Hot Chip - Boy From School

0:00You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirwe. I'm going to be on tour for the next few weeks, and all the dates are at songexploder.net slash live. I'm going to be playing songs from my new album, In the Last Hour of Light, with a full band, and I'm going to be talking about the making of my album with a special guest moderator in each city. I get to be the interviewee instead of the interviewer. So I'm going to be joined by Jason Manzoukas, Samin Nosrat, Alison Russell, Joshua Molina, Ken Jennings and John Roderick, Min Jin Lee, and Adam Scott.

0:37It's a really personal album, and I hope you can make it out to one of the shows. You can get tickets and more info at songexploder.net slash live. This episode is sponsored by the new video game Mixtape. It's sort of like if the movie Dazed and Confused were a video game. It's about high school and adventure and nostalgia. And if you're the kind of person who cares about the power of an amazing mixtape, then this game is probably for you. The soundtrack features Smashing Pumpkins, Iggy Pop, Suzy and the Banshees, Joy Division, The Cure, and a lot more. Mixtape comes out May 7th on console and PC.

1:16Check it out at mixtape.game.

1:22Hot Chip is a band from London made up of Alexis Taylor, Joe Goddard, Al Doyle, Owen Clark, and Felix Martin. Their second album, The Warning, came out in 2006. It was nominated for a Mercury Prize and named one of the best albums of the year by NME and Pitchfork. And later, NME would include it in their list of best albums of all time. For this episode, I talked to them about one of the songs from The Warning called Boy From School. You might have heard it in the second season of the show Beef on Netflix. The band's also in the show. Or you might have heard it on The Simpsons. You could have also heard the song In My Car All the Time in 2006.

1:58So I was very excited to talk to Alexis and Joe from Hot Chip about how Boy From School was made. We tried, but we didn't come along. We try, but we don't belong My name is Alexis Taylor. And my name is Joe Goddard. We became friends at school. We were like 11 and 12 years old, I think. We grew up playing football and talking about bands that we'd read about in the NME and went to loads of gigs together, hundreds of gigs. We all used to congregate at Joe's house, usually on a Friday after playing football after school. And we realised that we both liked making music and we would play songs on the guitar and listen to music or watch films and stay up late and have a fun time.

3:04I lived close to where we all grew up and went to school, a place called Elliot School in Putney, which is close to this house. So Alexis and I would go home from school and make music in this bedroom really, really very frequently. Joe was making music in a band with other people and I was making music in another band. But then at some point, Joe asked me if I wanted to record songs of mine that were like solo guitar and vocal songs, record them on his four track. So he was really acting like a producer from quite a young age. And he did that, but then also wrote his own songs. And we would play songs together.

3:47And I think initially they were separate songs from one another, like a Joe song or an Alexis song. And then at some point we started to write songs together and finish each other's sentences or write a second section for a song or something like that, or just sing together. And that was kind of the beginning. we really had no training in like engineering and making records we were really making it up as we went along i had a very small amount of equipment and we were using a computer but in a quite a rudimentary way doing it all in this bedroom boy from school was one of the first things that we made for our second album the warning we were just absorbing lots of influences from dance music from four to the floor house music and disco and dfa and other things that we were listening to at that time this was the moment in time when basement jacks released their first album which was for a kind of indie fan was a good way of getting into house music so i was going clubbing and this kind of like indie version of dance music was exciting to me but even in the process of writing boy from school the first iteration of it that was recorded and written at joe's house was more gentle and slow and was a ballad i remember leaving the room that me and joe were working in and going for a break into his brother's bedroom where there was like no one in the room and just using that as a place to write something we'd been to university by this point and started working jobs and something about like being in that room was quite evocative of many years spent hanging out with joe it made me think about the school days and those school days weren't that far behind us but something about like continuing having a friendship with joe and always making music with him and it often being in that house connected me to the school days quite closely as if we hadn't like gone that far away from our beginnings.

