The idea of a song

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22:01It turns out you can reset your expectations about songs, though, Nate. You know, at the beginning of the show, I played you Let's Get It Started by the Black Eyed Peas. If you were alive back in the 2000s, you would know that it was originally released in 2003 as Let's Get Our Word, which at the time was slang for getting wasted. The song even included a bridge about an epileptic seizure. Disability rights advocates were rightly appalled at the song, but somehow the song has given a second chance to introduce itself to the world. The Black Eyed Peas rewrite it for the 2004 NBA playoffs, and it's a hit.

22:34So you're telling me that Big Ben Wallace and the 2004 Detroit Pistons are responsible for saving the reputations and careers of the Black Eyed Peas. That's right. I mean, I'm willing to admit that there have been good introductions in the past. So many classic tracks. I mean, I think about like the Who are so good at intros. Yeah.

23:03hold on a second i'm just gonna go uh microwave a burrito you won't be fooled again by another long intro i understand uh while you're microwaving your burrito i'm gonna play you leonard skinner's free bird

23:22i mean you're basically strapped in for a nine minute long song now right Totally. You got to refill your lighter during that intro, perhaps. These are both the epically long variety. How about the kind that gets you dancing from beat one?

23:45It's a long break in Superstition.

23:50I love this, Charlie. It's making me think of one of my favorite stories from like the annals of pop history, which is when the Temptations were recording Papa Was a Rolling Stone.

24:06Which has an absurdly long intro. Yes. The producer of the track, Norman Whitfield, didn't tell the lead singer, Dennis Edwards, when he was going to come in. And Dennis Edwards was just in the recording studio just getting pissed, being like, Like, what? This intro's still going on. There's strings. There's like, like, what? And Norman Whitfield intentionally did that because he wanted Dennis Edwards to sound a little mad when he started singing that song to like, you know, it's a song about an absentee father. And he wanted to have like an edge in his voice. And Dennis Edwards finally comes in after, I don't know, like two, three minutes and goes, it was the third of September.

24:49And he is, he sounds pissed and it's because he actually is because of that long intro. I love that story. It tells us that, yes, the intro can be purposeful. There were so many great classic ones. I mean, Nate, can I play you one more? As long as I don't have to guess it. Yes.

25:14How dare you? Yep. How dare do you do this? That's Rick Astley is never going to give you up. You just got Rick rolled. I mean, it's a great intro. I'm speechless. Yeah, it is a good intro. It is a good intro. I just feel like intros maybe haven't been as good lately. I don't know. I'm trying to get into my head of like, why is my primary advice like kill the intro? maybe it's that you know our sort of nostalgia loop obsessed culture has made it so that intros are less original i found this really long playlist recently called pairs of songs with eerily similar beginnings created by someone with some of the best ears in music i'm grace bellman i am a music writer and professional playlist maker so for the past 12 years grace has been collecting songs that sound alike in their introduction.

26:07Sonic Twins, if you will. And it started with a new song that sounded like an old song. I had heard Back to Black by Amy Winehouse and Baby Love by The Supremes. I had noticed that they started very similarly. Once she heard this first pairing, she started hearing them everywhere. And they weren't just new and old songs. They were also songs that were sometimes made in the same era. Then I noticed there was a kink song and a beach boy song kink sweet lady genevieve and beach boys god only knows those started the same whoa same key and everything yep grace has some sharp ears this playlist is full of songs where like they start with the same chord the first few notes they're almost always in the exact same key and what's interesting is that for grace that this playlist ended up being less about things sounding the same and often more about finding really unlikely connections between songs of very different types.

27:02I have some favorites. I have like D 'Angelo and Eric Satie one. There's this Eric Satie piece that I would play called Je Te Vos on the piano.

27:17What? She says it sounds like D 'Angelo's Back to the Future Part 1 from Black Messiah.

27:25That is a deep pull. So ultimately what Grace finds from this playlist hunting that she's been doing for over a decade is that intros have a lot of information to tell you that they're worth paying attention to. I mean, like everybody, especially now, my attention span is short, but it always has to have been even before the introduction of smartphones into my life. And I really and I find myself being judgy on the first three seconds. Like this is what your first impression is, like what you, you, the artist, have decided that the first impression of me will be. And I know you thought really, really hard about it.

27:56and I know that for a lot of artists, it's like they want you to keep your attention, and so I think there are some artists who I'm sure, like you had said before, like really take their time in luxury over like six minutes of guitar or whatever, but I just think even that itself is informative. Oh, you're the type of artist that thinks that, I now think that that's important because if you've decided to keep that in there, even though I might be bored by it, what does that say about the rest of the song? is this is a song where like I'm gonna have to do close listening where like you know is it the way I listen to like minimalist music where it's kind of the same thing over and over for a while and I really appreciate the small changes so if you have a kind of boring intro then I might go oh okay I might have to like listen to really closely to to what you're doing and listen for a change um but at the end of the day my favorite intros are the ones that catch my attention and and the ones that just try to like be as flashy as possible.

