Wednesday, Jan 12, 2022 • 20min
Joy Oladokun - Look Up
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Joy Oladokun is a singer and songwriter from Arizona, now based in Nashville, who’s been releasing music since 2015. Last year, she was named an Artist to Watch by NPR, Spotify, and Amazon, and she was #1 on Vogue’s list of New LGBTQ Artists To Listen to Now. She put out her third album, In Defense of My Own Happiness, in June 2021. It includes the song “Look Up.” For that track, she worked with Grammy-nominated songwriter and producer Dave Bassett, and while they were working and talking, they recorded a couple long voice memos. Joy sent me those voice memos, and in this episode, in addition to the stems of the recording, and Joy’s story about how it was made, you’ll hear the actual moments in late 2019 when the song was first coming together. Joy explains how the song was inspired by the different, and maybe opposite ways that she and her partner see the world.
For more, visit songexploder.net/joy-oladokun https://songexploder.net/joy-oladokun
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Talking about
Speakers
(3)
Joy Oladokun
Hrishikesh Hirway
Dave Bassett
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
.Share
Break
Hrishikesh Hirway
01:40
Joy Oladokun
is a singer and songwriter from Arizona
who's now based in Nashville
. She's been releasing music since 2015 and last year she was named an artist to watch by NPR
, Spotify
and Amazon
, and she was number one on Vogue's
list of new LGBTQ
artists to listen to. She put out her third album In Defense Of My Own Happiness in June 2021, it includes the song Look Up for that track.Share
02:09
She worked with
Grammy
nominated songwriter and producer, Dave Bassett
. And while they were working and talking, they recorded a couple of long voice memos. Joy
sent me those voice memos and in this episode you'll hear the actual moments in late 2019 when the song was first coming together, and Joy
explains how the song was inspired by the different and maybe opposite ways that she and her partner see the world.Share
Joy Oladokun
02:34
Look up, do you see the sunlight? Look up, there's flowers in your hair, hold on, 'cause somebody loves you, you know trouble's always gonna be there, don't lеt it bring you to your knees, look up. My name is Joy Oladokun.
Share
03:01
The day I started working on this song, I was on a trip to
L. A
. to work on some songs with some people I hadn't met before, and it was December, it had been a long year and is one of those things where it's like, I don't want to go to school today, you know, I wish I could sleep in or you know watch a movie or go back to Arizona
and see my parents, but instead I was in L.
A. writing music.Share
03:28
I do get tired of writing sessions, but even if everything goes topsy-turvy and the session is awful, I still kind of feel like you learned something about yourself or about the world, and so I try to enter into each one as fresh as possible aside from the general feelings of "man, I'm tired and I just wanted to be christmas", you know.
Share
03:51
I wrote this song with
Dave Bassett.
When Dave
was introduced to me, my publisher gave me the sales pitch, it was like Dave
has worked with x person, like there was some selling point and I don't super care about those things. I tend to when those things come across my desk listen to the music and see like could this person help.Share
04:16
And I just listened to his work and I just thought it was all, I don't know, it was all meaningful, it seems like
Dave
consistently asked the artist what do you want to write about? What you want to say? And so I went from being like, "sure, alright with this nice white guy" to like, oh this is someone who could be a helpful conduit for something that I have trouble accessing on my own.Share
04:42
When I first got to
Dave's
, I sat down, and I honestly picked up a guitar pretty quickly, which is not usually the case, but we were getting to know each other while playing guitar. It was this weird soundtrack to the conversation of getting to know someone. And I think as I started to talk about some of the things that I was thinking about and going through and processing, we were landing on some of the initial chords and then eventually we were humming things into our cell phones.Share
Dave Bassett
05:21
I kind of like that one, but that one is also went, that's a pretty beautiful thing.
Share
Joy Oladokun
05:34
I'm trying to content wise, my girlfriend and I have been having lots of conversations. I'm like pretty pessimistic, and she's like the eternal optimist, and it's really beautiful.
Share
05:47
I think at that time the things that are happening now in my career were not happening, and we're not on the horizon, and I felt lost at sea a little bit. And so a lot of the conversations Rachel and I, my girlfriend, were having were around how do you hope for a future and an outcome that you can't see or that you don't totally understand? It's very easy for your brain to convince you that everything is going to be wrong, always and that things will be hard forever, or like if things are good, don't expect them to be good for too long because they're going to just crash down.
Share
06:29
I really am a bit of a pessimist and my girlfriend is just this incredible optimistic person who is able to acknowledge that life can be hard but still hopes for it to be good. So I think that it was just on my mind because I was like, what do I need to sing to myself? How do I craft this song into an eternal lesson for myself?
Share
Dave Bassett
06:54
That's a great thing right there, and I'm sure is being currently in your stuff, but is.
Share
Joy Oladokun
06:59
So Dave and I are having another conversation.
Share
Dave Bassett
07:03
You can look at everything two different ways, you know.
Share
Joy Oladokun
07:06
I start thinking about what he says, and these wires crossed in my brain, I'm like "broken roller coaster". Some days, your life feels like a broken rollercoaster.
Share
07:24
So this is the feeling, this is the emotion, this is the image I moved from there to like hiding out in the back seat of your car and like how like I used to as a sort of lonely high schooler slash college student put on
Manchester Orchestra
records in my car and like avoid talking to people about what I really wanted to talk about and then into the tell yourself it's raining because that is my MO of like to say "it's stormy, it's gross that there's no hope". Too far to, to jump before you fall again.Share
08:13
As someone who can live in my head, I can lose the forest for the trees, so to speak. I'm coming in, I'm talking about my life and my partner and my brain and how it works, and
Dave
was able to hear it and help organize how the idea would translate top to bottom.Share
08:34
Dave
has a live room in his studio, so I went into the live room, sat down in front of a mic and with the stool and stuff and played the guitar. I like really natural guitar recordings, like all the noise and stuff. Sometimes your life feels like a broken rollercoaster, a thousand useless moving parts, sometimes you spend your nights, too scared of getting closer, hiding out in the back seat of your car. You tell yourself it's raining, the clouds are in your head.Share
09:31
That's a melotron. It's sort of like a tape synth thing where you can choose sounds and the sound he chose was like vibes, so it plays a little tape sample of a vibe each time you press a note. And so he just played that little bell thingy, and it was beautiful.
