Chapter 1: What is the background of the band Hot Chip?
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 Rishikesh Hirway. I'm going to be on tour for the next few weeks, and all the dates are at songexploder.net slash live.
I'm going to be playing songs from my new album, In the Last Hour of Light, with a full band, and I'm going to be talking about the making of my album with a special guest moderator in each city. I get to be the interviewee instead of the interviewer.
So I'm going to be joined by Jason Manzoukas, Samin Nasrat, Alison Russell, Joshua Molina, Ken Jennings and John Roderick, Min Jin Lee, and Adam Scott. Hot Chips. is a band from London made up of Alexis Taylor, Joe Goddard, Al Doyle, Owen Clark, and Felix Martin. Their second album, The Warning, came out in 2006.
It was nominated for a Mercury Prize and named one of the best albums of the year by NME and Pitchfork.
Chapter 2: How did Alexis and Joe from Hot Chip meet and start making music?
And later, NME would include it in their list of best albums of all time. For this episode, I talked to them about one of the songs from The Warning called Boy From School. You might have heard it in the second season of the show Beef on Netflix. The band's also in the show. Or you might have heard it on The Simpsons. You could have also heard the song In My Car All the Time in 2006.
So I was very excited to talk to Alexis and Joe from Hot Chip about how Boy From School was made.
We tried But we didn't come home We tried
My name is Alexis Taylor.
And my name is Joe Goddard.
We became friends at school. We were like 11 and 12 years old, I think. We grew up playing football and talking about bands that we'd read about in the NME and went to loads of gigs together, hundreds of gigs. We all used to congregate at Joe's house, usually on a Friday after playing football after school.
And we realized that we both liked making music and we would play songs on the guitar and listen to music or watch films and stay up late and have a fun time together.
I lived close to where we all grew up and went to school, a place called Elliot School in Putney, which is close to this house. So Alexis and I would go home from school and make music in this bedroom really, really very frequently.
Joe was making music in a band with other people and I was making music in another band. But then at some point, Joe asked me if I wanted to record songs of mine that were like solo guitar and vocal songs, record them.
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Chapter 3: What inspired the creation of 'Boy From School'?
on his four track so he was really acting like a producer from quite a young age and he did that but then also wrote his own songs and we would play songs together and i think initially they were separate songs from one another like a joe song or an alexis song and then at some point we started to write songs together and finish each other's sentences or like write a second section for a song or something like that or just sing together and that was kind of the beginning
We really had no training in engineering and making records. We were really making it up as we went along. I had a very small amount of equipment and we were using a computer, but in quite a rudimentary way, doing it all in this bedroom. Boy From School was one of the first things that we made for our second album, The Warning.
We were just absorbing lots of influences from dance music, from four to the floor, house music and disco and DFA and other things that we were listening to at that time.
This was the moment in time when Basement Jacks released their first album, which was for a kind of indie fan, was a good way of getting into house music. So I was going clubbing and this kind of like indie version of dance music was exciting to me.
But even in the process of writing Boy From School, the first iteration of it that was recorded and written at Joe's house was more gentle and slow and was a ballad. I remember leaving the room that me and Joe were working in and going for a break into his brother's bedroom where there was like no one in the room and just using that as a place to write something.
We'd been to university by this point and started working jobs and something about like being in that room was quite evocative of many years spent hanging out with Joe. It made me think about the school days
And those school days weren't that far behind us, but something about continuing having a friendship with Joe and always making music with him, and it often being in that house, connected me to the school days quite closely, as if we hadn't gone that far away from our beginnings.
And I was a boy from school It began as a Casio-based track.
So when Alexis wrote this very gentle, delicate song, I remember feeling like maybe this is a moment when we should try to be kind of embracing a different groove and trying something a bit more uptempo. Like, let's try changing the context of this song entirely. It's such a lovely song. But to me, it felt like an exciting thing to suggest
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