There aren't that many experimental artists that truly break through to receive mass appeal. A band who skilfully manoeuvred their ever-widening sonic universe into the ears and hearts of the general public is Pink Floyd.

Despite Floyd’s lack of interest with the singles market (at least when compared to their multi-million-selling albums), Money supplied them with that rarest of things - a popular chart hit.

It would be one of their most notable stabs at the single market - until Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2 came along several years later. Its writer, Roger Waters, would later tell Q Magazine that, “The only other significant single in my career was Money from Dark Side Of The Moon. That was the only one that made any impact at all.”

Written during the making of the band’s legendary The Dark Side of the Moon, Money lyrically found Waters wrestling with his own socialist principles in the face of being, by this point, quite a well-paid pop star. Perhaps this thematic tension is the reason why Waters chose to craft such a musically constricted, and precarious song.

Two key elements of which hit you from the outset…

The first thing we hear is the sound of a cash register - or at least that's what we tend to assume, but the reality is somewhat different.

Roger Waters had a demo studio in a converted garden shed, located at the bottom of the garden at his house in Islington, North London. Many of his songs and ideas during this period were formed here and notably this is where Waters created the demo and the original tape loop for the track’s intro.

The process of creating loops from analogue tape was nothing new; the concept, originally known as Musique concrète, required the recording of acoustic sounds to tape, then subsequent editing and splicing, in order to turn these sounds into new musical forms, often with avant-garde or experimental consequences. It was a practice made famous in the UK by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Waters ran with the idea of creating a lengthy tape loop to accompany a new song, a riff-based piece which adopted a wonky-feeling 7/4 time signature.

Developing the idea with legendary engineer Alan Parsons at Abbey Road Studios, Waters built out the loop sound by recording the sound of coins dropping into a mixing bowl, and then tearing a piece of paper. Only then did he move on to recording a cash register. As he wanted each sound to punctuate each of the seven beats per bar, he chopped the tape in the old-fashioned way, using a splicing block and razor blade, and then delicately sticking them together with editing tape.

To ensure note duration consistency, each small piece of tape would have been the exact same length, totalling a loop with seven individual pieces - all joined together.

"The only way to keep it in time was to take a piece of tape with the sound on it and measure it with a ruler. You would take the exact length of tape and then splice the next exact length of tape to it.,” Parsons told Goldmine. “We would make a circular loop that was supported with microphone stands around the machine, and we would roll the tape, and that was what the band played to."

Waters and Parsons then ran the loop through a Revox tape machine, with a microphone stand acting as a support for the tape. It’s the sort of thing we take for granted in today’s drag-and-drop DAW-based word, but back then was a laborious and time-consuming process.

It's worth noting that this would've been a relatively short tape loop, at least by tape loop standards (a mere 20 feet it has been reported…). Longer loops often employed additional machines, with the extra tape-machine-horsepower used to keep the loop running. There are many tales from the Radiophonic Workshop’s history, of loops being run along the entire length of corridors…

Without wishing to take anything away from the concept behind this tape loop, and indeed the track itself, we have to pay homage to Ronnie Hazlehurst - a prolific TV composer who was active during the 70s and 80s.

Ronnie was commissioned to write the music for a new BBC sitcom, called Are You Being Served? Having written the theme, he didn't have enough in the budget to hire a percussionist, so with the help of a BBC engineer called Larry Goodson, constructed a tape loop of a cash register in operation, to act as the percussion track.

Why do we mention this? Well, Are You Being Served? first aired in September 1972, while Money (and its parent album The Dark Side of the Moon), wasn't heard until its release on the 1st of March 1973. Was Roger subconsciously (or consciously?) influenced by this quirky sitcom soundtrack? The jury's out.

Moving away from the tape loops and to the structure of the song proper, Money certainly keeps us on our toes in terms of number of beats per bar.

To begin with, the song is planted in 7/4; this makes it a beat short of the more common 4-to-a-bar concept, that would occupy the space of 2 bars.

The 7/4 signature ties in beautifully with the main riff, which is rooted in the key of B minor, and doubled in octaves by a picked guitar and bass.

There are embellishments to this construct, notably from a Wurlitzer electric piano, which plays an octave higher than the riff, with a relatively funky placement of the chords Bm7 and E. It’s important to note that this acts as tantamount to the ‘icing on the cake’ - essentially an aside to the main harmony. A heavily tremolo-ed guitar also ‘twangs’ the note B at the beginning of every couple of bars.

Money has an incredibly bluesy feel, and isn’t built around what we typically regard as a more usual verse/chorus structure - we could easily regard verses as choruses, as if playing blues or jazz.

Even so - and despite this blues feel - Money doesn't quite conform to the 12-bar stereotype, but it’s certainly close!

Sticking to our blues-leaning idea of the song’s A-section as its ‘chorus’, the harmony remains relatively static. We stay with the implied chord of Bm for a full 8 bars of 7/4; given that we are only one beat adrift from a two-bar construct, it feels more like 16 bars, so the welcome shift up to F#m at the end of the the chorus is very welcome.

Just when we thought we had got our head around the 7/4 concept, the shift at the end of each chorus presents an interesting timing conundrum (dependent upon how pedantic you want to be.)

We stay on an implied chord of F#m for 8 beats, before dropping to a chord of Em7 for 6 beats. Now we could easily argue that these 14 beats add up to 2x bars of 7/4, but the placement of the harmony supplies the shift to the chord Em7, on the 2nd beat of a bar of 7/4 - that feels so wrong!

It either is wrong - or it’s total genius. Whichever way you choose to count it, the beats will add up to the same, it's just whether or not your head can play ball.

To be fair, if you are just playing the guitar/bass riff, then it slots seamlessly within this off-kilter timing and implied chord structure.

After two choruses - with lead vocals supplied by David Gilmour - we are treated to a tenor saxophone solo supplied by long time artistic collaborator, Dick Parry.

This is where the blues vibe really does rear its head, as the extended sequence adopts a double-length blues form. This means that we hear all of the usual blues chords, but as we remain in 7/4, it feels like each chord is twice as long, which of course it is… nearly (It’s one beat less than 2 bars of 4/4, of course!)

As if improvising in 7/4 isn't difficult enough, Money shifts to a 4/4 time signature for the searing guitar solo that forms the long middle section of the song. Supplied by David Gilmour (who else?), the section feels like a blues shuffle. Although there’s a change in the riff and a subtle deviation to the chords, this section still keeps a consistent feel with the rest of the song.

“Roger came in with the verses and lyrics for Money more or less completed,” Gilmour told Guitar World. “And we just made up middle sections, guitar solos and all that stuff. We also invented some new riffs - we created a 4/4 progression for the guitar solo and made the poor saxophone player play in 7/4. It was my idea to break down and become dry and empty for the second chorus of the solo.”

We close out with another vocal chorus, before the song fades into the next track on the album…

Despite being regarded as one of the most meticulously crafted studio albums of all time, there is a spontaneous, freeform quality to Money. The tempo ebbs and flows, right from the outset - perhaps this is a consequence of the difficulty of playing completely in time with the cash register tape loop.

By our reckoning, the song picks up by about 8bpm from its intro to just the beginning of the first chorus, with the rip-roaring guitar solo motivating the tempo still further. These kinds of tempo fluctuations were fairly usual for live recording at this time, when playing to a click track was not the norm. But Pink Floyd certainly had fun with the shifting rhythmic sands here.

When released as a single, 10 days after its parent album on May 7th 1973, Money became an unlikely hit for the group, peaking at number 13 on the US Billboard Chart.

“We were by no means rich at that time” Gilmour told Uncut magazine in 2003. “Money was the single that helped to really break us in America. It was the track that made us guilty of what it propounds, funnily enough.”

For today's free and easy music producers, the knotty business of music theory has always had a slight whiff of the uncool about it.

Talk of Major and Minor scales conjure up images of dry, dusty, bewigged baroque musicians from centuries past, the nightmare of childhood piano lessons, or baffling overheard discussions in jazz clubs concerning the superiority of augmented 13ths over Neapolitan sixths.

And don't get us started on the joys of soloing in the Mixolydian mode…

This bad rep is entirely unjustified, however, since, regardless of whether you're a composer, songwriter, producer or DJ, shoring up your musical knowledge with a smattering of grassroots theory can have a profound effect on the quality of your output.

Here at MusicRadar, we never underestimate the importance of a good grounding in music theory. After all, how music works is the key to everything we do when we're creating a project.

So instead, try to think of theory as a framework to support and inspire your musical endeavours, rather than inhibit and impose rules on them.

The best part is that you don't have to plumb the murky depths of the subject to be able to use it to your advantage. When a crippling loss of creativity strikes when you're sitting in front of your DAW – and this can happen to any of us at any time, let's face it – having a few tried, tested and theoretically proven techniques in your back pocket can be a lifesaver.

Here, we're going to highlight ten of our favourite, most practical theory-based tips that can help to kickstart the creative process next time your inspiration well runs a little dry.

Let's knuckle down and get theory-ous!

• Best online piano lessons: recommended piano lesson apps, software and websites

1. Broken chords

Should your keyboard parts naturally tend towards the clunky side, things can be improved by employing a technique known as broken chords.

This involves breaking chords up into their component notes and playing them as short arpeggios (runs of notes). The technique doesn’t just add rhythmic interest, but it can be a great way of coming up with ideas for cool melodies that work naturally with the chord progression, since the notes you pick out are taken from the chords themselves.

