Switched on Pop - Zedd + Alessia Cara - Stay (w special guest Grey)

Episode Date: March 23, 2017

Charlie and Nate sit down with up-and-coming producer duo Grey—fresh off their hit "Starving" with Zedd and Hailee Steinfeld—to uncover the secrets behind Alessia Cara and Zedd's dramatic dance track "Stay" and Grey's own deep cut "I Miss You" (ft Bahari). Snare drums as currency, Game of Thrones samples and screaming into the void are all discussed in this deep dive into the world of pop orchestration and 21st century songwriting.   Featuring: Zedd + Alessia Cara - Stay Hailee Steinfeld + Grey ft. Zedd - Starving Grey ft. Bahari - I Miss You Earth, Wind and Fire - Kalimba Story Maroon 5 - Don't Wanna Know Mussorgsky - Pictures at an Exhibition Ravel - Pictures at an Exhibition Emerson, Lake and Palmer - Pictures at an Exhibition Grey - Do You Remember (Remix) Grey - You're Not There (Remix) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm very lucky to be joined in the studio with two special guests, if you don't mind introducing yourself. Our name is Gray. My name's Kyle. I'm Michael.

We are really excited to have Gray in the studio. You are an amazing electronic duo. You came out with a single last year, starving, written by you guys, Haley Steinfeld, and featuring Zed. And it was certified platinum, reached number 12 on the charts. A super big hit. You guys must be overwhelmingly excited. Yeah.

And so each week on our show, we break down a song or an album or musical idea. And what we need is we need your help breaking down Alessia Kara and Zed's new song, Stay. It's climbing up the charts. It's doing really well. Nate and I tend to think about music from a sort of more classical perspective because we took a bunch of wonky 18th century classical music theory classes, right? Yeah.

And so we think about chords and melodies and lyrical themes, and we're not necessarily sure that this applies well to looking at a song like Stay. So we want to enlist you as our resident experts because when I listen to your music, it embraces all sorts of other kinds of things that don't fit within our vocabulary. So what we're going to do, on the first half,

we're going to listen to Stay. You're going to help us break this thing down. We have a crazy theory that we want to test on you and see if we're on point. And then we basically want you to correct us. In the second half, we're going to talk about your new single, I Miss You, and break that down. Cool. Sound good? Sounds good.

So the first thing we should do is drop the needle and listen to stay. To pass you by, wind to change, we'll change your mind. I could give a thousand. We don't have to grow up. We could stay forever young. Dipping on my sofa, drink and rum and cola underneath the rising sun. All right, Nate, we're going to go to you because I think you have a wild musical theory that you want to throw at us. We do. We have concocted our own interpretation of this song. I think in part that's due to Alessia Kara's vocals on this track are just so impassioned.

I mean, like with everything she sings, there's just so much like immediate drama and pathos in there. So to us, this song is kind of a dramatic scene, like a play of sorts. And each section is kind of a different stage in the theater. We start here in the verse. And we have the first lyric we get is waiting for the time to pass you by. And we have a melody that's kind of like swan is how we think about it, right? It has this triplet field. da da da da da da da da da da da da da da right could i play that on the piano at this point the urgency of the song the drama

hasn't really kicked in yet we have kind of this this sad these sad overtones but it doesn't our protagonist doesn't seem that stressed out i have to say when i first heard this song i had no idea where it was going to go i heard this sort of swinging thing it was slow it was sort drawn out and i thought this was going to be maybe a ballad right so i feel like were being set up with something slightly misleading. Yes, and I think that's really revealed with one of the most fantastic and unexpected moments of this song, which happens right between the first verse and I guess the pre-chorus, we have timbale fill.

Make it on your own, but we don't have to grow up. We can stay forever. Love that Phil. Oh, good. Yeah, and I mean that timbalet fill just comes out of nowhere. after out of like a different song almost. Yeah. And all of the sudden, it's like the pivot point to, it's like the portal to a new dimension.