28:56I love what Grace is saying here. It's like, whether it's long, whether it's short, whether it's, you know, eye popping or whether it's calm. Yeah. The first thing you hear in a track is essentially announcing to a listener, like, this is who I am. This is my sound. This is my artistry. These are my musical values. And going back to our, you know, thin slicing thing, it's like you can get that from maybe just yeah a couple hundred milliseconds of sound you you learn so much about an artist which is a way i've never really thought about music before honestly in an episode of switched on pop long ago we theorized this idea of the pop overture where artists would put a secret chorus melody into the beginning of their song just so that it's familiar by the time you hear it again i think one of the first ones we identified was closer by the Chainsmokers featuring Halsey.

30:05We ain't never getting older. Yeah, okay. Right. So what do you call that? A subliminal chorus? Right, exactly. So people were basically like, all right, let's get the chorus first, but we're going to have to have an intro. What are we going to do about it? And yet, since that sort of like 2010s EDM era where we're hearing a lot of those pop overtures, more and more the intro has just been chopped off. Take, for example, Sabrina Carpenter and her song Taste.

30:44She leaves such a strong impression, she doesn't even need a first impression. there is no intro, boom, right into the song. Benson Boone does the same thing on Sorry I'm Here for Someone Else. I'm sorry I'm here for someone else, but it's good to see your face. Unless you count that as an intro, but I don't think that's enough. I wouldn't say. Another recent hit does the same thing, Stella Lefty's Boston. On a train back to Boston and we're jumping the gun And I'm telling you, baby, this is the part I'd run, but I like it when you're nice. Like it when you're nice. No intro. Maybe part of the reason we used to have intros was for radio DJs to be able to transition between songs.

31:32I'm just making this up as we go. That's a good reason. Like, is there an explanation, perhaps that's technological, when you're able to, you know, pull up a song at will on a streaming device? You don't necessarily need to have that padding of the intro. I'd have to think more about this, but I'm not ready to say it's just a case of like, oh, people don't have attention spans anymore. You know, the technology is certainly a reason. We've listened to a number of intros earlier on that were over 30 seconds long. A song on streaming platforms usually does not count as a full stream unless someone has listened to at least 30 seconds of it.

32:07And so if you haven't given someone some interesting material early on, you know, they might hit skip and go to the next song, which is incredibly easy now. I mean, you used to have to get up, you know, change records. That was kind of a pain. And so, yeah, people have much more flexible listening habits, perhaps. I'm sure there's some music fans who are distressed that the introduction might be a lost art, but I feel pretty confident saying that it's not going anywhere. And in fact, I can back this up because I went and spoke to one of the busiest music producers in the game right now. Someone who's worked with Taylor Swift, Noah Kahn, Gracie Abrams, and has made music for decades with his band, The National.

32:50It's Aaron Dessner. and Aaron is such a fun person to talk to about this topic because not only has he worked on like some massive hits of the last few years but he's really thoughtful and very generous about how he approaches making a song so I feel like he's the perfect person for us to hear from about how and why introductions still matter in the world of music and the very first song I asked him about, it might be the biggest track he's worked on. It's Cardigan by Taylor Swift, and it has a very unique intro.

33:48Here's what Aaron had to say about this introduction. That one's interesting. It's actually what you hear when that song starts, you hear the air conditioning in the backstage of an arena in Germany where the National was playing, where I wrote it, because it was really cold. It was like a hockey arena in Germany or something, an awful, awful situation. But then that's me patting my leg, you know, like playing drums on my leg, which I often do, which I kind of learned over time that if you record yourself like playing surfaces or your body and record it with an iphone it just sounds cool i wrote the music first and taylor wrote to it i think she said that when she heard that sound of the what is me like playing my my thigh essentially um that it reminded her of someone walking like on cobblestones in high heels like unevenly and that gave her an image in her mind which sort of like led her into this the narrative that she wrote you know that's wild okay uh i was like chorus is the most important thing it's the thing you write first and in fact the entire song concept came from like aaron destner just going honestly i know it's wild to think that one of the biggest songs off taylor swift's album folklore yeah starts with air conditioning from a backstage room in a German like stadium and then Aaron Destner just slapping his thighs.

35:20That's wild. Wow. Okay. He has a lot to teach us. Speaking of introductions, I also had this theory that another Taylor Swift song might be inspired by one of Aaron Destner's tracks for The National. there's a national song called the system only dreams in total darkness that has a really striking opening

36:00Those angelic voices, they're a little reminiscent of the Taylor Swift song from Torture Poets Department that Aaron Dessner produced called So Long London.

36:32Those breathy cathedral vocals. Yeah, I hear it. So I asked Aaron, hey, I have this conspiracy theory that these two songs are related. Is there any truth to it? Here's what he said. I'm going to debunk that. It's a good story how this happened. Taylor was, she actually, she arranged those vocals to go at the end of the song. So she was doing those choral, like these angelic choral parts over the end of the last chorus of the song. That you hear when you listen to the song, you'll hear her doing that. But then she actually said, what if that went at the beginning of the song? Taylor is interesting when she records because she's kind of mapped it out in her head.

