Wednesday, Mar 10, 2021 • 19min
Glass Animals - Heat Waves
Play Episode
Glass Animals is a band from Oxford, England. They’ve released three albums since forming back in 2010. One of their biggest hits is the song "Heat Waves," which came out in June 2020. It was certified Gold in several countries, and Platinum in Australia, where it hit #1. Dave Bayley is the singer, songwriter, and producer of the band. He won the UK’s Music Producers Guild award for "Self-Producing Artist of the Year," and he’s produced songs for other artists, as well. In this episode, Dave tells the story of making "Heat Waves," over several months. First, on his own, and then later with his bandmates, Joe Seaward, Ed Irwin-Singer, and Drew MacFarlane.
For more, visit songexploder.net/glass-animals http://songexploder.net/glass-animals
Read more
Talking about
Speakers
(2)
Dave Bayley
Hrishikesh Hirway
Transcript
Verified
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
.Share
Break
Hrishikesh Hirway
01:22
Glass Animals
is a band from Oxford
, England
. They’ve released three albums since forming back in 2010. One of their biggest hits is the song “Heat Waves”, which came out in June 2020. It was certified Gold in a bunch of countries, and Platinum in Australia, where it hit number one.Share
01:38
Dave Bayley is the singer, songwriter, and producer of the band. He won the
UK’s
Music Producers Guild award
for “Self-Producing Artist of the Year” and he’s produced songs for other artists, too.Share
01:50
In this episode, Dave tells the story of making “Heat Waves” over several months. First, on his own, and then later with his bandmates, Joe Seaward, Ed Irwin-Singer, and Drew MacFarlane. Here’s
Glass Animals
on Song Exploder
.Share
Dave Bayley
02:15
Sometimes all I think about is you, late nights in the middle of June, heat waves been fakin' me out, can't make you happier now. I’m Dave from
Glass Animals
.Share
02:20
May 2018 is when I first started something and I didn't feel like there was any pressure to make another
Glass Animals'
record, we weren't in a rush. So I was going into the studio every day, long hours, just getting crazy synths, just finding sounds. I have this like exploratory phase before actually making an album for the band, which is just me eating lots of cereal and doing nerdy things, twisting knobs.Share
02:50
I was in this studio complex in North London called The Church, there were some bigger artists in all the other rooms. And I was in this little basement room, and I was ready to go home, I had a long, very unsuccessful day in the studio.
Share
03:03
I always use this fishing analogy of
Arlo Guthrie's
where he always said that writing songs is like fishing. You change your bait, put some fresh bait on, you can move your boat to a new spot, you can get some new line, you can try all these tricks, but you know, mainly you just catch like tires and weeds and like weird fish that you can't eat. And I'd had a whole day of that, just catching weird fish. But I was like, fine, one more.Share
03:27
I always have a guitar plugged in and a microphone. And I think I just hit record, picked up the guitar, and that's when I started like fumbling around.
Share
03:40
I'd been reading some gimmicky book about songwriting, and it was about like how you can kind of get these longer chord phrases that tell a story, and I was like, “Oh, let’s try something like that. ” So, I was trying to get this longer chord phrase and just started noodling around trying to find eight chords that fit together and had some kind of arc that took you on a bit of a journey.
Share
04:00
It was about nine minutes of fumbling, and then I played that chord pattern, and I was like, “Oh, that's cool, ” so I'd play it over and over again.
Share
04:10
They had this very reflective quality, but then it resolves quite well that chord pattern, and it feels like, I don't know, maybe like coming to terms with something or acceptance. And I think that's probably where the lyric came from.
Share
04:26
Last night, all I think about is you. I think one of the first things that came out of my mouth was that vocal line. It was late at night, and I was thinking about all those people that I missed.
Share
04:46
Last night, all I think about is you. Don’t stop, baby, you can walk through. Don’t want, baby, think about you. You know that I’m never gonna lose. You know, what you, what you want.
Share
04:56
I do all sorts of things to my vocal when I'm recording these raw ideas'cause I think, like many people, I really hate the sound of my own voice. So sometimes I pitch it down an octave, sometimes I pitch it up an octave, and I don't know, I just have all these tricks to kind of disassociate yourself from, from you.