It's like the wardrobe in Narnia, right? It takes you into a new world. Yeah, I think what Zed does best is play with your expectations. And if he gets you thinking that the song is going to be one way, then he'll just change it up. And I think that's what any good artist does is make you expect one thing and then give you another, you know? Yeah. So, all right, this is the insider info we were looking for. Gray, this is good. And then everything else changes too, right? We have this like thicker rhythmic texture and the melody

that was kind of swung and like a little lackadaisical. Now all the sudden gets very straight and a little tense even staccato. So we've gone at once to like this tropical world where we can imagine drinking rum and cola underneath the rising sun. The Timbali took us there, but it also raised the stakes of the drama of this song a little bit. It sounds a little more urgent, a little more concerned, maybe. And at this point, we should probably step back and talk about what this song is about in general. And it's right there in the title, Stay. The song is like a plea, right?

It's like, don't go. Stay. All you have to do is stay. It's really, I mean, by the time we get to the chorus, I just kind of spoiled it. But by the time we get to the chorus, it's like, it's pretty heavy. I hear a lot of desperation in Alessiakara's voice. I like how you talk about it like a scene where I feel like the first verse, they're sort of sitting down in the room. And then the pre-chorus, when it starts to speed up, they're both standing up and one's starting to walk towards the door.

And then... I think something that's really cool recently with pop music because a lot of vocals have been very, very specific. Yeah. I feel like that's what's working a lot recently. It's really cool. I like it. Tell me more about that. Like, in terms of the sounds you choose?

In terms of lyrics, really. Oh, gotcha. Closer, for instance, it's very specific in the way that they talk about the storyline of the song, which is really cool like that. There's a lot of powerful visual imagery that you can conjure. Even though oftentimes these lyrics are fairly universal,

sitting by a beach drinking rum and cola. It could be any beach. It could be any kind of cola, your preference. You automatically have an image of what it is for yourself. But it's still a lot more specific than a lot of songs that I can think of where because of how vague the lyrics are and how metaphorical they are, it actually makes you focus more on the rhythms and the melodies and less on what they're actually saying because it doesn't perfectly make sense.

And that's probably what they were going for. But I think music also goes through phases and we're probably in a very specific phase of pop music, I'd say. Don't spoil the other half of the song. No, no, you're totally into it. You totally got it. My bad. Yeah, we're moving from the highly specific here. And then when we get to the chorus, all of a sudden,

we've become a lot more universal, I think. Right. Now I see this as another one of these Zed tricks, where he does the last thing you expect. When we get to the chorus, everything drops out except the vocals. And again, it's another one of these startling moves. And I think it's like not at all

what you expect a chorus to do, which is like expand. This one contracts and gets so dry. Yeah, I think what's most impressive about that part is how good it sounds and there's only three elements just at the beginning of that. It's crazy that you can have that little amount of elements

and it sounds that good. And we've come so. far. Yeah. Wait. Yeah. What would those three elements be? The vocoder, the synth, and then the vocal, just those three things.

At the beginning, at least before the drum line comes in. They're all kind of, they're all blurred together. Yeah, they're blurred together to sound like one. But yeah, it's the lead vocal, the vocoder, and the bass under it all. Can you explain what a vocoder is for listeners that may not be as familiar? So basically a vocoder is an effect that you. you could put on a vocal that will turn it into a chord essentially. So you can feed it any votes you'd like or any chords that you want and then it will play that

chord essentially through the voice of the person. Back to what Michael was saying. The three elements, just as a general role with music, anyone who's tried to make music or I think it applies to any art, it's really easy to put a lot of things in there. but it's really hard to have just very few amount of elements and make it still sound good because that means each of the elements needs to sound amazing, right? It's easy to confuse the audience by just throwing 50 layers at them,

but by making it sound really good with three layers is actually really, really hard to do. So props is dead for that. There's nowhere to hide in this chorus. Yeah, exactly. I see what you mean it's a bold move and one that pays off if you're buying this dramatic structure because all of a sudden it's like our singer is

kind of just yelling into the void and there's no response to her this entreaty to stay just stay she says and then she gets nothing back she just gets to this deafening silence a kind of silence that i don't encounter on a lot of pop songs you'd almost i think if i were driving the car i'd be like wait did my rate i just like lose my radio signal like something but it's very okay so so now we're in the chorus it's very effective and then what comes next. Charles, why don't you take the next section? So we've

called this the pop drop. I don't know what you all think about it because you write them. We've never read. Well, we kind of tried to write one. We weren't very good at it. But what we've seen in Zed's music and some of your music and lots of stuff on the charts as well is this as Nate was saying, this chorus which is

diminutive. It's small. There's not a lot happening. There's few elements. And the big moment is afterwards and it's kind of like a big EDM drop. But it acts kind of like as a super chorus. And so we called it the pop drop. Yeah. Sure.