37:20I think part of it comes naturally to her. It's also because she's been thinking about it. So she'll come in and kind of have a whole architecture in her head that she's going to chase down. And that was one of those things that then we were like, oh, wow, that's so beautiful. But it was at the beginning, and then she kind of sang more to it. So I was wrong, but it did kind of teach me something, which is that you might think the introduction is the first thing you make when you're making a song. You know, seems like kind of logical. Start with the intro and then keep going. Yeah. And it turns out that is not the case.

37:53In fact, it might be the last thing you do is you make the whole song and then you're like, okay, now what do we put at the very beginning? And the case of this song, it's what you did at the very end. Another really fun introduction that Aaron's cooked up is actually the lead single from Gracie Abrams' forthcoming album. It's called Hit the Wall. And I love what Aaron and Gracie did at the beginning of this track.

38:32I'm a slipknot. I'm afraid that my fortress is a glass box. That is a cool opening sequence. It's like, right? It's really organic and yet it feels electronic? Yeah, I had a similar reaction. I had another theory that I wanted to share with Aaron. I was like, maybe there's some inspiration from minimalist music, you know, Philip Glass, Steve Reich. Is there any truth there? Let's find out. And the story of that song is basically that I was searching for something to inspire Gracie, because I feel like we were hitting a wall creatively with the album, where it was like, literally, we were kind of stuck, where we had like all these different songs.

39:16and but we didn't have the centerpiece of it or like the the glue and so i was in the studio early searching one day and just was like fuck it i'm gonna make the the coolest thing i can make i'm gonna sample myself i'm gonna sequence myself and i'm gonna write chords and then she walked into that you know and she just started and she wrote the song and like it just because this like triggered her brain um and then we were we felt oh hit the wall that's the that's the glue that binds everything else together because it's kind of minimalist weird avant-garde pops on but it's also like clearly organic you know like related to the folkier side of her world but then lyrically it's really self-reflective and existential and just brilliant in the way that she's like looking at herself and the patterns of breakdowns and kind of what her life has been like in recent years and and and all the success too but like i think um the intro is really on that song i would say it's very very important it sets the table in a way and kind of it piques your curiosity so the intro for hit the wall is actually pretty short but i feel like it captures so much of not only the song, but also, you know, what went into creating it.

40:38It's the whole inspiration for writing it. Yeah. So when Aaron and I were talking, he was actually speaking to me from his studio called Long Pond in upstate New York, where so many artists, including Taylor, have recorded. And I asked him if there was an introduction from his work that stood out. And he kind of looked around his studio and then he told me this. As far as intros and the introduction of something, Noah Kahn, The Great Divide came out recently and we made a bunch of songs for it end of August, which opens his record. So it's the intro to his new record. And I was kind of shocked when he told me it was the first song because it's kind of this, in general, it's different.

41:24It was like a new world in a way for him. He had written that kind of impressionistic piano that you hear at the beginning that he sings to. And I created this drone around him. And when we recorded it, it was August. And here you can actually see that pond right there. And there's just a ton of crickets and frogs and birds and all kinds of noise-making beautiful things. And so I just opened the door and the piano mics on the Yamaha U1, are right there and so you really it's like you hear just this late summer feeling and like this drone of organs and other instruments and he kind of saw that through with me and trusted it so much and loved it so much to make it the the intro to his record and just how it's being received that to me is really affirming life affirming and art affirming and just felt like oh he took a he took a risk definitely putting like a long sort of out there song as the first thing that people would hear so i really appreciated that oh man i feel like i've had it all wrong right the the introduction is alive and well i mean take it from one of the most in-demand producers in pop right now and even those long intros they can be powerful starts of creation they can help read us into a song maybe i've been wrong this whole time okay so if you're changing your tune on the introduction charlie yeah what how do we want to think about this structural part of the song like what what is its role how does one approach it how are we going to wrap this thing up uh well first of all i need to make a formal apology to all of my students but you know to that point like an introduction has to make a memorable and unique first impression like it's got to set that scene but it can't do so in a way that it's just like repeating the same chords it has to be evolving and taking you somewhere this sort of musical gesture can't overstay its welcome yes it has to set up all of our expectations of where the song is going to eventually go and it has to do that really quickly it's a lot to pull off as a musician It's hard work.

43:55So we've discovered the introduction is alive and well. In fact, it might be one of the most important parts of the song. Yeah. Hopefully we've introduced ourself well. We've captured that thin slice of your attention for anyone finding us on Netflix who just, you know, scrolled away from binge watching Bridgerton or Love is Blind and stumbled upon our humble podcast. We hope you come back because we have a whole series planned. And what comes after the introduction, Charles? Well, the intro matters because you don't get the whole story unless you grab someone's attention and you pull them right into the verse.

44:30Yes. And next week, I believe that, Nate, you are going to argue that justice is due for the verse. Yes. A very underrated part of song structure. IMO. Until then, thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. And listening. Oh. There you go. Got to work on that.

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