TN:75 Fred again..

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Hello and welcome to Tapet Notes, the podcast that looks behind the scenes at the magic of recording and producing music. Every episode will be reuniting an artist and producer and talking through some of the highlights from their collaboration in the studio. So join us as we lift the lid on the creative process and the inner workings of music production to see what lies beneath. Hello, I'm John Kennedy and joining me for this episode of Tapet Notes is Fred again, to talk about how he wrote, recorded and produced the album "Actual Life" April 14 to December 17, 2020. Fred Gibson, better known as Fred again, is a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer. A classically trained musician, Fred was also heavily inspired by hip-hop and began to experiment with composition and music production during his school years. At the age of 16 through a mutual friend, he joined an acapella group, organized by producer Brian Eno, and after impressing him with his musical capabilities, gained Brian as a mentor. By 2014, he was working directly alongside him on Eno's collaborations with Karl Heide of Underworld. Continuing to venture further into the world of production, Fred co-produced an album with rapper Rutz Manuva and began taking on roles on a number of high-profile tracks from artists including Charlie XCX, Steph London and Little Mix. In 2018, even greater success arrived when he co-wrote George Ezra's smash hit Shotgun. The track spent four weeks at number one, only to be knocked off by Clean Bandit Solo, which Fred also co-wrote and co-produced. In increasingly high demand, 2019 Sore Fred share his talents on tracks from artists including Rita Ora, Jess Glyn and BTS, as well as Ed Sheeran's number six collaborations project and Stormsies, Heavy as the Head. The success of each record, Sore Fred, involved as a songwriter or producer on 30% of the number one songs in the UK that year, ultimately leading to him becoming the youngest recipient of the Brit Award for producer of the year in 2020. That year, he also released his first album as an artist, working in partnership with rapper Heide one on the album Gang, and in April 2021, he released his debut solo album, Actual Life, April 14 to December 17, 2020, a record that he uses as a diar of his life in the past year, using sounds around him and the people he meets as inspiration. Today, I've come to made a veil to join Fred in his studio, and what better way to start our conversation than by hearing something from the record. This is Kyle, I found you. I found you. I found you. I found you. I found you. I found you beautiful. I found you exploring. I found you. That is Kyle. I found you from the album Actual Life by Fred again, and I'm very pleased to say that I am now sat in a studio with Fred himself. Hello Fred. Hello John Haydon, mate. I'm very well. Thank you. Thanks for welcoming us into your space. So describe this space. It's a beautiful space. I've got a lot of light. I can see leaves from trees above my head through the windows, through the skylights. But this is a special studio space. Do you work here a lot? Yes, so this is the base of where I work for most sessions. We're in made of hell. We're real lucky to have this. We were looking for a place for years, we found this about a year and a half ago. It was a journalism school. So this room that we sat in was like a classroom with a whiteboard and loads of chairs when I first saw it. It's all a room within a room. We love it. It's really pleasant. Who have you worked with in this space? I think everyone I've worked with, I've worked with in this space. That's a long, long list. So Stormsy, Ed Sheeran, George Ezra, they've all worked in this room with you. Yeah. Amazing. That's great. And countless others. Yeah. Because I've been here for two years. So yeah. Fantastic. But the interesting thing is that we're here not to talk about your work with other people, but to talk about your work. Your work as an artist rather than an artist, a producer or songwriter for other people. But I understand that you didn't actually record this record here. No. So that I don't know when I started working on this project three years ago, I just kind of instinctively found myself working on it generally outside. I would just take my laptop places and set up and then when I run out of charge, I'd go working a cafe and charge up again and then go out again. I think in hindsight, the little bit of hindsight I have now, I think I was drawn to doing it that way because one you can, which is just incredible to me, the fact that you can just sit on the river and make a whole finish like that is to me just like the novelty of that will never wear off. The fact that you don't need anything other than just two hours of charge. So that I just think is an unbelievable privilege that we have thanks to technology. But also I think I was kind of probably purposefully moving away from a studio environment. I think for working with other people, which I love doing and I still do, it's nice to have this kind of studio thing of like this is where we meet and we kind of collide worlds. But for what I was trying to make, I definitely wanted it to feel like I wanted to not have the posh mic and not have the techie bit of gear I wanted it to just really feel earthy and like it was all built from the world. So making it in the world made more sense to me if you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, totally. And I guess maybe it put you in a different headspace to being in this room. Yeah, totally different. You're already thinking you're working with other people. Because it's such a personal record. And also you brought the world in through sound too because there's a lot of found sound or chance encounters that you've recorded that you've incorporated into the music. But also that have inspired the work in the first place. Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. I think it's all built from that. I mean, every song, for example, the background noise is always the noise of wherever I am when I first made it. That's just the thing I did because I quite enjoyed it as like a kind of sonic stamp of wherever I was. So there's always every song has like a hum drum of like a bar or a city, whatever. I'll just do it on my iPhone and just put it straight in before I start whatever I'm starting. Yeah. The thing that resonates most with me is making it, trying to make something that feels like a kind of collaborative diary. That's the feeling that when I first started taking these little snippets from like conversations and things that had happened in the actual world, it immediately just hit a thing of like this is like this collaborative diary feeling. Obviously I am the curator of this one, but like I loved that feeling because it was still born out of collaboration, which is so part of me, but just in a much more personal way, I think. Yeah. And that's why, you know, there are brackets after actual life with April of 14th to December the 17th, 2020. So that is specifically the timeframe of the recording. Yeah. And that's what will be the next one I'm staying on this now. I want to do this for as long as I can until I can get as good and pure as I can make the thing. So the next one is well haven't finished it yet. So I don't have the end date. Yeah. It's it will be the next set of months. It's the next bit in the diary. Yeah. Fantastic. And in terms of real sound, so we just heard a snippet of Kyle I found you that was the first track you started working on. Yeah. On April of 14th, 2020 then. Yeah. So that one was, you're right, that would be the only one that we a little bit before. So that would have been earlier that year. I made that in the tape actually. I remember. So the background noise of that song is the tape mod. And yeah, I mean his voice is just it was when I was trying to do this trying to find melodies and people's speech specifically the speech ones. And it's amazing to me how much people speak in a key and often also kind of BPM like they often have a pocket. So I'll drag in something like Kyle and I'll just start playing along on the piano on my keyboard on my laptop and just playing chords and finding harmony for it that feels like it's serving what he's saying. And it's amazing like how much it'll be like, oh right, Kyle speaks in E flat, which he does. And his cadence was landing so much on sometimes you can bully them into some other shape, but so often they're just telling you what they are and you just have to kind of create the sort of world around them that they can just sort of sit right in. Yeah. So yeah, that was the first one probably. Yeah. Amazing and the first track we're going to look at from the album in more detail is Sabrina. I am a party Yeah, and this was inspired by Her speech or her performance so it's quite interesting because the sample is taken from Sabrina Benay Benay, yeah, yeah, that's an amazing Performance or speech she gives that is quite hard to work out now is that everything that she's written into her a Speech or is it all off the top of her head because it's delivered with such intensity Yeah, yeah, sincerity, but it's so so rich in terms of the way she articulates herself that surely she must have written it all out Before hand. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, she has this I know exactly what you mean And that was I think probably what was drawing me most to it and the like passion in her like tone It was the piece of music that I By a long way felt the most conflicted about Sampling I'm a little bit more relaxed about it now when I was first making it I would kind of with each sample go through a kind of existential crisis It was like is this okay like am I bastardizing their emotion? Am I patronizing the purity of what they were saying because when I first drag in a thing It's looking to stop playing over at the beginning. You just feels like you're you're just ruining them because you're Just playing chords over them. It just feels like you're kind of doing some patronizing film school to what they've done So usually if I have to like if I muscle through that first bit and like find a couple things and maybe tune some things and Warps and sentences then sometimes what happens is I'll come back to it and it will be like Okay, this is a different thing now now. It's okay to Mess with it maybe but with Sabrina it was for sure the most like my god This is a piece of her that I need to be very delicate with but beautifully and shuts out to the wonderful Sabrina She was like probably the most Encouraging and sweet of anyone I've sampled when she heard it and has been like really lovely since then and Yeah, which was just so encouraging because I was Pranging out. Yeah, yeah, that's fantastic to hear and understandable Especially if we hear the original speech on its own when it's amazing. Yeah, she She's one with a real BPM pocket like when she goes like I was just think through to it and obviously there's a few different pockets you can catch in what she does But when she goes and turn it my head I am a party like it's so clear that party is beat one And it's so clear to me that it's like a triplet that proceeded that like just in the nature of how she said it That it was kind of natural and then it's just going into the kind of thing of tuning and stretching these notes so it can I mean I'll show you perhaps that's part of the problem Mom says I thought the problem was that you can't get out of bed. I can't anxiety holds me a hostage inside of my house inside of my head mom says where did anxiety come from? Anxiety is the cousin visiting from out of town depression felt obligated to bring to the party mom I am the party only I am a party. I don't want to be at Mom says It's do you know I mean it's a lot to listen to it is it's an amazing performance and I've seen the the YouTube clip that Well, I'll be asking you how you came across it, but I've seen it and it's so powerful Yeah, and the cadence of what she does reminds me of the beat poets in a way it reminds me of Alan Ginsburg or Jack Carroac when they're Screaming into the night. Yeah, and it has that kind of rhythm to it, but it's a personal declaration of her own mental crisis in a way. Yeah, and It's so powerful and so moving and she's so on the borderline of cracking up Yeah, yeah, she's really holding it together because if you were to actually try and deliver that in the way that she delivers it I think it would be really really yeah my god my god. How did you come across it? I came across it on Instagram I don't remember I was aimlessly scrolling as all of us as prone to doing and I truly don't remember I just came across it and I was am easily just like oh and her face is so like the video of it It looks like how it sounds as well her face tells the story You could almost have it on mute and you'd get off of the message like and so yeah, I mean you can see how dragging that into like this Crastamine of like logic it just felt like felt gross Yeah, yeah, I'm happy that There was something that could be made from it that she loved. Yes, which