What do you guys call that? Well, it's kind of tricky because, like you said, what people used to call the chorus, everything's been shifted back essentially. Right. So what used to be the pre-chorus or the build or something like that is where we place the chorus. And then after that, where you would usually have the loudest, biggest part of the song that used to be called the chorus. Now we do our EDM thing. guess and make it even bigger. So what you were getting at before where there's just like an empty

void and there's just so much silence, I think the drop also represents that in a way because if you look at the off beats of the two and the four, so literally there's only one sound playing on the end of two and the end of four and it's so alone and in that same way that you were saying Alessia was. So I think it represents that well. Four Two Four. Yeah, reinforcing that idea of isolation.

Yeah. And in that, I mean, and Charlie and I, I don't know, we've listened to this song a lot of times. And we've kind of become fixated on this sound that now I see as another one of these Zed surprises, which is this like deep male voice going, uh, or some approximation of that. And once again, it's like, where is that cover? like from another song that's from like a, I don't know, like a hip hop dance track or something. And what's it doing in there? Yeah. What does it do? I guess it keeps us on our toes kind of as as listeners in a way. In my head, the on is kind of like the response to the fill. It's just like, oh, like that was a great fill. It's great. Yeah. What do you think the likelihood is that that is actually Alessia Kara's vocal downpitched? It's not. It's not. It's actually Alessia Cara's vocal downpitched. It's not. It's not. It's not. It just wouldn't be smart to say. It's not. It's not. It's not that it's top secret. It just wouldn't be smart to say. It's. I don't know, for sure.

It's good to have secrets. Well, okay, so at this point, we are, I think we can deploy some of our, like, classical harmonic analysis in this song, because the chord progression here

is kind of interesting. Charlie and I were talking about how this song doesn't have a lot of, like, tonal clarity. There seems to be some ambiguity as to where the root of this song is, like what the tonic Yeah, we're not sure what key we're in. Yeah, it's like we can't decide we seem to alternate whether the song is in A flat major or F minor.

And I think part of the reason for that is because during this chorus, this oscillating chord progression kind of, that moves from D flat major to E flat major to F minor, back to E flat major. and then at this point you would hope to get some clarity and it would either go to F or A flat, but it doesn't. It just keeps going back to T-flat, E-flat, F-minor, E-flat. So it seems like this very intentional choice not to give the listener any firm ground to stand on, I guess, harmonically speaking.

And maybe it's really stretching, but what they're talking about here is the clock is ticking, right? And it's almost like the pen. of the chord progression going back and forth and back and forth like a clock and you don't know where it's going to go. Yeah. Which is then reinforced by the literal sound of a clock that we get towards the end of the course. Could another songwriter decide to take this into a happy, rejoiceful place where, oh, the person

actually stays and it lands on the major key? And it could have gone there. It would have not been as satisfying because we would have had a definitive answer. That's what's so interesting about being a producer is you. kind of have the final say in a way because no matter what someone wrote with lyrics or melody, the way that you re-voice it with chords and with the production that you make completely changes the intent of the song. Or it can at least. Well said. Yeah, this is an interesting question. Not just with this song, but with a lot of the songs Charlie and I talk about, it's kind of an open

question whether the choices that we interpret as having a lot of meaning, in this case, like a lot of dramatic narrative meaning are, I guess, predetermined or sort of conceived at the outset or whether they're more improvisational and accidental and kind of shaped in the studio or in the process of recording. Without speaking like every song, just in your experience, is there, are you like on more on one side or the other? Do you like outline it all at the beginning or is it all in the process? Everything's an accident. everything. It's like the title of your memoir right there. Yeah, well it's an accident but it's it usually happens beforehand. It's not something that like we halfway through your song are like oh that actually

