talk about her single, Remind Me. Please join me in welcoming Emily King to the stage.

Yeah. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Hi, Emily. Hi. Hi, guys. How you doing? So we want to start by just getting this song in our ears. Remind me is so catchy. We've just been like singing it back and forth to each other. Let me hear some. All day. You remind me of something. Yes. Something that I used to feel myself. Oh my God. I'm so impressed. I'm so when people ask me to sing on the spot like that, I am so nervous. I hate it when people don't ask me. And you're like just nailed it right away. So you'll all have this song stuck in your heads too, probably. But we also think this is more than just a catchy pop song. Thank you. Okay.

We think a good pop song is almost like a Homeric Odyssey in three-minute form. Oh, my gosh. Tell that to my GED diploma. We'll see if you agree with our analysis. But let's just kick it off by listening to a little bit of Remind Me. You remind me something. Something that I used to feel myself Something that is like a heartbeat racing

You remind me of something Yeah, something Wow, that was nerve-racking Can I breathe? Emily, what is this song about? What is this song? Let me remember. I wrote this song, I'm born and raised in New York City And at one point, about two years ago,

I was getting just sick and tired of it and I really needed to change. I also was kind of, my songwriting was a bit stagnant, and I was writing songs very, like, academically, and I was getting very heady about it, and I'm like, how do I write the perfect song? You know, and obviously, when you approach it from that angle, you only have bad songs.

And so I thought, my friend came up to me and said, I don't want you to write a perfect song. I want to know how you feel. and I said, well, damn, that's way harder, and I've got to feel things. And so I guess my approach to feeling things was I changed my environment. I moved to upstate New York, about two hours north, and I just felt reinvigorated in that moment because I'd never had these experiences before. I had to learn how to drive, and I had to buy a car, pump gas.

I was so nervous. I was doing it wrong. And it was thrilling. And within that week, I sat down and I wrote, remind me. Yeah. Because I was remembering this thrill of excitement that I hadn't felt in a long time. I love that because I feel like great songs are a combination of that feeling, you know, of intuition and of songcraft. Yeah.

I think this song is a great example of that. this song gives you this uncanny, powerful feeling when you listen to it, and it does it through these incredible songwriting techniques. And for us, this song is all about form and structure. The way the song takes you through from verse to chorus, to post-chorus, to bridge. So it's all reinforcing that central message of missing something and finding it. So we want to kind of break down with you maybe how this works for us. Yeah.

Sound good? Yeah, I also, I love how you say you didn't want to sit down and write the prototypical perfect song, because I think one of the things that you do here, we're going to see is there's all sorts of ways that you bend the rules. Right. And it makes it that much better. So it would be appropriate that we start in the verse. And I just want to ask you about typically in a pop song, what do you see is the role of the verse? What is it doing for the song?

Well, you're setting up the story. You're setting up the emotion, the tone, the sentiment. I think when people say something is bad music, for me that's because the emotion didn't really sync up with the melody and the lyric in the appropriate way. When you hear a great song, I think that it has accomplished that because the way that you sing a melody is a direct connection to how you're feeling. So in this case, the song starts off. You're kind of in a dark place. I've been without it for so long. I forgot what it feels like. When I set out to write the song, I didn't want people to know where the song was going to go.

Great. So I think it would be appropriate. Let's play the verse to get this in people's year. So we can get a sense of, where do we begin? Been in the darkness. It came along. It's very powerful. But yeah, I don't know quite where I'm going to go.

I can't agree with you. Yes. No, honestly, I don't know how this stuff happens. I was grateful when the song came to me. and when I started singing that melody the lyric was, Been Without a Touch so long, forgot what it feels like.

And I was going in the direction of a lover, and I thought, that's kind of like putting a ceiling on this emotion. It's not just about that. It's not about that at all, actually, for me in that moment. So I thought, okay, I'm going to take touch away. I've been without it for so long, which can be anything. Yeah, I love that.

So, oh, go ahead. I want to listen one more time to that same clip and sort of tune into the production. So really listening closely, folks. So, Emily, what are we hearing here? What's going on? I initially wrote this song without chords. I just sang it, which allowed me to take the middleman out of the songwriting of, like, me trying to find chords. And that felt good.

And then I figured out a bass line on the guitar. Then my producer, Jeremy Most, who's in the house tonight today. Where are you? He's like, don't, don't call me out, please. He's playing it cool. Then he started playing the piano. I thought, oh, we don't use piano that often. But the piano sounds so anthemic.

Now it's like making it a bigger, it just sounded bigger, more cinematic to me. And it was a nice way to kind of space out what was going to come in the song, which was more rhythmic energy. Oh. Spoiler alert. Don't go too far.