Here we have a four-bar progression of simple block chords. To the right, we have the same progression, but played using broken chords. Like finger-picking on an acoustic guitar, instead of playing all the notes on the same beat, each triad is split into individual notes.

2. Animating chords with inversions

Moving the order of notes around within a chord can take a progression in new directions without changing the actual chords. This is easily done by selecting notes and shifting them up and down an octave - most DAWs have a shortcut key for this, such as Shift-Up/Down.

Here we’ve taken a simple C, D, Eb, F progression and completely altered its shape by swapping the note order around in the second half. These ‘rearranged’ chords are known as inversions.

3. Change the bass note

The notes a bass part plays can assume the role of root note for the chords played by parts above it. Sticking different bass notes underneath can radically alter the sound of a static chord sequence.

Step 1: Let’s illustrate by looking at a piano part playing a repeated rhythmic C minor chord sequence over and over… and over. It sounds pretty boring, as the chord doesn’t change. Instead of thinking up new chords, though, let’s try injecting freshness by using a more animated bass part.

Step 2: For the first two bars, we stick to a C bass note, as it’s the root note of the chord. After two bars, however, we shift the bass note down from C to A, forming a completely different chord with the piano - an Am7b5 (A-Eb-G-C), in fact.

Step 3: Keeping the piano chord the same, we next move the bass from A to Ab, making an Abmaj7 (Ab-Eb-G-C) chord. Then down to F, up to G and back to C again. If you’re not sure what bass notes will fit, try picking notes that are already in the accompanying chord(s).

4. New flavours with modes

If you’ve never encountered modes before, this one tip could change your musical outlook forever. Scales are a basic component of music theory - most people know one or two of the major scales, the most common being C major (C D E F G A B). But what if we told you that you could unlock a secret world of evocative alternative scales simply by playing any scale from a different starting note?

Try it by playing C major in the conventional fashion, from C to C on a MIDI keyboard. Now give your ears a few seconds’ rest to forget the sound of it, and play the same scale again, but without starting on C. Try going from D to D. Or F to F. Notice how they have a different quality to the major’s happy, kindergarten sound? What you’re playing are different modes of the C major scale, and they sound different because of the different sequence of intervals between the notes that happens when you start somewhere other than the root note of the scale. Underpinning each new mode with a bass note the same as your new starting note will reinforce the effect.

5. Monotony rules

Melody-writing can be tough, but sometimes, if the rhythm is hooky enough, sticking religiously to one note is all you need to do.

Try using a monotone melody in a verse part, and slowly add small variations through the bridge section to build to a chorus hook. This approach also gives you an opportunity to focus on rhythm and sonic variety, rather than just melody alone, for adding interest.

6. Borrowed chords

Diatonic means “in key”, and diatonic chords are formed using only notes taken from a particular scale. So a C major scale containing the notes C D E F G A B - the white notes on a keyboard - would give you the diatonic chords C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, and Bdim, formed by stacking alternate notes onto each note within the scale. These are the basic triads you may already be familiar with; however, a palette of only seven chords can be limiting, so why not borrow chords from other keys?

Borrowed chords are most often taken from parallel keys - keys that have the same root note as the original key. In the case of C major, the parallel minor key is C minor, so we have a whole new set of chords to choose from - Cm, Ddim, Eb, Fm, Gm, Ab and Bb.

7. Layer chords together

For an exotic sound, try combining regular major or minor triads together to form polychords.

For a classic polychord combo, let’s use C major as the first chord (C-E-G). For the second, we need to find the major chord that has its root a perfect fifth above the root of the first chord. In this case, that happens to be G major (G-B-D). Play the two chords together and you get a Cmaj9 chord (C-E-G-B-D). If you’re stuck for which chords to combine, go for ones that already have a note or two in common.

8. Take some giant leaps

To give things a kick when putting together a melody, try making a dramatic leap up the keyboard. A good interval to use for this is a minor or major sixth.

You find these intervals by using the scale degree numbering system outlined in Tip 10. With major scales, the distance between the root note and degree 6 of the scale is a major sixth, so in the case of C, a major sixth above would be A. Jump up from C to A in the course of a melody, and it’ll take you up into a whole different area of the keyboard.

9. Build an extension

Extending regular major or minor triads by adding extra notes can radically transform a track. For instance, in C major, a Cmaj7 is made by adding the seventh degree of the C major scale (B) to a C major triad (C-E-G).

If we extend the scale up the keyboard beyond the octave, we get into the extended range, where a ninth is essentially the scale’s second degree played up an octave. So an easy way to play a ninth chord is to play a root-position triad (for example, C major – C-E-G) and add in the second degree between the root and the third (C9 – C-D-E-G).

10. Go pentatonic

Limiting yourself to notes from a pentatonic scale may give you a smaller choice, but it can give rise to some memorable melodies.

Step 1: While a conventional major or minor scale contains seven notes, a pentatonic scale only contains five. Effectively, they’re regular scales with a couple of notes removed. If we look at a normal C major scale, we can see that it contains the notes C, D, E, F, G, A and B.

Step 2: We can then give these degrees numbers, from 1 to 7. To make the scale pentatonic, we need to remove degrees 4 and 7 - in this case, that’s F and B, leaving us with C, D, E, G and A, the C major pentatonic scale.

Step 3: For a minor pentatonic scale, omit the second (D) and sixth (Ab) degrees. For the C minor scale, we’re left with C, Eb, F, G and Bb. Pentatonic scales sound great, and they’re fun and easy to use.

For as long as I have been teaching music, people have asked me if there is some way to automatically turn audio recordings into sheet music. Until recently, I told them that it couldn’t be done. But now there are a few AI products on the market that claim to do exactly that.

Klang.io's Transcription Studio promises to turn audio into notated transcriptions, lead sheets and guitar tablature. This would be a valuable tool for music educators, songwriters and composers alike. But does it work? We recently reviewed an AI transcription tool called Songscription, and we were not impressed. It detects pitches well, but it does not do so well with rhythm. Can Transcription Studio do better? Let’s find out.

What is it?

The word “klang” suggests “clang” to English speakers, but it means “musical tone” or “musical note” in German. Klang.io has been in operation as a company for a surprisingly long time; the hype around AI might be recent, but researchers have been working on the underlying machine learning technologies for decades.

Klang.io has been offering computer-assisted transcription tools for specific instruments for several years, but their latest offering is Transcription Studio, a browser-based audio-to-notation platform. (It's also available as a VST3/AU plugin, but for this review, we only tested the browser-based tool.)

In theory, you can drop any piece of music into Transcription Studio and get a notated score. However, these kinds of tools are only as good as their training data, and Transcription Studio's transcriptions work better on some kinds of music than others, as we will see below.

One disclosure before we go any further: I came to this review with a strong anti-AI bias, and I believe that we should approach generative AI with skepticism. Before I started writing, I spoke to the company’s founder, Sebastian Murgul, along with his public relations representative. I came away liking Sebastian and feeling more open-minded toward the product as a result.

Why should you care about my thought process, or my feelings about a tech company founder? In assessing a new technology, it isn’t enough to ask what the tool does now; you also want to think about where it might be headed in the future. There are many reasons for a music educator like me to be concerned about AI. Is this tool going to be an excuse to lay all of us off, even if it doesn’t do our job as well as we do?

Sebastian Murgul shares my concerns. He is a deeply nerdy person who just wants to make a useful product, not to disrupt (or destroy) music education as we know it. He does not actually think AI can replace human music transcription and analysis, and he recognizes that it can’t make sense out of every kind of recording.

Murgul has some specific cases in mind for Transcription Studio: for DAW-based composers of film and game music to be able to communicate their ideas to human performers, for example, and for pop songwriters to be able to generate lead sheets for copyright registration. (In the US, you only have to submit a sound recording of your song, but in Latin America you have to submit a notated lead sheet too.)

Murgul is clear that users will only get good results from Transcription Studio if they already have a good understanding of the music they are trying to transcribe, and if they are able to edit its output themselves.

Performance

When you enter the Klang.io Transcription Studio, you can choose between uploading an audio file, entering a link to YouTube, Instagram or TikTok (but not Bandcamp or SoundCloud), or recording straight into the computer mic. From there, you select a transcription mode from the options below.

• Multi-Instrument Mode: the default setting.
• Single-Instrument Mode: the most accurate and reliable mode, especially if it’s a transparently recorded acoustic instrument like piano.
• Classic Mode: this setting is optimized for classical music.
• Rock Mode: a beta feature. It differs from multi-instrument mode in that it is optimized more specifically for guitar, especially distorted guitar.
• Arrangement Mode: rather than transcribing each individual instrument or voice, this mode produces a lead sheet, just top-line melody and chord symbols. (Based on my tests, this should probably be labeled as a beta product too.)

After choosing a mode, you select the instruments in the recording. You can have Transcription Studio detect them for you, but it performs better if you tell it what to listen for. Finally, on the Additional Options screen, you can specify key, time signature, approximate tempo, note duration quantization, and whether you want triplets or not. Again, you can have the software detect all of this, but the results will be less accurate.

Once you have created your transcription, you can view and listen to it as a notated score or as a vertically scrolling piano roll. You can export your score in various formats, including Music XML and MIDI. Transcription Studio also has Note Editor mode, a rudimentary notation editor, though for any serious overhauls or formatting you will want to work in a separate program like MuseScore, Dorico or Finale.

