James Murphy From LCD Soundsystem On 'This Is Happening'

this is hi I'm James Murphy from LCD Soundsystem and this is the track by track of our new record the first song is called dance yourself clean which is a terrible title title but because I have to make the title of the song the thing that people will repeat the most I think that's the line that's repeated the most in the song what do I have to talk about this on this is the last song I finished this is long I lost my voice about trying to do it's the highest song register I've ever sung which previously record the previous record was held by on repeat from the first album and after which I vowed never to recording write anything that high for myself but then I got excited about a synth sound and forgot all about my vocal range and recorded it anyway and then had to sing it with with a voice that was completely blown out but then I took lots of steroids so I juiced for this record so it's cheating I cheated completely cheated to sing this song it's the opening track because it has a three and a half minute intro which is really really quiet so we hope people don't blow up their speakers because it comes in pretty hard after that hi everybody the second song of my record is called drunk girls I have often assumed that people won't think that I'm saying things exactly like they sound like they mean and that but I often realize that people don't really listen to things so it's not really about girls I'm not like making fun of anybody or drunk people or girls when we were in Los Angeles all the guys in the house who's mostly dudes we had this amazing chef who was a friend of a friend I asked if there was I was looking for a runner like someone who lived in LA and had a car that could help us go pick up pizza and then my friend said oh I know this girl she's a chef and she could do it and I was like I can't afford a chef but it turns out this person was a fan of the label she was a DJ too and a band and in like the band and had given up her apartment for some job that didn't materialize in some other city so she just came moved in to the house and became part of the family and she called us her girls so we were the girls to the mansion so it's if anything it's a song about funny genders and people being wasted and people who are drunk trying to relate to one another which I always find deeply hilarious and predictable even in myself I like I like drunk people I liked nothing is more fun to me than two drunk people trying to negotiate some sort of like romantic involved it's always pretty funny to watch when I grew up I was really into a bunch of different kinds of music when I was really young and some of it I kind of forgot about and some of it kind of moved you know you get into different types of music when you get older and on this record I kind of around the time of making this record I started re connecting to stuff that I was very interested when I was a kid and a lot of its really dubious and not very you know it's pretty questionable and I was into like this in Philadelphia which is close to where I grew up there was this like they're all these isolated scenes in America a different song different areas of different sounds this is why you have DC hardcore and like LA punk and New York New York City and New York City skinheads and like everything every area had a different thing but Philly had this like weird like dark wave like almost like Belgian dark wave synth guitar drum machine punk which I deeply loved and didn't know wasn't popular everywhere and there was a band called the executive slacks from there that was one of my very very favorite bands and because that seemed kind of dead ended in that weird way they kind of vanished but I've always had these records that were as important to me as anything else as a kinetic as a kid and there's a song called thirty years and in a song called the bus that were on these first the first things they did on four track I and I actually mentioned them in an interview and I got a note from them on MySpace which I thought was pretty funny they were like oh thanks for talking about us and I I asked for the tapes to trying to mix it they were like well there are four tracks and I don't think anyone has the tapes anymore um they are cassette for track but I always want to make a song that sounded like that every time I'm going to make a record I brought this record with me I brought this and like DAF records and I would listen to them and be like I don't know if I can get away with this you know what I mean like it's it's but it's but I love it and I don't know if how to do it so I just decided on this one this time that I was you know living in this crazy house I could just do anything and it doesn't matter so I made a song that kind of feels like these super aggressive atonal synth pop records I listen to as a kid and then made really dumb vocals nancy was very very drunk doing the vocals so she was just yelling but it's it's pretty bad girl liked all I want is one of those songs is the first song I worked on the record it's one of the songs it was in my head in a lot of different versions one version was like very John Cale I almost said like a country version in my head which was atrocious but I had it and when I when I started working on it kept oscillating back and forth Tina's John Keller from this country version would like these crosby Stills Nash and young harmonies and stuff but then I just started thinking about playing more guitar and that's the first song that I got a lot of guitar on guitar and piano and playing with space using space differently than I normally use in records usually I make them very claustrophobic and very small and I wanted to try and find a way of pushing the drums back a little bit having them not as loud having them have a little more space just as an experiment and this song nearly killed me for two and a half weeks I just couldn't get my head around it and then um I put it away until the end and it was I had a vocal and everything was pretty much done and it had an outro has my favorite EMS Cynthia and stuff on the record that's on that and then at the very very end I was finishing the record I I was obsessed with Reese singing it because it didn't it didn't bark as much as I wanted it to so I did I'd be saying it right before the danger self-clean song so it's the second of it so it's the first thing I worked on and then the second to last thing I worked on for the record so um it was really I hated it and then I felt fell back in love with it so I like it again I really like synthy heartfelt pop love songs really really like I like I did not stop I was constant listening to the rhythmic stuff and Bronski beat and the first couple OMD records and I loved these things and there's something like kind of naive and earnest about them and I don't really let myself I've never moved that I haven't let myself do that in this band much and again I was like what do I what's the worst things gonna happen people think I'm a simper an idiot like it's fine so decided I would just do it and I panicked about it I had Pat come in I was like this is suck he was and he loved it and I trust Pat so I've already won