I'm kidding. I know exactly to your point. We have this basic piano. They're anthemic big chords, but they're just sort of long and built out. And we have guitar. And that's it. And your voice. Which is kind of scary because you want to get people's attention.

Huh. You know, it's like start with a hook so that they don't leave because our attention's man. But it just felt like this is a tale. I'm telling a story. Hopefully they'll stick with me. And what I'm feeling here is I'm hearing something's missing. And that's in the lyric.

well. The production itself is so sparse. I love that you started without anything but your voice originally because we need somewhere to go. And I think that there is a way in which not starting with the hook and starting with something which is very sparse. We start trying to think what's going to fill in? Where is this going to take us? I love music that does that. You know, I know my limitations so I know where my hundred is at. So I have to make sure that I start like really broken down. So I know, I really broken down. Yeah, but I do, I love space and music, and I like to take my time. Yeah.

I think that brings us, like, to the next part of the voyage of this song. And this is interesting, because, you know, I think we usually expect that moment when you take it up to 100 to be the chorus of a pop song. Like, I think when we, like, what does a chorus mean to you in general? Yeah, chorus is like, that's ice cream. Like, you know, that's the good stuff. That's, sometimes it doesn't matter what the verse is, right? I mean, some songs, I mean, I could think of so many hooks, but not verses necessarily. I see.

So in the way that when you're eating dessert, it can sometimes erase the memory of the meal that you just had. I totally got that. You're just eating to get to dessert. So, okay, I totally agree. Chorus is big, anthemic, 100, ice cream with all the topics. Ice cream, baby. But let's listen to your course. It doesn't feel like 100.

It's not 100 yet. We're at 65 right there. 65. It's a little thicker, right? I feel like the base came in, added a little more depth. That's right. You've got to have something to keep people's attention. You got, you know, you're, it is, it's building.

You're building up to something. You're building up to a climax. Actually, the more challenging verse is the second verse. Because you're like, oh, I just gave them everything I had. Now what I do. So this surprised us when we were listening to this song because we were like, whoa, this is an anti-chorus or something. It denies you what you expect from the chorus,

which is that moment of apotheosis of like, whoa, I'm getting swept along in this. Yeah. We have to wait a little longer for that, right? When does that happen? Right, it happens late. Yeah. Yeah, it's late.

Well, I think you're almost teasing us a little bit because there is this bass guitar that's like, done, done, done. and then it's gone and then it comes back and it was like a heartbeat like things are catching up like a heartbeat is the lyric

boom you man you guys are good PhD that was unintentional PhD Armchair musicologist real musicologist amazing it's good combo

we don't get what we want we don't get that sweet ice cream we don't get what right now we're sort of still in the section of what's been missing we still haven't found what's been missing

in the song. Right, right, right. And we're going to get that because there is an awakening that happens. I'm trying so hard, but I can't shake it, shake it, ooh. This is an essential moment. This sort of ties everything together. If on one side of the song we're feeling lost, we are going to be found, and I feel like this moment, this, I can't shake the memory, it feels like for me, it has this idea of

when you have something on the tip of your tongue, and it's almost there, and you can't find it and then it arrives. And I think you're almost metaphorizing that in music. For you, what is the effect of having this arrangement fill into the chorus? What's its job? I couldn't just go from being without it for so long, forgot what it feels like. Oh, like what I've been missing.

I felt like I would just sacrifice the emotion, the emotional content. I wanted to relate to people, you know, because I know we all feel that way. So it just needed that second half. You know, it just needed to now I told you that I'm sad. And now I'm telling you that I remember what it's like to be happy. And then the hook is the display of joy. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster?

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or in your favorite podcast app. So I think for the audience, we need to give you the full thing. We need that sweet ice cream, that moment of being found. I really dug into this and got so excited by this arrangement because not only have you taken us on this journey from being lost to having found that memory.

It's sort of metaphorizing this idea of what it feels like to remember something. It comes into full view. You can see all the details. I'm hearing in the production the same thing happening. Not just in the song structure, but also in the individual notes. In the way that the piano, the guitar, and the synthesizer all fill out very distinct parts of the rhythm. They don't step on each other whatsoever.

They each have their own space as if all of the details are colored in. I took some liberties because I didn't have the stems of your track. I just went and recreated it. It does not sound nearly as good. Oh, shit, what? But only for... That's so cool. Only for...

It's kind of like the Fisher-Price version of your song. Thank you for setting Alexa. This is the remix. Yeah, yeah. So I just want to play each of these elements coming in. And for our audience, I want you to zoom in on each section. You're first going to hear the piano, then the guitar, and then the synthesizer. And you'll see, they sit in different spaces.