is fantastic So we're gonna make a big leap now so we've heard that original inspiration will go straight to the master to hear the end of This process and then we'll break it all down all right I know I should want to go it's just not that much fun having fun when you don't want to have fun Inside of my head inside of my house So I don't want to go I am a party Inside of my head And she's not that much fun having fun when you don't want to have fun I am a party So we can already hear the journey that you must have gone on to get to this yeah the finished version of the song So having outlined the process in a way so you you heard the speech you took it and then you put it into your Your program your world and then you started Responding to it. Yeah, so I'd played it fun enough this what with this one I don't know how interesting this is but I got like a version of it that was in many ways really close but crucially like emotionally Wrong in that the harmony wasn't serving it right which is this version And this has a different drone it has a one in the five on the drone as opposed to just the third Which makes it feel warmer and like more of a hug and I was living with it for ages Like why does this feel to like you'll hear what I mean when it kicks in Like it feels too nice It's like kinder and it's hitting the E flat one cause and the bass is a little bit sweet as sounding like but crucially I think the harmony the fact that the pedal is on one and five which just makes this like everything becomes quite warm and seventh theme like Homely and the fact that the bass was going to the E flat and so I lived it for ages because I was like in so many ways This is right but the feeling it leaves me with is wrong So it took a while to like deconstruct like okay right if I make the pedal note that runs through the whole thing that opening drone If I make that sit on a more haunting note that will reframe the harmony that is going and then if I take out the E flat Home one chords. It means it doesn't ever quite have that like landing chord one feeling and then it was like Starting to give off the right emotion, but weirdly it was kind of like everything all of the other choices were kind of fine Because like the pulsing rhythm of the bass the drum thing the structure of it So it's quite rare that version. I've had very few songs where that is the journey of it But I'm really really happy that we Got it right because yeah I feel like it encompasses the feeling I was wanting it to now which feels a bit more like frenetic and like Like it should feel like the claustrophobia of what she's talking about as the harmony like builds up and like surrounds your head Yeah, yeah and to capture or Match the emotional fragility of of what she's saying because the interesting thing about using Found speech is what you want to do with it to what you're trying to achieve. So yeah a key phrase I am the party. Yeah could be used in quite a different way and clearly from what you were saying earlier You don't want to be insensitive you want to yeah You want to be able to respond to the impact that her speech has given you yeah, and that's very emotional I'm sorry charged. No, it's very tricky thing to do. Yeah, no 100% like I think like grabbing the like here You can see the different phrases of her I am a party and then obviously familiar in the speech she says inside of my head inside of my head Inside of my head I quite love I think this is like anyone who loves sampling loves takes real pleasure from contextualizing the thing so that isn't obviously a taller sentence. She said like she says inside my head inside my home I later about something else but you know, I think it's the same reason why we love it when Dilla takes a sample and makes it sound like they're saying a lyric they're not saying from some folk record and yeah It becomes a slum village banger so yeah big up Sabrina big up Sabrina. So I mean Sabrina is she a poet then is that what yeah She's a writer I think million about right. She does a bunch of different things. I've never met her in real life because she's in Minneapolis a thing of America definitely right, but yeah, there's there's a pint to be had for sure and we've spoken about it will happen Yeah, fantastic So you've got this speech you've already started playing with it You're already kind of now bringing it into your own world and your sound world and you're so your mind really Yeah, in terms of understanding it so you start feeling it out Know what you want to do. Yeah, are you able to illustrate that? Yeah, so it would be like I mean out of chopter to the click because as I said in this one sometimes you have to really like Force things into a palce and push them into a place they might not be but it was very clear with her and so then I would just grab some like simple sound like a verb piano and just play along on my laptop keyboard. Which is what I'm doing now. So like she's obviously in the back. I am a morning. And just playing chords. But like trying to find what feels like the right because obviously hitting that E flat is falling into the same trap of the version I was talking about before. So I think you quite quickly realize that like that is your home thing obviously. I am a party. Inside of my head. It's kind of feeling right. And then this chord. Inside of my house. It has the hurt to me that the minor 3 like gives it like, oh okay this is now in the right sphere. So I would just do that with a drone. Usually I just drag in drones and let it just sit in this very slow world. I've like just trying to get the like harmonic emotion a bit right. And then once that's right you can kind of decide if it's going to become this drum beat or that drum beat or no drum beat or whatever. Would you record all of that as you're doing it? All the sketches, all the fiddling around. Oh my god yeah. So like I would have left that day with just a like emotional paint throwing. I guess I mean like just trying to find the sphere in which she's like it feels like you're honoring her. But it's becoming something slightly new. And then I'd I mean this version would have a million different bounces. But they would just sound like a drone with what I just played to be honest going for probably like 10 minutes. And then I'll just listen to it on my phone which is my favorite speaker in the world. I love listening to songs on my phone more than anything else. With headphones or- No, no just on the phone speaker. It's my favorite. I cannot tell you how much I love it. Because you hear like all of the I think for producers particularly like it's so prone. And I was like so I think raised into a school of thought of like you've got to have your NS10s and you've got to know your speakers really well and you've got to have all of this and this to me slightly mix emphasized version of production which is not 99% of what is most important is the writing and the creativity. And so when you listen to your bounce back on your phone you're effortlessly pushed into a place where you cannot be worrying about if you're kick it hitting right at 70 hertz. It doesn't even cross your mind to care about that. So you're alleviated to thinking about like is the chorus twice as long as it should be or like is this the right feeling because there's no risk of you becoming the guys like just zoomed right in next to speaker trying to get the exact attack threshold right like who cares if your chorus is the wrong chorus. It doesn't matter anything like as much as if you've got the wrong snare drum. And I say this is someone who spent years and years and hours and hours like I think focusing on the wrong thing. So I love basically every day I'm just trying to like set myself up. So I've got a you know email from myself to myself on my phone with like five sketches that I can listen outside the pub with a whole bunch of noise going on and you just immediately hear it with such clarity of like oh this makes me feel like this. This should be that. Oh that is the wrong lyric for that. And you just hear the bigger the truly important stuff like that really matters that makes the song. So yeah that will be sorry that was a long way of saying I'll just get a long bounce of the emotion of it and then I'll just listen to it on my phone. No but it's a deal. I explain it really well and it's interesting. Do you take that approach with working with other people as well? So you know you might have a day in a studio with Stormzy or something and walk away with a track and always I think of it as like doing my future self like a real solid because like my favorite thing in the world is to leave a pub got for a city and just put my phone up to my ear and just hear like what the day sounded like and you just hear the important stuff like it's cool when you're in the studio to go in this mode and care a bit about that and focus in on making your bass hits a bit but it doesn't matter that much. It's just an execution version of the feeling like there's a million great songs that we all love to have technically rubbish mixes or maybe that if you just spent 10,000 more hours on it you'd have changed that kick sample like who cares it's an incredible song in the emotion of it speaks louder. So yeah I just am always just trying to set myself up to have ideas to listen to on my phone that I'll hear like purely because then you make big clarity moves like okay right that's the wrong verse of this this chord needs to be there and then you move like 50% forward as opposed to as I say like just honing your kick sample for a day. Yeah amazing so you were able to do that fairly quickly for this song in terms of getting those chords right to match the emotion. Kind of I mean I got it close but that led me the version I made not long after would have been that one I played you that hits on the one chord and stuff like that so I got it close but I don't think quite right it was more the like other production choices were more actually proven to me to be right of like the pulse and the clavet here and the dotted bass line and all of that but yeah so no it was a slow hone to then it was a few months after I then switched the harmony to try and serve what she was saying better. Right and so in terms of getting all those other bits right was that a long or a slow process or was that quite in this one I think that was very instinctive sometimes it's so long I mean there's another song to say that was unbelievably long but in this one that was my instinct I said the rough bones of it was probably second time I sat down with it. Right and is that the same process that you you kind of start playing what you have and respond to it. Yeah yeah yeah I like to work really really quickly so I'll soon have loads and loads of versions of different interpretations of the song rather than spend hours and hours on like trying to hone one version if I'm like fighting it I'll soon have just spend like three hours make a hop and scrap everything throw another instinct at it if you know I mean there's only so many shots you can get at that until you're kidding yourself but yeah and as we heard from the master I mean there's there are different stages through the song that more things come in you know to take us on this this little journey that you take us on are you able to illustrate some of that yeah so like yeah oh yeah so I mean this is to the vocal your vocal yeah the crucial aspect of this whole album yeah is that you know you had these bits of speech or whatever they were sometimes other artists singing but then you respond to it as a singer yeah so I think I mean this one came quite naturally because it you know octave down and I wanted to say a version of what she was saying but with slightly different words so I found myself doing that quite a lot in like the sort of what would be the verse two I mean it's not quite like that as this song but in the verse two is often found myself wanting to say like a version of what the sample's saying but trying to put my spin on it yeah I mean it is just that really about this is the end of the verse yeah and then there's just loads of warping her there which is on an iPad that's called sampler and you can just play these samples like instruments that you can drag your finger across the audio file and like do this that mad like yeah so that's quite a tactile thing in a way even though it's on an iPad but yeah yeah yeah yeah no that's what I love about it was Jack and Parisi who I work with on all of my stuff and Marco Parisi to brothers and he is like a wizard at this thing and we use it a lot playing live because it's the one thing I found that you can feel like you're playing the sample like everything else I do is very manual like pitching and warping them it takes a long time and but this thing it just shows you the audio file and you can like by moving your finger across it in different ways you can create like this effects and you know the other things like it so I don't want to go what program is this it's called sampler i say m plr without any but yeah it's really expressive is the key thing I think so you can yeah just express but through the medium of subrinder in this case