Wednesday, Oct 7, 2020 • 17min

Dua Lipa - Levitating

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Dua Lipa is a Grammy-winning singer and songwriter from London. Her second album, Future Nostalgia, came out in March 2020. It hit #1 on the charts in thirteen countries, and it was shortlisted for the UK’s Mercury Prize. Dua co-wrote the song "Levitating" with some of her closest collaborators, including producer Stephen Kozmeniuk, AKA Koz. In this episode, Dua and Koz break down “Levitating” and how Dua’s childhood memories shaped its sound. songexploder.net/dua-lipa https://songexploder.net/dua-lipa

Talking about

Speakers

(3)

Dua Lipa

Stephen Kozmeniuk

Hrishikesh Hirway

Transcript

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Hrishikesh Hirway

00:00

You're listening to

Song Exploder

where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. My name is

Hrishikesh Hirway

Break

Speaker 2

00:47

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Hrishikesh Hirway

01:23

This episode contains explicit language.

01:25

Dua Lipa

is a

Grammy

winning singer and songwriter from

London

, her second album,

Future Nostalgia

came out in March 2020. It hit number one on the charts in 13 countries, and it was shortlisted for the

UK's

Mercury Prize

Speaker 2

01:39

One of the songs on the record is

Levitating

Dua

co-wrote it with some of her closest collaborators, including producer,

Stephen Kozmeniuk

aka

Koz

. In this episode

Dua

and

Koz

breakdown,

Levitating

and explain how do as childhood memories shape the song's sound.

Dua Lipa

01:57

I got you, moonlight, you're my starlight, I need you all night, come on, dance with me, I'm

Levitating

. My name is

Dua Lipa.

02:12

The day I wrote this song, I actually know the exact date,

Levitating

was created on 28 August 2018. I guess I just started writing for the second record, still figuring out where I wanted to go with it.

02:28

But knowing what my album title was going to be, which is

Future Nostalgia

. And I knew I wanted to touch on my childhood influences, and a lot of my childhood influences are really songs and music that my parents listened to. A lot of

Jamiroquai

Prince

Blondie

. And when those songs are played now, that just brings back such a rush of fun and exciting like emotions and all I want to do is dance and immediately takes me back to when I was a kid and I wanted to play on that emotion and that feeling and those memories and create something with like a fresh modern twist.

Stephen Kozmeniuk

03:09

I'm

Koz

I'm the producer of

Levitating.

Dua Lipa

03:13

Koz

it is such an incredible instrumentalist and producer and artist in his own right, and we've worked together for a really long time.

Stephen Kozmeniuk

03:22

Usually before we go into work, like I'll spend a couple of weeks or a month just like coming up with ideas to play when we hit the studio.

Dua Lipa

03:28

Before the session, I'd kind of like sent him like some notes and some stuff that I've been inspired by.

Stephen Kozmeniuk

03:34

She definitely had the idea of blending a lot of old stuff with new stuff, and I just thought like the best way to reinterpret the past was just use old instruments.

03:44

I had been looking for this synth forever, called

The Roland VP-330

. I've probably been looking for six, seven, eight years and then one day I found it in

Tokyo

, got it back to

Toronto

, I just plugged it in and literally the first thing I played was like what turned into

Levitating

04:01

The whole song was basically just built around that one patch, you know, this great synthetic choir sound, It was the first thing I play on it and I just happened to be recording because sometimes I feel it's just the best time to catch something and then just kind of looped it and started building a song around it, and then it has like a sound that's like analog strings and that's also that synth.

04:34

You know, it's like you don't want a keyboard that does like 100 things, you want one that does just a couple of things really well, and just has like, a vibe and a sound. I was kind of thinking it would be cool to do this kind of like a slinky disco track.

04:48

It was pretty simple. A lot of these times, you don't build them out too much, you just build out, like, just a great vibe to kind of write to and then forget about them until you hit the studio and then hit play.

Dua Lipa

05:02

I wrote

Levitating

. There were some of my close friends and collaborators,

Sarah Hudson

, Coffee Clarence Jr. and

Koz

. And I've worked with all three of them for so long, and Coffee is brilliant with melodies and

Sarah

is very much like a Fairy Godmother, and she starts every session with a tarot reading. It would be like, another way of opening up and talking about, like, our experiences of what was going on in life, and it instantly changes the energy in the room.

Stephen Kozmeniuk

05:36

It's always a good laugh with all of us. But sessions are an interesting thing because it's actually quite nerve wracking.

Dua Lipa

05:43

And so when we went to the studio, he was like, okay, he's like, I have some tracks, he's like, I'd love to like, play some stuff that I've been working on with, like you in mind and what you kind of told me. I think maybe

Levitating

was one of the first tracks he played.

Stephen Kozmeniuk

05:58

Someone would have their phone out and just as you were playing the beats and stuff like, you get your immediate reaction to melody and you just kind of capture it. Just so you don't forget it when you go back to it.

06:10

This one stemmed pretty heavily from

Dua

in the room. It can happen so many different ways, people just start singing something, but I remember like

Dua

really led this one.

Dua Lipa

06:19

Almost immediately, we went into the melody of. And then you kind of hear

Sarah

in the background going, "oh my God!"

06:31

It came so naturally, and we were just ready to go, and it just felt like such an easy like "yes, that's what we're going into".

Stephen Kozmeniuk

06:46

She was like instant on the melody.

Dua Lipa

06:49

You know, you make it up along the way, but it's just all about like the feeling.

06:55

We had the visual of being in like an

Austin Powers

movie and having

Mike Myers

just somehow like doing some random

Levitating

dance that we were just making up, that was just like helping give us a mood while we were writing the lyrics.

07:14

We ordered these donuts because I was like, "how are we going to spice this up?" And so I bought some donuts, we all had total, like sugar rush and just started writing, and I think that we were literally

Levitating

from the sugar rush.