When a song is really well done the end result can seem self-evident. Like, of course it should be at that tempo and of course the chorus hit at that time. But songs often go through pretty big changes from beginning to end. The track “forlyleinsanfrancisco” by WNXP Nashville Artist of the Month Meg Elsier is an unconventional song that started off in one place and, because of the trust in the studio, ended up in a league of its own. Let’s pick it apart with Ryan McFadden, who produced the album, and the singer-songwriter Meg Elsier.
“Meg brought ‘forlyle’ in and it was really slow,” McFadden remembers. “I thought it was cool, but suggested that we sped it up, two maybe three times as fast, and asked Meg to write like six more verses. And she was like, ‘Cool!’ She then went to the back of the room with her notepad and just started writing. I was thinking she would go home and work on it but she just wrote the whole back end of the song just in one go, as I got a cup of coffee.”
“It was like word vomit,” Elsier confirms. “Which I feel it sounds like in the best way. It’s truly just spiral. It’s about spiraling and it’s the epitome of doing it.” And you can hear that in the song.
The spiral started with Elsier being upset with someone and not knowing how to handle it. “I’m a person who doesn’t like to be angry. I’m really uncomfortable with those feelings. So it’s rooted in that bubbling and fizzing, which is making its way out. It’s being heard and felt. But it had to explode in order for it to get there.”
The song itself is unconventional in terms of structure and songwriting. “There isn’t a masterminding of doing things different because that just doesn’t work,” explains McFadden. “It was a lot of genuinely doing stupid things and making dumb sounds. Enough that free exploration and finding that feeling that was exciting became more important than pausing a good momentum to question whether that thing made sense.”
The drums are an example of the free exploration of the studio and the trust in the room. There are no drums to speak of for the first minute and thirty seconds and then a drum ramp starts and hits for an unreal 34 seconds before continuing at a frenetic pace for the last two minutes of the song.
“So you come in with this thing where Meg can barely get the lyrics out, we are doing it really, really fast and the players just know that anything goes, which means you can hit a drum ramp for a really long time and we just went with it,” McFadden reflects.
Elsier remembers going into the studio with no real idea: “Well, we didn’t know what we were going to do.”
“So many things came from everyone feeling free and excited in that moment to do something like drag a drum part out for so long,” McFadden said.
“It goes on for a while. It goes on for a looooong time,” Elsier seconds, laughing.
“They were just chasing a feeling,” McFadden said. And creating a feeling is what Spittake is all about.