so yeah that was definitely the only thing that brought this end bit to life for sure and then it's just like a whole bunch of noises that we're going on around me so that siren is made out of a siren that was going on as on the south bank and there was some thing those sounds so that I just be recording on my phone basically like I'd say like 75% of all the sounds in every song I make will be recorded on my phone I'll get like kick drums not from my phone but most drums I'll make from just like almost everything most of my vocals is recorded on the phone so potentially at the south bank you'll just sing into your song yeah I will sometimes I just use in the mic on the phone yeah yeah which is why I think I found this thing that I actually prefer singing really quietly because I don't love my voice very much but sometimes I do like want to say a thing but when I do it really quietly I don't hate it as much and when there's like the noise of the world in the background it doesn't feel as like just disgusting as like just this like posh like drive oh it's not my voice like I'm hearing it now if I just start singing I'll leave but if it was in an iPhone you can hear like traffic in the background and like a bit of a natural reverb of a room or whatever like I'm immediately to me like alert to it because it just feels like the world doesn't feel like this dry sterile thing so yeah I have that it was a moment it was an art gallery I used to work in a lot because they'd always let me charge my laptop in the cafe and I got to the point where I got so comfy there like I'd walk in and they'd be like oh hi and they'd give me the power extension and it was great and I got to the point where I would come in with like my drum machine my Opie one that I had my interface a little SM7 and then we were like that Granny is having. like ham, terine, next to me and like scums, and then like lovely bit of art. And then I was like, okay, Ryan, this is getting too far now. But yeah, so it was, it's always generally that kind of way, yeah. - Amazing. Would you use the, just the mic on the laptop then, as well, just as much as you would? - I don't love it as much as the phone. - Yeah, the mic. - Because it's pretty much, it's presumably quite close. I mean, I'm picturing you now outside South Bank or on the South Bank, and you know, if somebody were to walk by, it could look as if you're having a conversation with somebody. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And I don't quite know why it is, but the laptop might, I think probably because it's better, but it doesn't sound as, and there's inbuilt compression into the iPhone voice memos that is beautiful. Like, I am obsessed with that. Like, even for songs, I make for other people, I'll record most stuff on, I mean, me and Johnny McDade, he's this wonderful man, other producer, a good friend of mine. He has this joke, he always says, we kind of often find out I was talking about, it's just like the sentence, it doesn't matter what you put in, 'cause increasingly, like, a lot of my producer friends, and I think I'm like this, like, doesn't really matter what you put in. It more is like what you do with that random bit of sound and all the stuff we can do and these things, like, it's amazing the extent of it. And sometimes Johnny will, like, fuck with me, and he'll just like make a ridiculous sound and recording, and be like, go on, do something with that now. And usually because you're just like, forced into this, like, all right, what could we make out of Johnny going like, or whatever, you just do make something that's, you wouldn't have thought of and is interesting as opposed to, like, you know, just putting a SN58 next to a snare and hitting it and being like that. So snare drum, like, I find it much more inspiring this being, like, and often you'll get back on the phone and it will have loads of like glitches and sounds you didn't want that are actually great. And I love the sound of it. I really love the sound of it. And it's my favorite mic. And my favorite speaker. (laughing) Amazing. And yet do you think you're quite attached to the software and the processing that you can then apply to? I love those bits. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I still, if I record a drum kit off of this, the sound it sounds like coming in, I love. But I definitely, it needs to be the two in tandem for most of what I do. Because I'll just like, screen ridiculous noises and all like that, siren. (upbeat music) Like, they're all from just a recording of the street I was on. But obviously to make that sound like that, you've got to do like, mad, rash, like distortion and effects and all sorts of things that make it kind of poke out and pitching it around and so on. So yeah. And do you do all of that really quickly? Or yeah. So yeah, I'm obsessed with speed. The benchmark to me should be like how someone sitting with a guitar back in the day could just, or still now, could get out their song. Like they're just there, they know they've got kind of, a few chords to work with and they can just push it out really effortlessly. It can, which means that it can come so from within them. Or even to classical musicians like, you know, most of the greats essentially I think would write, they'll from the piano, like, and they could orchestrate from there. And there's so few things in between what is in them and it coming out. I guess then there was a bit more because they had to score. That would probably be their equivalent of us having to use a logic. But so I'm really keen to try and find as many things as they can do to like minimize the distance in like time and stuff has to happen between what's in there and getting it out. And so I think practicing quick working methods is like the main thing there. Right. That was going to be my next question. So like a musician masters their instrument through endless hours of practice. You know, you make sure that you're on top of whatever little gadgetries you're going to use in the box. And just using it like a toy. Like again, I really do say this is someone who spent hours and hours and years and years doing this a different way. But I think using it from a place of play and instinct. So you're just like, you know, when I was like a teenager, a lot of the people who I'd be like following from YouTube whatever would say, yeah, so, you know, you'd need to use a compressor like this and with an EQ, you don't want to be making moves bigger than like kind of 60B because you'll start to hear the sound. You should be thinking about your mic placement. And so I was like, okay, right. Really trying to take this in. Actually, personally, I found none of that to be true. Like I'd much rather move unbelievably quickly and rationally. And if I've got a 25 dB spike at 2K and that's what sounded right then go go go and who cares? I'm sampling off YouTube off the time anyway. So it's not like I'm in the business of like audio purity. Yeah. But yeah, so I think, yeah, just trying to draw from instinct as opposed to learned practices. And then I think often you just make stuff that you're like, wow, how did that come about? When you're missing to it later that day, do you remember really what you did because it was just sort of coming out? Amazing. And it's great because you're going from a place of impurity. But because of your abilities with all the bits of kit that you've got, you can kind of turn that to your advantage and turn that into a strength or a tone or a color that you can then use and make wonders out of. Yeah, no, I feel so. That's why I say like, I'm really just why I work outside lasers because I just can't believe I can. It will never be lost on me that we can just sit wherever you want. And for two and a half hours, probably you've got just a million infinite possibilities of like too much. The main problem with logic is there's too much. But one thing that's nice about that is at least you're not then also got all the other stuff of the studio. At least you got this one little thing. I do lots of things in logic to minimize. I disable most of my plugins and stuff like that. That's very just like this, this, this, and this. But just the fact that you can just do anything. I just think it's incredible. And when you're working on it, are you wearing headphones or are you then using the live-wired headphones? Yeah, yeah. Always I put headphones. I love them. Right. Wow. And so in next time we see you somewhere, I'm a random street or outside a cafe or you could be creating the next class. I have had this a few times because I work near my gap on the river quite a lot. And sometimes people come past and go, you're right, I don't like safe. But yeah, I love it. Fantastic. So I mean, what was the next stage with Sabrina with this track? I think the next stage would have been, yeah, once we'd sorted out the harmony of it, then there would be a brief technical moment where I would do what I would implore everyone not to do until this point. Once everything is fine, then I'll go through a little moment of checking like 20 different kick samples to make sure it's knocking as much sicker. And it's a very technical and like black and white job, if you know what I mean. But the key thing to me is to not do that job until your song is done. Because always you drain your perspective and your clarity of your ear, worrying about that, which you can do with just as much clarity right at the end. At the master, you can switch out 20 kick samples and hear them and be like, "Oh, that's the best one, great." So me and Jack, the aforementioned Parisi, will do like a whole bunch of those and we might try a few different A/O/A, so a few different palettes for the pedal note, switch out a couple high hats, generally drums stuff often just to make sure it hits right. And yeah, I mean that makes it sound quicker than it was long. I mean, how long is that process when you're going through all these different kick drums? We'll do a few songs in a day and then hear them with freshers the next day. And usually it's quite clear, particularly when there's two of you to bounce back. Not long, it doesn't need to be long because it's a technical thing. You can just hear it if you just set up a channel that has, in this case, the. Kick, I mean, that's the original version, so the kick would be this. That's from a break, layered with that much more like heavy thing. And so we'd have just like put a bunch into a battery pack and just played them all through and you quite quickly just hear what is, I'm not really too fussed as to why, because it doesn't really matter. So yeah, we'll do that for a day or so. And usually by then, I mean, all of my songs I'm like, "Mix with Jay Reynolds, who shuts out Jay, absolutely love Jay." But I think Jay would also say like, "I generally am quite close to, it needs to sound done." And then Jay can add a percent I can't hear. But I've made the mistake before of like trying to expect the mix, it's gonna like fix it all and all of the things it's gonna, and your chorus is gonna sound 10 times better because it's mixed and it's not how it ever works. So yeah, I definitely think you want your song to sound done and then send it to mix. Yeah, fascinating. Would you be able to build us up through the parts to the completion of the song as we move through it just quickly? For sure. So yeah, look out, unchallenged this project looks. This is just the mixed stems, which carries none of the trauma of what it took to get there. Right, yeah. I always find it almost conflicting looking at this because I'm like, "Wait, I went through so much, how can it look so?" Just like these stems. But yeah, so it would be like. So yeah, that drone. I can't tell you how much of a difference that makes switching because I always play over drones and different pieces of lambing pieces I've made and having the drone on turn node, which is a G. As opposed to being on the B flat and the E flat, like the whole emotional palette of the song, it sets you up for such a different world. Not that much fun having fun when you don't want to have fun. I mean, now, for example, that's how I'm there. That's turning on the iPhone mic. You know when you like to switch it. That's what that is. I live in the same place. I love those, like sometimes I'll build whole drum beats out of them, like they're so up front and beautiful. Then this A2A with a square wave from retro synth in logic. It would have had a bunch of plugins on it, but I can't see them now. Yeah. This rash guy was inspired by Fade by Kanye, obviously. So yeah, the drums are like kind of simple to me. There's so obegiated synth in there. I love making like impact sounds that aren't crashes, like the siren being here, like. That thing. Yeah. That's kind of, I mean that's, we show our whole hand there already. It's not a song that's adding parts throughout the whole thing. The parts are slightly tweaking and evolving, but that's kind of everything. And then, like, you know, by the last one, you just have a bit more like hell pads. The main thing is tweaking her city. I love the looping of like the fun, like. But I don't want to have fun. It's not having