Making Real Music for a Fake Band

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In 2013, the playwright David Ajme was flying to a conference, listening to in-flight radio on his headphones.

And I heard this Led Zeppelin song, Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You, which I knew from when I was a kid.

And I was listening to the vocals, and I really started listening to them because I was on the plane trapped.

And I started to realize, like, wow, this is a really tempestuous, extremely emotionally intense song.

And so I started picturing in my mind's eye, like what it must have been like to be in that room when they were recording this.

I just suddenly got a picture of it in my head, and then I thought, wait a minute, what if that's the set for a play?

David's written more than half a dozen plays, all of them very different.

There's a monologue delivered by a sneering member of the upper class, a ribald riff on the 70s sitcom Three's Company, a drama set in Brooklyn's Syrian Jewish community where David was raised, and another about the last days of Marie Antoinette, co-starring a talking sheep.

With Led Zeppelin ringing in his ears, David began to imagine something realistic, grounded, set at a recording studio.

And then I thought about the content of that song, which is this weird push-pull dynamic of love and hate, because he's singing, I'm gonna leave you.

But it sounds like he's coming on to somebody, and he's also sounding like he's going insane with conflicting feelings.

And I thought, that's kind of what I want this to be.

And that's all I kind of knew at the beginning.

Off the plane, David began to flesh out this flash of an idea, to dream up characters, plot, and language for a new play.

It would be called Stereophonic, and it's about an unnamed, romantically, and musically entangled 1970s rock band recording their second album.

And as they start to record their second album,

they suddenly become insanely famous.

And so the pressures mount, the relationships start to fracture, and it's all about kind of what happens in that crucible of making an album.

David is a playwright, not a musician.

But from the start, he knew the audience would need to hear parts of that album.

That meant the play would need songs that sounded like another older time and place.

Songs that felt like they'd emerge from characters David was creating.

Songs that sounded like they might be hits.

And the play needed these songs, even if that defied the conventional wisdom of his craft.

You're not really supposed to show the expertise of the character.

That's what I learned in playwriting school.

Don't show the character's expertise.

You know, it's like an Alfred Hitchcock film.

The door closes, and who knows what's behind that door?

It's much more terrifying than anything you could see.

But like, I was like, no, I think we need to see it.

Making music like this is hard.

The work has to jump through all sorts of hoops to come across as even halfway authentic, let alone transcendent.

And if it falls short, the whole thing falls apart.

It's a tricky musical problem that other pieces of art have tried to solve.

And now, stereophonic was going to try to.

And yes, it was a throwdown.

We're going to sort of take a risk and see if we could do it.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willip Haskin.

Pop culture is full of fictional bands singing songs purpose made to capture a moment, a sound.

This music doesn't organically emerge from a scene or genre hoping to find an audience.

Instead, it has an assignment to do.

It needs to be 1960s folk music, 70s guitar rock, 80s heavy metal, 90s gangster rap, and on and on.

In this episode, we're going to use the play Stereophonic, which just opened on Broadway, as a kind of case study in how to construct songs like this.

The playwright David Ajme and his collaborator, Will Butler, formerly of the band Arcade Fire, will walk us through how they did it, how they made music that needs to capture the past, but wants to speak to the present, that has to work dramatically, but hopes to stand on its own, that must be plausible, but aspires to be something even more.

So, today on Decodering, how do you write songs from 1977?

Right now.

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okay i mean not like hello is this close enough david ajmi came into our studio earlier this year i thought so you want to be able to see everybody you want it a little bit to the side i hit my knee i'm sorry when he got the idea for his play stereophonic he knew right away it was going to be about a rock band in the 1970s and that it would need music but the songs needed to wait while he built the structure those songs would live in.

And every dramaturgical decision David made had a knock-on effect on the music.

Like, think about the image of the set that had flashed into his mind.

So I think I had the idea for the set and thinking about all the sonic opportunities of using a soundproof booth on stage and having two spaces, the control room and the sound room.

I just started to imagine, not that I knew a damn thing about recording because I didn't, but I knew that would excite me.