5:55And I was a boy from school, helplessly helping all the rules. It began as a Casio-based track. So when Alexis wrote this very gentle, delicate song, I remember feeling like maybe this is a moment when we should try to be kind of embracing a different groove and trying something a bit more up-tempo. Like, let's try changing the context of this song entirely. It's such a lovely song. but to me it felt like an exciting thing to suggest going with something that we hadn't really ever done before like having a go at a kind of style of music that felt kind of novel for us to do at the time and this moment of joe suggesting changing it from the ballad to the disco bass track was quite a big moment and it's not an obvious link between the kind of lyrical content, slightly nostalgic words about your experiences at school, trying to summarize a relationship.

7:15That doesn't necessarily sound like the subject matter of disco music. So I think it was a bit of a leap for both of us to see, will this work? That original version, It was on this Casio MT-70. I think that that keyboard was particularly good at sparking ideas for Joe and for me. It's a really simple, inexpensive instrument that I guess was mass-produced by Casio in the 80s. It doesn't have a lot going for it in terms of synthesis power, but essentially it was the most important instrument for all of our songs at that time. and even when we decided to make this kind of up-tempo version it's used for almost all of the sounds on the song.

8:05I remember Alexis playing the bass line with this kind of lolloping rhythm. Within like, you know, the next two or three hours we put down like most of the major elements.

8:26I remember that riff is on the Vox electric piano that sounds a bit like a clavinet and plays all the way through. The effect you put on it, Joe, gives it a kind of auto-wah kind of sound. Like that's done immediately after it's recorded. So the processing is a big part of the production. Yeah, so I did a lot of experimenting with effects on each of those little parts. And so I just spent hours and hours cutting up these little bits of audio and moving them until they were perfect and kind of playing with the delays on these notes because we wanted the groove of this thing to just be super kind of tight and funky and mechanized.

9:07So it was a matter of like moving stuff around until it felt right and then looping that. And he was always and still continues to be somebody that wants to keep working hard to perfect something. Previous to this, I'd just been using drums drums from our Casio keyboard and cut them up. But at that time, I was learning about taking drums from other tracks. So I sampled a kick drum from this DFA remix of Decepticon by La Tigra. Really great remix. One of my favorites at the time. You know that we discussed this with James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy from the DFA many years ago and they told me that they had taken that kick drum from Is It All Over My Face by Loose Joints, the Arthur Russell project.

10:14We would just kind of record like some clapping in the room. We didn't have like a full drum kit in my bedroom but we had a hi-hat because we thought it was an element of the drums that's good to do for real to be able to introduce your own kind of groove with your own kind of style

10:35Alexis sang the words to the song like right then and there in that original session And I was a boy from school

10:49Helplessly helping all the rules And I was a boy from school helplessly helping all the rules. I was somebody who wasn't rebellious. I couldn't help but go along with things in a kind of fairly by-the-book way, which I suppose meant I'm not a rebellious teenager. So I think something about all of the time spent at Jo's house and then being in that room made me just look back on the school days fondly and with some wistful feeling. And there was a girl at school Blending all the words she'd learned from home The next line was about a girl at school who I had a crush on and then went out on a date with and really liked.

11:51And then I was talking about her seeming quite grown up, like she had absorbed a lot of mature behaviour from a family situation she was in. And it felt like she didn't remain young for very long, but had quite a lot of growing up very quickly. That was my sort of perception of her. Nothing could keep her a child Long hours don't you know we try You know, those school days in general and the girl that I was singing about and all of that love, it's a nice place to go back to. More with Hotship after this.

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15:46For all of those years of making records together, we never had like a vocal booth. so when Alexis is singing he's just in the room with me with headphones on so I'm listening only to his voice without being able to hear the music Now I find you on the street Then I learnt those words and sang just in unison with him Breaking rules hopelessly we meet And it would be the same when I would record vocals and Alexis would just be kind of listening to me. Lives are found but loves are lost Say goodbye to everything nothing costs I don't think we felt super confident about singing. We weren't people who sang with great skill and expertise and confidence.

16:48you know it's not like we harmonized in a dressing room practicing all of these things and perfecting it we're doing our best but we certainly weren't these like super slick pro singers so i can also hear that in the recording it sounds really nice to me but um it's not super impressive like some people's vocals would be i'm not saying that as a criticism of it i really like it but it feels like people who haven't had vocal training in the best possible way like they're naturally themselves You know, Alexis would be singing the verse to a song and I'm listening to him recording takes and that would spark in my mind ideas for the next section of the song.