because Pat likes it I was doing something very strange I was surfing in Los Angeles I'm not really a surfer but I really like it and I got into it it's because we know when in Rome murder the Christians and I was surfing with the guy who's in a much more successful rock ensemble than mine and he asked very very lightheartedly and honestly he's like what are you gonna make a Radiohead on this record I think you should which I thought bespoke of like I mean this is someone who very naturally writes songs that people love and has an incredible sense of melody and I kind of wanted to be like do you think I'm not trying I mean I'm not like actively trying to make hits but like you know I'm trying to do the best I'm just making music the best I can I don't even know that's something less so why don't I make hits like what is it and I realize it's like I just don't think that that's I think we don't whatever it is that makes it hit is I'm usually not that interested in I guess so we do the best week we can and I just started it just became like a kind of a fascinating idea like about what how we don't make hits I kind of like that we don't make it's gonna be fun to have one I guess maybe it wouldn't be maybe it might be a disaster pow-pow is the song that I wrote to get back into the record I wrote I wrote it in my head in Australia when Pat and I were on a DJ tour Pat Mahoney the drummer of LCD soundsystem and my DJ partner mr. Patrick Mahoney but who is missed misprinted as Pat Maloney on the door of our dressing room in Australia and I took lots of pictures of that so Pat Mahoney stroke Maloney and I were in Australia DJing and it just came to me and it was kind of the song I thought was missing from the record and it's a song that's been in my head like that the kernel of it was in my head for five or six years and I never got around to writing it was always like odd you know every time I wrote was ready a record a great pal pal kind of got to record this but it was you know it was like there were someone's really fast and scrappy a punk there ones that were slow or dance here and then it all kind of glued together in Australia in my head so when I got back as a way to get back into the album I wrote and recorded that song and made my manager want to kill me I didn't even tell him what I was doing cuz I was I was late with the record that was supposed to be doing vocals I was like yeah I'm doing vocals for the pow pow what what the hell is that my god yes when the song so change the title it's like sure and then finally sent it to him and it was entirely new song but it sounds the most like it wound up ironically sounding like an amalgam of the first couple of LCD singles somebody's calling me was a song written about a kind of an awkward situations that people find themselves in in LA where I was having very stressful week and I was feeling a little bit texts by humans and was having panic attacks about working on all I want early from earlier on the record so I i inebriated myself with anti-anxiety medication and went swimming which is always a good idea did it with a buddy though I always go with a buddy I just do I just have been to worse life lessons and then went to sleep and in the middle of the night had a had a song in my head like in its completion and luckily I had a 909 a-rollin 909 drum machine with a little tiny guitar amp on on my piano in my bedroom and a little handheld recorder so I got off the middle tonight and programmed with a simple little beat and wrote the song of piano singing into the like singing and and then went back to bed and when sometimes you're on like let's say anti-anxiety medication you don't remember like I'll watch movies on a plane looks like it there are some plans I'll take like a xanax or something and watch a movie and I'll wake up and I'll be like I guess I saw that movie but I don't really remember what happened and I'll watch together but I do kind of remember this well I didn't remember recording the song and I listen back to it and I liked it which was fun because you get to be a fan like I got to be like I got to be like hey I like this song this guy made because I didn't do it I don't know who did it and after the brutal two-and-a-half weeks of banging my head against the wall with all with all I want the next day I recorded the whole song and by the end of the day so like I woke up in the middle of the night I started it wrote it woke up and recorded the whole thing in the day and that was it was the end of it and it it was it felt really good and it has a very crazy sense sound that I really like that's really way too loud oh yeah that's another thing this whole record almost every song has something that's just way too loud like and it might the guy mastering at my friend Bob was kind of uh he's like you know this that thing that comes in the middle there it's it's like really really really loud and I kept you know it's like an if it didn't feel like really awkwardly too loud it was all wrong so I always like that I'm songs I always wimp out but I didn't want to win bad this time so that since it's really loud there's a bass line in it that / that is on purpose of reference to another bass line that I've recorded before that and I wanted to make something that felt happy like a happy end of the record and that's the happiest musical song on the record and I wanted to be it to be about being to a certain degree about be about being in a band in the way that some other songs I've written are about are about being in the band and about how much I like it and about how much it's a tough thing because I don't like leaving my life and being in a band means you leave your life it's just that you're if you leave your home and you leave your friends and you leave your your dog and you leave your habits and their reading and everything and that's that's always hard but I do love being in the band and it's just a song about both about loving being in this band that was never supposed to be this big of it never supposed to be this big of a part of my life it was always supposed to be a non-professional experiment and I think it is still a non-professional experiment but it's a non-professional experiment that takes up a much bigger part of my life than I expected and I just wanted I felt that felt like the right way to end a record like to you know simultaneously loving doing what you're doing and really really missing being home [Applause]

Channel: NME

Views: 83,566

Rating: 4.9645734 out of 5

Keywords: nmemagazine, nme, james, is, nmetv, video, lcd, by, music, this, soundsystem, murphy, track, happening

Id: 29nbwH6JZoQ

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2010

Reddit Comments

[u/TilikumHungry]

I posted this because I always thought Somebody's Calling Me was my least favorite LCD track, and then I discovered this subreddit this past summer and realized that a lot of people here felt that way too. I never saw this interview until tonight and when he said this I thought to myself, "That makes so much sense."

Also the rest of the interview is great if you haven't seen it!

[u/zazum]

Can confirm, Xanax is a hell of a drug.

[u/heliumhands]

No wonder it’s such a bad song