Deep Dive #1 - Surrender Yourself

Surrender Yourself was released back in October, and it was my first new music in some time. Here's a deep dive of how it was composed and produced!

How did we get here?

For a while there it felt like it wasn’t going to happen. I finished the album from which this song is taken (‘Springs Eternal’ is out on February 16th!) way back in April 2022! But work, non-work, incompetence, mental health, finances and maybe even fate all played a hand in pushing this thing back. I’ve taken comfort in believing that, had I started this whole process a year earlier, it wouldn’t have been the right time for the material to reach its true potential. It needed to be incubated a little more before it was ready to hatch into this world.

When I initially began making (or finishing) the album with Mike Lindsay at his studio in Margate, I took in 9 nearly finished and almost fully produced songs that I was convinced would be the whole album. Job done. But I left the first week of us working together feeling that nearly half of them needed scrapping and that I needed to write some more and better ones. It wasn’t that Mike and I had ruined anything. On the contrary, the work we’d done on one or two of the songs was so good that the weaknesses and inconsistency inherent in the others felt glaringly obvious to me. They weren’t really salvageable, or at least malleable enough to be shoehorned onto this record. I had to go home and write some more songs that were as good if not better in about 5 weeks.

This song in particular has had such a great evolution and after working on it with Mike for a while it was obvious that it was a much bigger and more immediate banger than I had given it credit for. I’m so pleased that it’s what we released first from this album. It felt exciting and infectious enough for it to be a good taster of the album, and it conveniently features all of the people who appear on the album at various points; a dramatis personae before the action begins…

Danelectro? More like Willelectro!

So come with me, as I take you on a deep dive of the process of making this song. Comments and questions are very welcome, as I fear I’ve gone into too much boring detail here. Let me know how interesting or dull you found it. It’ll help me make these kinds of posts better in the future!

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First Sketch

The first sketch of an idea for this song goes back to 3rd February 2019 and was called “Kerosene”. Someone must have been staying at our flat in Hackney (East London) at the time as I clearly remember that when I recorded this first sketch I was kneeling on the mattress in my studio (aka the spare bedroom) where a bed had been made up. Listen below and hear how the melody and chords remain virtually intact…

In my head, kneeling on that bed, I had in mind early 2000s New York for some reason. There was something ever so vaguely Nick Zinner (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) about the chords, or maybe just the staccato nature of the part. Or perhaps it just reminded me of Karen O’s vocal in the chorus of ‘Pin’. Looking back now, I guess the reason I was singing “Kerosene” was probably because it sounded a bit like “Karen O”. Obviously my version had none of their ferocious sex appeal (my current version still sorely lacking in that aspect, too), but it was still exciting me in some way. Exciting me so much that I wouldn’t return to it for two whole years! Granted, there was the minor issue of a pandemic in the way. But also, there was something poppy and futuristic about this song idea that didn’t fit my vision of where the album was originally to be headed. I honestly thought I was going to be making a stripped down folk record, with some strange electronics layered. How wrong I was.

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Uncle Brian Steps In

As I mentioned earlier, when Mike and I started working together on finishing this album I went back home after the first proper week-long session we did and decided I needed to write a bunch of better songs.

I had about 8 weeks from then until our next booked session, though Christmas stood in the way, plus a much needed rest for me after a very busy post-pandemic catch up year.

When January came around and people returned to school and work, I too returned to the grindstone. All I had to do was write 4 or 5 amazing and idiosyncratic futuristic pop songs in 5 weeks. No big deal!

My first thought was to e-mail Brian Eno, as you do. I’d been working with Brian before the pandemic on a bunch of things. Having gotten to know his method of working over the last few years, I was confident that he had reams of deliciously strange rhythmic beds or unused compositions hanging around in his gigantic iTunes playlist (yes, I still say “iTunes”) that might inspire something in me. So I asked him if he wouldn’t mind sending me a few to use as starting points for new compositions. It might be that I didn’t even include his contributions in the final mix, but I just needed a catalyst.