would have sounded better. No, it's usually like the beginning when it comes to chords. Right. Yeah. Like a lot of the time in pop music songs are written by someone else. Sure. And that's just that's a very standard thing and they might have had their own meaning on what type of song it is. And they have, they probably wrote it over their chords. But then with modern music, a lot of the times it takes someone else like a producer

who then takes that and then does whatever they think sounds best. And a lot of the time, it's totally separate from what the original writer originally intended, but they think it's even cooler. Yeah. Like that, we've had that happen lots of times where we've gotten vocals from

writers and they're like, wow, I never thought of it that way, but that's even cooler than what I thought. Yeah. I enjoy that because it then gives us permission as listeners to further interpret what's going on. Obviously, Nate and I come up with these absurd theories about what is this song about. And really, it's how do we hear it? It's not what the intent is, like the songwriter or the producer.

It's just, it's out in the ether now. Yeah. You're never going to hear the original intent anyway. I bet if you even spoke to the person who wrote any song, they can't even tell you exactly what something's about. Right. It's always about intent. There's just these layers of how things get morphed over time.

Imagine how it is with movies. It's probably even crazier. With thousands of people participating. Yeah, there's just so many people editing it along the way. So we've taken this song, which, as we were saying, we are applying sort of our view of a sort of more traditional, classical approach to breaking it down. What are we missing? Well, I think what you were just talking about is partially what you're missing,

because I think a lot of people scribe too much intent that there was a plan all along and that we, as a producer, you make some decision based on something ideological, but it's usually that something sounds really, really cool to do one way. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I feel like that for us, but I'm not sure if most producers go that deep when it comes to making sounds. Yeah, you're probably right. It's probably just whatever sounds the best. Right. Because that's kind of what you know. Yeah. We're just sound nerds, really. Yeah. It's like a different breed of person. Which I guess then explain. this. Yeah, that's like one of our favorite parts of the song. Yeah. And it's just literally a really

tasty fill. So, right, right. I went for a hike up in Griffith Park the other day and I was just listening to this song and your song on loop. And what was interesting is these, these little moments were the ones I just got totally stuck in. Yeah. And the song would repeat and I would be waiting for that little second to come and boom, it hits you. And it's just, it's so powerful. And like you said, it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily have to have meaning. It just feels awesome. Yeah, sure. I like to think of it as what's cool about producers in this day and age is like they, even though they don't sing and they're not like the main focus per se, if you're just listening as a regular listener, because usually you're like, oh, it's a singer, it's their song. But like that's kind of like their voice. Like they have these really cool fills or these really cool chords, correct chords, everything. Sure. Though I would also throughout the possibility that you think of yourselves as sound nerds who gravitate towards certain fills. for their tastiness quotient.

But perhaps unconsciously, you're also drawn to them because they link with the message and meaning of the song in some subtle way that you're not even like necessarily aware of. Maybe I'm getting too Freudian now. That's totally possible. No, that's totally possible.

So I actually think this is a great bridge into talking about all your music because you've worked with Zed. There are some similarities between these songs in terms of being in a similar BPM. There's some harmonic. ambiguity. There's a female vocal. But these songs are totally different, totally their own. So we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to go into your song.

I miss you. Yeah. And see another side. Cool. Cool. Convierte your passion in a new business with Shopify and bathe records of ventas with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world. Has heard of the best. The incredible system of Pago of Shopify facilitates the company on your website on the website on the website, in the

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Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Welcome back to Switchedon Pop on the first half. We broke down Zed and Alessi Carra's stay with our guest, Kyle and Michael from Gray. And now what I want to do is do a segment called Off the Charts, where we take a song that we want to see rising on the charts real soon, and that is your song. I miss you. I was saying earlier, I can't tell you how many times I've listened to this tune. And it's funny. Oftentimes, I'll listen to it one time through, and I'll be like, next time it through, I really want to pay attention to the second verse. And then I'll get totally distracted in a great way. It takes me in all sorts of directions, and it doesn't get boring, I think, because it's just constantly building. So I can listen to this on the repeat, and it just continues to entertain me. And I was saying on the first half, there are some similarities here between our first track, a sort of similar BPM. We have a lead female vocal. It features this EDM pop drop sound.

