♪ Taking a drive ♪ - You barely hear it, it's so muffled. It's so in the background,
but you feel it. I'm always trying to hide stuff. Hi, I'm Finneas, and I'm gonna
take you behind the song, "What Was I Made For?" ♪ I don't know how to feel ♪ ♪ But I wanna try ♪ This happens occasionally where
lyrics and melody and chords are all kind of happening
at the same time. I sat down at the piano
and we just started writing the whole song, minus,
I think, the final verse that happens at the very end of the song was written about 30, 35 minutes. We recorded a little voice memo, just, like, sitting at
the piano on my iPhone. Four or five days later,
whenever we reconvened, recorded a vocal and a piano at the tempo that the final version is in. ♪ I don't know how to feel ♪ ♪ But I wanna try ♪ I think of creativity
as, like, not a task, a recording of great vocal for three hours and comping all the takes
together as a task, right? If we're sitting and creating something, I try not to be rigid at all. And then when she's recording
vocals, she's very rigid of her own sort of volition. We try to make it very safe. I think that if you feel judged, and I'm sure Billie and I both
fail at this occasionally, but I think if you feel judged, you'll be so much less creatively open. That's been a huge part of our process. And Billie and I laugh at it all the time. We'll listen to an old song or a new song, and we'll shake our heads and giggle at something that might be silly or something that might
be a little contrived. But again, it's just because
of the feeling of safety. (soft piano music) I record everything on Logic Pro. This song is real piano. There's a piano in the
studio that sounds great. Any other instrument, sometimes
the actual acoustic one is the wrong flavor for the thing. But Petrof piano has a felt pedal. It is sort of typically called,
like, the practice pedal, but it has this incredible muffled feel. You engage the felt, and the hammers hit the felt instead of just hitting the string directly. (soft piano music) So that's the piano on its own. What I have selected is piano and stereo, and then room and stereo. The room is much like, sort
of, more in the background of the whole recording
and then the actual mic's that are right next to the hammers are what you're really hearing. So we just started piano, vocal. This was sort of the
first base of everything (soft piano music) ♪ I used to float, now I just fall down ♪ ♪ I used to know, but I'm not sure now ♪ The fantasy is that the song is so great, and the vocal is so compelling
that you could put out a song with no production and no layers, and that it would be, you
know, just as well received. That's like your creative Nirvana fantasy of like just pure minimalism. And there are historic,
amazing examples of that. Especially like, you go back in time to more primitive recordings. We don't have the limitations
of that time, so we're trying to make the thing that is the
most fun for us to listen to. And Billie is like a harmony God. We just set about adding doubles. ♪ What I was made for ♪ Those are left and right hard panned to create a wider image. ♪ What was I made for? ♪ Some harmonies come in. ♪ Made for ♪ ♪ What was I made for? ♪ We kept 'em really quiet. The whole thing to me, is
like invisibly supporting the lead vocal. ♪ 'Cause I, I don't know how to feel ♪ No harmony there, just lead in doubles. ♪ But I wanna try ♪ Some harmony here. ♪ I don't know how to feel ♪ ♪ But someday I might ♪ At that point, where
after the first chorus, this is probably the point in the song where we're not introducing new songwriting components anymore. This is this crazy toy. We ran 'em through a plug-in
called SketchCassette, and they're like, (garbled music) they sound like a little
toy kind of breaking. (garbled music) They're kind of following the
vocal melodies, which is cool. (garbled music) They have such a kind of a, they sound a little crazy like this, but it's so melancholy
to me, which I, I love. A bunch of mellotron comes in. Mellotrons have just, like,
the prettiest onboard stuff, it's really crazy. (bright dinging music) It sounds so vintage and warm. Little vibraphone, fake
cello, fake strings. This is a contact plug-in. (soft orchestral music) I think that it's all kind of about, like, the sort of physics of it. Once the production became
lusher, there was room for the vocals to become lusher. And after we started adding
more instrumentation, went back to the first half of the song, added some electric bass
guitar just to support the kind of chordal structure of it. And we started automating
in a bunch of ad-libs, and did a bunch of automating
of delay and reverb. We did these kind of
throws where they swell in. ♪ Try ♪ They just kind of pop
out under certain words, and then all these beautiful ad-libs too. ♪ Looked so alive,
turns out I'm not real ♪ Which are buried way in the background, but they just add a little more life. ♪ Oh I, I don't know how to feel ♪ ♪ But I wanna try ♪ You got these kind of
things supporting the melody and also getting outta the way, and it's just sort of feels like a choir of people singing, even though
it's all Billie's voice. Mark Ronson sent about four tracks. (soft piano music) It's so delicate, so soft. Like an orchestra stem, some harp. Beautiful, love it. And then keeping, like,
pretty much kept it all out until nothing planned, and then verse two. Just to start bringing stuff in. (soft cello music) Some old, like cello comes
in first, which is great. (soft orchestral music) Matt Dunkley did the
string arrangement for this and the James Bond song. There's some really subtle percussion that just happens on impact notes. ♪ Taking a drive ♪ You barely hear it, it's so muffled. It's so in the background,
but you feel it. I'm always trying to hide stuff. I'm trying to hide stuff because I'm a terrible visual artist. But, like, when you see a great painting and it's 190 different shades, and it doesn't look like 190
shades, it looks like a sunset. And that, to me, is the approach
with all music productions. Like, if you're thinking
about it, I have failed. But if you're just absorbing
it, then it's a success. (soft organ music) This is a organ run through
an Arpeggiator plug-in. So I'm playing all of the notes and it's just cycling through them. (bright arpeggio music) ♪ I, I don't know how to
feel, but I wanna try ♪ ♪ I don't know how to
feel, but someday I might ♪ I don't think about what people are gonna take away from music, I just think about what I do. If I am in a car or
listening to headphones, or just in my house
listening to a speaker, and I hear a song, and I resonate with it on some, like, subatomic level of like, "Oh man, I feel this song in my chest." Whether it's just a beautiful melody or it's a profound lyric. I'm trying to recreate that
feeling that I get listening to great music in what I make. I know that when we made this song, Billie played it ad nauseum, it was like a therapy session for her. She felt like she had totally expressed what she needed to say. If fans take away that, that would be like the biggest victory. But to me, it's like if the audience took some
profundity away from something and I felt nothing, I'd
rather the opposite be true. I'd rather make music that I love. Seeing the response was
incredibly gratifying. It was awesome. (crowd screaming) I think the goal was that it was, it was reflective of the
experience of this character, but there's also this
much broader reflection of just like, who am I? And especially with Billie as a artist and as a young person who's
already been in the public eye for a long time, no one, I think, probably feels more figured out by the rest of the world than
anyone in the public eye. People are like very quick to be like, "I know who that person is, I
think these things about them and I think they're this way." You know with your friendships and your relationships
with anyone in life, that you're subject to change. And the you of today is different than the you of six months ago, and the whole joy of life is changing, so. (soft piano music)