The most interesting feature of the Note Editor is the Anacrusis (Pickup Bar) setting. Transcription Studio’s makers recognize that the software has trouble identifying downbeats, especially if the recording has any silence at the beginning, so they make it easy to move the location of the first beat of the first bar. Unfortunately, you can only move the downbeat in increments of one beat. (This is an issue, as I discuss later in the review.)

In testing out Transcription Studio, I repeated some of the same tests I performed on Songscription for the sake of comparison, but I mostly selected pieces of music that were better suited to showing Klang.io’s strengths and weaknesses.

I started with Nina Simone’s recording of the blues standard Nobody’s Fault But Mine. It’s a simple piano-plus-vocal recording, and had I recently assigned my aural skills students to transcribe it. Could they have used Transcription Studio to cheat on the assignment?

The answer is: sort of. Transcription Studio detected the notes and rhythms of the piano part very accurately. However, it gave the key signature incorrectly as D major; the song is a blues in A. In fairness, there is no consensus on the correct way to write key signatures for blues, but A or A minor would be the usual choices.

Transcription Studio’s take on Nina Simone’s vocal was less accurate. It simplified her melismas significantly, and it was thrown off by her vocal timbre, because notes that she sang with more inflection appeared in the transcription on the wrong pitches.

For a comparison with Songscription, I tried Crazy by Patsy Cline. Songscription had failed to make head or tail out of the song, presumably because its training data doesn’t account for 1950s recording fidelity or instrumentation.

Transcription Studio did not do much better when I asked it for a lead sheet. It could not distinguish the lead vocal from the backing vocal or instruments, and the triplet feel threw off its rhythmic detection, so it couldn’t find the tempo or downbeat. It did get the chord symbols mostly right, and it detected the lyrics accurately too.

However, Transcription Studio shows lyrics in a strange way. Rather than placing each syllable with its corresponding note, it groups entire phrases together in the middle of their approximate location on the score. I would prefer to have lyrics be on a separate page; it is confusing to see them placed so unconventionally.

I wondered whether Transcription Studio would do better on a multi-instrument transcription of Crazy. This time, I specified the instruments, the key, the time signature and the approximate tempo, and also told it that Patsy Cline is an alto. Klang performed better this way. The bassline was quite accurate. The vocal melody was still mixed up with other parts, but now the meter and rhythm were right. The guitar and piano parts were more hit and miss, and the drum part was completely chaotic; I guess the training data doesn’t include drums played with brushes.

Next, I tested Single Instrument mode with a solo piano recording of Blue Monk by Thelonious Monk. Transcription Studio offered me the choice of pop or classical; jazz was not an option. I chose pop, because that seemed closer. I also entered the key and tempo. The results were good, at least until Monk’s improvised solo started. The software rendered some of his expressive timing strangely, but that is understandable; many human transcribers would struggle to represent those rhythms.

Transcription Studio’s chord symbols were mostly on point, but with some odd omissions. The chord library does not include ninth chords, so Klang wrote Bb9 as Fm7. In Monk’s solo, something about his timing threw off Transcription Studio’s beat detection, so even though his tempo is steady throughout, the transcription was off by one beat from that point. Unfortunately, the anacrusis correction feature only works for the first downbeat. This is something you could easily correct in an external editor, though.

Transcription Studio’s training data includes lots of classical music, so I expected it would have an easy time with Prelude No. 1 from the Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach, as performed by Glenn Gould. I was right: the transcription took one tenth as long as any of the others I had done so far. It was quite accurate, aside from the fact that it was confused by the silence at the beginning of the recording, which it rendered as a one-and-a-half-beat-long rest. The anacrusis correction only works in increments of one beat, so you would need to fix this in an external editor.

I was interested to see that Transcription Studio added chord symbols to the Bach piece, with about 95% accuracy. I sometimes write jazz-style chord symbols on classical scores for harmonic analysis purposes. It is intriguing to consider the idea of having software do it automatically at scale, though I think people should be doing this kind of thing by hand for the sake of their own understanding.

For a further test of Classic Mode, I used Bach’s Contrapunctus I from the Art of Fugue, performed by the Emerson String Quartet. This chart was mostly accurate too, though Transcription Studio missed the first note, along with a few others that were played quietly. Transcription Studio also combined the violin and viola onto the same staff. Once again, it placed chord symbols throughout, which is not a feature that most classical performers would want, but that jazz and pop musicians might find extraordinarily useful.

I wanted to see how Transcription Studio would do with electric piano, which is not one of the instruments on its list. So I gave it What'd I Say by Ray Charles. I gave the software the key and tempo, and told it to listen for vocals, piano and drums. It did pretty well on the electric piano, with good pitch accuracy and timing, and mostly accurate chord symbols.

The timbre of the electric piano did confuse it somewhat, because it heard the top notes as a vocal part. Transcription Studio got the broad outline of Ray Charles’ actual vocal melody, but the rhythms were squared off and the pitch was sometimes a half-step off. As with Crazy, Transcription Studio could not even approximate the drums.

Maybe the noisy vintage recording was throwing the transcription off? I figured that a cleaner, more contemporary recording would work better, so I tried Everybody Laughs by David Byrne. As I expected, the results were more impressive. Transcription Studio misidentified acoustic guitar strums as hi-hats, but the guitar part itself was remarkably good, with clear and accurate tablature along with notation.

The vocal part was uneven, with David Byrne’s idiosyncratic singing clearly throwing the software off. Transcription Studio did pretty well with the string arrangement, showing that the training data includes a lot of orchestral music. The only real problem was that it heard harmonics as separate notes in places, but this is a problem that all pitch detection algorithms share.

For a more mainstream pop recording, I used Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen, assuming that this kind of loud, bright and clear pop banger would be easy to transcribe. Transcription Studio wrote this vocal line extremely accurately. However, it had trouble distinguishing the other instruments, presumably because they are layered and processed so heavily.

For a more authentic transcription challenge, I wanted a song that I didn’t already know how to play. I chose Burnin’ Hell by John Lee Hooker. I wasn’t expecting much for the vocal, but I thought Transcription Studio might do well with the guitar, since it is unaccompanied and has clean tone. Sadly, whether it was Hooker’s open tuning or playing style, Transcription Studio couldn’t make head or tail of it. I guess there isn’t much blues guitar in the training data.

How about the Beatles? I tried Blackbird, figuring that it is sufficiently classical-informed in its harmony and playing style. However, I forgot that the song has a lot of meter changes, and Transcription Studio understandably could not follow them. Also, it had trouble distinguishing Paul McCartney’s voice from the guitar. So some measures were perfectly clear and accurate, while others were chaotic.

My final test was one of my own original compositions, a track I made in Ableton Live using only synthesizers and drum machines. I can’t find my Ableton session anywhere, and I can’t remember exactly what notes or chords I used. I’m sure I could figure it out, but I have never had the time to sit down and do it. This is the exact use case that the company has in mind.

Transcription Studio has an option for synthesizers, but there is clearly a limit to the weirdness and inharmonicity that it can cope with, so its transcription of my melody and bassline was not very good. However, it did get the majority of the chords right. The transcription is not usable as a guide for a performer, but it would be quite helpful to me if I were to transcribe the track myself.

Verdict

As with other transcription and audio-to-MIDI tools I have tried, Transcription Studio does very well at detecting pitches, especially on single instruments that are recorded clearly. It also does a good job with vocals in a conventional pop style. It can identify note onsets accurately, and if the rhythms are straightforward, it can organize those rhythms into a meter fairly well.

However, if the rhythms are too far off the grid, or if they're too swung and idiosyncratic, Transcription Studio struggles. The more complex the recording, the less able it is to separate the layers, and older or noisier recordings are a problem too. Also, even when its output is accurate, you may still need to do extensive editing and formatting before you could hand charts out to an ensemble.

The difference between Transcription Studio and its competitors is that its designers recognize the limitations of their tool. They are assuming that you are not a complete novice, but rather that you already have some musical sophistication. The user interface makes clear that the more you can inform the software in advance, the better the results will be, and that you should expect to edit and adjust the output afterwards.

The best way to understand Transcription Studio is not as a tool for generating sheet music. Even if its scores were perfectly accurate, writing sheet music for human performers requires more than identifying the notes. You need to use your judgment to decide how to lay everything out and how much detail the performers will need. (I expect AI transcription to get more accurate, but I do not expect it to develop editorial or graphic design skills.) I think it’s better to think of Transcription Studio as a tool that gives you clues for writing your own sheet music, and in that application, it has significant value.

After years trying to decide just what kind of act they wanted to be, the Pet Shop Boys eventually settled on a formula that would yield some the 1980s' most enduring hits.

Following the unsuccessful release of their first single West End Girls in 1984 the track was re-recorded and reissued the following year, rushing straight to number one in the UK chart with similar success in other territories. Pop fans were besotted by a winning combo of sharp lyricism, clubby energy, and vocalist Neil Tennant's charismatic presence.

This was just the beginning of what would soon grow into a truly exceptional career, which is still in rude health over 40 years later.

Tennant and keyboardist Chris Lowe were quick to embrace new gear and sampling techniques, utilising the most innovative electronic instruments of the day to create a slew of timeless pop anthems; Rent, What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Domino Dancing, Always on My Mind, the list goes on.

Their biggest tracks would have enormous audience appeal yet were imbued with an intelligence that outclassed their chart contemporaries.

A former music journalist, Tennant explored class, sexuality, politics and the intricacies of the human heart.

