The cool thing about looping is, once you lay down your basic idea, it inspires the next thing. In a way, you formulate your own ideas.Ĭan you describe your mental state when you’re performing? Is it an extreme presence or is it the opposite, like you are not conscious of what you’re doing at all? When I heard the Cocteau Twins, I was like, Oh, you can just sing in a way that sounds like language, but it doesn’t actually have to be saying anything. I liked lyrics growing up, but mostly I liked the sound - the sounds of the melodies and the sounds of the syllables going together. It was actually greatly inspired by Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins because hers was a mixture of some gibberish and I think Gaelic and English. I use gibberish to allow myself to use syllabic sounds and textures and things like that as a form of language. Sometimes there are words and they’re coherent sentences, and sometimes they’re just ideas of something that kind of sound like words, and then there are sounds that sound like words that aren’t words at all. A lot of times, it’s like going in and out of focus, like a camera lens. Who doesn’t like a little bit of a hip-hop simulation in there? I don’t really listen to hip-hop, but when I do hear it, I’m like, Oh, there’s a cadence that sounds familiar.ĭo you remember any of the words you said or why you said them?Įh, not really. Oh, yeah, I remember doing that because the beat was pretty beaty. Kind of a wash of slight melancholia.ĭo you remember when you were like, “Oh, I can do a rap breakdown in this song?” So, it felt more like, Ah, yeah, Tamaryn. Maybe I was pulled toward that because I’m going more for vibes than necessarily a style or a genre or something. There was a moment where I was like, Oh, this is kind of Tamaryn-y.
I’m a big fan of Tamaryn, who’s a San Francisco artist who’s inspired by Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Cocteau Twins. Hopefully.įor this song, do you remember what was the thing that you were like, “This is what it is”? So it’s just really every layer I add it’s like, “Is this what I want to add?” And then you have to commit to it. And then when I find something that I’m kind of grooving on, or it feels good as like a vibe, then I will record that and add that to the loop. I just start kind of messing with the effect and I start doing something vocally, and usually the sound of it will dictate what it could be. I just try to find a tempo that feels good and then try to do the right amount of bars to, you know, give me enough space to generate something. What just happened? What went through your mind as you started? You have to be conscious of those limitations.
If I do a really strong beat and I like how strong it is and then I start adding too much on there, the beat gets weaker. You have to manage what you are layering over. You can layer stuff, but you can’t layer too many things because the earliest things that you lay down start to lower in volume, which is handy for some effects like you heard at the end like other things were starting to fade out the more I kept layering and layering. It records up to 15 seconds and that’s kind of it.
I call it a linear looper just because you can only add to it, you can’t take away from it. What are the pedals you used to make this song?īasically, I have a reverb pedal called the Hall of Fame, which is a standard guitar reverb pedal, and then I have this Line 6 DL4, which is a looping pedal. Tune in to Good One every Monday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to the episode and read an excerpt of the discussion below. So, we came up with a plan: He’d record a new song on the spot for the interview, and together, we’d try our best to capture what was floating around that brain of his. Which made him a particularly difficult subject for Good One, Vulture Comedy’s podcast about the writing of jokes, since his writing process is to never write anything - it’s to get out of his own way. Watts is in such a flow state when performing his brand of improvised, abstract musical comedy that not only does he forget the song the next day after a show, he forgets it instantly when it’s finished. As Reggie Watts puts it, “It’s kind of like channeling in a way.” To put it simply, what researchers found is that while improvising, the portion of the brain in charge of creating is firing hot, and the self-monitoring portion is essentially shut off. Last month, the Washington Post released an article about what happens in the brain while improvising, which included videos and studies about freestyle rappers, jazz pianists, and long-form improvisors. Photo: Vulture and Terence Patrick/CBS via Getty Images
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