It has this non-resolving chord progression. But I think this thing is entirely its own. And I think Nate and I were most blown away by your production and your use of texture and gesture, elements that we don't think about as much, and honestly, have confused us. So what I want to do is we're going to drop the needle, take a listen to the track, and we need your help in figuring out what the heck is going on here. Cool. Let's do it. Just because I don't make a thing about it. Don't mean that I'll never think about it.

Because I do. Just because I learned how to live without you. Don't mean that I ever reach you. Yeah. After all that we've been through, I never told you that I... Beautiful stuff. Yeah. Thank you.

Thanks. When I heard this, I kept trying to find something to grab onto. trying to apply the way that I think about music and constantly break things down, and it kept failing. And there was only one thing I could find. Okay. And this is an honest compliment that I am confused, because I really think that you're employing a whole language of electronic music and doing it in a way, which makes it very organic. And I don't know what I'm hearing. Responding to what you said about how you were listening to the song and you couldn't pick up anything, I just,

just want to say that's probably because we aren't as good as Zed at at simplifying things. So like us and Zed came up from the same way where we grew up listening to like metal and rock and a lot more complicated types of music, Prague metal and things like that. But he's older than us and he's better at simplifying things. So I think a lot of that is that our music is probably still a little bit too complicated, but that's okay. On the other hand, maybe you're embracing a really effective wall of sound kind of approach. Sure. Because there are moments here where subconsciously,

I feel the music. And then consciously as I try to narrow in, I'm like, whoa, whoa, what is that? There's one thing that I know I'm hearing. I'm hearing some underlying riff that seems to go throughout the entire song. You can hear it in the opening. I know there's a guitar that eventually does that,

and I don't know if you can manipulate that guitar. turn it into something else. After all that we've been through, I never told you that I... I'm looking at a book on my bookshelf, which is the study of orchestration. And this is what I was thinking about, was that you have taken something simple that runs throughout the entire thing, and you've orchestrated it in so many different places in different ways that it sounds new every single time. This is a really cool opportunity because we don't really talk about orchestration so much

Like in the course of the song, we start with this unknown sound that we don't know what to call it. What are we going to call it, though, just for our purposes right now? It's actually a Calimba. A Calimba. A Calimba. A Calimba. Yeah. What is a Columbah?

You hear it a lot in pop music nowadays. I would say like the sound of 2016 and 2017 is the Colimba in pop music. Like, don't want to know from Room 5, for instance. Yeah, totally. At the beginning. Yeah. That's actually an African. thumb piano like an imbura like a gourd a dry gourd hollowed and and attached little little metal

pieces that you play with your thumbs and i think the fact that you just called it the sound of 2016 is like fascinating because there's an earthwind and fire song probably from the 70s called columbus story where the lyrics the song starts like i saw it in a store one day and i thought it'd make me play future music for all of you so it's like Ooh. A prophecy. You were four shot out in the 70s. That's very cool.

Prophecy from Maurice White back in the 70s. Right. I'm guessing that your Colomba is actually a sample pack that you're playing on your computer. You're not actually playing the Klimba. We went out and bought like probably 16 and then tried them all out. And then you sampled each one. Yeah, 100%.

Nate, do you want to take us through our ideas of orchestration? So this Calimba melody, this Calimba riff that we hear in the beginning transforms when we get to the chorus into an acoustic guitar. So at once it's kind of familiar and new, and then when we get to the post-chorus or the pop drop, I guess, it's there, and then it's like all these different instruments start to contribute to that riff. We have acoustic guitar, we have Kalimba, and I think some synth bass as well are all kind of touching on that same riff.

So this is to us like such fascinating like thread of continuity moving through the whole song, even as the song like radically changes from section to section, there's still this presence that is constant throughout. Maybe it's that presence of sorrow and how I miss you. Sure, Charles. I think it's what if that's what allows us to have the. little of a complexity that we do without getting too far off. It's because of that motif. Yeah, you stick to one thing and you just work it and work it and work it. Because when we get then

to the pop drop section, Nate and I were listening just the other night and I'm like, Nate, it's in there. It's like, no, it's not. I'm like, yes, it is. It's in there. I guess in one respect, like, we do see kind of an analog to what some classical musicians do. And to give a little bit further detail of how Nate and I think about orchestration. We do a bit that we call classical masters. Charles, coming correct. Yes, we see kind of an analog in classical music in terms of the way composers sometimes re-orchestrate their other works.