Their extensive use of the Emulator II (and accompanying library), Fairlight CMI, Linn Drum, with Roland Super Jupiter synth meant that their sounds too, were truly cutting edge for their day. But, the Pet Shop Boys weren’t just twiddling knobs for the fun of it.

They were transmitting the sounds of the most hyper-intense clubs into the living rooms of Thatcher's Britain.

We could pick any number of PSB’s top tier to examine musically, but their enormous and iconic hit It’s a Sin from 1987 is a particularly fascinating one to look closer at. It draws upon some well-known musical techniques, extending back hundreds of years.

When Neil and Chris started working together in 1982, Neil made use of some redundancy money to rent a small demo studio in Camden, where the two would work on Fridays and Saturdays.

This was the demo location for all of the songs on their critically-acclaimed first album, Please (1986) and many of the songs for the equally acclaimed second album, Actually (1987).

Tennant would man a four track mixer (presumably some form of Tascam PortaStudio) while Lowe would play synth and electric piano. Tennant would also play the odd bit of acoustic piano when required. But mainly, Neil's job was to create the toplines and the lyrics.

Studio owner, Ray Roberts, was very impressed with PSB's early demos, offering them use of the main studio, in return for a percentage of the publishing on the songs. This seemed like a fair deal - particularly given the duo’s lack of financial stability at the time.

Between the ages of 11 and 18, Neil Tennant had attended a Catholic school. In line with the orthodoxy that was instilled in all students, he was taught that sex (outside of marriage) was a sin.

This particularly draconian teaching resurfaced in Tennant’s head when he heard Lowe play a hymn-like chord progression. Suddenly, the basis of It’s a Sin's lyrical theme crystallised in his mind. Although its lyric was an honest admittance of the shame he felt for having absconded from his school's teachings, the music told another story. It was a bombastic rebuttal to the judgmental nature of such prudish restriction.

When I look back upon my life
It's always with a sense of shame
I've always been the one to blame
For everything I long to do
No matter when or where or who

A demo of the first version of the song was recorded with New York’s hi-NRG producer Bobby Orlando, but this version was ultimately shelved.

However, there was a sense that with the right hands and ears on the mix, It’s a Sin had the potential to be something special.

Working alongside producers Julian Mendelsohn and Stephen Hague, Tennant and Lowe transformed the song into a show-stopping pop epic. The re-worked mix was suitably dense, incorporating recordings of ambient sounds captured while visiting the Brompton Oratory, and even included elements of a sung Mass, which was recorded at Westminster Cathedral.

Strangely, they also included samples from an Apollo rocket launch - from the original commentary provided by NASA. Was there something slightly Freudian about that choice, we wonder?

The song sprawled out into a monster of considerable heft, maximising the hi-NRG feel of the original demo whilst daubing it in a dramatic gothic cowl.

“It’s a Sin at its heart is a heavy metal record,” Tennant told the Financial Times. “There is a huge link between hi-NRG music and heavy metal: the urgency, the chords, the slightly histrionic melody. You could do a medley of It’s a Sin with The Final Countdown by Europe; in fact, I don’t know why we haven’t done that.”

Upon release as Actually’s lead single on June 15th 1987, It’s a Sin became the band’s second UK number one after West End Girls. By the end of the year, it’d be the country’s eighth biggest-selling single.

Let's look under the hood at just how It’s a Sin works.

Set in the keyboardist’s favoured key of C minor, the main verse structure is pretty much entirely dependent upon a musical tool which relates back to the late 1600s…

The application of the circle of fifths is clearly evident in the song. This approach is based on the principle of one chord naturally leading to the next, with the distance between these natural shifts always being a 5th.

You can count an interval of a 5th by simply counting in a step-wise movement, with the notes you start and end on being notes one and five respectively. For example, if you are on a chord of C, count 5 notes upward and you reach the chord of G, and so on.

In the case of It’s a Sin, PSB use a descending circle of 5ths for each verse, so our chords follow a downward cycle with the sequence - Cm, Fm, Bb, Eb, and Ab - before breaking out of the cycle to use Fm and G, before repeating the sequence again.

It's worth noting that this song is not alone in its adoption of this musical device. You will hear it used in songs as diverse as the jazz standard Fly Me To The Moon and Gloria Gaynor's disco classic I Will Survive, alongside Basket Case by Green Day and Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix.

That's quite a legacy for a theoretical trick first established in the 17th century!

Above and beyond its basic musical employment, the reason we continue to love this sequence is pure physics.

The ‘perfect 5th’ slots beautifully into the naturally occurring set of frequencies, which are described as the harmonic series. When these harmonics and overtones are used in a musical context, there is something very organic and ultimately pleasing from a listener’s perspective.

When blasted at volume into our ears - as they are in the context of It's a Sin's energetic arrangement - that feeling of inevitability is maximised. It's as if the song were always meant to be.

The chorus section is heralded by the arrival of trumpeting synth brass, which relates back to our home key of Cm, alternating with a chord of Ab/C.

We also hear alternating chords between Fm and G, which are slightly unnatural bedfellows, but add a beautiful sense of discordance, as a reaction to the verse.

Once we reach the bridge section, there is still a heavy reliance upon the key chord of Cm, which is held for two bars, before shifting to a chord of Ebm. This could be regarded as an unrelated chord, thanks to the presence of the note Gb, which is a tritone away from the note C. Its presence here adds angst and fury, before moving to Gm and back to Cm, and a turnaround using a chord of Bb.

Beyond this effective musicology, It’s a Sin’s true power comes from the impact of Tennant’s immaculate and distinctive voice - and, of course, the bravery of his religiously inspired theme.

Contending with this type of repressive, religiously-sanctioned prudishness in a pop context at a time of hyper-tension (and hyper-conservatism) wasn't something to be done lightly. It was a positively incendiary move.

It's a Sin's underlying rejection of imposed restraint had particular resonance due to the ongoing global Aids crisis, where once again the idea of sex - particularly gay sex - being shameful was asserted daily across sections of the British media.

The song’s righteous fire was perfectly visually articulated by the Derek Jarman-directed video, which featured Tennant facing the judgement of a church inquisition. It’d be the first of many collaborations between Jarman and the pair.

However, not everybody was a fan. Several newspapers were critical of the song’s seemingly anti-religious undercurrent, and the very school that had inspired Tennant's words - St. Cuthbert's Grammar School - criticised Tennant’s oft-repeated press mentions of the school’s strict orthodoxy as the basis for the song.

“It is very unfortunate that Neil has painted this distorted picture of his school days and the things he was taught,” the school said in a statement, published in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. “It is very hurtful. It is a long time since he has been here and there have been a lot of changes since then in the Church."

Years later, in a 2009 interview with The Atlantic. Neil reflected on a song that had grown into, for a certain generation, a more meaningful hymn than anything they’d had to learn in school

“When we brought out It’s a Sin, it was quite interesting, because people took it really seriously,” Neil said. “The song was written in about 15 minutes, and was intended as a camp joke and it wasn’t something I consciously took very seriously. Sometimes I wonder if there was more to it than I thought at the time, but the local parish priest in Newcastle delivered a sermon on it, and reflected on how the Church changed from the promise of a ghastly hell to the message of love.”

Having previously claimed that Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter “couldn’t have got arrested” back in his ‘80s pop heyday, producer and songwriter Mike Stock has been fleshing out his argument in an interview with MusicRadar.

Stock, of course, was one third of crack music production outfit Stock Aitken Waterman, who had hits with Kylie Minogue, Rick Astley and many, many more. As he discusses how the industry has changed in the almost 40 years since then, though, it’s clear that Stock doesn’t believe that the current streaming-centric landscape is a hotbed for great pop music...

The music business has changed immeasurably since your hits started in the ‘80s. Do you think that now – living in a world of streaming – we’re in a better or worse place for making, finding and enjoying music?

“Well, you could ask this question first: How many artists in the last 10 to 20 years have achieved iconic status? That’s artists that are going to be around in 20 years. Is Taylor Swift that person? Is Ed Sheeran?

“The number of people achieving that ‘superstar’ status is always the same as it ever was – only one or two in any generation. And to be number one on the charts now is to be invisible. If you're a fan you’ll know if your artist is in the charts, but there's nothing now that we can focus on and so there’s nothing to measure your success against.

“For example, you see Harry Styles, and you say, ‘What a fantastic video. What a brilliant blah blah blah’, and it’s an interesting sound, it’s a bit art house, he's a bit this, he's a bit that, he's very… Harry Stylish. That's what he is. But that's all that he is. It's very superficial.”

“And I don't like Taylor Swift as an artist, I don't get that. I want to hear something that’s got the passion in it that deserves the love from the audience. That's what I want to hear, and I don't know many of those now. I can't remember the last time I heard one.”

Do you think that streaming has taken the magic out of making and discovering music?

“Back in the day, when you bought a record, you made an effort. First of all you would show your love for the artist by getting on a bus and going down to Woolworths and paying three quid for it. But that's an effort and who wants to do that nowadays?

“But we used to make records knowing that that's what somebody was going to have to do, and because of that we put love and passion into it, thinking that we want to make this exciting. We want you to love it like we love it. But these days… Who cares if the music just goes on Spotify?

“Most people use Spotify like it's a radio. They pick a list, they start it playing and go about the housework, or whatever. They don't lean forward. They're not going on to Spotify and typing, ‘I want this song’, playing it, and then being happy. They just lean back, put the thing on and let it run. So that means the passion for the music is less from the user, and that bounces back on the maker of the music, who's not that bothered either. Because if you don't have to work up any passion or thought or effort, then neither will I.