Share
05:14
And this was kind of around the time that I started using Auto-Tune to do that for me. I feel like a lot of music is about not overthinking things, and when it's your own voice, it's so easy to overthink it.
Share
05:27
It's like, I don’t know, I think sometimes I'm on
Zoom
and I can see people looking at their own picture, and kind of losing sense of the conversation, and I don't know it's kind of the same thing, it stops you doing that, it stops you, just allows you to not think about the rules and how it should sound and try not to make everything too perfect.Share
05:51
Road shimmer wigglin' the vision. Heat, heat waves, I'm swimmin' in a mirror.
Share
05:52
At that point, I kind of tried to firm up a sound. When I have the guitar live and recording, it's not often a particularly interesting sound. So I just recorded the guitar, pitched it down an octave.
Share
06:10
Pitched it up an octave.
Share
06:16
And that just left enough space for the vocal to sit in between. Because a lot of writing a song is about leaving a space for the vocal to breathe.
Share
06:28
You just need a better life than this. You need somethin’ I can never give. Fake water all across the road. It’s gone now, the night has come, but.
Share
06:38
The guitar was a bit plucky and tinkly, so I thought it needs some warmth. It was a really deep, rich-sounding synthesizer. I remember putting the drums on after those synths. Well, at that point, I just looped everything I had. And loads of different verse ideas came out, loads of different hooks came out. And also ‘cause the chords are moving so much, you could use quite rhythmic vocal patterns that weren't necessarily crazy melodies to keep things moving, you know, the chords did a lot of the moving for you. So, I put Auto-Tune in key, picked up the microphone, and then I just went for it.
Share
07:24
Gotta be a better time for this. I don't wanna, but I let'em come in. I just wanna be alone. You just gonna be a mean too, and I think after about two minutes I was like, “Woah, I've got loads to go with here”.
Share
07:42
I tend to feel very comfortable writing late at night. I think there's a part of your brain that really, the sensible bit that keeps you alive, starts to shut down. And you just get to that point in the night and that part, the sensible bit's gone, and like these weird bits of your brain start coming out.
Share
07:59
At that point, I think it's probably time to head home, I'm knackered. The song ended, I heard someone behind me, and I was like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa". I thought I was alone in here. I turned around and there's just someone sitting there at the piano with a glass of wine. I was like "What is this? Who is this? Who are you?"
Share
08:17
And they just said, "It's
John
." And I was like, "Who is John
? I don't know John
." They were wearing a really nice suit, and I was like this is so strange, I said, "Hi John
. ” And they turned around, and it was Johnny Depp
! I couldn't believe, I was like, so he weirdly, Johnny Depp
was the first person to hear this song.Share
08:39
Someone who was working in one of the studios above me came in and was like, "Oh Dave, I'm sorry, we,
John
got lost." and he'd gotten lost, he was working with someone in a different studio and anyway, that was pretty weird, and then they invited me upstairs to go hang out, so that was it, that was the end of day one.Share
09:07
I just didn't touch it, for like six months, and then I was going on another
LA
trip and was gonna be pitching songs for a particular pop artist. One of my favorite pop artists as well, I was so excited and nervous, and I was digging through just old stuff and I think I remembered this and showed it to this pop artist to no success.Share
09:29
I mean, it would have been a great thing to have one of my favorite pop artists sing a song, but at the same time, it was a really personal piece of music, and I think a part of me would have actually been a bit sad if I'd given it away.
Share
09:42
Sometimes all I think about is you. Late nights in the middle of June. Heat waves been fakin’ me out. Can’t make you happier now.
Share
09:54
“Sometimes all I think about is you, late nights in the middle of June ". It means something very specific to me, but I like it when a chorus lyric can be interpreted in lots of different ways. For me, it's actually very, very personal.
Share
10:06
I lost someone, I lost my best friend some time ago now. I'm getting a bit welly-uppy here, but this particular person had their birthday in June and every time their birthday comes up, it is just like, it ruins me. I guess this whole song is about missing somebody. And people are just kind of vulnerable to that, you can't do anything about it. You can't help and save everybody, and it's okay to let yourself miss someone and feel this pain.