What you see on stage is a recording studio with the engineering board and control room in the front and a soundproof recording room visible through a window pane behind it.

The entire play takes place in these two spaces.

That meant the audience wouldn't see the band performing a whole song in concert or in front of a crowd.

They'd instead see the band hammering out parts of songs in the studio.

That decision was just one of many that would shape the songs to come.

Others came out of the research David was doing into the recording process.

In the beginning, it was really like so remedial and pathetic because it was me going, What's an engineer?

And like, what are overdubs?

And what's mixing?

And I'd read some books, and I'd just like take phrases that sounded really like professional and cool.

And then I'd like write them down and I try to insert them.

So for a long time, it was like, put more EQ on the amp, but I think that didn't make sense.

And, you know, in these books that I read, you know, they were like slicing the tape and like trying to suture everything together.

And it was excruciating.

And they were so tired.

And like, they would just do that day after day.

Like the stuff that you do, especially in this analog period.

And that was why analog was so interesting to me because it's more obstacles.

You know, it's more dramatic.

David's research also included watching documentaries about the making of great albums, like Bruce Springsteen recording Darkness on the Edge of Town.

I became fixated on this documentary style.

Like I became so fascinated by just the scale of what was happening.

So if someone was having this, like a sort of Soto Voce conversation in the corner of a studio and then someone was flicking their ash, like the flicking of the ash became extremely vivid for me.

So David wrote a script that is full of Soto Voce conversations, slow, painstaking progress, and the feeling that you're watching something private.

When you're a flying the wall in a process, it's not for you necessarily.

You get privileged access to something.

And that was the feeling I wanted to give the audience.

Another documentary that was particularly influential was D.A.

Penny Baker's film about the recording of the cast album for Stephen Sondheim's company.

Just like Elaine Stritch in that movie.

In the documentary, the actress Elaine Stritch famously cannot nail her song.

I'm just screening.

and it's too early to strain.

You see her fail over and over again.

I wanted to show process, and I wanted the process to feel granular in a way that was maybe unusual and that potentially boring.

Like, how many times do we need to hear them mess this up, you know, and repeat this one part of the song over and over and over before people go bananas?

Like, or are they going bananas in a good way in the audience?

You know?

I wanted to demystify the way art was made and I demystify people's ideas of what an artist process is.

And so many times in movies, like you see like all this success and all everyone's like, oh, I got this great idea.

And then they write it down and then they record it and then they're dancing and singing.

It's like, is it ever like that for me?

Like I'm thinking like I know, it's drudgery and it's boring.

But if making art can be grueling, watching documentaries about the process rarely is because of the people you're seeing slog through the material.

Talents like Elaine Stritch and Bruce Springsteen.

In bringing a documentary sensibility to stereophonic, David was doing something in addition to deciding on the style and mood of his work.

He was also cueing the audience about the quality of the band in his play.

After all, documentaries about the making of an album are hardly ever about an album that sucks.

And David indicated his fictional band didn't suck in another way, too.

Who's in the band?

The group, which we never actually learned the name of, consists of five people: a British couple on bass and keyboards, an American couple on guitar and vocals, and a British drummer.

They're recording in Sausalito, California, starting in 1976.

And over the course of the course of a year, as they keep recording, both couples break up and make up and break up again.

All of which might sound familiar to you if you're into the band Fleetwood Mac.

Because all of this, the nationalities, the instruments, the year, the location, and especially the making and breaking up, also describes Fleetwood Mac as it recorded the Smash album Rumors.

And if you don't love me now,

you will never love me again.

I'm going to bring up the elephant in the room.

Is Fleetwood Mac the elephant in the room?

I just have like listened to a lot of interview guys who have done and like, I feel like we're not allowed to talk about it.

And are we allowed to talk about it?

I mean, you can talk about it.

It's really not what the play is about.

It's definitely an influence, but there are many, many influences.

Just like fully superficially, there's a huge number of similarities, which obviously you're aware of.

Like, and you chose.

