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 Phineas and I'm going to take you behind the song What Was I made for know how to [Music] feel but I want to try this happens occasionally where lyrics and Melody and chords are all kind of happening at the same time I sat of 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
in about 30 35 minutes we recorded a little voice memo just like sitting at the piano on my iPhone four or 5 days later whenever we reconvened recorded a vocal and a piano at the tempo that the final version is in but I want to try I think of creativity as like not a task recording a great vocal for 3 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 Billy 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 Billy 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
[Music] safety 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 pet piano has a felt petal is sort of typically called like the practice petal but it has this inredible muffled feel you engage the felt and the Hammers hit the felt instead of just hitting the string directly 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 mics that are right next to the Hammers or what you're really hearing we just started piano vocal this was sort of the first base of of [Music] everything I used to float now I just fall down I used to know but I'm not sure the fantasy is that the song is so great and the vocal is so 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 Billy is like a Harmony God we just set about adding doubles those are left and right hard panned to create a wider [Music] image some harmonies come in we kept him really quiet the whole thing to me is like invisibly
supporting the lead [Music] vocal I don't know how to feel no Harmony there just lead and doubles but I want some Harmony here I don't know how to feel but some I am at that point we're 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 them through a plug-in called sketch cassette and they're like they sound like a little toy kind of [Music] breaking they're kind of following the vocal Melody as which is cool they have such a
kind of a they sound a little crazy like this but so Melancholy to me which I I love a bunch of melron comes in melron have just like the prettiest on board stuff it's really [Music] crazy sounds so vintage and warm little vibron fake cello fake strings this is a contact plugin 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 cordal structure of it and we started automating in a bunch of ad libs did a bunch of automating of delay and Reverb we did these kind of Rose where they swell [Music] in they just kind of pop out under certain words and then all these beautiful adlibs [Music] too which are buried way in the background but they just add a little more [Music] life but I want to try you got these kind of things supporting the melody and also getting out of the way and it's
just sort of feels like a a choir of people singing even though it's all Billy's voice Mark Ronson sound about four tracks so delicate So Soft like an orchestra stem some harp beautiful love it and in keeping like pretty much kept it all out until nothing plan and then verse two just to start bringing stuff in some like cello comes in first it's great Matt Dunley did the string arrangement for this and the James Bond song there's some really subtle percussion that just happens on impact notes taking 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 if you're thinking about it I have failed but if you're just absorbing it then it's a success this is a Oregon run through an arpeggi plugins I'm playing all of the notes and it's just cycling
through [Music] them I don't know how to feel but I want to try I don't know how to feel but some [Music] I don't think about what people are going to take away from music I just think about what I do if I'm 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 the song Billy played at 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
[Applause] I think the goal was that it was reflective of of the experience of this character but there's also this much broader reflection of just like who am I especially with Billy as an 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 with any one in life that you're subject to change and the you of today is different than the you of 6 months ago and the whole Joy of life is changing so [Music]
