DJ Shadow - Mutual Slump

30 years ago, DJ Shadow released his debut album, Entroducing… and it changed my life. I listened to it so much. And when I first started Song Exploder, he was on my list of dream guests. And then 10 years ago, that dream came true, and I got to make an episode with him in honor of the 20th anniversary of the album. Well, now it’s the 30th anniversary, and DJ Shadow is on tour this fall, celebrating it with a set that just focuses on songs from Endtroducing… And, there’s a special edition of the album on vinyl. So, in the spirit of all that, I wanted to go back to this episode of Song Exploder from back in 2016. For more info, visit songexploder.net/dj-shadow. https://songexploder.net/dj-shadow

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway.

• 0:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'm going to be on tour, playing some shows this fall. I'm going to be in London on Wednesday, November 18. I'm going to be performing solo at Roughtrade Records on Denmark Street. And I'm going to be in conversation about my music, moderated by one of my favorite actors and writers, Matthew Bainton. And a ticket to the show also gets you a copy of my album on vinyl or CD. And in December, I'm going to be on tour supporting S. Carrie. We're going to be playing a bunch of shows in the Northeast US. So I hope to see you in one of those places. You can find all the details and get links to tickets at songexploder.net/live. That's songexploder.net/live.

• 0:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

  This episode is sponsored by LinkedIn. Anyone who's ever had to spend money on marketing knows how tricky it can be to feel like you've spent that money wisely. Well, with LinkedIn Ads, you can be sure that you'll get a great return on your investment. You can target your campaigns by company, industry, job title, and more. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com/songexploder. That's linkedin.com/songexploder. Terms and conditions apply.

• 1:31Hrishikesh Hirway?

  There's a new podcast called Before the Moment with Nile Rodgers. In every legendary music career, there's a moment right before it all changes. And in every episode of this podcast, Nile Rodgers talks to a legendary musician about the choices, the events, and the relationships that shaped their career before the moment that everything changed for them. Every story is unique and opens a window into the lives of some of the biggest names in music. And Nile is the perfect person to lead these conversations because for over 50 years, he's played guitar with artists like Diana Ross, David Bowie, Madonna, Daft Punk, and Beyoncé. In the first season of the podcast, some of Nile's guests include John Legend, Miguel, and more.

• 2:15Hrishikesh Hirway?

  New episodes are coming out every other Tuesday. Listen to Before the Moment with Nile Rodgers wherever you get your podcasts. 30 years ago, DJ Shadow released his debut album, Introducing, and it changed my life. I listened to it so much. And when I first started Song Exploder, he was on my list of dream guests. And then 10 years ago, that dream came true, and I got to make an episode with him in honor of the 20th anniversary of the album. Well, now it's the 30th anniversary, and DJ Shadow is on tour this fall, celebrating it with a set that just focuses on songs from Introducing. And there's a special edition of the album on vinyl. So in the spirit of all that, I wanted to go back to this episode of Song Exploder from back in 2016.

• 3:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Here it is.

• 3:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  In 1996, Josh Davis, aka DJ Shadow, released his first album, Introducing. It's been hailed pretty much universally as one of the best albums of the 90s, and Time Magazine included it in its top 100 albums of all time. It changed the face of hip-hop and electronic music and helped define the trip-hop genre. Now, for the 20th anniversary of the release, DJ Shadow breaks down the song Mutual Slump.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  This is Josh Davis, aka DJ Shadow.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  The record store on the cover of Introducing, called Records, in Sacramento, California, that record store was my muse. If I felt like I ever was kind of hitting a creative brick wall, I would get in my car, I would drive to go to that record store once or twice a week for the entire duration that I was working on the album, and just spend a few hours looking at records, listening to records. And generally, without really even trying very hard, I would chance upon something that inevitably unlocked whatever jam I was in creatively. And that's where I found the drums, which come from a, well, a European prog jazz record.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  I think the only part of the original sample that I kind of left pretty much unchanged was the noisy intro, the kind of drum fill with the guitar feedback over the top.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  I don't like to just loop, you know, a one-bar break. The rhythmic basis, the breakbeat, has to be the strong foundation upon which everything else is built. If you chop a breakbeat and there's five or six different kicks you can use, five or six different snares you can use, what I like to do is alternate between the three or four strongest kicks, the three or four strongest snares, until you've reassembled a kind of super version of the original.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  The secretive component of sampling and crate digging and looking for beats, looking for samples, goes all the way back to the very beginning of hip-hop culture. DJs who discovered breakbeats that made the audience react had a secret weapon. And DJs used to cover up the artist's name and song titles to protect that knowledge. But again, that culture, as much as I contribute to it and aspire to it, can also be a little bit pretentious. So I always felt that you have to balance the kind of secretive beat-digger philosophy of sampling by sampling just, you know, something almost intentionally really obvious.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  The Bjork album had come out maybe six months prior to me starting work on this track. She was kind of a big presence in the UK when I was living there in the summer of 95.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  I liked the record and I liked the idea of taking what is kind of an obvious sample and putting my own spin on it.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  One of the things that I liked to play with a lot is taking samples and slowing them way down.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  For samples that are prone to melancholy anyway, they seem to become even more so when they're slowed way down. At some point, it crossed my mind, oh, I wonder what the Bjork sample would sound like over these drums. Realized I would have to pitch it way down, which I was happy to do. And then realized, oh, you know, there's something here.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Between the drums and the Bjork sample, I mean, already the song had a certain feel. To me, the song had a foreboding, it had a melancholy, but it also had an anger. During the kind of intense drum break section, there's a little sound, and it just kind of felt like this disoriented, almost kind of a warning sound. And to me, it just fell in line with the energy of the song. I mean, I felt like the song was approaching this kind of almost unhinged place. And that sound inserted in the way that it was between the drums, on one hand, was kind of a slick production moment, like something I was proud of on a producer level. But it also touched the right kind of foreboding