Right.

I chose.

So tell me about that.

Yeah.

I think, you know, I don't know.

I just,

it's weird.

Like the process when you make something, you sort of shut off the part of your brain that's super critical, or at least I do.

I have to.

And certain structural influences really took hold.

And there's something about that particular band in terms of like, like I was saying, that push-pull dynamic in

the Led Zeppelin song and the emotions, the roiling emotions.

I think it just feels like a very, and they're one of, they were one of the biggest bands in the 1970s.

By connecting the unnamed group in stereophonic to a band as big as Fleetwood Mac, David was further upping the ante, implying to anyone who could see the parallels that the band in Stereophonic was at least in the ballpark of Rumors Era Mac, one of the most beloved, obsessed over, and mythologized records and groups ever.

This was setting a high bar for a composer, and at first, David wasn't even sure where to find one.

I didn't really know any like rock band people, but I did know someone who knew the creative director of Arcade Fire, and I love Arcade Fire.

So we reached out to Arcade Fire.

And it was just a subject line question from a playwright.

Will Butler, who also joined us at our studio, is a multi-instrumentalist and former longtime member of Arcade Fire, the Grammy-winning, platinum-selling indie rock band.

I was just like, yeah, I'll meet with that guy.

Sure.

Why not?

And it was lovely.

That was nearly a decade ago.

Will was immediately into the challenge of writing realistic music for a fictional 1970s band.

But he had to wait until David wrote the script and gave him some even more precise requirements.

There's a big section in the play where the drummer, I wanted him to have a huge meltdown over his drums.

And I was like, what would make him have a meltdown?

And what would he do to fix it?

I was like, oh, they're fighting over the drums.

This is the drum hit they're fighting over.

This is what happened before the drum hit.

This is what the bass was doing when the drums were, you know, just, it was kind of like just, you have a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle and 600 of the pieces are done and there's 400 pieces left.

Putting the puzzle together was a challenge.

The music Will was charged with creating needed to be performed by the actors live on stage.

It needed to fit into specific scenes and conflicts.

It needed to hold an audience's attention as it was painstakingly assembled.

And it needed to shoulder the implication that it was in the vicinity of an act like Fleetwood Mac without sounding like a cover band.

It is like a very silly problem to put in the play.

it's like, and then they play a song that is plausibly one of the great songs of the 1970s.

You're like, cool, okay, let's just do that.

But how exactly do you do that?

And how do you do it well?

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So, before we get back to David and Will and the music they created for Stereophonic, I want to look more closely at previous attempts to do what they're doing.

Make art for artists who don't really exist.

And I want to start with an example that did its job very effectively.

Doing that thing you do.

The movie That Thing You Do was made in 1996, but it's about the meteoric rise of a 1960s band called the Wonders, who are propelled to fame by one hit single.

This song was written by the late Adam Schlesinger, and it sounds period-accurate, like a song from the early 1960s.

Moreover, it's so infectious and catchy, such an earworm that even when you wish it would stop ringing in your head, you have no doubts that it could send a group of unknowns up the charts.

And in fact, the song made it onto the Billboard Hot 100 when the movie was released.

Now, just think about this film if the song were worse, less accurate, less sticky.

It'd be harder to believe the whole thing.

Every time you saw someone on screen who was wowed by it, shrieking crowds and panting executives and impressed radio DJs, you'd think, I don't know, that song isn't that good.

And so a lot of fictions sidestep questions of quality.

They keep it entirely off screen.

They don't let you hear the song or see the painting or listen to the poem or read the book that's supposed to be so fantastic.

Or they keep expectations lower.

In the movie Almost Famous, a teenage journalist goes on tour with the fictitious 70s rock band Stillwater, who have a single called Feverdog climbing the charts.

Feverdog, which was written by Nancy Wilson of the rock band Heart, does sound like a muscular, Led Zeppelin-ish guitar rock jam from the 70s.

We come to understand, along with the kid journalists, the band is deeply flawed as individuals and as a whole.