Brian is one of the greatest instigating forces of any musician I know. He just knows immediately how to create an unusual and interesting place to begin from. I was thrilled when he happily obliged, though he did so not before asking me for some keywords to help narrow down his search for the right kind of flavour. Here is what I offered:

“Camp / Kitch(-ish)

Sensual / Astral

Verdant / Flourishing

Frantic Energy But Slow”

Quite unexpectedly, he ended up sending me 26 pieces(!). It took me a few days to really sift through all of those. Some felt like nearly finished songs which, while tempting, wasn’t quite what I was after. But others were purely drum beats he had made – probably utilising some of the many random probability plugins he uses to wrong-foot himself into bizarre and interesting patterns. Some of those proved excellent and fertile ground from which to write on top of.

Proof that even Eno has a slow upload speed sometimes.

I started working on top of one of his pieces, called “LITTLE FEET, HUGE BODY 90bpm, played clock”. Here’s an excerpt:

Something about the strange stuttering accent of the rhythms made me think I was listening to something other than a beat in 4/4, so I decided to follow that instinct and write something either in 7/8 or 5/8 over it. Once I got a little counter rhythm going on top of it, that’s when I suddenly remembered ‘Kerosene’! I played the chords on top of the rhythm Brian had sent and marvelled at the instant vibe that was created.

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Meter? I Hardly Know Her

This song is in the time signature of 5/8 - a meter I’ve felt comfortable writing in for a while now. The East India Youth song ‘LOOKING FOR SOMEONE’ is in that time signature too. The allure of 5/8 really gets me going once I lock into it. It’s so close to being familiar but there’s just a slight skip in the rhythm that keeps you second guessing. I love that uncertain space. At the right tempo I also find it a very danceable meter.

In my original sketch, and my initial Brian beat-melding demo, the guitar chords in the verse are being played straight, with each chord landing on a down beat of the bar. But the real turning point the song took for me was changing that rhythm.

The old version:

1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and-5-and

And the new version:

1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and-5-and

Here’s an excerpt from the final stage of my demo:

Notice I’ve also added some other drums, a synth bass line, and edited Brian’s loop to come in later. I also then followed it with a ‘chorus’ section that actually has the same first two chords of the verse (D major and A Major), but instead of then going to F# (the tonic chord of the song), it goes instead to a B7, creating a sense of suspense, refusing to resolve. An arrangement has begun to take shape!

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A Little Help From My Friends

After a little more work, adding a bridge section from a melodic idea that was about 8 years old, and some demo vocal tracks (I’ll spare you those) I decided it was in good enough shape to bring back to Margate with me.

I’m so glad I brought this song back to Mike, because we made it sound a tonne better than where my demo was heading. Just simple things like replacing that cheesy 60s organ I had in the chorus section with a more staccato part played on something a bit more complimentary to the mix (a Korg Delta), or beefing up the synth bass to truly pin down the low end of the rhythm section, these small changes made a huge difference. It also took it out of the world of being a bit too Latin heavy. Something about the polyrhythmic shuffling, the time signature, and the bass line – which is very much in the Latin Jazz world – was all starting to seem a tiny bit pastiche. We needed to inject some futuristic and otherworldly sounds into it to bring it into its own space!

On our last week of working on the record I suddenly had the idea to bring in two friends of mine to layer up things on what we’d already done. ‘Surrender Yourself’ especially needed quite a lot of layering. Firstly, Genevieve Dawson, who I’d worked with on the live show for Anna B Savage’s tour back in 2021. Genevieve is an incredible musician. A great keys and piano player, an unbelievable singer, and her writing and arranging is just exquisite. She’s also a wonderful person who is an absolute pleasure to be around – which, when you’re working as intimately as this, is a quality that counts for more than anything.

