Pharrell Williams - Piece By Piece

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 Rishi Kesh Hirway.

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Pharrell Williams is, well, let me just say, he's a big reason why Song Exploder exists.

He's a singer, songwriter, and producer, and in the 90s, when I first heard the work that he was doing with the Neptunes, which was his production duo with Chad Hugo, it blew my mind.

It made me want to know where those sounds came from and where those ideas came from.

Pharrell has won 13 Grammys, he's been nominated for two Oscars, he's produced iconic songs for Kendrick Lamar, Britney Spears, Clips, Gwen Stefani, and so many others.

And on his own, he's made songs like Happy, the giant hit for Despicable Me, that was the best-selling song of 2014.

And now, there's a movie about his life called Piece by Piece, but it's an animated Lego film.

For this episode, I talked to Pharrell about the title song from Piece by Piece.

So coming up, you'll hear how Pharrell built that song, including a first draft that never saw the light of day.

You'll hear how he built Piece by Piece by programming it on his own with MIDI instruments, and then adding and replacing those parts with other musicians, including the high school marching band that he used to play in.

I'm Frell Williams.

I never wanted to do a documentary on my life or like my musical career.

I just always strayed away from it.

I just don't like listening to myself talk.

I'm an artist, but I'm more so a producer.

And I'm much better at helping other people hone their craft than I am the person who enjoys seeing myself on the camera or listening to myself on a recording.

For example, like I did a song called Beautiful with Snoop 20 something years ago.

And I'm singing in falsetto on the chorus.

Beautiful.

I just want to know

of my favorite girl.

Like a lot of people could like it, but when I was listening to it, I would just hear Mickey Mouse because I sing like this.

Hi, kids.

You know, I was a very harsh critic on my work.

So I didn't want to do a documentary and listen to myself for an hour and change.

But it was actually only until my agent was just like being so forceful.

He's like, you got to make one.

And finally, he said the magic words, which were, you can do it whatever way you want.

And once I heard that, I was like, okay, if it's truly whatever way I want, I wanted it to be animated and through the guise of Lego.

Did you play with Legos when you were a kid?

Yes, that's where this all comes from.

My parents would get me those things for Christmas, and it's like it's a big deal.

And the filter of Lego gave me the space and enough degrees of dissociation where I can look at it objectively.

Piece by piece started out a completely different song.

See the prey can eat the predator.

It's a sweet song.

It was like, yay, you know, we,

but that's all it is.

It's sweet.

But I was like, man, this doesn't disrupt the dance floor.

It wasn't sticky and it didn't feel urgent.

And I knew that, like, I wanted something urgent for this film.

I wanted the verses to just be like

aggressive, like a 1977 Trans Am.

You know, when you hit the gas, it's like, oh,

like it needs to do that.

I was like, the melody's cool, but this just ain't it.

So I started from the basic building blocks of what the drums were.

And that boom, boom, boom.

That part right there

that ended up taking on a new life and a new thing is piece by piece, piece by piece.

I program all of my instruments in logic.

That's a clavichord, but like a fusion of a little wa-wa-type guitar vibe.

And the bass line needed to feel like, you remember this movie called Drive with Ryan Gosling.

Yeah.

You know that jacket that he wore?

The scorpion jacket?

Yes, the scorpion jacket.

I knew it needed to feel like I was putting on that jacket.

I don't have a word for it.

I just know the feeling.

The feeling is like that jacket.

When you hear that, it doesn't sound like the daytime.

It sounds like the night.

Very dark, very nocturnal.

And it feels like a club scene.

It sounds like you're driving.

I knew that I wanted to sing the first verse in my lower tone.

I decided a long time ago, I would write my own chronicle.

Sit around, that ain't me.

Nor is following the lead.

And I layered it like eight times on top of myself because I wanted it to be clear and I wanted to feel like the urgency of an army.

Let me build what I see.

You know it starts with a piece.

Give it time, let it breathe instead of suffocating crazy dreams.

Hey!

If I'm going to talk about my life, like then I need to have a track that sort of encapsulates everything that I am.

You know, I have songs that are like very dark and feel very nocturnal, which are the verses of this one.

And I have songs that are very bright and feel like the daytime.

And that's what the chorus does.

I told you, I told you.

And the only way it happened was mine.

So that just sounds like joy to me.

And when it pays off, pays off, that feels very bright and very like sunshiny, you know, and I wanted people to feel that, that freedom and release of tension.

I play and program all of my instruments, and then I get live musicians to replay them.

So I got Brent Paske to replay my guitar.

And then I sent him a voice note to be even more detailed, even more forensic about like what I wanted the guitar riff to sound like.

Okay.

In the second verse, I take it back and I give you a little bit of context.