Start with the piano. long and held out right very spacious we got the guitar synthesizer and we're gonna slow it down here and each one sits in its own space as if filling in all of the details you've remembered that moment and the production has given you a full picture it's in full color now thank you for that recreation give it up thanks thank you That's awesome. So I wanted to ask you, some artists developed their material in partnership with their producers

and others lay down lyrics after the track is made. I understood it in the verse. It sounded like the lyrics came first, but how did you collaborate with your producer, Jamie Most, in making this track and having these beautiful moments come together? Well, I don't, I, Jeremy is brilliant guy, and he plays everything. So I'm just lucky because, you know, you save bucks for one thing. But second, I mean, he just, he really can create this atmosphere for the song that it needs. And when it came to that hook, I remember one of the shining moments of making this album was when Jeremy started playing slap bass on that hook.

So good. And I was like, that, because, you know, there were other iterations where it wasn't slap bass, it was just regular bass, which was cool too. but the slap brought this happiness to this song and you know not every player can do that yeah there was a reason why the slap base didn't make it in the recreation not going to happen it's really tight these very sensitive films

I love it oh so cute so yes I think Jeremy like completely gave the song the clothing that it wanted to have and it was a direct connection to the feeling And I was just so grateful on that. I was just, that was wonderful. Cool.

Thank you, Jeremy. Where are you at? Yeah, shout out. Shout out to Jeremy Mos. As Charlie was saying and illustrating with those clips, it's like, it's all, everything is interlocking in this really satisfying way. And then the last part of that is your voice. And this is also the moment where your voice becomes like really thick and you layer

in all these harmonies as well, vocal harmonies. So it's like becomes, I think together that the effect of this section, the latter half of the chorus is like just this sense of everything coming together. And like it's the musical idea of locating that missing thing, right? Thank you so much. You're welcome. Wow. I always, I'm not like a, I don't really belt out music often. This was a challenge for me because I just heard that it required that type of singing.

oh like what I've been missing oh like I was keeping my own ass I would have much preferred to sing that in a softer way but it just required that energy and so it kind of took me to a different level as a singer but it did it I just envisioned you know a choir it felt like very much gospel influence and so I had to do all those layers

but I remember the challenging part was trying to figure out how to approach those phrases because at first they were very syncopated. And then I realized that the surprise of the second O coming in a little bit early gave it this jolt. How does it go? Oh, like what I've been missing. Oh, something like what I've been missing. So that took me a few days to try to figure that out.

That's really cool. We were just talking backstage with our friend Joe, who is a musician, and he was saying an old adage that a teacher had taught him, which was that rhythm is like an addiction. And once you get the rhythm, you want more of it and you want different, but you want it to like change and excite you. And there's a way in which having that change all of a sudden you bring a phrase early. Yes. When you expect it to come later, you're like, it's so satisfying. It was satisfying to me. I was worried that it would kind of not be as catching.

as maybe something that was completely, like the first thing was repeated as the second. But I love surprise. We're like walking proof of how catchy it is. Oh, thank you. Let's see, we've gone through verse, we've gone through chorus, we've gone through the post chorus.

This brings us now to our favorite part of a song, which is... The end. Thank God. It took forever. Which is the bridge. The bridge. What role does the bridge play?

in your songwriting. The role of the bridge is to break up the song with just enough time that you're not sick of it yet. That's a great definition. I like that.

The bridge is the part in the song when you're like, okay, I've been hearing the same stuff for like two and a half minutes. Exactly. Let me take a bathroom break. Little palate cleanser. That's a very cynical

take on a bridge. I love bridges because it gives you a chance for variation in a song. And it also gives you a chance to shine a light on an emotion that hasn't been expressed yet. And so, yeah, the bridge came last. Sometimes the bridge comes first, you know. It's a necessary part in a song. Let's hear it. It gives us a new harmonic content, new lyrics.

And it's a different lyrical approach, right? It's a little, it's darker. It's like the idea of losing this thing that you just found. It's kind of sad. I found something. I didn't have it. Then I found it. And now we're in the bridge and it slipped away.

Honestly, I was dumbfounded. What else do I have to say? And I went to Jeremy because he's the poet of the family, of the musical family. And I said, I don't know what to say here. And then he's like, you want me to do it? I say, yeah, just do it. So it almost slipped away. You know, you're reiterating.

The bridge reiterates what you're trying to say in the story. But you have to be clever about it. Well, I feel like in this case, it gives you, like, this note of suspense right before what you imagine is going to be, like, one more chorus, right? So in order so that final chorus doesn't feel just inevitable, but, like, earned and meaningful, you need to introduce, like, oh, But let me introduce some doubt into the song. That's an interesting way to put it. And then we're going to squash that doubt. It is.