• 8:26Speaker 01

  that the track was conveying already, anyway.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  I wanted to make instrumental music because, to me, it seemed like a challenge. I wasn't just making beats that sounded like they needed a vocalist on them. I was trying to make arrangements that worked in an instrumental form and kept your attention and evolved. To me, it was almost like a more difficult task. But I didn't want the album to be devoid of words.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  I was scared, I have to admit, at first. Never had a cat before.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  The female voice on the track is actually my wife. At the time, we were dating, and her name is Lisa. For this part, you kind of have to use your imagination because I recorded the album at Dan the Automator's studio at his house, that he was still living in with his parents at the time. The studio was actually contained within an unincorporated part of the house. So you actually had to climb up a ladder. You had to open a hatch, and then you were in this extremely small space that was really only big enough for a mixboard, some outboard gear, and a rolling chair. And you couldn't stand up. You would hit your head on the ceiling. And the person who was recording something,

• 9:48Speaker 01

  whether it was a rapper, or in this case, my now-wife, she was in a pitch-black area below where I was. And you had to close the hatch again, and they would have to sort of feel where the microphone was and talk.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Five feet under.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  But it actually lent itself really well to her just sort of being in a space in her own mind. And I recorded her for probably about 20 minutes.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Do you feel like Darth Vader?

• 10:17Speaker 02

  And I'm Princess Leia.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  She was raised in Japan until age eight, and then came to America. And she talks about literally seeing the movie Xanadu, which would place it at 1980. And she lived in Southern California, so roller skating was a thing, and she's seen people do it in movies. I didn't give her any kind of direction because I knew that the more I said to her, the more it would be contrived. She just kind of steers herself in all these unusual directions and finds herself saying things that, you know, they're odd. I just wanted to try to capture some of that. And then I just sort of sampled the pieces from her dialogue that I felt somehow made sense in the track.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Then I came to America, saw Xanadu. That's all I wanted to do, roller skate.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  The saxophone that runs through the end section, to me, there's a despair and unhinged quality to it. It's a free jazz expression. And with a little bit of needle dropping, it made it even more unhinged. I mean, there's a point where literally I'm picking up the needle and dropping it at random, almost.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  And then the pullback right at the very end before the track rides out.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  The flute exists in a natural state, in the same note structure, but the vibes do not.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  So I bent the vibes to match the flute.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Putting samples in tune with each other was something that I really wanted to achieve in my music. And this is before time stretch technology and pitch bending and stuff like that. It was a factor of luck and a factor of will.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  I didn't want it to be simple. You know, there's new things happening every eight bars, every four bars, changes and bridges and places where it goes abstract. And then there's time signature changes. And I didn't want it to be intellectual by any means, but I just wanted it to feel different.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  I wanted other producers to listen to it and be like, how did he do this?

• 13:16Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And now here's "Mutual Slump" by DJ Shadow in its entirety.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Then I came to America, South Xanadu. That's all I wanted to do, roller skating.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  Do you feel like Darth Vader?

• 15:54Speaker 02

  I was scared, I have to admit it first.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  Never had a cab before.

• 17:21Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Visit songexploder.net to learn more and visit djshadow.com for tour dates and the 30th anniversary release of "Introducing." Song Exploder is sponsored by DistroKid. If you're an independent artist, DistroKid is now offering a new way to start selling merch without dealing with inventory or running an online store. DistroKid Direct automatically turns your existing album artwork into merch products, like shirts and hoodies, posters, totes, all kinds of things. And you choose what to sell, you set your prices, you connect PayPal, and DistroKid handles the printing, the shipping, and the customer support. They don't take a commission, so you keep 100% of your merch sales.

• 18:05Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 18:49Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 19:34Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 20:21Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Song Exploder is produced by me, Craig Ely, Mary Dolan, Kathleen Smith, and Tiger Biscoe. Carlos Lerma makes our episode illustrations and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me, you can subscribe to my newsletter, which you can find on the Song Exploder website. You can find out about live events at songexploder.net/live and get a Song Exploder shirt at songexploder.net/shirt. I'm Rishi Keshi-Hirway. Thanks for listening.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Radiotopia, from PRX.

• 21:14Speaker 03

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