Share
10:45
So, after it had been denied by this particular pop artist I think, I was like, cool, this is good, I have ammunition to show to the band. And I think we were going to the studio in November, December, and I was like cool, this is another one I can show the guys and maybe, maybe they’ll like it.
Share
11:05
There’s Ed, Joe, and Drew. These guys are amazing players and musicians, in a way that I am not. Joe is always very keen on acoustic drums. I think they just add life. That feel of a good drummer is really hard to replicate with electronic drums.
Share
11:30
So Joe always has a pass with acoustic drums. July of that year, Joe had a really terrible accident, he was injured very badly and couldn't walk or talk for a long time. But Joe is very stubborn, and he was riding a bike when he had his accident. The first thing he wanted to do was get on his bike again. And the second thing he wanted to do was get back on the drum kit. And he just wouldn't let anything stand in his way. And he's playing with the groove that he always had.
Share
12:05
Sometimes, it takes a lot of time getting drums to sit together, but I love layering like snare sounds and kick sounds. And it can be quite a fine process. Sometimes I'll cut all the low end out of one, cut all the high end out of another to get them to blend together, and then run that through tape machine. It's a long and very tedious process that everybody hates watching me do, and I'm sorry to everyone who's ever seen it.
Share
12:34
And then, Drew and I were doing a lot of orchestral arrangements for everything, and he was keen to put these big stabs in. Big orchestral kind of moody like boom and then plung of a slightly cheesy jazzy guitar on the off beats. In those jazzy kind of seventh chords, it adds a little bit of optimism. ‘Cause ultimately I think the song is meant to be optimistic. It is really sad at its core, but it's kind of about accepting that sadness and vulnerability's okay.
Share
13:24
The road shimmer, wiggling the vision. Heat-heat waves I'm swimming in a mirror. "Road shimmer wiggling the vision. Heat-heat waves I'm swimming in a mirror". The lyrics are all about mirages and reflection.
Share
13:35
Usually I put somethin’ on TV. So we never think about you and me. But today I see our reflections clearly. In Hollywood, layin’ on the screen.
Share
13:48
I just had this picture of two people sitting on a sofa and looking into the TV screen, and seeing the reflection of the two of you, and realizing that you can't help them, and it kind of breaks your heart, yeah. I think the song was really intimate and really personal. So I liked the idea of the verse being really simple, just one single vocal and then the choruses I wanted to beef it up big time.
Share
14:12
Sometimes all I think about is you. Late nights in the middle of June. Heat waves been fakin’ me out. Can’t make you happier now. Sometimes all I think about is you. Late nights in the middle of June. Heat waves been fakin’ me out. Can’t make you happier now.
Share
14:35
I absolutely love 808 bass. I used to DJ ‘til quite late at night and then not be able to sleep, I'd come home and start making music while all my housemates were asleep. And I just, I needed to feel that bass outside the club, so, yeah I've always been obsessed with 808s.
Share
14:57
Last night all I think about is you. Don't stop, baby, you can walk through. Don't want, baby, think about you. You know that I'm never gonna lose.
Share
15:17
So that intro is the first demo, the first-ever thing that was ever recorded for this, is that. I thought that was a nice way to round it off because I kind of like to think that albums, they're kind of like a snapshot of who you are in that certain period of time and where your head's at.
Share
15:36
Sometimes it's just useful to like help you get to the next step, if you think about like the idea of the song and the concept. It can just be, it can be a helpful trick. But really, I think in this case, it felt like a nice nod back to something really, really personal and starting just alone at night in a room until
Johnny Depp
showed up.Share
Hrishikesh Hirway
16:05
And now, here’s “Heat Waves, ” by
Glass Animals
, in its entirety.Share
Dave Bayley
17:19
[Heat Waves -
Glass Animals
]Share
Hrishikesh Hirway
18:02
To learn more, visit songexploder. net. You’ll find links to buy or stream “Heat Waves, ” and you can watch the music video for it.
Share
Break
22:02
Radio Tokyo from
PRX
.Share
Break
Add podcast
🇮🇹 Made with love & passion in Italy. 🌎 Enjoyed everywhere
Build n. 1.38.1
Hrishikesh Hirway
Dave Bayley