It's like, okay, maybe it's not good yet. Maybe we're not going to get out of this mess. And then this is another crazy moment that we come to post bridge. Because I think what we're expecting is like, is that quashing? It's like, no, no, don't worry. It's not going to slip away. We're back. Here's our sick, like, you know, thick chorus with all these different instruments.

and harmonized vocals. Is that what happens? Let's find out. Something that is to raise? That's kind of bleak, honestly. Yeah. It's the chorus, which we're familiar with, but it's like the most stripped down

sparsest version of the chorus yet with just piano and vocals. And it's kind of, it's a little unsettling. It's because it's like... Or I guess to say if the song ended right there, it would be a very... I think you would come away with a very different... lasting impression, right?

Absolutely. I think this, yeah, I guess what this was trying to do was I've sort of been telling a story to someone else, perhaps, and this was more, I'm looking in the mirror at myself,

you remind me of something, you know, it's just more introspective version of that. Whoa. Nate's face has fallen off. This guy, That's amazing.

I love that. Okay, but it doesn't end there. Does not. No. No, no, no, no. I like a happy ending. All right, let's hear it. We get that beautiful moment of awakening again.

Oh, God. It's wonderful. Oh, yeah, I forgot the... And then it goes back down after that. There's a brief pause. Like, are we going to get it? Oh, yeah, right. And then it comes in.

It's gorgeous. You guys are funny, man. We really like this stuff. I love this bridge, false chorus into full post-chorus. It takes the whole structure of the song, everything that we experienced before, the missing something and finding it and gives it to you at a nice little executive summary at the end. But it's also doing something, this is where I was saying, I think you haven't written the prototypical perfect pop song. I think you've written the perfect pop song for the message that you're trying to convey. And it needed this, what I'm calling a down chorus, this section where you don't get the chorus

that you think you're going to get at the end. And it's something that I don't hear that often, but I went looking for some other examples. It's the down chorus, a thing. So I wanted to play some other stuff that we're hearing in the top 40 that has used this idea often to very different effect. So we're going to listen to Zed and Marin Morris's middle. Down chorus, very sparse. We're going to blend it. Full chorus.

Nice. Fun. Hearing this as well on Sam Smith and Normani's Dancing with a Stranger, this is sort of a slow-build house track. Sparse. So it's a great moment there as well. Sam Smith raises his voice a whole octave and sings the whole thing higher, and so everything builds up.

So you have that down chorus and the full chorus. And finally, I think our show would be incomplete if we didn't play a song from one of our favorite artists of all time. We're just gonna roll the clip. So that's Taylor Swift's Delicate. That track is fire though. Yeah, it is fire, right? In fact, she uses this to a very different effect. I think she actually, all of her choruses are down choruses.

There's all these really small, quiet moments until finally at the end of the song, you finally get the whole thing. Well, does it come from the dance floor? They do that all the time, you know? Break it down, break it down. Ooh, it's gonna go, I got my makeup! The breakdown, definitely.

I think it's just, we just want variation. And I learn from performing that if you start on 100, you have nowhere to go, just like what we were talking about. So you have to really build, pace yourself. But that's so cool because it's not, it's evidence that like something is happening to the fundamental structure of a pop song in which the chorus is always big, expansive, bright. Like we are in a new moment where you and all these other artists are like changing how we think about the chorus. That's awesome. It is. I mean, well, I had nothing to do with it, but I probably stole from Taylor Swift.

Our job is to tell you what, you know, that you do. Well, I think it's fun to play with the dynamic. If the song was about something else, maybe I would have done something else. But I don't know what else to say about it. You guys may feel so good. I don't think I've written my best song, hopefully not. And there's so much magic that is involved. And you really, it's strange, it's like you giving birth to something

and then taking credit for the child's success, you know. People would look down on a parent that did that, right? I've never thought of it that way. I think this is such a gorgeous song. It shows us that the structure of a three-minute pop song, verse, chorus, post-chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus, all that. has so much room for creativity. You have actually

sort of superimposed this idea of remembering something into that canvas of the pop song and show that there's so much room for creativity within it. I want to say, thank you so much

for being on the show. Thank you so much. We also want to thank Aloft Hotels for making this possible. And this has been just absolutely wonderful. Yeah. Oh, thank you so.

Hey, just one more thing before we run credits. We're actually running an annual survey with Vox Media. to help us make a better show and to find new ways to support it in the long term. It would mean a lot to me if you'd fill it out. It's at Voxmedia.com slash pod survey, or you can just click the link in the show notes. It means a lot. Thanks.

Switched on Pop is a production of Vox Media. Our producer is Julian Weinberger, Engineering by Brandon McFarland, and our community manager is Sarah Terry. Our executive producers are Nishak Kerwa and Allison Rocky. Find us on Twitter and Instagram at Switched on Pop, and please send us your thoughts and recommendations. we really like to interact there, and we turn lots of your ideas into shows.

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