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12:36 · 1,855 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The guest list is the argument. Disco supplied Nile Rodgers and Giorgio Moroder, hip hop and R&B supplied Pharrell, seventies soft rock supplied Paul Williams, alternative rock Julian Casablancas, experimental pop Panda Bear, and each brings a decade with them.
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- The method is stated plainly by Thomas Bangalter: they wanted to do what they had always done with machines and samplers, but with people.
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- Instead of drum machines they hired Omar Hakim to play long extended patterns rather than song parts, which gave them an original library of drum samples to cut from.
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- Chilly Gonzales was kept in the dark about the finished shape, played for hours in a single day, and was coached at the piano rather than handed sheet music, the way a director works with an actor.
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- Giorgio Moroder contributed nothing musical. He was sat in front of microphones and asked to tell his life story, spoke for three hours, and the duo wove pieces of it into an arrangement carrying a 70-person orchestra.
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- The whole project came from one question: why do seventies and eighties samples sound magical. Their answer was that everything mattered, the room, the players, the hardware, the engineers, so they rebuilt those conditions instead of sampling the results.
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- Instant Crush began when they met Julian Casablancas through a mutual friend while scoring Tron: Legacy, and he improvised much of the final vocal after deciding his first draft fell flat.
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- Touch sits at the midpoint deliberately, described by Guy-Manuel as the emotional and sonic core, the point furthest from either shore, and it carries over 250 separate elements.
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- Paul Williams finished Touch's lyrics using a book about near-death experiences, a subject he could speak to because he had been through something similar.
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- Get Lucky's first demo had no Nile Rodgers guitar at all, built around a Wurlitzer. Rodgers asked for everything but the drums to be muted so he could lock his part to them, which is the disco discipline the record was trying to recover.
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