Gen learnt the words and memorised the parts before she got to the studio so that the half day she spent with us was used as efficiently as possible. Here she is nailing one layer of her key line in the song:

The idea with Gen’s vocal was to blend it with mine when I’m singing in my upper range. Not just to bulk it up sonically, but also to create this unusual, slightly androgynous tone. Mike also stuck our vocals through the OTO Biscuit, which has a great vibrato feature on it - giving them a slightly David Bowie style wobble. And of course as we all know, in David’s early 70s work, he was the king/queen/other of androgynous vocal and style.

After a little lunch break, we spent the rest of the day mixing Genevieve’s vocals into the work we’d already done. The next day, my wonderful friend and close collaborator Alexander Painter arrived. Armed with cello, clarinet, saxophone and his own sonorous vocal, we really worked Alex to the bone over the one day he was with us. On ‘Surrender Yourself’ he layers up his vocal with mine in the chorus, creating a lovely harmony between us. He also provides a key moment of saxophone in the middle 8, rising and rising where the vocal melody descends, passing each other on the staircase.

L-R: Me, Alex Painter, Mike Lindsay

More of Alex on a future edition of my deep dives. He’s a key player in most things I do these days. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And finally a little percussion session with Mike to round it all off!

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Bonus Geekery

I’ll try to keep this bit short because it’s quite “for the heads”. But just a little run down of some interesting mix and production things that Mike and/or I did on this track:

• The MBV Style guitar in the chorus was doubled up and sent through the OTO Biscuit and added this nice, thin layer that sounded nearly Os Mutantes-like. Would have loved MBV and Os Mutantes to have been in the same room at some point.

• Since having the drum beat there and established was quite a key factor in how the songs on this album were written, none of the drums on this album are “live”. The sounds are from the extremely brilliant sampled kits from Toontrack’s EZ Drummer, which I think I’ve been using for about 14-15 years now. I’ve become quite good in that time at programming my own beats and then applying extra MIDI processing to humanise them. I like them to sit in this half robot/half human world. Perhaps one day I’ll work with a real drummer on my songs (there are some human drums on a couple of tracks on ‘Your Wilderness Revisited’ courtesy of Fabian Prynn and Tristan Williams) but for now this option suits me, and it’s a great time and money saver when both are at a premium.

• Further, on the drum front: it was with this song that we found that running the overhead channels (yes, EZ Drummer routes out the entire individual kit channels for you, should you wish!) through Mike’s Thermionic Culture Vulture, this gave them such a great “live” feel. A trick we repeated across the album thereafter.

• The delay on the climbing Saxophone line in the bridge was done with the Eventide Harmonizer H949. We set it up so I could ride it from the mixing desk in stereo, making it rise slowly as the bridge progressed. Routing effects and channels out out to the desk and “performing” them was something we did a lot on the album.

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And Finally, The Words

The words happened very quickly for this song, unusually for me. I had read this satirical Guardian article in which an AI chatbot, trained on the reams of robotic inanities Mark Zuckerberg has offered the world, is interviewed. It greatly amused me.

Time wise, it sat interestingly in that brief period of pre-GPT 4, collaged machine learning weirdness, where the AI wouldn’t just make mistakes, but almost beautifully poetic mistakes, as seen in this interview. The current GPT-4 feels so bland in comparison, though technically more competent. They sucked all of the soul out of it.

I clipped out some of my favourite lines from the interview and added them to the end of the song, thus giving a lyrical direction.

This song would be sung from the perspective of an imaginary Big Tech cult member trying to indoctrinate you into their clan, trading your life of free agency and choice for one of heightened convenience and technological / biological augmentation. Something we can all relate to!

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The Finished Article

All of these brilliant people and ideas combined, I think the end result of this song is one of a weird, hopeful exuberance. Maybe the dystopian, endlessly generative, augmented hell/dreamscape (delete as applicable) it speaks of is kind of fun sounding?

Maybe it’s also time 5/8 became the new 4/4. After all, it’s 1/4ths better, is it not?

So please enjoy this song now, with a fresh perspective on the work and people involved in bringing it to life.

Listen on: Spotify / Apple Music

THE END.

Please! Ask questions in the comments! If you made it this far, I really want to hear from you.

Much love

-Will x