“Like, I hated the name ‘hit factory’ [used to describe Stock Aitken Waterman’s output]. I thought it made us sound like a sausage factory – that we were just churning them out – and that couldn't be further from the truth, because we always put the time and the hours and the effort in.”

Crazy Shot In The Dark by The Fizz and the long-awaited, self-titled debut album from Suzette Charles are out now.

In honor of Oasis's triumphant return, Welcome To Hell World recently asked fans of the band to list their best songs. John Cullen picked Wonderwall, and to pre-empt critics that believe it’s a boring choice, he argues: “This is one of the greatest songs in history. Just because some of your university friends defaulted to it at karaoke doesn’t act as a strike against it, I’m sorry.”

Even though Liam Gallagher sings “like he just fell down the stairs into a dank pub in Manchester”, Cullen argues that he nevertheless “absolutely nails a vulnerable longing that many have tried to capture and very, very few have done so well.”

Wonderwall was a smash hit in 1995, reaching number two on the UK charts and number eight in the US. But in 2024, are young people still pulling out their guitars at parties and playing it? I asked my students, and they assured me that this is very much a thing. These kids weren’t even born when the song came out! The brothers Gallagher have apparently touched a deep intergenerational nerve.

How did this song become such a standard for beginner guitarists? Why did it attain meme status? Before we address these challenging questions, let’s start with a simpler one.

What exactly is a Wonderwall?

No one seems to know. From an article in The American Songwriter, I learned that Wonderwall is the name of a British film from 1968. The titular wall separates two apartments, one inhabited by a scientist, the other by a model. The scientist discovers a hole in the wall and becomes a peeping tom (which, gross.) George Harrison wrote songs for the film, and the soundtrack was the first solo album by a member of the Beatles. Noel Gallagher saw a copy of the soundtrack someplace, and the rest was history.

The song was originally titled Wishing Stone, but Noel thought “wonderwall” sounded better. But what does he mean by it? In a 1996 Rolling Stone article, Liam explains that a wonderwall “can be anything… It’s just a beautiful word. It’s like looking for that bus ticket, and you’re trying to fucking find it, that bastard, and you finally find it and you pull it out, ‘Fucking mega, that is me wonderwall.’” That does not enlighten me much, but maybe I’m overthinking it.

Noel told NME that he wrote the song to cheer up his then-girlfriend, later wife, and finally ex-wife, Meg Mathews. After they split, Noel denied it had ever been about her in the first place, saying instead that it’s directed to an imaginary person. I didn’t know any of this backstory going into this article, and I can’t say that learning it has changed my experience of listening. Whatever power the song has, it isn’t in the literal meaning of the lyrics, such as it is.

The instrumentation

Owen Morris produced Wonderwall along with the rest of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?. He and the band worked fast; it only took them half a day to put the song down, and the entire album was done in a few weeks. Liam sings and plays tambourine.

Noel plays guitar, piano and bass; the band’s bassist Paul "Guigsy" McGuigan doesn’t appear on the track. Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs plays the cello patch on a Mellotron, a kind of primitive analogue sampling keyboard from the 1960s. The paradigmatic Mellotron sound is the flute at the beginning of the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever.

Drummer Alan White used Promark hot rods, bundles of thin wooden rods that are quieter and more diffuse-sounding than than standard drumsticks. He had only recently replaced the band’s original drummer, Tony McCarroll.

In a Q Magazine interview., Owen Morris praised White for being “intelligent and articulate and a real musician”, but then said that he wasn’t a fan of White’s playing: “Alan’s essentially a jazz drummer. He is NOT a rock band drummer. He was always shuffling away on his snare (which actually became the signature rhythm of Wonderwall), and never hitting the basic back beats in a dumb rock and roll way.” Morris has a point. You can see White using a traditional grip in the video, a sure sign of a formally trained drummer.

Hot rods and Mellotron are mildly interesting twists, but otherwise, the song is a standard mainstream rock production. It could just as easily have been recorded in 1975 as 1995; its only era-specific touch was the brickwall limiting. Oasis’ deliberate non-innovativeness is a big part of their appeal; we will get into that below.

The theory

Wonderwall has a reputation for being a big, dumb, four-chord song. It is definitely easy to learn and play, but it has more going on harmonically and melodically than I expected. Noel plays the song in E minor, but he has a capo on the second fret of his guitar, so it sounds in F# minor. In the following section, I’ll be discussing the chords he plays, not the ones you hear. Transpose everything up a whole step to get the key of the recording.

The chords are highly guitaristic; no pianist would ever have written them. Every chord in the song pedals the notes G and D on top, the notes you get on the third fret of the B and E strings. The song’s intro is a loop of Em7, G, Dsus4, and A7sus4, two chords per bar. The first three chords belong to the key of E minor, but A7 is an outlier, because it belongs instead to the jazzier E Dorian mode.

The distinctive note that sets it apart is C-sharp, but because he’s playing A7sus4 rather than A7, Noel’s guitar part doesn’t actually include that note. Nevertheless, it’s strongly implied. Anyway, the verse continues the intro loop until the last line (“about you now”), where it switches to C(add9), Dsus4, and a full bar of A7sus4.

The vocal melody is as guitaristic as the chord progression. It’s based around the easiest possible scale to play on guitar, the open-string E minor pentatonic. The first note of the melody is B, a typical enough choice over an Em7 chord. However, Liam sings it strikingly flat, making it an ear-grabbing blue note.

The drums enter in the second half of the verse, but they don’t come in on a downbeat like you expect. Instead, they start in the middle of the line “backbeat, the word is on the street”. This choice is a baffling one. Why not have the drums hit on the word “backbeat”? I suspect that Alan White may have come in late by accident, and then the band decided that they liked the effect.

The prechorus begins with an Aeolian cadence: C(add9), Dsus4, Em7. That repeats, and then after another C(add9) and Dsus4, there’s a quick descending major scale bassline under a G chord: G, G/F#, G/E. This leads into two full bars of A7sus4 on the line “don’t know hoooow”. Each phrase in the prechorus’ vocal melody starts on F-sharp, the first departure from E minor pentatonic so far.

The chorus is a loop of C(add9), Em7, G, and Em7. The vocal melody includes a new note, C, on the “af-” in “after all” and on the “-der-” in “wonderwall.” That note is native to the key of E minor, but none of the Cs in the melody occur over the C chords. The melody has been more or less independent of the chords the whole time, but in the chorus, it’s particularly striking. You feel the song as a general vibe rather than a harmonic structure with an order and sequence to it.

The final Em7 chord in the chorus hangs for an extra bar and a half. This is a disruption to the hypermeter that I’m sure trips up every dorm-room busker. Everything settles back into structural regularity with the second verse, and there are no further surprises or oddities for the rest of the song.

Brotherly love

You can’t talk about an Oasis song without getting into Liam and Noel’s public persona. They are an easy target for parody, as David Cross and Bob Odenkirk demonstrated on Mr Show in 1997.

Americans like me are not very sensitive to British class politics and regional identity; everybody just sounds “British” to us. But in their native country, Liam and Noel’s roots in working-class Manchester are the most salient part of their identity. Manchester’s closest American equivalent is Detroit, an unglamorous industrial city with a surprisingly rich musical history. Aside from Oasis, Manchester has also been home to the Smiths, Joy Division, Simply Red, the Stone Roses, the Verve, the 1975, and even the Bee Gees (though they technically grew up in the suburb of Chorlton.)

Jason Diamond cites the Gallaghers as examples of a British archetype that he calls “The Lad”, a defiantly uncouth working-class character with hip-hop-like swagger, best embodied by Begbie from Trainspotting. Diamond explains that the Kinks and the Who are Lads, but the Rolling Stones aren’t, and that John Lennon was a Lad even if he wanted not to be. The Lad doesn’t have to be male; Diamond lists Adele as an example too.

The Gallaghers aren’t just Lads; they are brothers, and their relationship is, shall we say, fraught. As the lead singer, Liam might be the voice of Oasis, but Noel is the band’s undisputed leader. He is not humble about this. In the aforementioned Rolling Stone article, he says, “I’m in the best band, and I’ve just written the best album. So as far as I’m concerned, everybody can fuck right off. Those other bands are not even in a position to string my guitar at the moment. Fucking wankers, all of ’em.”

Liam has a similar level of self-confidence, and the brothers do not resolve their conflicts with quiet compromise. They may be more famous for fighting than for music. A tape of them verbally abusing each other was even released as a single, and it made it up to number 52 on the British charts.

It’s not necessary to know any of this to enjoy learning and playing Wonderwall on guitar, but it does give you some insight into the song’s outsized cultural footprint.

The meme

Wonderwall is easy and fun to play, but so are a lot of songs. Why has this one saturated the amateur guitar world so completely? Why do people call that specific voicing of Em7 “the Oasis chord”? Some guitar stores have banned Wonderwall, putting it in the rarified company of Stairway to Heaven, Smoke on the Water and Seven Nation Army.

The specific meme phrase, “anyway, here’s Wonderwall” originates in this video:

It works as a caption for anyone with a guitar - or any other instrument, for that matter. The more incongruous the instrument is, the better, and the same goes for incongruous players.

Amusing though the meme is, Christopher Hill argues in The Voice Mag that it has a deeper meaning: “The Wonderwall meme isn’t about the song; it’s about the player… there is an implied discouragement of new guitarists from trying to learn the piece: it becomes a ‘cringe’ activity.” The song may be a cliche, but it got that way for a reason, it’s a useful learning tool. To some, a would-be guitar bro inflicting Wonderwall on his roommates might be cringe, but we need to careful not to discourage amateur musicianship.