fun, we don't want to have fun. And having like fun fun fun fun fun. But yet, at the same time, what you achieve by the end is that, you know, her desperation and acknowledgement of her own desperation still end up being positive through your treatment, I think. In the same way that it has been positive for her, to be able to express that, not only to her mother, but to the world and the world she was speaking to at that time. Whereas a positive step for her, or one assumes it was, because otherwise, and why would she do it. But if you listen to the song as a whole and go through the whole thing, you come out in a different place, I think. Sick. I mean, I've been amazed for me for this record. Like, a lot of people hear the songs really differently in a way that I love. I hear this song to me, it feels tragic, but there's a million right ways of hearing it, I think. So yeah, no, I mean, maybe it depends where we're at at that moment. Yeah, I think so. I think that might be it, hopefully. Excellent. Well, let's reprise the master and we'll be able to move on to another one of the songs from the album. Reprise the master. [Music] There's party sounds, but yeah, so that would have been. I think that's from Berlin. I went out there a couple times when I was trying to work out a song, the sound of what I was trying to do, and we just do these solitary, writing trips on my ones and I loved it. Just going, going wherever I wanted to be my laptop in a day, like what I do in London, but just in a new city and then just going clubbing at night, but kind of very much on my. I'd still get a mashup, but it's so different to have a mashup when you're on your ones. I would just be downing beers and having, because you can smoke inside there as well, say, "My god, you're my cigarette, so I must have smoke." But you don't get the same type of mashup when you're on your own. You can't. It's just a much more calm, solitary, I'm just at the bar. I'll go over dance in a very kind of like that German way where you're just kind of in your own circle. It's not a collaborative thing. Dancing here, I don't think it's very much a one individual thing. Like, there's, you know, that place Burkheim. I do, but I've never been, but yeah. It's great. I would go there. I mean, that would always be where I'd end up on the weekend, because it's obviously open late night. Yeah, going in there, that's actually a lot of the drum palette of what I'm trying to do is inspired by the drums in there, but I found myself wanting to like put more harmony on it than I was getting in those things. Like, I love those tunes and like, bring by randomer, which is like the Burkheim classic is to me one of the best tunes ever. But for my stuff personally, like, I was like, "Okay, this drum sonic of like absolute stunness of it, I find really beautiful." But then I was in like, I was sitting next to my friend the other day, like I was in Burkheim and you can't bring your phones in. Or you can, but they, they tape over the camera. It's very much meant to be like, if you'd have your phone out, it's bad vibes, like no one would like that. But like, I was just looking over the main room bit. They've got this kind of balcony where I was just having a Ziggy and looking over it and they're playing this like, that type of technique where you feel like you can never quite catch the hair bob. It's just like 170 beefy animals, I'm shit. And it's just unbelievably like, it weirdly is to me the closest cousin to ambient music despite being the opposite. The role it plays, I think is super ambient. It's just a very different interpretation of it because it's not like the like arc of the songs in there, like in the true main room, Burkheim stuff. Like it's not like an arc of any song I've made, like it's not trying to build up showing you clear, like this is now we're feeling like we're building up to this. And now this is that like every now and then you'll get like the bass will cut out and then the bass will come back in. But like, it's just this, it's ambient. It's totally ambient. It just happens to be 160 bpm throbbing kick drums. And so I find myself like getting out my phone and like playing chords into my ears. So I could get like, because after like four hours, I'm just like, give me a little bit of harmony, just a little bit. So I'd like just play like what I was wanting to hear into my ear. And then like people were looking me and I was like, oh, sorry, no, it's not, I'm not trying to film anywhere. I swear, like I'm just, I just want to hear like a little drone over this. And then putting it back in my pocket. But yeah, so I think that noise is the outside of there in the morning. Right. Or in the main, it's in the foyer. That's it. The foyer of Burkheim, which is an absolute safari ever place. But yeah, real chaotic energies at the end of like the Sunday night. Fantastic. And you're going out on your own. So I mean, you're talking to other people, engaging with other people, but not necessarily looking for that. Yeah, like it happens and you have nice fleeting moments. And also like the nature of being in somewhere like Burkheim, you get hit on a lot. If you're like a straight guy, I was saying to my friend of mine the other day, like I think being a straight guy in Burkheim is like being a girl in the rest of the world. It's just an inversion of how it goes. You just walk around and people come up to you and go like, and they have this kind of sense of like, you sign up for this, right? And fair plates to them. Like you're in their space. Like it's totally calm. But then obviously I get to leave Burkheim and live my life normal in. But I think that might be what it's kind of like the rest of the world being a woman. So yeah, like you have that kind of stuff and lovely chats with there was one moment where I was sweating in the cubicle to have a piss on like, again, this would have been the Sunday night. So by that point, it's been open for 70 hours or whatever. And there is like a weight in the air that is built up. Like you walk in, it's just, it feels like you're in like heavy a gravity or something. And I was waiting for a piss in the cubicle at like 6th day of my Monday morning, I guess it would have been. And eventually the door opened and I get in and like four other people like all get in with me and they're all looking at me like, oh, safe. Is he joining? I was like, oh, lads, I'm so sorry. Absolutely do your thing. Don't let me go. But they all look at it. It was this very sweet, like the like four lads all just parted in. They were all like, oh, is he joining? And I was like, no, no, you good. You good. I apologize. I have a lovely time. I was suddenly just in this really close space just like, well, so yeah, it's a good hang. That's a good hang. Amazing. We're going to move on to another song. But we'll take a quick break and then we'll be looking at me, heavy in marked contrast. Yeah, for sure. For sure. So the next Fred again song we're going to look at is me, heavy for a actual life. But before that Fred, I wanted to find out a bit more about you. So it's interesting you were talking about a Burghain and talking about how that intense nonstop rhythm was actually quite close to our ambient. Yeah. And I know that you've got a long association with somebody who we associate with ambient music, Mr. Brian Eno. And I was intrigued to know how you started to work with Brian. And also what your musical background was before that because clearly from what you're telling us about your music, it's based in the understanding of music theory and being able to play. A bit. Yeah, I think I mean, I was a classical person when I was younger for sure. That was my upbringing. And I went to like a classical music college. But I definitely am not in the level. Like when I was there, it was immediately obvious to me, like, oh, these guys are different breeds to me. But I obviously do have like theory and stuff like that down. Yeah, Brian, I met when I was. 16, I think? I've been very, very lucky to have him as a mentor for 10 years now, so. And he has like a singing group that happens every Tuesday, and it will be like his neighbours and, you know, his neighbour who's like a masseuse, and then like Annie Lennox, he's Annie Lennox, and crazy, Hodgepodge of beautiful people, as you'd imagined from Brian, and one of our friends was his neighbour. So I went along to that, and, yeah, we just quite quickly started working together like I would just, every time he'd like, give me like a thing to work on, or something to try, or a thought I would like, spend the whole of the next week just going absolutely ham on it, like, you know, 23 hours a day, just making a million sketches to come back. The next Tuesday, and be like, "Hey, got a couple things here, and look, try and make a little casual that I've been going crazy." And to the point where Brian's still messaging me to this day, because there's thousands of my sketches on his computer, and he always leaves his computer on Shuffle, whilst he's just pottering around doing his thing. And so he'll, I'll regularly get texts from him being like, "Hey Fred, you know, Thursday evening, sketch three, sounding brilliant from 2014, or whatever it would be." And I'm like, "Great, thanks, right." Amazing, so let's just go through that again. So you ended up in a choir, a kind of ad hoc choir with Brianino, and it's Brian, like, the choir master. He's choir master, yeah. Right, okay. And what pieces are you singing? It's like gospel and country songs. Right. For performance, or just for, for like, it's a very powerful thing, singing in groups, I think. Like, if you go when you're a church for Christmas, and we all hear the desk can, I've overcome with you, Faithful Ever, that's like 30 seconds, and that makes all of us feel quite a bit different by the end of the song. Let alone two and a half hours of like, beautiful country and soul and gospel songs in a tight-knit room with like, harmony, and like, Brian does it as like a form of yoga, and I think it is exactly that for the mind, and I think we're really body too. Yeah, and how many people would be in the choir then? Anything from like, small group of like seven to like, 20 something on a big day. So you were welcome to us, a new boy. I was welcome to just like, in turn, because I'd like, tidy up the, like, I'd organize the sheets with all of the songs on and stuff. I mean, it makes it sound like a more formal thing than it was. And I was also slightly musical theory guy, so I was, weirdly, despite what you think, I mean, there's amazing musicians there, but they're less in theory world. Like, Brian isn't, he'd be the first to say, not at all, a theory type of train musician. So my one USP was that I could like, remember the key of the songs, and like, I could tell Brian what the BPM, we were singing it, well, so he could write on the thing. So I was like, I've got my thing. Right. So you were 16, you were pre GCSE, or do you just tell us? Yeah, I was diving right into my GCSE. Right. I'm not with the same verb that I was going into the Brian Demoist covered. And so what at the end of a session, he'd casually say, you know what? He'd give you an idea. Yeah, like we, and it just kind of became more and more until he was like, helping me with the projects I was working on then. And then I produced an album with him in Co-Hide. And I'd written like a, I mean, it's a ridiculous sort of, it's almost pretentious this, but like I'd written this thing called, I called it an electronic symphony. Yeah, when I was about 16, and because basically someone told me I was like, what's the symphony? To one of my teachers and they were like, it's actually just a piece with a large range of like textures and timbres. And I was like, is that it? I was like, so I can have one. Great. I'm going to get myself a symphony. I thought there'd be way more like, you know, I think you'd have to like pass a PhD and stuff like that to get one. So I was like, incredible. I'm going to write myself symphony. Just because it sounded cool. And so I did. In fact, that was, maybe it was a little bit, yeah. So I did that. And then I think it was off the back of him watching that that we started working together more after the singing sessions because I gave that to him on time. Right. Because we recorded it. And then that led to working with Paul Heiden. Yeah. Like he then brought Karlin. But like, I mean, the symphony was a whole ridiculous diving in at the deep end. Because at being at school, I took it for granted then. But I could put, I was like a 50 piece orchestra with like a whole band. And I could just do that. Just ask my friends and the orchestra to fit in my piece. And like, that's insane now if I was to put that on. But we did a whole like, our long piece with like rappers and like singers in a band. And a 50 piece orchestra. And it was kind of, I mean, it took like hours and hours of work. And the fact that you can just do that is incredible to me. Yeah. But because you were at school and you were at a music college then. I wasn't at a music college, but I was at a school that had an orchestra. Right. A good orchestra, yeah. So I was super lucky to