17:28We tried, but we didn't have long. We tried, but we don't belong. The chorus that Alexis had written was very beautiful and there had been a kind of strong Beach Boys reference because that was a band that both of us were really, really, really passionately kind of in love with. So it has a lot of layers of vocals that we both kind of added. We tried, but we didn't have one We try, but we don't belong We try, but we don't belong I was thinking about the relationship with that girl at school and how even though you're very young and it's not like a proper relationship, it can still make you feel those first feelings of connection with somebody in a romantic way being with somebody and what you can feel like when that doesn't work out it's essentially talking about loss and it's also talking about friendships being lost between different people as their lives develop as they grow older things not fitting together as you had hoped they would and what you feel like after that.

19:06Say goodbye to nothing, everything costs. We had this kind of funny children's glockenspiel that we would take to the live shows from the really early days. It felt important to us to kind of bring a range of slightly unusual instruments with us. And I think that's there in a fair amount of hot chip music. It's a kind of a childlike quality.

19:41And I remember that we had an auto harp.

19:50It's a really super cool instrument. Like super annoying to tune because there are tons of strings but like a really, really lovely sound. we had these things kind of scattered around my bedroom floor you know that really felt like how we made music back then was like what do we have around us joe had a lap steel guitar

20:18i definitely can't really play the lap steel guitar very well so it's as good as it could be and it's a bit fumbly but it's something that was there in the room and again like if you've grown up listening to pet sounds by the beach boys you're kind of fascinated with the idea that they put together different instruments that don't normally get put together so we absorbed something from their productions and then felt like it was normal to go and now we put lap steel now we put auto harp now we put cassio just put these things together because we know we like it when all these sounds blend together.

21:03And then there was more writing that Joe did for like the other section of the song. Just responding to the kind of emotion of Alexis's chorus. I got, I got lost You said this was the way back I got, I got lost You said this was the way back The track sounds quite sorrowful at the end, like those vocals are quite exposed, the high range that we're singing in. We tried, but we didn't have long We tried, but we don't belong Things are sort of falling apart around that. So it sounds like the musical equivalent of something coming to an end after the words have talked about something coming to an end.

22:06We didn't have long. I feel like it works really nicely as an ending, but from my perspective now, being an older person, I would generally now finish a track with drums and things so that a DJ can mix out of the record into something else. I feel like I'm kind of more encumbered by the constraints of genre now, now that I understand and know more about making music. So it's nice to just think back to being a person that really didn't really know that much about those things and wasn't really thinking about those constraints. I can remember hearing it in a club in Sweden, walking through a really busy dance floor and the song was playing.

22:49and that's my only time I think I've ever heard it in a club and it felt A, really exciting to hear it and B, I remember thinking we made a song that isn't exactly like most club music but it still managed to get played. So I sometimes feel like we kind of got away with something because it doesn't sound like other dance tracks. It sounds a bit more gentle. So it's nice that it could sometimes get played in nightclubs. and it's probably the song that people have emotionally connected with the most out of any song that we've written. Just the other day we were playing it in Sydney at the Sydney Opera House and I could see somebody really actually crying during the song and looking pretty distraught and I don't know what it was that they'd gone through but what the song makes you think about that's beyond the song, that's your own experiences.

23:43But there's an emotional core to it that I think is quite real.

23:51Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.

24:10And now, here's Boy From School by Hot Chip in its entirety.

24:30And I was a boy from school Helplessly helping all the rules And there was a boy at school Hopelessly wrestling all his fools And there was a girl at school Blame it on the words you learn from home

25:16Nothing could keep her a child Long times don't you know we try We try But we didn't have long We tried But we don't belong We tried But we didn't have long We tried But we don't belong

26:09Now I beg you On the street Heartlessly Breaking rules We

26:24Lives are found And lives are I say goodbye to nothing, everything comes Now I find you on the street Breaking rules hopelessly we meet Lots of fun, lots of lots Say goodbye to everything, nothing costs We tried, but we didn't have long We try, but we don't belong We try, but we didn't have long We try, but we don't belong

28:10I got, I got, I got He said this was a way back I got, I got likes He said this was a way back I got, I got likes He said this was a way back

28:43We tried, but we didn't have long We tried, but we don't belong We tried, but we didn't have long We tried, but we don't belong