The word “amateur” simply means “lover of”, and don’t we want more music lovers? Amateur musicians will always vastly outnumber professionals, so why not encourage them? Everyone is a beginner at some point. It’s hard enough to push through the early stages of music learning without being anxious about being mocked for it.

Wonderwall is a reassuring song. It’s reassuringly easy to play, and even when it was new, it was reassuringly familiar. Aaron Bady points out that in the 1990s, “guitar bands had stopped being cutting edge - all the cutting edge music was non-white people - so ‘an un-novel pastiche of past guitar bands’ was a way for Britpop to live in its white past”.

But Wonderwall isn’t a simple pastiche of classic rock songs, either. It’s a little peculiar. Liam Gallagher’s voice is abrasive, the chords and melody don’t have traditional harmonic function, and the drums enter in the wrong place. I have noticed that really huge hits tend to be conventional in their broad strokes but weird and a little annoying in their details. If Wonderwall was too easily digestible, we would long ago have moved on. The same is probably true for the Gallagher brothers.

It might be called Stupid Song, but Olivia Rodrigo’s latest single is yet another smart piece of pop songwriting from an artist who can do no wrong right now.

With Stupid Song riding high in global streaming charts, Rodrigo has now given us a little insight into how it was written in a new video interview with Pitchfork.

“It's the only song that I ever wrote on my grand piano in New York,” she remembers. “It was really expensive, and I was like, well, I didn't write any songs on it, but this one, this one I got it out in like the last few weeks of me moving [from] that apartment, so it was all worth it.”

Rodrigo says that the inspiration for Stupid Song came when she was out for an early morning walk in London: “This guy walks up to me – I thought he was gonna ask for a picture and I'm like, oh yeah, that's cool, it's cool – and he walks up to me, he goes, ‘You are so beautiful, like, can I take you to dinner?’ And I was like, ‘No, but, like, wow, thank you so much,’ and I was so like, just joyful and happy, and I went home, and I wrote this song about being infatuated with someone, and just like in total limerence.”

Discussing the song’s arrangement, Rodrigo says: “I wrote it on piano, and so obviously there's an element of it that's sort of piano ballady, but it had such energy, and we're like, let's put dance drums in there. And I think that little bridge part, it's my favorite part of the song, I love that part. I think it was the last thing on the record we finished, because we just could not figure out what that part was supposed to be, we tried everything under the sun, and yeah, I love that bit.”

It sounds like Stupid Song came together in sections, then, and Rodrigo says that she has no problem with it sounding like a hybrid of different parts.

“Whenever I play this song for people, they're like, ‘it's like three songs stitched together, but in kind of a cool way.’ And I think that was the vibe, that's what we were going for.”

Like other Rodrigo songs – Vampire, for example – Stupid Song is also a track that builds, almost theatrically, and she accepts that this is now something of a trademark for her.

“I just sort of write that way,” she explains. “I don't really know why. I’ve just always loved a song that is very dynamic – that's the type of music that I listen to. I think that's why I like rock music so much. I like something that's just really loud sometimes.”

There’s also another genre that Rodrigo and her co-writer/producer, Dan Nigro, have bonded over, along with an artist who’s served as an unlikely inspiration: “Dan and I, we really love a power ballad. We actually really love Meat Loaf songs sometimes, because we're like, ‘this is the ultimate power ballad.’”

Elsewhere in the video, Rodrigo also breaks down two other songs from her new album, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love: The Cure and Cigarette Smoke. And, as if she wasn’t already busy enough, she’s also announced a new one-day music festival, Daisy Chain Fields, which will take place on 29 August at Great Park in Irvine California and feature an impressive all-women line-up.

As well as Rodrigo herself, this includes the likes of Chappell Roan, Bikini Kill, Doechii, Garbage, Katseye, Mitski, Rachel Chinouriri, Santigold and The Breeders, while Karen O, Sarah McLachlan and Stevie Nicks are listed as special guests.

All profits raised from the festival will benefit non-profit organisations that advance and advocate for women and girls, and presale tickets go on sale tomorrow, 24 June.

Charli XCX has been reflecting on the frenzied reaction to her recent single, Rock Music, and to one line from the song in particular.

The pushback when Charli sang ‘I think the dance floor is dead, so now we're making rock music’ was immediate, not least from Madonna, who responded with a caption on an Instagram post that read: ‘If your Dance floor feels dead / Maybe you're playing the wrong music’.

All good fun, but XCX has now clarified what she meant by that line in an interview with Rolling Stone.

“That lyric is very much about my relationship with Brat, and my personal experience with that album,” she says, before suggesting that she still appreciates good new dance music as much as anyone.

“My husband [the 1975 drummer George Daniel] runs a dance music label,” she points out. “There’s been such a wealth of incredible dance/electronic-adjacent records that have been coming out recently, whether it’s Slayyyter or Underscores or PinkPantheress. Dance music is in an incredible place.”

On a similar theme, XCX also played down the suggestion that Music, Fashion, Film, her forthcoming album, will be the rock record that some people have predicted. After discussing her love of The Velvet Underground and asking herself “What if we made a record with guitars?” in 2025, some fans assumed that this was the direction that her next album was taking, but it sounds like this isn’t the case.

“Obviously, I know that there’s been a lot of conversation around me making a rock album, which is something that I never said,” Charli says. “But to be honest, I’ve never thought about genre in a binary way. I find that to be a very old-school notion. I don’t even know what the genre is. It’s just me and A G Cook and Finn Keane, doing our thing.”

That means trying to avoid being influenced by anyone else, too: “To be honest, when I make music, I’m thinking less about other music as a reference point. I actually shut myself off, and we just escape into our own world. I’ve spoken at length about loving Lou Reed and John Cale and the Velvet Underground. But would I say that the record sounds like any of that? No.”

This admission comes despite the fact that XCX recently collaborated with Cale on House, one of the songs she contributed to the soundtrack to Emereld Fennell's 2026 adaption of Wuthering Heights.

Elsewhere in the interview, Charli opens up on her relationship with the late producer Sophie, who she worked with extensively on her 2016 EP, Vroom Vroom.

“I lost some­one who completely changed my life, and there are a lot of feelings to work through with that, especially because they were so attached to my creative life in a really positive way, but also sometimes in a difficult way,” she says. “Being able to express those feelings through my work has been really cathartic for me.”

Music, Fashion, Film will be released on 24 July.

One of the benefits of the streaming age is the unlimited access to more music than we could hope to listen to in our lifetimes. Here at MR HQ, we consume music at industrial levels, but it never ceases to amaze us which songs our peers cite as their proverbial desert island disc.

One of our brethren is a recording engineer. He’s worked with some huge names, from Depeche Mode to David Bowie, but once admitted to us that there was one particular song that had managed to capture his ear like no other, but if he was ever asked about it in public, he would flatly deny his admiration and liking for Britney Spears' effervescent Toxic.

Pop snobbery aside, there is an incredible amount about Toxic to respect. Released in 2003, the track's tightness in production terms - with heavily truncated and gated sounds - meant it hit the ears of millions with just the right amount of punch. It's also full of fascinating production flourishes, namely that swooping string sample…

Back in the beginning, Toxic wasn't intended to be a Britney song at all. It was originally written by Christian Karlsoon, and Pontus Winnberg (aka Bloodshy & Avant) alongside Henrik Jonback, and the master of commercial pop success herself, Cathy Dennis. Dennis penned the lyric about her recent breakup with former boyfriend Noel Fitzpatrick (aka, The Supervet, trivia fans).

Writing the lyric was difficult for Dennis; "That was sheer torture," she said in an interview with Songwriting Magazine "I beat myself up for seven days, not sleeping. The melody came first, then I had this puzzle of trying to fit words to the right number of syllables. It was really weird. I kept writing and then re-editing myself again, and again, and again."

“Some of my stuff I just couldn’t get, and Toxic is a great example,” Dennis told The Gentlewoman. “It’s not that I didn’t like it, I just thought it was too odd, too complicated. I felt like I had been so in my head that I couldn’t judge.”

Initially, the song was written with Janet Jackson in mind, but she passed, so they moved on to the next artist, Kylie Minogue. Kylie too, wasn't impressed…

Britney Spears was thrilled by the song however. According to sources, Spears was incredibly excited about the opportunity to record the song, insisting that the record company release Toxic as a single, even through there was reluctance and push-back to do so.

“I really like Toxic,” Britney told MTV. “It’s an upbeat song. It’s really different, that’s why I like it so much.”

Her instincts were on point, and Spears must have felt somewhat smug when Toxic became a chart-topper across the globe.

There's several reasons why Toxic has become such an important song for Britney, and continues to resonate over twenty years since its writing. Let's explore why…

One of the most endearing production traits of the song is the sense of space. The drums are gated and heavily compressed, without any sense of reverberation beyond a very short decay.

The guitar and bass tend to sit alongside the drums, adding punctuating rhythms which nicely frame the vocal.

However, one element that inadvertently became a key hook of the song, is the use of the string sample which we tend to hear at the end of each 8-bar section.

It nestles among an additional live string orchestration (recorded as a separate entity) which crescendos and adds a pad-like element to the verses.

The high glissando-based string sample was taken from the song Tere Mere Beech Mein, which was part of the soundtrack for the Bollywood film Ek Duuje Ke Liye. The production team also played around with the sample, stretching it out, and even reversing it on one occasion.

