Lorde - Sober

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh, Hirway.

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This episode contains explicit language. Lord just put out a new song and announced that she has a new album coming out this June.

She's also touring in the fall with some past Song Exploder guests like Blood Orange and Empress Of as support.

And so hearing all of this news these days, I thought it would be nice to revisit her Song Exploder episode from 2017.

She came over to the studio and I have a very cute photo of her playing with my dog from from right before we recorded the interview. Here's her episode on Sober.

Lord is a Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, and producer. My full name is Ella Maria Lani Yelit Shokona.
So it's a whole thing.

Her second album, Melodrama, debuted at number one on the charts in June 2017, five months before her 21st birthday. In this episode, Ella breaks down her song Sober.

You'll hear how it started with the original demos she made with her co-producer Jack Antonoff, and how the song changed over the course of working on it for months and months.

You're a queen on the weekend. Ain't a pill that could touch your rush.

But what will we do when we're sober?

My name is Lord. I'm breaking down my song sober.

I remember I had spent the summer in New Zealand and I was reeling from this summer, which was very much like wild and fluorescent. That first summer on the cusp of being an adult.

I'd just come out of a relationship and was just like drinking all the time. I'm just like, either like sleeping or getting ready for like what we were going to do that night.

When you come out of a relationship, you just want to fill the quiet as best you can. You know, you're like, I just don't want to deal with this quite yet.

So I'm going to make every moment full and social and busy and loud. And then I won't have to think about it.
So the song in particular was said at a party. But

there's such angst to it. I had this like very distinct memory of standing in the corner of my lounge, having like a very tense conversation with somebody and people on my back porch dancing.

The DNA of sober is wanting to tell someone how you feel and knowing they feel the same way and needing the evenings theater to come and have all the characters going and then you can let your guard down.

That was kind of the spread of the night, which became sober.

I worked on this record with my co-producer and co-writer, Jack Antonoff.

People sort of tell you you have to come to LA. They send you to all these like fancy studios.
And I think when you're beginning a project, that can be terrifying.

So there's Westlake recording studios, which is like very fancy. And Michael Jackson recorded there and I couldn't make anything good there.

And then we discovered this room down the back, which is like a production room. We called it the rat nest.
It was like this this tiny little room, very dirty.

And that room really was the room where sober started to take shape. The whole thing started on the Juno 106.

And I just recorded these vocals. Oh, God, I'm clean out of air in my lungs.
It's all gone, played so nonchalant. It's time we dance with the truth.

The slow kind of droning version, which existed for a long time, just like this moody, emotional journey i knew exactly where the chords had to go i was literally pulling jack's sleeve going no no no here

can you do it like this so quick

no no no no can my lungs so got a feeling but

no and

through a lot of this process you know i had such specific ideas about all of this stuff I knew exactly what it was so early and he was very open to me playing God over the writing session in such an intense way with that, which is cool.

And a lot of people, you know, I think would not be so good at doing that. For a long time, Jack was like, I like the song, but I don't, I don't know if I quite, you know, visualize it like you do.

And I was like, trust me, this is my passion project. Like, so it does the verse and then it goes,

But my hips are missed your hips, so let's get to know the kicks. Will you sway with me? Go astray with me.

And it's an uneven number of bars. It's just this weird thing that my brain absolutely needs.
And like props to Jack, that's why I love Jack so much.

He was sort of trying to get his head around it when we were writing it. And he was like, oh, there's an extra bar.
And I said, is that wrong? He was like, no.

If Jack had been like, no, we can't do that. I think that would have really changed the course of what we ended up doing for this album.
But Factory's like, no, it's cool. We can make it work.

So April 2016, we go to Coachella, Jack and I. We get a studio and we can work in the day and go to the festival at night.

So we went to the studio and I was like, I love the idea of it just snapping into this little groove. And I sung Jack the rhythm of the groove that I wanted and he made it really quickly.

Jack is always just like going around hitting a bunch of shit and the main sound in this is the little bongo he like hit with the drumstick.

And then I went,

It's a vocal sample. It's me going, night, midnight, lose my mind, I, midnight, lose my mind.

As soon as I heard that first loop, I went, I, when you get to my. I really clipped it kind of princey or MJ-ish and

just put it over the top.