Don't do it

to make friends with people who are trying to use you to

further the big business desire

to glorify worthless rock stars like Stillwater.

Feverdog doesn't and doesn't need to make Stillwater sound like the best band in the world because they're not supposed to be.

There's another way to take some pressure off of these songs.

It's when their primary purpose isn't to be awesome, it's to be funny.

The bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushion.

That's what I said.

This is Spinal Tap, is a send-up of the absurd excesses of heavy metal, featuring a bunch of musically spot-on parodies.

My baby fits me like a flesh took sea.

Spinal Tap has inspired dozens of other musical spoofs of everything from gangster rap to country music.

Life's a race.

And I'm in it to win it.

And I walk as damn hard as I please.

How do I walk, boys?

And the better the music in these movies, the catchier, the more accurate, the more effective and funny they are.

But the whole ridiculousness of a parody and the way you're never entirely subsumed by the story because you're always thinking about what it's spoofing creates some slack for the music, gives it some space.

The songs don't have to stand on their own.

But sometimes a piece of fiction just comes right out and says, What you're about to hear is great.

Last year, Amazon aired a series called Daisy Jones and the Six about the making of a smash 1970s rock record that, yes, also bears some resemblance to Fleetwood Mac's rumors.

The show cost $140 million, and the songs were written by musicians including Phoebe Bridgers and Marcus Mumford.

And they were fine, a little too polished, a little too purpose-made, but totally decent, which in this context is not quite good enough.

As one review put it, a narrative hinging on transcendent music is undone when the songs are just pretty good.

It's an example of how close music like this can get to sounding like it's supposed to without elevating the project it's a part of.

But sometimes it can do worse than that.

And to really see this, I want to step away from music for a second.

Live from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, it's Friday night in Holland.

I love it when he does that.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was a TV drama created by Aaron Sorkin and set behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live-esque sketch comedy show.

Sorkin plus SNL plus a cast that included Matthew Perry of Friends helped make Studio 60 by far the most anticipated series of 2006.

I wrote about TV back then and trust me, people were excited.

And then the show started airing and we got to see the supposedly hilarious show within the show, which included topical celebrity parodies.

Tom Tom Cruise, what causes depression?

Have you studied the history of psychiatrist?

I have not.

Well, then you don't know what you're talking about.

If you hear this and you're thinking maybe it was funny in context, it wasn't.

The Studio 60 sketches were not good.

Not every sketch on the real Saturday Night Live is good either, but these didn't really stack up to the worst ones.

Because Aaron Sorkin didn't seem to care that much about being funny.

He wanted to write about serious issues and tell you what to think about Tom Cruise.

But this was supposed to be a show about a sketch comedy series.

The main characters were supposed to be comedic geniuses.

There kind of needed to be some comedy.

And so, Studio 60 only lasted for one season.

That's the risk when you show an audience fictional art that's supposed to be great.

Whether it's a sketch comedy show or a rumors level rock album, you have to get it right or you lose the audience.

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So I want to return now to Stereophonic and the challenge facing its creators.

The playwright David Ajume and his collaborator, Will Butler, had decided to go the perilous route of actually writing original music and showing its creation to the audience.

That music had to do a lot of work.

It had to serve the story in David's play.

The music has to do something.

And if it has to make the hair in the back of my neck stand up, then I have to say if it's not happening.

And Will totally got that.

Will also got that the songs needed to feel like they were written written by David's characters.

And so he had to really know those characters.

Over the years, as David kept rewriting, Will pored over the scripts and watched the show evolve at every workshop.

And then I would go home and think about it and write it instead of the piano and try to play a thing.

He wanted what he was playing around with to reflect the time it was supposed to come from, but also the time in which it would be heard.

Right now.

And make something that feels like it's from then, but also feels like it's from now, but also feels like it's from always.

You know, it's kind of a funny puzzle to make.

As he assembled that puzzle, Will had a really key insight.

Instead of only turning to 70s bands for inspiration, he wanted to turn to what would have inspired a 70s band itself.