As a song, Toxic conforms to a fairly regular song construct. After a brief introduction, the first verse is driven by an 8-bar section, which is repeated.

Fixed in the key of C minor, Toxic plays around with the tonality of the relative major, and the major dominant.

After four bars which are fixed in C minor, we shift to Eb major and G major, both for a bar each, before returning back to C minor, for two bars, replete with the associated string sample at the end of the sequence.

Having repeated this section, it then repeats a further time, but this time with a different vocal line, acting as a pre-chorus bridge.

The vocal line here plays around with the chord structure even further, by using 6ths and 7ths in the melody, which are the element that adds that slight sense of James Bond-esque mystery to the harmony - it's a similar device to the James Bond theme in fact, where we hear the addition of a min/maj 6th leading line to a minor chord. It’s a classic John Barry trick!

After a short interlude, where we hear a synth bass with a heavy high-pass filter applied (or equivalent EQ), we head into the chorus.

This section gathers pace by increasing the speed of movement to a chord per bar, alongside a greater use of 7ths.

This begins with a straight chord of Cm, followed by a descending sequence of Eb7, D7 and Db7, all for a bar each.

This chromatic and descending movement also provides a further sense of spy-like mystery to the harmony. We then move back to Cm, and Eb, before things alter slightly, with a chord of Ab and a final chord of what sounds like G7 with an added #9.

This is an interesting moment, because while the guitar plays G7#9 for the whole bar, the bass shifts from G up to a Db, for 2-beats each.

This creates a further sense of angst and hiatus, as Db does not fit into this chord, but acts as a tritone pivot, before heading back to the home chord of Cm.

This section then repeats, but this time with a nice change to the chorus construct.

Now we hear new melodic content which is provided by a lead guitar which is also heavily garnished with tremolo, framing an additional vocal part from Britney.

Once we have heard a complete cycle of two verses and two chorus, we shift to a breakdown section, which serves as a form of bridge.

It is heavily reliant upon high-pass filtering with added distortion, and a bass part which leans heavily on the previously-heard chorus harmony.

This underpins the wailing and reverberated vocal which flies over the top, before we head back to the chorus for the outro of the song.

Backed by accompanying iconic video, wherein Britney was famously dressed as a stylised air hostess, Toxic became a worldwide smash, climbing to number one in the UK, with similar successes elsewhere. Toxic was, quite literally, inescapable.

Toxic has of course become one of Spears’ most recognisable songs, nominated for a myriad of different awards and securing Best Dance Recording at the Grammys, and winning the ASCAP and Ivor Novello awards for the most performed song of 2004. Not bad for a song that Janet Jackson and Kylie first assumed was a bit of a stinker…

"I listened to a snippet of it in the record-company offices and decided against it. I knew that Britney was keen for it,” Kylie later admitted to The Sun. “That's cool. I wasn't at all angry when it worked for her. It's like the fish that got away. You just have to accept it."

Life moves pretty fast in Taylor Swift’s world. In fact, she’s just revealed that she wrote, recorded and produced I Knew It, I Knew You – her new end credits song for Toy Story 5 – on the same day that she watched an early cut of the movie itself.

In a video posted on Instagram that was captured on the day in question, we see Swift addressing the camera. “Kind of a hectic day,” she begins. “At 11am, went to see Toy Story 5. Got so inspired, got the songwriter zoomies. Went home, wrote the end credits song for Toy Story 5. We have now produced it and I’m doing vocals. It’s 6.57pm.”

Explaining the fast turnaround, Swift says: “In two hours, Bob Iger [CEO of The Walt Disney Company] and Tom [MacDougall, president of Walt Disney Music] from Pixar are coming to hear it. We have not recorded it yet [the vocal], and I think this is one of the most fun days of my life.”

Sitting alongside Swift is recording and mixing engineer Laura Sisk, who worked alongside producer Jack Antonoff on the making of the record (Swift was a producer on the song, too).

The video confirms what Swift said when I Knew It, I Knew You was announced – that she wrote it “as soon as I got home from the screening.”

Assuming that Swift made it back around 1pm and her meeting with the execs was at 9pm, this means that her song was created in around eight hours, which is certainly pretty speedy.

We’re guessing that more production and mixing work was done after that, but the story provides further evidence of the worth ethic that has taken the star to the very top of her game. Swift by name, swift by nature.

Toy Story 5 is released today.

As many songwriters and composers will tell you, happiness is often not the best state to be in when creativity is needed. Broadly speaking, that little bit of friction and tension in the real world can serve as the perfect raw fuel for a masterpiece or two.

Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody would beg to differ however, having rustled up the band’s biggest hit - Chasing Cars - in a particularly blissful state, having just begun a new relationship.

"Chasing Cars I wrote when I was happy," Gary told Smooth Radio. "That's what came out. It's one of the few songs we've written that is a genuine love song - about being in love, while in love."

The song was birthed during a wine-fuelled writing session back in 2005 when the Northern Irish indie outfit were preparing to make fourth record Eyes Open.

It was one of a batch of songs that Lightbody concoted whilst in the salubrious setting of a converted garden shed, masquerading as a studio. Gary was in the live room, while regular contributor and producer Jacknife Lee was sat at the desk in his control room.

“I was staying with Jacknife at his house in Kent, which had a little studio he called The Garage,’ Gary told PRS For Music. “He was at the desk recording as I just wrote a bunch of stuff - a stream of consciousness. I wrote 10 songs that day, and we were three or four bottles of wine deep by the end of it! But five of those songs ended up on the album, one of which was Chasing Cars.

The song title itself was inspired by Lightbody’s father, who would chastise the young Gary for being utterly besotted by a girl in his youth. According to one source, he would say to Gary - “You're like a dog chasing a car. You'll never catch it and you just wouldn't know what to do with it if you did." It's a phrase that stuck with him.

Lightbody wrote a tender lyric for the song, which basked in the radiance of his new love. Shutting out the surrounding noise of the world, Gary evoked the transcendental contentment of simply laying side by side with the object of his affection.

Its soon-to-be iconic chorus stressed the euphoria felt when sharing a moment of quiet intimacy with the person your want to spend your life with.

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

“It's the purest love song that I've ever written,” Gary told Rolling Stone, “There's no knife-in-the-back twist. When I read these lyrics back, I was like, 'Oh, that's weird.' All the other love songs I've written have a dark edge."

Its emotive lyric in place, it was the towering, rising arrangement constructed by the entire band - Tom Simpson, Paul Wilson, Jonny Quinn and Nathan Connolly - that ensured that Chasing Cars cut through. And boy, did it cut through…

The fact that the song was written so swiftly is perhaps key to its simple-but-effective structure. So let’s break down just why it works so well…

The entirety of Chasing Cars is based around an 8-bar chord progression, and just three chords. This construct could conceivably be quite repetitive and boring, but it’s reliant upon two strong elements which form the supporting cast.

Firstly, there’s the aforementioned strength of the vocal performance and melodic line, which switches construct as it moves between the verse and chorus sections.

Secondly, the arrangement ebbs and flows, moving from very minimal, to an elevated dynamic to heighten the chorus elements.

If we consider the opening section, we hear the distinctive picked guitar motif. The song is rooted in A major, but the initial open chord, with the picked notes of A and E, remains a constant in terms of texture.

The chord sequence itself consists of A (open/major), C# minor, D major(9) and back to A, with each chord being played for a full 2-bars.

The exact nature of each chord slightly alters, depending on its location within the song, and this is down to a number of differing factors.

To begin with, the sparseness of the picked A and E is shored up by a guitar playing open chords underneath, in a relatively subdued and muted style.

The second chord C#m, is not fully revealed in the first verse, although the picked A and E does switch to a G# and E here to embrace the harmony, and could imply a chord of E major instead.

It's only as the song progresses that the solidifying nature of the harmony becomes more apparent, although as we reach the chorus sections, the emphasis on an increased dynamic through the use of distortion plays a trick on the ear. It adds harmonic overtones to fill in the notational gaps in a chord. It's a very clever and common trick, and one that works very successfully here.

We do particularly like the 3rd D major chord in the sequence, which thanks to the presence of the picked A and E, turns the chord into D major9. This is bolstered later in the song, with the addition of a fuller orchestration, laying the sweetness of a major9 chord in the perfect location, before resolving back to the tonic chord of A. It's a choice that emphasises the size of the underlying emotion.

The ‘chugging' effect which presents itself throughout the track, is generated by the continual emphasis on 8th notes. This becomes far more apparent once we reach the second chorus, although the full arrangement salvo isn't released until we get to the third chorus, when finally the bass and drums embrace the 8th-note chugging in a form of band unison.

There are some nice production tricks to maintain the dynamic energy and ‘blooming’ nature of the song. There are synthetic sustains in both the bass and pad form, which help to maintain the gradual build, with each chorus giving us just a little bit more of a dynamic rise, before pulling back toward the end of the song. Nicely symmetrical!

Chasing Cars was clearly a winner, but post-release as a single on June 6th 2006, the song - like its arrangement - built and built, eventually becoming an evergreen radio staple.

Despite the fact that it never reached the top of the UK charts, it remained within the chart for more than three years.

And live, the song went off…

“It felt like it didn’t matter what room we were playing in, what size, what festival — the whole place would be singing,” Gary told PRS.

In the US, its placement in the season finale of uber-popular medical drama Grey’s Anatomy took the song - and Snow Patrol - to a whole new level.

