The xx - Crystalised

0:00Jamie xx:You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirwe. Let me tell you about one of my favorite podcasts in the world, How Did This Get Made? It is so funny, and it is just one of the best film discussion podcasts talking about some of the very worst movies. It's hosted by the comedians Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Manzoukas, all of whom I adore individually, and then together, they're just a magic combination. And they'll also have guests on sometimes, like Seth Rogen and Adam Scott and Nicole Byer.

0:39Jamie xx:And I just love this show. I listen to it when I'm at the gym, which is a terrible idea, because sometimes I'll be in the middle of some exercise and in the middle of a crowded space, and I burst out laughing, and I look like a complete psychopath. but it's worth it. Check out How Did This Get Made if you love talking about or hearing about just terrible, cringeworthy movies that are so bad they're good. Check out How Did This Get Made today. Thanks to Gusto for supporting Song Exploder. This show, pretty unexpectedly, turned into a small business a little while ago. And Gusto is online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses.

1:18Jamie xx:It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use. So you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. They've got options for every business size, whether you're as small as Song Exploder or much bigger. And they can work with nearly every budget. It's quick and simple to switch to Gusto. You just transfer your existing data to get up and running fast. Plus, you don't pay a cent until your first payroll. So try Gusto today at gusto.com slash songexploder and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash songexploder.

1:59Jamie xx:Once more, it's gusto.com slash songexploder. This episode of Song Exploder is brought to you by Booking.com. My wife and I have been thinking about visiting some of our friends in Philadelphia this summer. And so while we've been daydreaming, I've been looking on booking.com to check out places where we might stay in Philly. I put in our dates, and there are over 100 options listed. So I'm gonna start narrowing things down. I'm gonna choose places that have an eight or higher rating and a king bed available. And then I'm gonna focus on hotels in one of my favorite neighborhoods, the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood.

2:39Jamie xx:And look, there's a hotel here with a 9.0 rating, And there's a note on the site that says, couples in particular like this hotel. They rated it a 9.5 for a two-person trip. All right, so look at that. That sounds pretty awesome. You can find exactly what you're booking for. Booking.com, booking.ya. Book today on the site or in the app. The XX formed in 2005 when they were still in high school. They signed to the UK label Young and put out their first album in 2009. It won the prestigious Mercury Prize and was named one of the best albums of the year by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and more. And since then, The Guardian has named it one of the best albums of the 21st century.

3:25Jamie xx:This year, the three band members, Rami Croft, Oliver Sim, and Jamie XX, played together as the XX for the first time in eight years. I spoke to them in between the weekends at Coachella, where they were opening their sets with the song Crystallized. It's the first song that they ever released, back in April 2009, when the lineup also included Barya Koreshi on guitar. I spoke to Rami, Jamie, and Oliver here at my studio about how they first found each other and how they made Crystallized.

4:11Oliver Sim:I'm Jamie, I'm the producer and I do all the electronic stuff on stage

4:16Romy Croft:I'm Romy and I play guitar and I'm one of the songwriters and I sing

4:21Oliver Sim:And I'm Oliver, I play bass, I sing and I'm the other songwriter.

4:29Romy Croft:Oliver and I met in nursery school when we were three.

4:33Oliver Sim:And then we met Jamie when we were 11, the first day of school. I didn't know anybody else that came from my previous school, so I was on the hunt for some friends quickly. and I gravitated towards these two quite instantly. I just felt like some kind of similarity, like a strangeness probably that I felt similar to.

5:01Romy Croft:This is wonderful, fascinating to hear this now. Jamie and I used to go skateboarding together and we used to watch a lot of skate videos together and discovered a lot of amazing music. There was a video that Jamie showed me that had Portishead and Mazzy Star and The Cure. I think that was actually an amazing way of discovering music.

5:20Oliver Sim:And then my uncles were DJs, so I inherited my decks when I was 10 years old, playing records, playing my parents' records. And then I learned about the sampling of those records and all of that. We didn't really start making music together. Like, we started independently. Jamie was making his solo music. Romy was making hers. as I was making mine.

5:44Romy Croft:It was just such a private, personal exploration, connecting with music. It was such like a shy... I remember a moment of us sitting together, and I was like, I like singing. And you were like, I like singing.

5:59Romy Croft:Then Oliver and I were kind of trying to, along with Baria, who was also in the band at the time, trying to find a way to play live.

6:08Oliver Sim:We were gigging me, Romy, and Baria for quite a while. so for a period of time I was watching these guys do it and going to the gigs.

6:18Romy Croft:Yeah we begged Jamie we said please play drums in the band please play live drums because he was a great drummer.

6:24Oliver Sim:I didn't really know what to do because I didn't want to play drums on it because it sounded so good as it was. It wouldn't have worked because these guys were a lot quieter than they are now you just wouldn't have been able to hear what was going on on stage if there was a live drum kit that was one of my main things that was stopping me from doing that i'm really glad

6:42Romy Croft:that jamie said no at first because it kind of forced oliver and i to we figured out a way to make electronic drums simplistic ones first and i think because of the limitations i mean a lot of everything we'll say has probably come from limitations as you know oliver and i were like writing to electronic drums from the eight track that i had it had like drum beats in it so we sort of would use those or i remember making some really simple drum beats on like a weird program on drummer on my computer what is that program like hammerhead or something yeah very basic i really remember that and then just we had that burnt it on a cd and then we gave it to the sound person and said like have to be like track three and it would go like one two three eventually we said to jamie please can you can can you like help us and make some beats so you I made some beats and then eventually...