You're not trying to copy 1976.

Like if you live in 1976, you like listened to the white album when you were a teenager.

If you're a British drummer in 1976, you grew up listening to 45s from Stacks Records and stuff like that.

In the 70s, you're still ripping off Little Richard.

And you're like still thinking about Abbey Road and you're still doing all these things, but it sounds like the 70s because you're recording on a board in the 70s and the harmonic information ends up being in the 70s, but you're not trying to copy what's happening right then.

You're trying to like summon all of the decades before.

There's one crucial song Will had to write that I want to focus on.

It's called Masquerade.

Ultimately, it's the only song that the audience hears all the way through from start to finish, but not right away because the band is struggling with it.

You have to hear the start of the song like seven times and then you have to hear the whole song and then you have to hear the second half of the song again and that's the composition.

Because they keep messing it up.

Yeah.

So they keep going back to the beginning.

It's like take they start with take 34 and it just keeps going and you have to enjoy that.

The character who's supposed to have written the song is named Peter.

He's a gifted, driven and controlling guitarist who ultimately takes over as lead producer on the record.

And all of that was a clue to how the song would start.

Will showed us on a guitar he brought to our studio.

So he's just a guitar player.

So it's like, let's, There needs to be like guitar riffs.

Like, it needs to be like someone who compulsively plays something, like, how Slash is always picking up guitar and playing doodie doo doo dee doo dee.

And it's kind of like how Zeppelin is just always doing weird medieval journey songs.

Peter's songs are very medieval.

Yeah, he likes to journey to the medieval places.

And it's like just a riff

and

what are the drums doing?

It's like a little bit disco.

It's like a little bit

on the hi-hat.

It's a little bit of Wee Will Rock you.

It's a little bit of Led Zeppelin, John Donham, just like meat and potatoes and muscle.

The bass line wants to be a little bit country, like it's a little bit rockabilly, a little bit post-buddy hall-y.

There's a line in the play where Peter's like, keep it simple, roots and fifths.

So this is one of the songs where it's like, yeah, I'm going to just groove.

I'm not going to like make it too fancy.

Got my ticket to the masquerade.

Sold it sold and the money paid.

I mean, I knew all along that the songs are full of harmony and that it's two and three part harmony.

Grab my bag and I'm on my way.

These are all people that were teenagers in the 50s or the 60s, so that's their point of reference.

And it's like, oh, they were really into the Buffalo Springfield record.

Besides sonically desiring it and desiring it in my life, in general, wanting beautiful harmonies in all my songs, it also does a lot of character work.

To see two people function together beautifully is so dramatic that no matter what other words come out of your face, then when you hear them sing, you're like, oh, that's why Simon and Garfunkel did it for so long, even though they hated each other, because it's like, it's self-evident.

Will wanted that kind of harmonic self-evidence in stereophonic.

But getting it wasn't just a matter of composing and arranging.

It was also a matter of casting.

The band in Stereophonic is made up of five actors, none of whom were professional musicians.

They had just seven weeks of rehearsal before the play was initially staged off Broadway last year.

That's seven weeks to sound like a band that had been together for years.

Seven weeks for the three vocalists to sound like they'd been singing together for years.

Day one of working on the song, it was just like tears of joy, like it's going to work out.

The way they sang together, you were like, oh, these people have sung together in Madison Square Garden.

These people have sung together for 100 nights on tour.

And the lyrics they're singing together are about love and loss, temptation, and obsession.

The masquerade might be a party or a show or a dark underworld.

Or it might be a metaphor for the masks and make-believe of relationships or for fame.

Or maybe a masquerade just sounds like a good, sexy time.

Whatever you think it means.

The lyrics and the instrumentation and the harmonies.

They all add up to this.

And I keep moving on through the dark.

Traveled many miles and I love to stop a while.

But

nothing shouts gonna keep us apart.

Why, why, why, why, why?

Why won't the sun rise?

Why, why, why, why, why?

Can't I forget your eyes?

And then there's a bridge.

Promises I made

were made of glass.

