Noughties nostalgia has been everywhere for a while now, including the pop music industry. Take Tate McRae’s Greedy, for example, the 2023 global hit that, it turns out, literally took a sound from the early 2000s’ pre-eminent producers.
This has just been confirmed by Ryan Tedder, who wrote and produced Greedy alongside Jasper Harris and McRae herself. The ubiquitous Amy Allen also has a writing credit, and Grant Boutin is listed as a third producer.
Speaking to Mix with the Masters for a Behind the Track video, Tedder says that work on Greedy started when McRae came into the studio with a very specific request.
“She's like, ‘I want to do some early 2000s kind of like Timbaland-style tempo records,” he recalls, and he was definitely the right person to help with that.
“I used to do these beats all the time because I was signed to Tim for two years,” Tedder explains. “So I was constantly trying to emulate him because I was in the room while he was doing [2002 Justin Timberlake hit] Cry Me A River. I was there the day they did it. The whole [Timberlake] Justified album, Missy Elliott, you know, like all that stuff, a lot of huge records.”
That’s quite the flex, but it took almost 20 years for Tedder to be able to apply those skills to a production of his own.
“The funny thing about Greedy was this was the first time in my adult life, in my career, that I had the opportunity to return back to how I originally started as a producer,” he confirms. And he knew that it wouldn’t take him long to come up with something along the lines of what McRae had in mind.
“We were all here and I literally turned to Jasper, who was the other producer, and Amy and Tate,” remembers Tedder. “And I said, ‘start thinking of concepts. I need like 20 minutes. Give me 20 minutes. I'm going to put on my headphones. I'm going to make the beat.
“I hear the drums in my head. I need to find the sounds and put the beat together real quick and then we can write to it.”
Explaining his process, Tedder says: “The first thing I did before I came up with any synthesizer or riffs or anything was focus on the drum loop. This is a pretty simple song. Those records from that era, like early 2000s, were simple. It was all about the swing and the swag of the beat.”
And the sounds, of course: “Timbaland, thank you,” says Tedder as he plays Greedy’s snare and reveals the song’s rhythmic secret. “This one is probably SexyBack. Yeah, pretty sure that's the SexyBack snare.”
SexyBack was another massive Timbaland/Timberlake production - the lead single from Timberlake’s second album FutureSex/LoveSounds and inescapable in the summer of 2006.
“I was around Tim long enough… you pick up some drum sounds,” chuckles Tedder, and that’s certainly not a bad one to take with you.
What of Greedy’s most notable melodic element, though - the percussive but also melodic motif that plays throughout the whole song?
“I wanted to use something where you can't tell where it's from,” says Tedder. “You don't quite know what it is, but it feels like a human played it.”
“I immediately knew that I wanted to do some type of hand drum,” he continues. “I got very lucky with this sound. I did not manipulate it. I didn't sound design it. It was already, I played it as is.”
Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that, as the sound is playing, Tedder has Spectrasonics’ Omnisphere plugin on his display, and it’s a patch from this famous software synth - Hang Drum Sugar Packets - that Tedder is talking about.
That might sound like an odd name for a preset, but after Greedy had been released and Spectrasonics realised that one of their sounds had been used, it explained its meaning in a video and everything started to make sense.
It turns out that, as the preset name implies, it’s powered by the sound of a hang drum (AKA a handpan) being hit with a couple of sugar sachets - cane sugar sachets, to be precise. This is why, when you listen to Greedy, you hear what sounds like a shaker as well as the pan itself.
“That pattern going through the entire song, that is so much of what makes the song so hypnotic,” says Amy Allen. “I think just, so many people, people maybe don't even realize that that never stops.”
Along with the drums, it does indeed form the basis of Greedy’s entire Groove. “You put it all together, you've got the meat and the heart of the song,” says Tedder.
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