be there. Yeah. Amazing. But then how do you go from working with Brian Eno and Carl Hyde and entertaining ideas of writing your own symphonies? [laughter] So then going and ending up working with Stormzy or Ed Sheeran or somebody else. I know what you mean. It's very different. It's amazing how much Brian exists outside of or on top of the music industry. Like he's not in it. He does his own thing and beautifully so we wouldn't change it. That's been the case since day, I think. But yeah, it was interesting to me at the time how much that did not was not a thing that would lead to that. Like, working with Brian is one of the most beautiful and invaluable things I've ever done and still do. But on a sort of how it led to meeting them, that was more happened because I was making a lot of songs with, I had like three different projects with friends of mine at that time. Like different singers and rappers and stuff I'd met. And off the back of the symphony thing we did, we spoke to some labels. So we had, we knew a few people who we could like send stuff to and we'd send them songs we'd do. So we had a kind of vague dialogue with a few people and then I started making more music in that vein and basically my brother and I, my brother who manages me and is incredible. We just went absolutely in and just did like sessions with everyone we could possibly find to do a session with and went crazy for like four years or so and just tried to climb the ladder of pop and hip-hop music. So just kind of out of kind of interest, you could have listened to everything, got excited about different artists and then knocked on their door and said, "Yeah, do you want to make a track?" Yeah, totally. I mean, I think from when I was at school, hip-hop was the main genre. I was like at school and at college, I was definitely like the classical person who was doing hip-hop, which was fun because it meant that I was for the one time I was like the punk, which I've never been before or since. But for a beautiful moment there. So that was definitely the music I felt most versed in that and classical. I mean, shout out to my brother as well because he's got an incredible ear. So he would often find artists who would then since blow up but he would find them on their first video and get them along for a session. So like everyone from Jay Five, who is his partner obviously, I was the first person to have a sweat with and then Stefan Dorn the same even through to like Joe's from O'Wanda, like storms to a degree. Like it was early days when we first went with storms and like a bunch of people so like yeah, having him around is a real blessing because he can, he's got a real ear to the ground on stuff. Yeah, amazing. Is he older than you? Yeah, he's two years older. Yeah, and he would make some of those initial calls or. Yeah, I mean he would just let, since we were kids he would be playing me like chasing pavements like the day it came out. Like this is crazy listen to this. Then that happened for 10 years. Yeah, with him just playing me tunes and I was like, this guy keeps on telling me songs and then they become and everyone else knows the songs. What's going on? Yeah. How does he know the songs before everyone else knows and then you just clock it to someone who has a really good ear and is like passionately following everything. Yeah, amazing. And Dan, what were his sources? Now where would he turn to to? Vlogs. Vlogs, I think we were, there was a beautiful little kind of two years I think where the blog was just everything from like, because also when I was 16 that was when dubstep was happening in England. I mean that was the blog central genre I think as well, but that was an incredible, incredible moment. Like I know it's, there's like, feel like the dubstep is even as a word is like, mad in like, trauma now. Because we've seen it like different parts of the culture become, but it was actually the most exciting thing because there was this phase for like a year and a half where every song that came out was the best thing I'd ever heard. I don't know, it was just like constantly blowing my mind and. What kind of things? Well, I remember for example like a friend in school playing on his phone, the screen remix of In For The Kill. And all of us would be there like, what is happening? But it was so alive. Like it was happening. You could feel them coming out each week. Like the excision mix that had the bass and X version of like my dubstep knowledge can actually go deep. I went in. And that's kind of how I learned to like technically produce I think. Like I was definitely making loads of hip-hop and writing songs. But to make that type of music you had to grapple with a bit more technicality. So like following like there's a video of Rusco and his attic like breaking down had to make a synth on Albino. And I was just like that was my Bible. Like Rusco and his like ninth Siggia 11 a.m. just breaking down an LFO. That was everything to me. So yeah, I I am. And so then were you trying to how can I get this equipment? How do I make these sounds? Because it was just like, I mean, I made some awful awful things. But it was so fun. And you felt it become you know from midnight request line screen or whatever is like what a lot of people would say is one of the founding things through to Rusco we ridden. through to like, excision and bass and actor pushing it into like more like, noise-core territory or whatever you not noise-core, but more like, gnarly. And then obviously, when Scrillex came about, Scrillex, who is a good friend and a genius, as we all know. But obviously, the problem there is that people called it the same name. Like, it should have just been called something else. Yeah. It's when people get protective over there. Like, this is my dubstep. Why are people calling that my dubstep? Like, that's not it. And so people start hating for no reason. Because obviously, like, I mean, obviously, time has shown that Scrillex is a genius. In fact, I was with him the other day and we were going through this and I was finding out, like, I was clocking in myself, like, wow, my knowledge on this goes, I was pulling out deep cuts of like tunes that are like only released in like the Neuro-essential mix and stuff like that. And I was like, look at this guy going, "Buffer Bar was Scrillex on dubstep." So yeah, it shouts out all of those legends. They inspire me infinitely. Yeah. Fantastic. What an amazing combination of roots into making music and into making pop music in a way, which is really quite interesting, isn't it? Yeah. Now, you've got all these different things going on in your life at that point and in your world. But taking you then onto a journey that has allowed you to become an artist, but also to work with some of the biggest artists of our time. Yeah. Amazing. What a combination. Appreciate it. We're talking a few as an artist now. And we're going to look at another one of the songs from actual life, which is me, heavy. So maybe we should hear the mastered version before we get any further. So there's a great performance of you performing that song that you put up on Instagram. And now, since I've seen that, I can't shake off that that wasn't how you made the song, because in my mind, it seems to capture a moment of you just pouring your heart out. And so, but you know, it's really powerful in that way. But what really happened for it? I mean, not far from that. I mean, the music was made. I didn't think I was going to write that song on it when we made the music, which. So I mean, I'll show you this sound. I did a sketch. It's called Sunday Morph Day with my mate, Big Hand, who I live with, who's also joined on a mess and a great producer. And we do these kind of like throw paint at the wool production days, often on the weekend, where you just kind of like just throw ideas. And there's no intention. Like the most. You know, we're talking about like being play, trying to push that to its most extreme, of just absolutely playing with sound and seeing how you can push it and bend it. And so this was. came out of taking this sound. That's a sample. That's how it sounds without the plugin on it. And we'd like kind of just grabbed random chords from all over it. And then this plugin called Morph, that I adore. So we then sent that through more if you can like combine it with another sound. So that's being sent to this as a trigger. This random groove. But so if you blend the two, it becomes with Morph. If I dial the Morph out, and that's it off, and then. I mean, it kind of. it morphs them. It does what's in the tin. And yeah, and that just made this like sonic palette that was really like sort of enchanting to me. And then we left it. And that was just one of the five things we did that day. And then came back to it. And you know, a week later, like, how does the Saturday, Morph day sound like? And the end of my then wrote that song over it, which was. I think we left it for longer than that actually. It would have just been setting around for a while because then it wasn't until 2000, the way through the record that. everything that was going on with what the record is about became so dire that like that was what got written over it, if you see what I mean. Yeah. So a minute in effect for this song, that became your drone piece, your starting point. Yeah. Totally. That was the best. The canvas with colour in a way and just move on from there. Yeah, 100%. And then it was just honing the lyrics, I think. I wrote it all with, again, obviously I wrote the lyrics myself, but we like. we've made the song together. And I don't think I could have for would have made it with anyone else because he's like my best friend. And so I think it was through the nature of being with him. It was possible to write a song that was as. as whatever word you want to use. But yeah. Yeah. Candid, open, crank. Yeah. And so kind of pouring a heart out. And because you were in a comfortable position and able to do so. And the music was connecting with you in this way. Yeah, definitely. I think it was just. yeah, that point in the diary, I guess, where there was, you know, this is the only song on the record that isn't built out of a sample of someone else, hence it being called me. Right. Right. So we should explain that a lot of the songs on the album have names or people's names as titles. And then in brackets, maybe a subtitle, such as Sabrina, I am the party, which we were talking about. So this is me getting heavy. Yeah. Yeah. It was originally called me quite evening. That's what it says up here on there. Because that was one of the lyrics in the verse. And then the last lyric that ended up ending the song was heavy. So I called it that. But yeah, I think then it was, you know, it was the same thing in terms of honing the song. The only thing that really needed to be honed was the chord choices here, like when it goes. That like falling down pattern. Which came from like quite intricately pitching the sample to allow us to make those chords. Yeah. And then there's just, you know, giving it a bed of something to fall back on. And then the cat. But yeah, I think for me it was like a really to make a song that was so not dance music. I mean, there are a lot of songs in the record that aren't dance music, but to have it be so much, like I don't know what the music you'd tell is, but like it's definitely not a dance music song. And for that to be one of the songs that is like resonated with people the most, I think means a lot because then it's like, okay, great. I can make a whole bunch of different types of stuff and it will still sound like the same piece of work, hopefully. Yeah. I mean, there are a few different things that connect the record together, you know, a kind of sound palette. You know, and one of them is, you know, the sound sounds that are around you throughout the various different places that you take yourself to create. Another is the use of the sampled voices and the way that you bring those back and kind of weave them throughout the course of the record as well. For sure. And another is obviously your own voice and also the way that you're seeing and the way that you choose to sing. Did you record those vocals on your iPhone? Yeah. Yeah. And what kind of treatments do you put on your vocals? I mean, we've kind of learned the go-to mic. It is the eye. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have to admit. The go-to settings would be the logic silver compressor. It's going from something so like, so of the heart to so of the brain. So you have to, if you hold, oh, when you click on the plugins and logic, you get the legacy plugins. And that's what the real good shit is because you get A-verb, which is Brian's favorite verb. Shes up, Brian. You get silver compressor, which is a wonderfully crass shit compressor that just, I think the main reason why I like it is because when you turn it on, it's compressing it loads. So you don't really do anything. You just like, it's almost like a button for compression on or off. So it's just that. And then I just like, I mean, boring stuff like I rolled off the bottoms of the vocal a bit and the DS. I think the most technical I'd go, I didn't do it on this song, but the most technical I go is, I love having a reverb before the compressor. I love the sound that makes because it means that you still get the up front vocal, but as soon as there's a chance for it to breathe, the reverb seeps through into the sound and fills whatever void the lead vocal allows it to fill. So you get this really like full on, but still very clear sound that really exaggerates the space it's in. So that if it's with like a room verb or even with a big one, it's just a very different effect. I find really like effective. But if I'm honest, it's because it does what the iPhone compression does, automatic, right? Which is that if you speak into this and you're in a big hall, it you'll sound really close until you stop speaking and then you'll hear the reverb. come through because the compression will inflate it up. So I'm essentially just trying to do plugins in logic to make it sound more like the art. Let's hear another section of the master again and we'll move on from me to our next selection. I think it's interesting to, you know, despite you getting very real. I think it's interesting, you know, despite you getting very real on us in a way with that vocal performance. There are little bits of other voices that we hear or other sounds. Take us to the other emotions that are on the album as well, don't they? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm keen to, I like them in constant colours for sure. Yeah, it's fascinating. We're going to take another break and we'll be back and we're going to be looking at Angie. I've been lost next. Sick. The next song we're going to look at from Fred again's actual life is Angie. I've been lost and this is how it sounds on the album. I've been lost, I've been lost, I've been lost, I've been lost for a while. We're already trying, I've been lost, I've been lost, I've been lost, I've been lost for a while. We're already trying. So that is Angie, I've been lost featuring Angie McMahon, who I think is the starting point for this song, is that right? Yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah. So tell us about Angie and where you found that. So I found that sample again on Instagram just like stumbling around and it was her. I think she's like sat on her bed singing it with a guitar and I was just like immediately obsessed with it. Like I just played that loop of her singing that because when it gets to that it's from her song called Pasta, which is an amazing song but I didn't really know any of that at the time. I just played that bit over and over and over again and this was weirdly actually at the beginning of last year because I didn't actually work out to make the song until the end of last year, hence it being the last song in December. But for the whole year it was like, I call it like the compass of the record because it was like, I would just always come back to this thing and I was like, I have to make this work somehow. And I cannot tell you how many passions there are of it not working to me. Yeah, big ups Angie and her incredible voice is just like weirdly actually I didn't know this. Maybe I subconsciously knew this but I'd actually heard her sing a few weeks before I found the sample in like a random basement with like 30 people in East London because my friend leaf volabek who's an amazing singer. One of my favorites in the world he was playing and she came on to sing a song with him in me and my little brother with him. We were just like, oh my god, who is this woman? What's she done? And I hadn't quite put two and two together when I just stumbled across this video and then when I was watching more of it I was like, oh my god, that was that voice that I heard in the basement in wherever I was. So yeah, for like a year I just flopped and flopped and flopped and failed and fucked it and got it wrong so many times I wrote so many songs around it. The only thing that stayed was the drone. Which in this case was the one and five drone, the drone that got expelled from I'm a party I think was the right drone here because it feels more like it surrounds her warmly to me. But yeah, like I mean I'll play you some of them but yeah, that would be great. So that's really interesting that it took you so long but I was so really interesting that kind of encounter with Angie actually seeing her perform and then somehow maybe subliminally finding her again on on YouTube. Yeah, totally. It was fun enough. It was a video posted by Annie Mac on her Instagram of Angie playing that one bit. It's almost like Annie Mac was sending you this. I've always noticed her saying I appreciate what you've done for me. Also the yeah, just the amount of versions. I mean big hand who I have mentioned already like the amount of times he's like come up the stairs our gaff and it's just been this playing around with me just doing yet another set of chords or drums or verse lyrics or whatever and right. Yeah, over and over. We're going to hear a few of those now. I think that the first version would have just been this. I've just loaded up a pianist I can do again. It's the same thing I was playing on thing. I'll just play over the things to see what like works. But that's just playing random stuff now, but it would have been a version that would have sounded like that for 10 minutes and then outside the pub you hear the chords that just hit right and then began like so then there was this. There's my friend I love him we're in Italy together at like 6 am on the years day. She fell off the table she was like I wasn't here for a minute guys. So this emotionally totally wrong totally wrong. I was just trying to find the pocket she could fit into she's quite fast so I was at 140 bpm and I was at that time making a lot of 4 to the floor 140 150 even 160 bpm 4 to the floor stuff because of the amount of time it's been in bow kind. But this you can feel it when it comes in like it becomes mischievous. There's still some of Angie's heart in there but it sounds like it's fine now and it's not the truth like it needed to sound like yeah but I'm really trying is what needed to sound like. So there's a whole version of that I think I sang a verse on this one. So and then there was this. I was trying to make the verse more of a main thing trying to make it less half time as it opened. So you can just be like more like keeping the momentum of it going more. And then I thought maybe it could be like where it builds up in the verses and then at the hooks it goes back to zero. There's kind of something in that but it wasn't the version of the song that I wanted to end the record if you said I mean that would be more like the middle. Then there was this one where it goes like the need this is just like I skipped loads in between these. This is like nine months later this happened. Yeah. The drums are slightly more right. And I got the chop this version of chopping up Angie's voice. It felt like okay that now there's a place it can live that can stay in that world but it doesn't have to go to like a whole verse from me to like deviate it too much away from it. Like it can cruise a bit more effortlessly. But these drums are still like I mean here they're almost too stepy but they go to being like a drill ridden now. So here we're at like one thirty six or thirty eight BPN but it still is like four to the floor but like half time snares and it felt to like match her like there's too much like. The drums felt too mushy and then eventually I went to it's called the cottage and it won. I went to my mate Trevor was living in this cottage in in like Amish and my son and over and in the evening I just started messing around with it being a bit slower and then. Jack shouts out the legendary parisies, it was like he had the beautiful bit of clarity to slow it down, to speed it up in the sense of like the problem I was having is that it was at a tempo that I couldn't quite put the kind of groove I wanted to on, I was going half time all the time. And so he was like, but if you push it down to like one, 32, then we could put a groove on it that was double time and it would actually feel faster even though it was slower. Once that happened, the song breathes and it was like putting in this break. ♪ Really try ♪ (humming) 'Cause once you feel that. ♪ Really try ♪ It sets a bed of a song that can now roll. Like, it's not feeling like it's to like, storage, there's now in cruise, like it can. sections can come and go, it feels a bit more like there's a dance underneath it, but that's obviously missing the bass. This is the first version of it. Yeah. Once we had those drums, it became. ♪ I feel the world is stopping ♪ And like, suddenly it could be forward to the floor and like there was a home for it that wasn't patronising Angie and wasn't feeling too, like, musely or serious, but like, later foundation that the song could breathe in, I think. And also, there's so many others that I haven't played. Yeah, how many, how many do you think you did in? I mean, there'll be, if I did, all the different bounces, there'd be like 200, in terms of like different versions of the song, probably 10. Yeah. Like, actually different approaches to the song. Yeah. And in building the final drum pattern that you were happy with, how were you doing that? That was just through Chopic, like, that was very, very quick. Again, it was just like a playing to Jack, where it was at. And then he was like, have you thought about doing this way? And I was like, no. And then we slowed it down. It was, it's that type of piece of like, counterintuitive logic. You know, it's so often like, if you're spending loads of time on a song, if there's like one thing that you're like, well, the one thing I know is this, usually that's the thing you have to break to fix it so often. But the amount of times I'll be like, okay, the only thing I know for sure is it has to start this way. And then the solution is that, yeah, to make it start, it's always that. It's so bait, the universe is so bait. [LAUGHS] And so I think here I was like, I really wanted it to feel energetic and momentum. And so it hadn't crossed my mind that slowing it down could achieve that, because obviously slowed it down, alleviated space for a double-time drum beat. But yeah, it's always the one thing you're holding dear is what you've got to kill to save the song as a whole. So I mean, you've had made a decision in your mind quite early on then that you wanted it to be up tempo and wanted it to be different to what Angie's singing. Yeah, yeah, I wanted the drums to fight in a way. The like absolute, peaceful cloud that she's sat on. I don't know why I just did. That's based on just the feeling of it, which is obviously what it's all based on. Everything we're talking about is just, you know, technical execution approaches to try and get to the feeling of the thing. Yeah. So this is December then, where you finally hit on this. Yeah. Amazing. And then so how did you then realize that? I mean, maybe you could illustrate that. Yeah, like I mean, sometimes we'll do it in, I don't remember if this was actually one of them, but I'm a big fan of like, you know what I'm saying about like speed and trying to get everything out of the way of her instinct. I'm fascinated by the extent to which you can compromise on the amount of time you have, and it doesn't seem to affect how good what you get is. So for example, this year a lot of the time I've been like, first thing in the morning, I'll, I'd started off like setting myself like, okay, you've got an hour to make an idea. I'd like put a time on my phone just because again, it just puts you in just state of kind of play. If like, okay, go, go, go, don't worry if it's not just go. And as this year's gone on, I've made this timer shorter and shorter and shorter. To the point where I now do 15 minute timers from like scratch, I'll do four in an hour. And always basically without fail, three of them are rubbish. One of them's got something in it. And that only took an hour. And if I do one thing in an hour, usually one in four of those hours is rubbish. So I'm like, hold on. On a very like, I don't totally understand it. But I think it's just like, essentially, I think it's like you're buying more tickets to the lottery. Because really that's what most of this is. You're just trying to like wait for an accident to happen or something that you didn't really mean to do. Like you're just trying to get out of your own way and like hope that you accidentally press that button that makes the base 10 times louder. And they're like, oh, that's the song or you accidentally cut. It's always that. And so to me, the more tickets you can buy into that lottery, the more likely you are to stumble across the thing that is outside of yourself. Because I have no interest in what is in here. I have interested to like what I feel reacting to something. I think that even you can do that down to like an approach on a song. Like if you've got a song you love, just be like, all right, I've got 15 minutes. Make a different drum beat for it. Like real quickly, you don't have to worry about the palette of it and like making it sound perfect. But