Gathered all the shots to bring to you.

I lit a candle and I prayed before the night.

The bridge ends with a far-out keyboard sound, played by the band member Holly.

Yeah, there's kind of like a harpsichord-esque keyboard solo that's a little bit prog.

It's like a little bit like trying to be like a fake Bach thing, but like a bit of a dumbed-down Bach thing where like Holly was playing some Bach riff and Peter's like, that's great, but it's too fancy.

Like, can you make it a little bit dumber?

Which is, I mean, that's what Prague music is.

Because we were making a band, as you do it, you like feel silly, but you're also like, this isn't very satisfying, though.

And then when you go back to the song,

it does the thing that a bridge does, where you're like, oh, yeah, the riff.

Like, back to the riff.

Like, oh, yeah, oh, cool.

Yeah, I'm on a journey.

Oh, yeah, back to the riff.

And then the end is trying to like the songs in 1976, and then it goes into a it's like

I'll see you when I get there.

I'm gonna see you when I get there.

I'll see you when I get there.

I'm gonna see you when I get there.

I'll see you when I get there.

I feel like at the end of this song, you want to feel like 1977 is coming.

Like, you're a little bit like the next song could be Devo, or the next song could be Fleetwood Mac, or the next song could be the new Beyoncé Country album.

Like, you want it to feel like anything could happen at the end of this song.

I saw Stereophonic at the end of last year and I really liked it and I really liked the music.

The next day I emailed the publicist to ask if I could listen to the songs all by themselves.

But sometimes when I'm listening to music that's this essentially referential, I start to question why.

Why are we always looking back?

Why are we always mucking around in the same pool, returning to the same well?

We have the original music.

Do we really need more backwards-facing culture, riffing on the familiar?

But every piece of music riffs on what we already have, on the songs and sounds that came before.

The songs we've been talking about may not marshal those influences to try and create something that sounds new.

They try to make us see and hear in a new way.

What stereophonic in particular is trying to do is to get us to see past the myth of the great famous celebrity rock and roll band.

It wants instead to center the labor, the thousands of tedious, painstaking, earthbound hours that go into making songs that are worth caring about.

To see all the effort expended to sound effortless.

Stuff is good when people just keep doing it.

Like every, we all just kept doing it.

Obviously, there's just a great amount of skill, but just like

the humility to be like, okay, yeah, let's edit this.

Okay, yeah, let's throw this out.

Okay, yeah, let's try it.

Well, I mean, that's kind of the play.

Exactly.

Throughout Stereophonic, there's a character named Diana who's coming into her own, learning to stand up to her partner, to stand up for herself, to trust herself as a musician.

She brings a song to the band, a song that in reality has been worked over and on for years.

So in the moment, in the play,

it can just sound like the beginning of something.

This is the song that Diana brings in, and she plays it for Peter, and she's nervous, and she's playing the piano, and it's

Sunday morning,

and the

lies fine.

Hold on, let me figure out how to play it.

It works that way.

This song was designed to be played by someone who doesn't quite know how to play it.

Sunday morning,

and the

light is fine

In the beating of a bird's wing

I come alive

I was dreaming

of a love song

But what good is

what good are dreams when the wind starts blowing

Nothing forgotten Nothing forgiven when the night comes to an end,

like the bird on the window sill,

I tremble

through the passing shadow.

Close my eyes and count to ten

until

I'm in the bright light,

forgetting my name

who shadows our lives

familiar by its strange.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

This episode was written by me, produced by Max Friedman, and edited by Evan Chung.

We produced Decoderang with Katie Shepard.

Derek John is executive producer.

Merrick Jacob is senior technical director.

The band in Stereophonic includes Sarah Pidgeon, whose voice you're hearing right now, Tom Pasinka, Juliana Canfield, Will Brill, and Chris Stack.

Stereophonic is now playing on Broadway and the cast album will be available May 10th, 2024.

I'd like to thank Daniel Aachen, Marie Bashara, Blake Zedell, and Nate Sloan.

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See you in two weeks.