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8:51 · 1,349 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The opening synth riff is not a synth. It is Anthony Gonzalez's own voice, pitch-shifted and buried in effects.
▶ 00:00:01
- M83 began as an instrumental electronic duo making shoegaze, nothing like the pop the project became known for.
▶ 00:00:56
- Gonzalez took the name as his own for independence, spent two months outside Paris widening the sound, and started putting his own voice into it.
▶ 00:01:21
- The eighties turn starts with Saturdays = Youth, whose cover pays respect to the Brat Pack films of John Hughes, with looser, more melodic song structures.
▶ 00:01:40
- He fell into depression after that record and moved from France to Los Angeles alone just before turning 30, looking to change as an artist.
▶ 00:02:27
- The move backfired usefully. Childhood memories flooded in, and the homesickness and melancholy became the actual engine of the new sound.
▶ 00:02:45
- California became the subject, with overnight sessions out in the Mojave and the hilltops of Los Angeles as the visual reference, the place that made him homesick turning into home.
▶ 00:03:02
- The argument for why it works is about memory, that music from your formative years is bound into your self-image, which is why a sound from a particular decade can carry a feeling rather than just a style.
▶ 00:03:22
- The gear is period-correct: a Roland TR-808, the most used drum machine on hit records, and a Jupiter-8, the synth heard on Thriller.
▶ 00:04:05
- The arrangement escalates deliberately, a blown-out drum fill into one of the biggest choruses in modern pop, Gonzalez moving from near-whisper to shouting, and then a saxophone solo when the voice runs out of room.
▶ 00:05:27