7:31Oliver Sim:Eventually I went on stage and started playing the MPC.

7:34Romy Croft:Having Jamie play the MPC live in the band was a very big turning point of the fluidity of it being live feeling, but still electronic.

7:50Oliver Sim:And MPC is a music production centre, that's what it stands for, and it's actually meant for making full tracks on them, usually hip-hop but i never did that because i always just wanted to use it as a live tool playing it live tapping the buttons i think when we started writing crystallized we only had about four songs you know we were playing pub sets for about 20 to 25 minutes and jamie had just joined the band i remember the very like earliest demo was rommy and i playing two acoustic guitars

8:38Romy Croft:it was in front of um the program on photo booth photo booth the most roundabout way yeah it worked though we'd like filmed ourselves there was the video and then you could extract the audio

8:58Oliver Sim:At that point, songs very much started as like words on a piece of paper.

9:04Romy Croft:We sort of used to share lyrics back and forth, like poems.

9:07Oliver Sim:I remember my first lyric was inspired by something my mum read in a paper about how you can have your ashes compressed so hard that they are turned into diamonds, which is really macabre but that's the first lyric you've applied the pressure to have me crystallized you've applied the pressure to have me crystallized and you've got the faith that I could bring paradise

9:45Romy Croft:those first lines of crystallized you know I thought they were so visual and really unique but then I think I sort of reacted then I'm sort of in my second verse trying to write something that is got a similar pattern and wanted to use an interesting word like crystallizer there's like paralyzed and you know other words that kind of bouncing off what Oliver had said I'll forgive and forget Before I'm paralyzed Do I have to keep up the pace To keep you satisfied

10:23Oliver Sim:Mine and Romy's writing was very much like a patchwork rather than like sat in the room together but so many of the songs from the outside must really sound like we're singing together, you know, two parts of a love song sang at each other. You know, Ron and I being best friends and not only that, both being gay. You know, it's not directed at one another. It was kind of making each other's perspectives kind of just hoping they would fit.

10:59Romy Croft:Sort of a shared space, both individually saying our perspectives on it, but never really asking like, ooh, what's that about for you necessarily? Just reacting to each other's lyrics. Then you could sort of like create things and then send it back and forth between each other, have that distance from each other, but the closeness. Yeah, that autonomy to be able to make things separately was a big thing for me. And the way Oliver and I sing together kind of comes from a place of like, oh, you go first, no, you go first. So then we sing together.

11:37Oliver Sim:The first time I really remember was us trying to figure out what the song was and how to play it live, probably for that weekend's show. I was also trying to figure out my new toy, which was an MPC, and plugged a microphone into it and got Oliver to sing like an ooh, just a note, just to see how it worked, and then recorded it into the machine and started messing with the pitch live, and that became the intro of Crystallized.

12:11Oliver Sim:So that sound is still that same sound from that first day of just trying to work out Crystallized.

12:17Romy Croft:It really feels like it's such a deep dive into memory to remember the creation of this song. I know that in terms of my personal connection with playing the guitar, I've never really been that interested in full chords. I really love melodic guitar.

12:39Romy Croft:But wanting to be able to sing confidently and play the guitar, there was a simplicity to the instrumentation of it. because a lot of what we wanted to put on the album was exactly what we could play live. And I wouldn't feel confident to play that full intro riff and sing. I had to move to just running single notes. You don't move slow And taking steps in my direction The sun's on's echo Does it lessen your affection?

13:19Jamie xx:My conversation with the XX continues after this.

13:26Jamie xx:Song Exploder is sponsored by the game Mixtape. And to learn more, I talked to one of the creators. My name is Johnny Galvatron. I'm the writer and director of Mixtape.

13:35Oliver Sim:It's about three teenagers on their last day of high school going to their final party together, listening to the greatest mixtape of all time.

13:43Jamie xx:And where did the idea for this game originally come from?

13:45Oliver Sim:Just wanting to make a game based around That's Good by Devo, which is the greatest song of all time. There's just something alive in that song that speaks to me. And it's very much a game about being a music lover and someone who appreciates music and knows where to place it in their life. And then game-wise, there are different kinds of mechanics. There's different kinds of music. There's different kind of art style. So the game as a whole should be viewed as a mixtape and kind of this artistry of arrangement.

14:14Jamie xx:And so how is the game itself like a mixtape?

14:17Oliver Sim:So usually in a video game you will have a standard set of mechanics which might be fighting. But in a mixtape there's different people saying different things with different vibes. And you want each song to be given its own experience, its own life. And you want to use the medium. That's what's kind of important about making video games. You want to use the medium to show what the music is showing. We have this song BJ Thomas most of all where a friend gets betrayed and she floats back through town and just kind of knocks everything out of her way as she flows through town and you control her and like what a beautiful way to kind of use that song and to use a mechanic and input to show the betrayal and the despondency and the sadness and when you can get all those things mixed together and hit those crescendos where you hit between video game, music, narrative, of that's the gold, that's the diamond that you aim for.