Share
10:04
Sort of dances around what the guitar is already doing and then some of the vocal things that come in. So don't tell yourself it's raining, the clouds are in your head, you tell yourself it's better, to jump before you fall again, before you lose it all again, look up.
Share
10:32
I always like to joke when I'm recording the vocals for a song that I just wrote that I've never heard this song before. It is true, you're sort of like performing something and connecting with something that you have never super heard in its complete version. And so I just stumbled through it twice because I'm like, I have never, none of this is familiar to me.
Share
10:59
Look up, do you see the sunlight? Look up, there's flowers in your hair, hold on, 'cause somebody loves you, you know trouble's always gonna be there, don't let it bring you to your knees, yeah, look up.
Share
11:24
I wanted the bass to be this marriage between like a bass sound and a little growlier guitar sound. I love '60s and '70s, dusty, low country vibes where it's music that to me sounds like it was made for driving, just music to drive to.
Share
11:46
I really just like pianos and for a Look Up specifically, it gives it this emotional gravitas like sonically that I don't, I think it would have if it was just sort of this blackbird rip off tune, you know, on the guitar.
Share
12:13
In the lines right before the chorus, I think the goal was to sort of mimic my racing negative mind. That's the reason for sort of the cadence change. And then the jamming those two lines, like the jump before you fall again, before you lose it all again because that's how my brain is.
Share
12:32
Like it just sort of ramps up and ramps up and ramps up until I'm like making a weird decision, or I feel deregulated. And the hope for the pre-chorus was to sort of make it feel like that. But then you hit Look Up, and it's like this breath of like, oh, take a second. You tell yourself it's raining, the clouds are in your head, you tell yourself it's better, to jump before you fall again, before you lose it all again, look up.
Share
13:03
In this song in particular. I can't help but think of Rachel and Rachel's voice simply because it really is something I've learned from her to be like, I had an awful day at work and people were tough, let's go on a hike and like enjoy nature or like let's play with the dog because you know, the dog is goofy. To like find those like sweet, beautiful moments in the midst of what can be big or small chaos in your life and say like this is good.
Share
13:37
Sort of an incorruptible good, you know, I think that's why I went with sunlight and flowers in the hair, you know, and people who love you. Look up, do you see the sunlight? Look up, there's flowers in your hair, hold on, 'cause somebody loves you, you know trouble's always gonna be there, don't lеt it bring you to your knees, look up.
Share
14:14
The rhythm on the track is all samples, we found a cute soft kick that we liked doing that sort of four on the floor pulsing, and then they've added some shakers and like clicks and just little like percussive elements that kept the movement going without distracting from the more important parts of the track.
Share
14:42
That is another melotron, I think that's like the cello patch, and it's dope because that's why it's a little like wobbly and weird feeling because it's just type, and it's just over recording of someone playing the cello that someone stuck inside a box, and now
Dave
gets to playShare
15:04
After we finished this song, and I left
Dave's
, I thought about it a lot because it was one of those days where it's sort of like I even started by saying "I didn't super want to go to work" and I left with something that I really treasured, which is really cool.Share
15:20
I was maybe going to go back out to
L. A.
, and do background vocals with Dave
, but because we couldn't travel, I was home and I during that time had started taking really seriously, trying to have sort of like a full service studio vibe upstairs and cutting the background vocals was actually one of the first things that I did on my own for my project. And I ended up producing a few songs on my project and stuff like that. But it was doing the background vocals for Look Up where I was like, oh, I think I could do this. Look up, look up, hold on, look up.Share
16:12
I like to play songs for Rachel on the guitar, sometimes the songs help me communicate my feelings, or you know, like help her understand like, oh she's been trying to tell me this and this is finally the clearest way she's ever said it, you know, and it's honestly part of our language with each other.
Share
16:41
So I came back, and I played it for her, just me and my acoustic. Mondays aren't always bright, some days, you lose thе fight, but life can be beautiful if you let it be, tomorrow keeps taunting you, with all kinds of mystery, it's a blank page for your poetry, if you let it be.
Share
17:12
I think that people really do teach us a lot, specifically the people that we allow to be close to us. You know, if you can have care and if you can have fresh air and if you can have self compassion, I think you can get a lot done. Those are all things that I've learned from Rachel, and so it was one of those moments where I like played it and like there's just sort of like emotional like thank you for helping me learn this.
Share
Hrishikesh Hirway
17:45
And now here's Look Up by
Joy Oladokun
in its entirety.Share
17:58
Visit songexploder. net to learn more about
Joy Oladokun
, you'll also find links to stream or download this track.Share
Break
Hrishikesh Hirway
22:38
This episode and the show's theme music were made by me, editing help came from Casey Deal and Craig Ely artwork by Carlos Lerma. Music clearance by Kathleen Smith and production assistance from Chloe Parker. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent listener supported artist owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia. fm. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram @hrishikeshhirway and you can follow the show @songexploder. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder. net/shirt. I'm Hrishikesh Hirway, thanks for listening. Radiotopia from PRX.
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Hrishikesh Hirway
Joy Oladokun
Dave Bassett