you'll get the feeling if it's like that pattern, you'll feel it if it feels right and then you can choose the one that you made and really hone the sonic of it. And I think this was one of those that we were doing with Jack. Yeah, so like these are the stems of it. So yeah, the drums is. Basically chopped up this break to make it play a different pattern. But it's essentially all the break and then just choosing the kick drum with it. Like there's a few like triangle things layered on that and that little rim shot over that. But essentially it's just the break. The purist kick. I made this kick with Jack and we use it on everything. Like it knocks in a clubby way but it feels like natural still. It doesn't feel like *makes noise* like it still feels like. Like that's the kind of thing that I'd spend like, I think doing stuff in Berlin, I just found myself like obsessed with like how these like small things, particularly when it comes to dance music. There like really are important decisions. I know I have sang earlier, it doesn't matter how your kick knocks. But it matters how your kick feels. Like, doesn't matter if it could be a little bit more 60 hertz. But if the sample is like the difference between like a *makes noise* and *makes noise* that's going like that for your whole song. That is so. that's Carl Hyde, underweight Carl. You obviously is in the business of a *makes noise* Yeah, I remember him saying like, it's mad when people say like, "oh, it doesn't matter." And I know that it sounds like I'm concentrating what I'm saying but I do think when it's large scale stuff like this, it totally matters. Because this thing is for your whole song, going to be going like, "Duh, duh, louder than everything else." Like if that's this sound or this sound, that matters. It just is I think about choosing the moment in your creative process to address those things. And like in Berlin I spend loads of times just like making songs where you notice the difference between like how having a kick that feels like that does that, that would be a classic techno UK. And you can hear each time. Like that's a big harmonic piece of content that as opposed to the harmony of bringing being like totally different emotions. I think that's what I mean is when it's the emotion of it, not the compression or yeah, who cares about like, A being your songs while you're writing them next to this other person's song in the mix. It's like, "well don't A be that, yeah, you haven't finished your song." Yeah, so yeah, I think I've sidetracked myself from what I was even saying but the the bass is just retro synth and logic again. Kind of like 90s like the mobile inspired bass sound. And then even that drone is kind of mobile anyway. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, these are just the ES2 dark pads and logic. I basically only use, well not only, but mostly I use logic stuff and audio. Like to me the best sounds I've been making, it's all just like built on like sampling. I'll show you one. This is one I was doing in a song the other day. This is all logic. This is just the quick sampler and then like a vowel, a vowel, a guess, but you could use A, a verb or whatever. And so it's like chopping up things in quick sampler so you get like, I think this is running it through some other first stuff as well, but I'm just playing that different notes of MIDI. Now that's just a whole song dragged into quick sampler but to me that has so much more layers of intricacy than loading up a random pad that I've used loads that inspires. There's things like that making the palette on this. I don't remember totally what it is, but I know this one's a very pure one. That's just ES2 logic. I like kind of the either extreme. I know it's just the pad that is just like, oh, like that's just, there's nothing to take in. It's just harmonic content for the one that's like absolute like a million layers of intricacy and that um. and then. *music* we don't mean we try to love. Oh this is Cynthia. So that would be step effects in Logic. I mean I'll put it on the whole stem now. Like you can draw in the rhythms you want and make the filters and stuff react to it. Which is what's making that sense. Do that. Because that would have been just a pad. And like gated and modulated on the cutoff. And then the use of some of the other vocal samples and stuff. Because we have this in this song. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a few different cool bets. The biggest legend who you get at some point, not totally sure where is Carlos, who there's a whole song made out of Carlos. A billion others actually that I've made. But he is this guy that I met in Atlanta. He was like a construction worker. And I was just having a beer and he just like came up and said, "What's good, my partner?" Like in his man. Like I've literally got the video of him walking up to me and saying that. And I was like, "Yo." And then we just had this chat and I like got him some tequila or some shit. And like we just had a hilarious like time. I was just kind of sat there. And then you outside the club, Struct Pub or wherever you go. Yeah, so this is a, yeah, we were outside of gig and he, yeah, and he, I mean, this is. So had you just performed or had you just gone? No, it was a friend of mine to show. Right, so it was like. My guy, what's he gonna say? Yeah, it's me, Lane. This is Carlos. This has already got a pitch correction on it, because you can hear. You've been hearing, you know what he or not can't do. We're gonna make it through. This is the raw file, but I've tuned different lines to sort of find. So like the next day when I was like super hungover, I was like looking at this video. This is the first thing I sampled. And I was just cracking out looking at all these videos, because he's a beautiful spirit. But I was like just putting them in and saying how much. How close he is naturally to singing. Yeah, it's me, Lane. This is Carlos right here. I'm not your man. I'm just playing piano. We're gonna make it through, like there's such a tone in that. We're gonna make. You wanna come out, dude? I want you to see me for it. I'm here. These guys are giving me life. I'm here. Like loads of different experiments based on what you can do with him. I want you to hear me. But him going, we're gonna make it through is on like loads of tunes on the record. Yeah, totally. It's like an ongoing motif. Yeah. It's interesting though. Why were you filming him? Or why were you recording him? Because I'm always the person who's just like filming stuff from a night out because it's fun to have. For the reason I had, because then the next day I'm lying in bed all over like, "I love it." And I like being the one who's like just documenting all these moments. I laugh falling off the table on New Year's Day, or whatever it is. I love it. I mean, it's interesting as Nick, because he has an older person. No, I'm not in sync with that. And so, when I'm hanging out with younger people and they're doing that all the time, and you're thinking, "Why are you doing that?" And I'm like, "See, you can say, well, I'm doing that because then I go on to create a whole album out." Oh, no, but that's what you're explaining. That isn't what you're doing. You're kind of an enjoyable way of processing things. Yeah, I think it's a direct, I think there's totally a risk that everyone is, we can all scum too if it's taken you out of the present. But I don't think it needs to. I think it can, particularly if you're in a company where it's not disconcerting. There's so many videos on my phone that my friends will just be like, "Oh my gosh, there's a video of that happening," or whatever. Like, I've got a video on my phone with me when I'm waiting for the aforementioned big hand. We were trying to break in our other best mate, Red, into Glastonbury. And I literally stood there like 10 meters away from them in security guards. And I'm there like, "Oh my god, it can't believe this is about to happen." And they're like going up to them and I see them walk up holding like 50 braces of Guinness on either side. And he's not got a wristband and it's Glastonbury and everyone says, "You can't do it." And then they just like charm him somehow. And they're like, "Oh yeah, these guys, you can tell they're all right. Let them through them." And they're like, "What the fuck is going on?" And then they're walking up to me holding loads of Guinness. Just like, "Everybody stay very calm. Don't look like it. Just stay very calm." And I love having all of these like a million different moments on Dari. Yeah, as I say. Yeah. Whether they become anything other or not, it's not really. Yeah, I mean, and that ends up being a golden moment. And one that, you know, you get to use as a color on your record. And it's purely by chance that you just happen obviously to be there, but to be recording it at that moment. I mean, you know you're going to meet Carlos and you know he's going to have this musicality to his speech or say these really uplifting. Yeah, yeah, it's incredible, man. I said, "What are we saying, Carlos?" And we're going to make it through. Yeah, I'm enormously interested in trying to track him down as we speak. I sent him this like a few days after when I had made stuff. I texted him and he was like, "This is crazy, man." But then his phone number changed or so. I'm trying to track him down. So you did take his number just out of, you know, by chance in a way. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's interesting thing is that because you've got these films and because you've got these recordings and then you bring them together with some of the other found material for your live performance. You did this amazing performance in April going off that album really. Yeah. But when you're doing it, you know, you can see you're triggering samples, playing keyboards, etc. But you've got this film or this screen with matched footage. Yeah. Here's some of the original footage and say, Sabrina, they've got her speech, but you're. It's as if you're cutting it up in real time and it's quite a thing. It's really powerful. And it captures the emotion and the sincerity of what you're doing. But it also creates another level of entertainment, you know, for one of a better description. It becomes a package. Yeah, yeah. I'm real looking forward to like really honing the live show side of it as well. Like, I'm going to keep making these records and simultaneously, you're going to keep trying to hone how to present it in its like purest form in the live world. So it can be like, yeah, I don't know. I just love it when it feels like there's this living, breathing diary that can kind of animate and then go back to being small and private and then come out over and out. It's an interesting dichotomy with what you do in terms of Fred again, artist, Fred again, producer, Fred again, songwriter, which you're more comfortable with because it seems to me that part of you as an artist wants to share, but doesn't want to share. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure that is the case here. I think I'm equally comfortable. They all very much inform each other like, I'm never going to stop working with other people because you learn it's like a totally different part of the brain and it really informs the other part of the brain. So I feel comfortable with cool that actually yeah, I'm just definitely like the way I would explain it is it's like if I'm making a song with let's say storms as he said him, like as a fan of Stormzy I know, I've got so many ideas of songs I can't wait to his Stormzy make. And you know, then thinking about as we were last year or two years ago, like about him doing the Glaston Be Show, I'm like, right, what song do you want to hear here Stormzy come out and do it? Glaston Be Show and these things that there's so many, you're so bird-seying it, you're so outside and able to see it as a fan, which leads to one type of creation, I think, and then the other stuff for my stuff, it's like I'm just blindfolded and throwing stuff at the wall and then like every night and then I get to see what has been any of any value. And I guess there's probably people like Jack and Hen who I work with maybe more on the other role of they're like producing me. Yeah, but yeah, there's so different processes but they really compliment each other, I think. Yeah, yeah, and it's interesting because it allows you to be the artist you are in terms of stylistically what you're trying to communicate. For sure. Because other artists that you're working with communicate other aspects of your personality that no satisfy you in that way. Yeah, yeah, I hear that totally, I hear that for sure. Which is great for us because it means that we get something else. We get Fred again, not the Fred again, that could have been Fred trying to be Stormzy or something. It's fascinating. We have a couple of questions we'd like to ask everybody who comes on the podcast. Maybe we should just kind of finish off this song, so because it builds to the climax as it were, of Angie. Let's do it. [Music] - Is that from that? Don't have nothing left. - It's from, I think it's from a video of a guy singing to his wife as he's coming down the stairs. He's singing like a song. Again, another random thing on Instagram. He's like coming down going like, "I can't remember the song he's singing, but one point he goes, 'I don't have nothing left.'" - Yeah. It's great, 'cause I mean, so many of those samples are as if you've spent a lifetime creak digging, trying to find those random bits on vinyl. Or is he don't need to do that now in some ways? - Yeah, they're different creaks. - Yeah, exactly. - Yeah, that's a great way of describing it. There are so many different kinds of crates that you're exploring, Fred. We ask a couple of questions of everybody who comes on tape notes. And one is Kit. Now, we've talked about Kit in various different ways. And normally we say, "Have you got a favorite piece of kit or a piece of kit that you can't live without?" But I'm guessing that you're going to say it's your iPhone. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a bit of a sure thing. So you know the answer to that, don't you? - But in terms of, you know, as we get attached to different kinds of equipment, so is there a particular iPhone that you favor? Because they're constantly changing and evolving. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, that's a great question. - It's a great question. - It's a good question. - The deepest I've gone on that is that there is a different compression that you get on a WhatsApp voice note, a two-on-end iPhone voice note. WhatsApp voice note, that compression algorithm should be sold for trillion pounds to like fair child or something like that is the best compressor I've ever heard. I don't really understand how it works. It's like really extreme limiting, which is what it feels like it's doing. But sometimes I'll record stuff into WhatsApp, I'll often send like a hand or my email or whatever voice notes that are just actually things that I can export it from WhatsApp with the compression it has that does it, but yeah, both voice notes and WhatsApp voice members are a gold mine. - Yeah. - And you're recording all those sound sounds on just voice notes, not? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. - So it's not as if you've even put in a special program that you want to use to record or anything. - No, no, no, no. Yeah, no, it's just that. I did at one point when I was like, didn't it look like I bought one of these little attachable Zoom mics or whatever. And I was like, why am I doing that? As soon as I record. I've used it once to record a piano when I wanted to use a proper mic and then we used the iPhone one in the end. I'm sure maybe you'll speak to me in like a few years now, I'll have become an absolute audio purist who's like repulsed by my past and like all I use is like new 47's on everything. But yeah, not right now. - Yeah, well, it's fascinating really. Because it seems so simple and it's so open-ended because it means anybody. - Yeah, who can afford an iPhone? How's that to use? - No, to never end. So I think some people find it's really, really exciting. - I think that there's a whole lot of Empress New Clothes on the audio puritan. Well, like I've never met someone who'll happily walk into a blind test on half the things they claim to be most important. There's no way I'm going to hang my flag next to a thing I can't hear the difference of. Let alone when Skrillex is making pieces of music, how he does, of Apple headphones, and he's developing YouTube and through to the, you know, you mentioned the disclosure boys and like, the only record that we're throwing a spanner in this that I truly love that is recorded would be voodoo. And that's obviously a really, really different thing because it's all live instruments. But that is obviously quite dependent on the opposite end of the spectrum. And if I was doing that kind of music, I'd probably work in that domain a bit more. But for the like toolkit that I like to use, all of these things of like, you know, I have to be this an AIF air for whatever and all that, like it just doesn't. I went with Brian when we did the record when I was like 18. We had to get a master of one of the songs we'd done. And it was all the whole project was made so like loosely and it was all vaguely. I was a million different sessions and no one knew what was what and all we had was this MP3 of the version we wanted to master. And the master was like, we need to have a wav. And so with Brian, he's like, people put him at the top of this tree and he like, dragged in the MP3 into logic, bounced it as a wav and sent it back off. So they saw dot wav and they're like, load it in. Let's master that one. Right. Great. And I was like, well, fantastic. Brian is loud too. Like, you know, so many engineers would be like, yeah, Brian, you know, man, like the level of like details of sound. And it's like, he does have the levels. He's just sound just in the stuff that really matters of the like heart and things like, if it's an MP3, it's okay. I think. Yeah. Yeah. And the other question we always like to ask people is about advice and whether you've received advice from someone or you have through experience, learn some lessons along the way that you would like to share with other people. I think it was a technical boring one that I think is just actually useful is an off-rend of mine, Rupert, who's a great engineer and producer and stuff. He told me when you're not inspired, which is often to do all that you can to prepare yourself when you are inspired. So like, I've got a long list of stuff on my phone of like jobs that don't take inspiration to do. So it would be like make 10 cents, that cool. Or just like things, it's just a kind of just fucking around like, or like make 12 drumkits that sound nice or whatever. And just prepare your artillery because you can then, if you make a session of like 50 sounds that you kind of fuck with, but you didn't have any inspiration to really go anywhere with them. The next time you're inspired, you are going to so quickly move in and through those and it will mean you'll be able to capture your instinct so much quicker. So I think that's just a useful technical thing. And then I think the, I think probably the thing I most practice would be like the discipline of it, which is like to say like as much as there are times where you're just not going to be inspired and that's something good to do. I do think it is also like a muscle that can be trained. And like when I was at music college, like all of these people would be perhaps in classical but I then like 14 hours a day until their fingers and numb or whatever. And I was like, right, okay, I want to take this and do it in my thing because I'm definitely not that. If I could like apply this school of thought to writing and producing and stuff because it's so a muscle and it's amazing to me how constantly like it surprises me even though I find myself saying this like let's say you're feeling super uninspired for a whole week and you've already made the drum kits and the sounds and you're still sat there like for fine games and ways of making a game like set a timer that's like 30 minutes and say you have to make a song that samples this song or whatever or close your eyes and touch the Spotify screen and sample whatever the song you've touched or a million different things. I'll go around the room. You're in and record every sound you can see and make a song out of that. If you make a song when you're in a state of feeling really uninspired and you keep doing that, let's say you have a whole week of feeling really uninspired but you keep powering through it, you will make something that's good probably. And then that means that next time you're feeling dry and like, I've nothing left, you'll be like, "Ah, but you see this sketch you did on that day that you felt a bit rubbish." That did actually then become something you really liked. And like this, I have to learn this lesson over and over again like literally a few weeks ago we were finishing a record and it was like absolute, everyone was at the end of their inspiration for it. And we got so many good things, wrote three new great songs for it, finished loads of good ones and the whole thing felt a bit just like, "But we were all very much the school of thought of like, come on, let's get this done, let's fall back on our like, we've been practicing 10,000 hours for these moments where you just have to like rely on your instinct and your technical, whatever." And then it says a million other reasons why you're not feeling inspired and then you hear the things in two weeks and you're like, "Oh, great." So the, which is a great moral of the story because if the moral of the story is, we'll just carry on. If you think it's shit, you could well be wrong, you might as well carry on. It's a way better moral of the story than if it's like every time you think it's shit, you're right and just stop because that's so not, it's not that simple and I don't think it ever has been. So I think that's a really long-winded way of saying that to like hone the muscle of the discipline of doing it and enjoying just like putting it down, edit later, put it down, edit it later and getting it out of you. Get it out of you. Yeah. Get it out of you. That's a great catchphrase. And, Tasté, I've never such sound wisdom and quite practical in some ways. It seems doable. No, you can listen to that and think, "Actually, I'll just take that approach and it will get me places." It's hard sometimes, but it's, why would it not be? Yeah, no one should be expecting it to just be like, "Yeah, that day I woke up and the song came to, "Oh, you know what? I've got a great anecdote I can close your." So this is, maybe you've heard this, this is a Brian's story, but he, when I think it was you two were making their second, no, like they're followed up to Joshua Tree or something like that. And they were in this state that so many people have been in, I'm for sure have been in it where you're like glamorizing the process of your past records. Like, let's say you've had that song that was great a year down the line, you're just like, "Oh, do you remember that day where we all just hung out?" And wrote, "The streets have no name." And it was all just really chill and I remember a good time. They were going to be here and it was great. And your memory glosses over the time where there was three hours where you didn't have any verse, two lyrics and everyone was pulling their hair out. And your memory glosses over the time where the drum pattern was actually wrong for the whole first five. You just color it all in and go like, "Do you remember that time?" And you forget that you actually really did have 90% of it was you just really trying to work it out, like stroking your chin, being like, "Right, this doesn't feel necessarily easy." And so then you're in this track where you're in the studio next time and the song's not coming easy and you're thinking, "Well, this isn't good. remember how it was when it was was easy. Let's set this one off. So this was the state of mind that apparently they were in and Brian took them to like a three Michelin star restaurant where you're welcomed in and everything is like the actually epitome of calm and perfection and just absolute beauty and presentation and it all looks immaculate and there's like a way to reach person and you're seated down in the room is standing and all of that and they're all sat there and then he takes them into the kitchen wearing a Michelin star restaurant like that shit. It's like it's mad like if you leave a plate here for more than 30 seconds it's fucked and it can't be served and like absolute chaos and everywhere you look just people moving like crazy just like stress in their eyes and he was like guys this is your studio stop trying to make records out there you make records in the kitchen this is what it should feel like it's okay if it's like feels chaotic if it's okay if it feels like there's the songs causing you loads of stress and all of that like it's just okay embrace the journey of it and stop trying to make it in this like you know clinical sterile environment of everything should be done and easy and quick so yeah I think there's lots to be said. Yeah fantastic Fred thanks so much for inviting us in here and sharing so much of your world with us it's been absolutely fascinating. I appreciate it thank you man. And we should play one more tune from the record so an outro choice and what should we go for I think an outro could be oh big hand because he's got a lot of mentions he has still my joy in brackets. Thank you for listening we hope you enjoyed the episode if you have a moment do tell your friends and leave us a review it all really helps thanks to those of you who have already donated to the show I'm just one part of the team that brings you tape notes it relies on your support if you'd like to donate please head to our website to ask a question on a future episode or find out who's coming up head to our socials and on Instagram you can see pictures from the recording sessions or each episode of tape notes thank you for listening until next time goodbye. [Music] [Music]