That is, just like in your piece, the underlying melody is the same, but the instrumentation of it keeps changing. So I thought for one cool example of this, we could go first to the piece by Modeste Moserzhki. from the late 1800s called Pictures at an exhibition. And we can hear kind of the main theme of this piece for piano. And then the great French composer Maurice Ravelle comes along a few decades later

and takes this piece for piano and re-orchestrates it for a symphony orchestra. And then in probably a century or so after the original, the rock band Emerson Lake and Palmer. No. Do a Prague rock version of the same piece, re-orchestrated this time for a rock organ trio. Sometimes those Prague guys really actually just wanted to be in an orchestra, right? Yeah. I like this example because it shows the same melody over centuries transforming as different composers.

Basically, like, keep the melody exactly intact. Like, it doesn't change at all. All that changes are the instruments that play it from piano, in the original to brass and strings and the second to rock drums and electric organ in the third and every time it does the quality of that melody

changes dramatically in the way like the meaning we draw from it and the emotional resonance of it changes so much I guess in I miss you you're doing the same thing but over the course of three minutes in one single song and it's brilliant because every time that riff

returns whether it's Calimba acoustic guitar or this kind of melange of instruments. It has a different meaning, even though you've heard it before. It has a different meaning. It's very smart. So that's the classical kind of connection, I think, here.

I think also when you, one thing that's really interesting to do is take one thing on its own and then see how that makes you feel at the beginning of a song and then take that same thing but put something else over as a counterpoint.

And that's how, in the drop, we have that melody over, that bass now, what's become a bass, that was the original melody. I used to know you better. Better than anyone. Now I don't know you at all. And for me, it makes me feel differently.

Yeah. Re-contextualizes it somehow. So did this song start from that riff? Yeah. Yeah. Yes. We got it. Yeah. It's the one thing that I picked up.

It took me, seriously, I think, 15 lessons to realize that that was going on. Just because I was so taken by all of the other movement and orchestration that was happening. So how did that riff start? Usually we completely rewrite chords. If we're given a top line,

we always like to write our own chords. But in this instance, we are given this with a guitar playing that exact rhythm and that melody. We tried to write other things, but this was so good that we had to use it. So we actually, yeah, just wrote the song around that riff.

Tell me about how you think about where you want to take it. What is that process of trying on different elements? Some producers like to just make a rough sketch of a song, of the whole song, and just generally get the sounds out, and then they'll go and refine them later. We work the complete opposite, where we won't move on from the first 10 seconds or the first four bars until the first four bars sound amazing, and then we'll move on, you know? One of the first things that we did actually in this song was we realized,

if you listen to the intro or to the first verse, the vocals are in. in triplets. And growing up, I was always told, you know, learning drums that you can never put 16th notes over triplets because they don't line up right. Oh, yeah. But in this case, it worked. The drums were playing, doot, dot, dum, which is a 16th note rhythm, but the vocals are in triplets. So if you play that, it's actually really weird. Yeah. That's pretty hip. I did not even notice that.

It sounds really natural. It's syncopated in a really cool way. Yeah. Anyway, so that's what we started with the Zad idea. Yeah. That's what we call a little bit of polymeter. Sure. Yeah.

One of the things I'm really amazed by in this track are, I was saying earlier, the gestures and textures. And there's all these sounds that kind of like the Zed track with the, uh, like, whoa, whoa, whoa. What is that? I have to listen to that again. What's this?

It's a bow and arrow. It's a bow and arrow. It's basically like a medieval bone arrow sample, and it is actually hitting flesh. We have this pack of movie sounds that movie audio guys for movies use, you know? And one thing that's really important to us is that our sounds sound different from anyone else's,

and that's a good way is to use things that aren't made for music. So this is literally made for a medieval scene like Game of Thrones style. Yeah. And we just found a bow and arrow hitting flesh and it sounded cool. So... What does that do to the meaning of this song? It doesn't do it. Okay, that gets out what I was saying before,

which is that it doesn't have anything to do it. Right, right. It's literally just sounded cool and we like it. Just like a texture. Yeah. I think what it does for the song for me is it just raises the stake. Sure. It takes us to a new place.