I get vulnerable and I sing in a higher octave.

When it was time, I got butterflies.

I got butterflies.

Don't look surprised, girl.

Don't look surprised, girl.

With the dream besides.

That's the Princess Anne Marching Cavaliers, my high school band.

That marching band was such a strong part of my story.

I started right after seventh grade.

So I was about 12, 13.

I've always played played percussion and I played bass drum.

And the bass drum sounds basic, but marching bands have a bass line that has four to five different bass drummers playing in sync.

I was a part of that line.

And I think it's given me the breadth that it's given me musically because we were learning overtures and rhapsodies and concertos and all these types of things that like the average musician probably didn't have to go through.

So, it's like a flex.

It's like, yo, my high school marching band on this song with me because I never dreamt when I was standing in that drum line that I'd be given an opportunity to do anything like this.

So, let's do it.

Man, when it pays off, pays off, it feels so good inside.

Screaming, I told you, I told you, I told you.

I was kind of like writing to the fact that it was kind of like a breath of fresh air right at that moment and a release and an exhale, you know, and being metaphorical for like when you get to that place in your life too.

Peace by peace, peace by peace, peace by peace, peace by peace.

You know, the anatomy of a song is always interesting when you see what the urgent and active ingredients are.

It's always interesting to see those things, isolate them, put them together, see how they work.

The mechanics is like a really interesting thing.

And that's zoomed in, right?

But when you zoom all the way out and go to the macro of it all, I am not thinking as much as I am feeling.

The construction of a song is not a thought thing.

It's more like sculpture.

You're just chiseling away or you're adding clay, you know, it's like that.

Music is the skeleton key that's opened every door for me.

I'm 51.

I love making music.

It's not about chart position.

It's not about like the gamification that the industry places on you that you need to do this and you got to do that.

I make music because I love it and it's so fun.

And if it ends up being a big record, cool.

I went through that in, you know, my 20s, like, oh, you know, it's got to be this chart topic.

I mean, cool.

It does what you want to do.

But I make music because it's fun for me and there's no pressure in having fun.

Coming up, you'll hear how all of this came together in the final song.

I'm pretty active and I eat pretty well, so I've been operating under the idea that I'm basically healthy.

But thanks to Function Health, whose sponsor song Exploder, I found out that actually a handful of biomarkers around my heart health are below what's considered normal.

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And now, here's Piece by Piece by Pharrell Williams in its entirety.

You know it starts with a piece.

Big time, let it be.

Instead of suffocating crazy dreams,

hey, tell me something else.

Hey, tell me something else.

Hey, tell me something else.

In that case, old, crazy.

It feels so good inside.

I told you, I told you.

And the only way it happened was mine.

When it was time,

I got butterflies.

Don't look surprised, girl.

With a dream besides,

well, everything seems so easy for other guys.

But I never move my eyes.

It takes a thousand tries.

Tell us nothing off.

Tell us about being off.

Hey, tell us about being off.

Hey, tell us us that they go, hey, tell us something.

We're praise of days on, oh.

It feels so good inside.

And I told you, I told you.

They ain't a girl they want to die.

And they break up where we go to

keep stacking high, high, high.

Peace my peace,

peace my peace,

peace, my peace,

peace, my peace,

peace, my peace,

peace, my peace,

peace, my peace,

peace, my peace.

They feel so good inside.

I told you, I told you

any other way, but mine.

So days old, days old,

high.

They ain't nothing on to die.

And we got miracles to me.

Keep stacking high, high, high.

Peace by peace,

Visit songexploder.net slash Pharrell to learn more.

You'll find links to buy or stream piece by piece, and you can watch the trailer for the movie.

There's also a Song Exploder episode about the song Just by Run the Jewels, which features guest vocals by Pharrell.

And if you want to check that out, there's also a link to that in the show notes.

This episode was produced by Craig Ely, Theo Balcombe, Kathleen Smith, Mary Dolan, and myself.

Our production assistant is Tiger Bisco.

The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo.

Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts.

You can learn more at radiotopia.fm.

And if you'd like to hear more from me, you can sign up for my newsletter.

You can find a link to it on the Song Exploder website.

You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt.

I'm Rishi Ke Shirway.

Thanks for listening.

Radiotopia

from PRX

This episode is brought to you by the new film Splitsville.

It's a comedy about relationships and the messiness that comes with them, and it stars Dakota Johnson and Adria Arhona.

It premiered at Cannes, where it got rave reviews, and it's distributed by Neon.

And for me, that's huge because I trust Neon the way that I trust my favorite record labels.

I will definitely check out anything that they put their name on.

So I'm looking forward to seeing this.

Splitsville is already playing now in select theaters, and it'll be playing everywhere on September 5th.