When

So the song was like really intense and drony and serious. And then right at the end, for like 20 seconds, it just flipped into the funnest groove ever.

And, you know, it felt like changing the radio station or something, which I was into. It was cool.
And it stayed like that for a really long time.

So flash forward, New York, November 7th, my birthday. We're in a studio.
We're at that stage with the album where we needed someone to take us out of our zone a little bit. And we meet Malay,

who is very wonderful, works on Frank Ocean, and realized he is my favorite type of producer. He wants to hear you talk about the genesis of the song and the emotional energy.
And like,

I'm sort of used to clipping my language for technical people, you know, because people don't want to hear about the the color of an evening or the way a light looked on a wall or whatever, but he really does and it really helps him do great work.

And so, with the song, I was like, I just met him, and I was kind of looking at the floor and telling him the story of the song, and he was like, Okay, cool.

We booked the big room downstairs at Electric Lady for him to muck around in, and uh, we went down there the next day, and Malay has taken that groove,

that groove that came in right at the end of the song that 20 seconds and underlayed it underneath the whole song and he's taken out these really serious minory chords that were like

the chords of my fucking dreams and replaced them with these buoyant urgent insistent party chords

And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. The song feels right for the first time in almost a year.
It was incredible. We were just flawed by it.
It had the movement that it needed.

It instantly felt like we were in the vignette that we'd been chasing for a long time. He was like, yeah, I had to sacrifice your perfect chords.
I was like,

it's okay because it worked so well. And that was really exciting to me.
So it really needed to just be pushed off the edge by him. Yeah, it was so funny that that didn't come from me.

But, you know, sometimes even when you do know what something deserves to be, it takes somebody else's good idea to get it there and for there to be fresh ears involved.

And I think in that session, I also came up with the little stop. It goes...

Oh God, I'm closing my teeth around this liquor wetland. Just kicks down for a second and then goes back up.

More with Lord after this.

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We recorded the vocal for this verse with Cook Horral. Cook is a legend.
He just records vocals. That's all he does.
He does all of Rihanna's vocals.

And in a song like this, especially this verse, the timing is like very syncopated.

We're sleeping through all the days. And I would kind of let days go as long as it can, and then it would have to snap back and go to the next part.

And my favorite thing to do with vocals is get so specific, just this drop more of regret or anger or lust or this tiny smile on this word, which you rip away on the next word.

You know, I'm really into slight emotional molecular chemistry and getting this vocal bouncing off the walls perfectly. Could not have done that without Cook.
We're sleeping through all the days.

I'm acting like I don't see every ribbon you used to tie yourself to me.

Second burst of the song is one of my favorite things I've done with vocal production. I'm a big fan of thinking about the characters that my vocals are playing in songs.
I always think about that.

And there's always those moments in a party where you're sort of throwing your head back and forth and being like, what is this like fun house of terror that I'm running around in?

You know, especially if you're drunk, who knows what else is going on, you know? And I love this idea of there aren't people in your house.

There are just bodies walking around and you only care about one person at the party anyway.

And it's like these little kind of voices pinging out maybe they belong to these detached bodies oh god i'm closing my teeth around this liquor wet lime

loose my mind i know you're feeling it too

we basically recorded straight harmonies through the verse and then chose little moments for them to ping out here and there and they certain harmonies only exist on a certain word it's like all those little voices in your head that are like telling you someone's bad news there's like so many different vibes that the vocals in that second burst take on.

Can we keep up with those?

Ah,

hey, just these like little bratty kind of

shouts in the back of the song. So I feel like the lead is you saying what you want to say.
And then sometimes those are what slips out.

Imagine this narrator like trying to keep those voices in and just, ah, and you sort of, oh shit, cover your mouth, you know, ah, it's just like popping out all over the show

there's always an element of strange feedback ticking away at the back of a jack antonoff song to really like give it body and uh i love that

this is some classic jack antonoff shit right there jack's always doing a lot of that taking a sound and pitching it and distorting it and pulling it to a weird place.

Oh, and then I had the idea for the haunts. If you remember all that great Hudson Mohawk luna stuff, I mean, it was the best.
I was raised on tonight.