All right, and we're in a new spot. Actually, it is cinematic in that way. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. We try to think of our music not as music. Totally. It's more that the music is a part of the whole thing.

And that's why a lot of our, a lot of what we focus on is texture and ambience and where we are. We like to know where we're at. So we'll create an ambience of that. And we'll put a lot of quotes in our songs and things that add more than just the music. The music is just a piece of it. Yeah. What do you mean by quotes in the song? We have a few songs, a few remixes, and a few of our new originals have quotes from different, I don't know, intellectuals, I guess, like Carl Sagan or something like that, right?

That perfectly fit the theme of what the song was talking about. Anyway. Cool. Okay, what's this? I'm trying to remember what we used to make. Very industrial. Yeah. I think it's just really, I think it's the snare that we made for this other song that we never end up using.

and it's just like really heavily affected with, I don't know what, I can't remember. As a producer, snares are like gold. Yeah. Like a good snare is like currency, you know, it's so important, right? So like producers will give out a lot of things, but usually they hold on to their snares. Yeah, no, snares are like the thing for producer. How much time do you spend thinking about your drums? A lot.

Yeah. It really, really matters that your drums sound good. So we don't, I don't know what that is. It's something cool. It doesn't matter. Sounds great. Yeah. I think that's the theme.

They're trying to protect their trade secrets. No, yeah. I wish I could tell you exactly what it was, but I don't even remember. It's probably a layer of like six different things to make a snare. Right. Like we, I think one time we went into our garage and recorded a wooden paddle hitting a ping pong ball and then just use that as the reverb for a snare. Yeah.

That's actually in starving. If you listen closely, the reverb from the snare is in our garage. Yeah, hitting a ping pong ball. So there you go. Okay, there's a scoop. There's a scoop. Scoop. Wow, that's going to be all over the net.

Nice. What you're saying and reinforces this idea that the orchestration throughout this entire song is the reverb is orchestrated. It is this unique thing that you have grabbed and layered onto 10 different drums to create a single sound. And I think part of the reason why, as a listener, I'm coming away saying, what am I hearing? you're basically creating new instruments. I can't say, oh, that's the first chair of violin.

It's its own thing. And it's unique to the track. It might be a sample library that the producer uses through other things to develop a sound, but every single time you're making it just fit right in in its own perfect way. I also, I just, I love this moment at the end.

You just take that guitar and... Yeah, it's literally just stretched in Ableton. It's beautiful. Yeah. just sounds wonderful. So you got this track sound, like you got some lyrics, you got some underlying guitar. What are you thinking about in terms of meeting that initial idea with all the production elements that you're bringing into it? How are you marrying the lyric with all of the production? I mean, I kind of get in a place where I try to imagine exactly where the vocal is

or the production. And like for this song, for instance, I don't know, it was kind of like during a rainy season and it really felt like just you're sad and you're in a car and you'd just broken up with your lover and you're just like sad and it's raining and you're drawing on a window that type of feeling like that melancholy feel and like we kind of wanted to bring it to like a cool melancholy type place like tungsten type vibe we wanted to make like a pop song that was like still really intelligent and cool in a way and all the type of like instrumentation and stuff like that kind of felt that I don't know. What do you think? Yeah. No, that sounds right.

There's almost like a synesthetic quality to the whole track where it leaves you feeling with it's like, I miss you quality. Yeah. I really enjoyed that. Yeah, it really, like I said before, it really matters to us where we are when we're making each song, which makes music videos really easy.

Awesome. Yeah, yeah. What should we be looking out for from the Brothers Gray in the near future? We are working on an EP right now and it'll be out. I mean, we keep saying it's going to be out, but it'll be out like mid-2017 for sure. Awesome. Can't wait to hear it right on. Stay tuned. Well, I am absolutely digging. I miss you. I can't wait to see more and more. I want to see it rising at the charts and lots of people listening to it. Thank you so much for breaking it down with us. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much.

Switched on Pop was produced by me, Charlie Harding. And edited by me, Nate Sloan, with the help of the talented Bill Lance. Our design, is done by Luke Harris and we are part of the wonderful Panoply network. You can find more episodes on our website, switchdonpop.com or on iTunes, where we have yet to receive a review in Rhine.

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