Like, that's 10% of why I make the music that I make.

I was like, we just need like a ton of brass, you know. Our engineer, Laura, Laura Sisk, who is the greatest engineer in America.
I sort of let her take charge of this horn part.

So the first line, which eventually was played on a horn, but was first on that Juno, was the doo doo doo doo doo.

I was like, we have to just get triumphant there.

So we started with tenor and barrisax.

I was like, we definitely need trumpet.

We were sitting there and we just kept telling them to play harder and harder and harder. And they were like, this is, it sounds like our instruments are breaking.
And we were like, like, yeah, yeah,

that's 100% the vibe we're going for.

Just play it kind of inappropriately. I want to hear the edges of your instrument.

And then.

Can you hear that? That's a fucking tiger's roar. There is low-key a tiger's roar starting that bridge, which was just the kind of like ridiculous dramatic flourish that it needed.

We were in one of the last two sessions for this song, and Jack was just like going through, he just has these endless banks of bizarre samples.

And we just find this tiger's roar, which I thought was so cool.

I love the way it swells the top of that part. That's like one of my favorite sneaky things on that song.

So, next time you're listening to Sober, please enjoy the Tiger's Roar at the top of the bridge because it's our baby and we love it.

The daylight we're cheating. We know that it's over in the morning.

New Zealand is so beautiful, and every day I just found myself kind of so moved by the light and like all of these bodies and the water and people on my back porch dancing.

It really does feel like a very specific vignette from two years ago. It's a very specific, beautiful image to me, but it definitely feels like the past.

Coming into, you know, early adulthood and every party felt so monumental and so endlessly inspiring and intoxicating and interesting. And there's a reason I wrote an entire record about partying.

But it's very interesting, like you finish the record and that door really does close. My research trip ended essentially.

I did all the like exploration I needed to do, and it's funny to look back on remembering these evenings and taking so much from them and injecting so much meaning and then being so transcendent and feeling a lot of affection for that time.

But also, like, you know, it's a little more chill now. I'm like,

I'm not making every drink, like, it's the last drink I'm ever gonna make, you know.

And now, here's Sober by Lorde in its entirety.

Oh God, I'm clean out of air in my lungs, it's all gone. Played it to nonchalant.
It's time we dance with the truth.

Move along with the truth.

We're sleeping through all the days I'm acting like I don't see Every ribbon you used to tie yourself to me

But my hips have missed your hips So let's get to know the kicks Will you sway with me? Go astray with me

You queen on the weekend Ain't a pill that could touch our rush

But what will we do when we're so?

I'm your dream with a fever

Bet you wish you could touch our rush

But what will we do when we're so

These are the games of the weekend

We pretend that we just don't care

But we care

I'm your dream with a fever

Bet you wish you could touch our rush

But what will we do when we're so

teeth around this liquor wet lime at night. Lose my mind, I know you're feeling it too.

Can we keep up with the ruse?

But bodies all through my house, I know the story by heart. Jack and Joe get fucked up and possessive when it gets dark.

But my hips are missed your hips. So let's get to know the kicks.
Will you sway with me? Go astray with me.

Can't we queen of the weekend? Ain't a pill that could touch our rush.

But what would we do about what we saw? I'm in your dream with a fever.

Bet you wish you could touch our rush.

But what would we do about what's up? These are the games of the weekend.

We'll pretend that we just don't care.

But we care.

I'm in your dream with a fever.

Bet you wish you could touch our brush.

But what would we do when we sowed?

We faded the daylight, but jaded.

We know that it's over. In the morning, you'll be dancing with all the harmony, the treason.
The fantasies of the leaving.

But we know that when it's over in the morning, you'll be dancing with us.

Oh,

dancing with us.

Oh,

you'll be dancing with us.

Can you feel it? Can you feel it? Dancing with us.

To learn more, visit songexploder.net/slash lord. You'll find links to buy or stream sober, and you can watch the music video.

This episode was originally produced by me and Christian Koons with production assistance from Olivia Wood. This reissue was made by me and Mary Dolan.

Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm.

You can follow me and Song Exploder on Instagram, and you can get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Thanks for listening.

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from PRX.

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