According to Lightbody, Chasing Cars started out well outside the top 100 on the US iTunes chart. (In 2006, standing within this newfangled iTunes chart was deemed to be one of the best benchmarks of popularity in the nascent iPod era.) The day after the DVD release of the show's second season later that year, it was at No.1.

The single release peaked at number #5 on the US Billboard Top 100 - the band’s biggest success to date and one of the top selling rock songs of the 'digital' era.

Aptly, for a song that had achieved such mass exposure, Chasing Cars was chosen to be the very last song to be performed on the legendary BBC music staple, Top of the Pops. Gary considered the song one for the people;

“It’s a song that has perhaps got into the musical consciousness, which is something we're very proud of. It's rare that any band has a song that goes that deep into the world,” Gary told PRS

The most notable recent accolade came in 2019, when it was crowned the most-played song on UK radio by music licensing body PPL. "It's unbelievable," Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody told the BBC. "I'm not sure how that happened.

"It's an emotionally open song and it's a simple song. But it's also unabashedly a love song, and we don't really have any others” said an overwhelmed Gary. “The way it unifies an audience is the thing I most cherish about it. It's a beautiful moment every time you play it."

We’ve all been there. Sometimes the music just flows… More often you spend days chasing a four bar loop round and round… Waiting for inspiration to strike… And it never does.

We’re here to help.

You’re suffering from writer’s block – an affliction that prevents your mind from escaping preset paths and keeps your creativity locked down until you can finally shake it off. And the good news is that freeing your mind from writer’s block and releasing that creativity could just be a simple matter of getting a fresh perspective and undertaking one or two creative exercises.

1. Get a fresh perspective

Often, subtle shifts in your mental state can get you past a block and, better still, potentially open up pathways of creativity hitherto unexplored.

Writer’s block often stems from an expectation that something should be possible (or even easy) and a frustration grows when that’s proving harder (or even impossible) for reasons beyond your control.

Thus, your first mental shift should be to remove any sense of expectation. That is to say, just because you’ve made tracks before, why should it be the case that it will be easier or just as straightforward this time? After all, circumstances change.

Just because you’ve switched on your same computer and loaded the same DAW doesn’t mean that today will yield the same musical result as yesterday, so removing that expectation can remove a lot of unnecessary pressure.

2. Change your pattern

Repetition is the enemy of creativity, so it should come as no surprise that, at some point, your brain will rebel if you fire up the same sounds, work at the same tempo, program the same beat patterns or reach for the same chords. Changing things up can be as simple as changing the order of the musical parts you bring to your tracks. Do you always start by programming beats? Then don’t - make that the last thing you do.

Do you usually plonk down some chords and a guide melody before getting to work on sound design and production? Turn off your keyboard and draw notes into your DAW instead, so that you’re forced to think about every note you add to a chord - if you’re going to the trouble of adding notes manually, it may well prove to be the case that you’ll pick different chords or voicings to the ones your muscle memory selects when you’re playing to a click track.

3. Get a production partner

Collaboration is another way to eliminate writer’s block. Having someone else’s idea to kick-start the creative process takes the pressure off having to come up with all of the ideas for a track on your own.

Similarly, asking others for feedback on your work in progress will throw up some ideas you won’t have had on your own. Even if you don’t agree with the advice you’re given, you’ll be forced to think about your tracks in a different way, which can get you over a hump.

Better still, there may be a good reason why you disagree with any constructive criticism, which will make you defend your work. The more you talk and try ideas the more forward momentum you're injecting.

There’s nothing better than this for finding your self-confidence and realising that, just maybe, you’re not as bad at this music stuff as you’d been allowing yourself to believe.

4. Outside contact detox

Try to have a music production day without any other distractions. Set aside a day on the calendar, be prepared to set an alarm and have an early start and – just like a professional musician who’s attending a paid-for session at a studio – have a day of exclusively making music.

Leave your phone off. Turn off the WiFi and unplug that ethernet. Go 100% internet free for a day and exclusively use your computer to make music with none of your usual distractions.

Have fun with your studio. Perhaps start with something simple like tweaking a synth sound. Or creating some kick drums. Ditch that one-man-band, jack-of-all-trades, writer/engineer/producer role and knuckle down to one simple job at a time.

With nothing else on your mind you’ll soon be inspired to add notes and beats and begin building something fresh from scratch. Most of us find we work quicker and more efficiently if working towards a daily deadline. With your studio day drawing to a close you’re forcing yourself to deliver the goods before you have to finish.

5. Give it a rest

If you reach an impasse with a project and can’t get it over the finish line, don’t simply delete your work. Make sure to save your in-progress projects – and label them clearly – so you can return to them later.

It’s amazing how returning to something a few days, weeks or even months later can allow you to see it from a fresh angle. Often, within a few seconds of hearing a ‘familiar’ old, unfinished loop, your brain will imagine that hidden ingredient to take it to the next level.

6. Remix yourself

Starting from an existing finished project and rearranging it is often a lot easier than creating something new. Try starting with a track you’ve previously finished and using it as a basis for your next track.

The rule you need to set here is that your new track must be completely different from your starting project, thereby forcing you to up-end your previous sounds and track elements.

Try changing tempo. Swapping out synth sounds for acoustic sounds. Deliberately go in unfamiliar directions by imagining you’re on a remix project with a brief to completely change the track.

7. Give yourself a goal

Staring at a blank DAW screen will get you nowhere. Instead have a ‘mission’ to accomplish and stay focused on delivering that.

For example, you could decide that this afternoon is all about ‘130bpm percussive techno tool’. Or your mission could be to create a ‘beatless synth jam’. Or set aside a day to make some ‘peak time DnB’.

Stick to this original aim, and file any ideas that arise along the way to one side for a later date.

8. Start arranging early

Instead of endlessly listening to that loop, start turning it into a track early.

As soon as you have a few fundamental building blocks – for example, a chord progression and basic beat – duplicate these across your timeline to create the foundations of a full track. Delete elements as necessary to designate an intro, outro and breakdowns. Break your arrangement up into 8-bar sections and colour code or label these for easy delineation.

Now change the energy of your track in some way each time you reach a new section. As a rule of thumb, there are three ways to do this: add an element, remove an element or change an existing sound – for example, changing the instrument used to play your lead melody, or moving part of your bassline up or down an octave.

Knowing when to add and when to take something away is a matter of personal preference but by letting your arrangement force you into making changes you’re always inching towards a finished track.

A couple of quick tools to help your arrangement along include creating a set of Auxiliary effects (on sends from your tracks) that you can quickly lean on for spot effects or enhancing the sound of a track. Have a template with your favourite reverb, delay, and chorus ready to go and then simply add (or automate) them to your tracks as you go.

The sooner you have something sounding ‘great’ the more likely you are to stick with it and finish the job.

9. Find your hook

One important step when it comes to developing a track lies in establishing what element provides the focal point, aka the hook, of your track.

This should be the most distinctive element of your composition. In a pop or rock song this would usually be the lead vocal, but when it comes to electronic or instrument music, the hook could be a lead synth riff or a bassline or rhythmic pattern.

Whatever genre you’re working in you should be able to identify a specific focal point for your track which will inform a lot of your decisions when it comes to arranging. For instance, your hook will likely be something you want to build up to, meaning you may choose to remove it from your track’s intro and breakdowns.

It will also provide the basis from which to create elements like counter melodies. For example, if you have a descending synth riff as your lead hook, try creating a counter melody that ascends through the same scale, with a rhythm that works around, rather than on top of, your lead line.

Introducing this in the background after two or four repetitions of your lead will help add depth and keep your lead hook fresh.

10. Use transitions and automation

The key to keeping your track ‘happening’ lies in creating dynamic movement both within and between sections.

The easiest way to do this is by using transition FX. These are things like white noise sweeps, pitched risers, crashes or reversed cymbals – elements that can be placed at the start or end of a loop in order to create a pull-in or release to signify the change in your track.

Even if you’re just using placeholder FX that you plan to replace when it comes to applying finishing touches, having some sort of transition in place will go a long way towards giving your arrangement the correct ‘feel’, and could help inspire what elements need to be added or removed for the next section.

An equally essential technique for introducing movement to an arrangement is through automation of sound parameters and effects. The most obvious example of this is by automating the cutoff point of a low-pass filter to make a lead, bassline or chord progression brighter as a track builds.

And finally… One more…

11. Commit early

Bounce plugins or external instruments down as audio as soon as you’re happy, to remove temptation and avoid endless tinkering and reworking.

If you need to make changes later you can get creative with effects or editing.

The modern DAW has given us unlimited power and potential, often to the detriment of creativity and getting the job done. Don’t let the possibilities of your DAW get your track stuck in a rut!

Ryuichi Sakamoto was a man of numerous gifts; a pianist, keyboard player and musician, producer, singer, songwriter, composer and even an actor. Despite considerable success as a solo artist and founder member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, the Japanese artist made his acting and film scoring debut in 1983, in the feature film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.

Directed by Nagisa Ōshima and starring in the film himself alongside David Bowie and Tom Conti, Sakamoto not only played the pivotal role of Captain Yonoi, but bagged a BAFTA award for his original score. Not bad for a first outing in two different feature film camps!

Ryuichi Sakamoto was well known for playing synthesizers as part of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, but the acoustic piano continued to be an integral instrument for his work.

While touring as a solo artist (albeit with a superb group, which included Manu Katche and Pino Palladino) he could often be seen fronting the band from behind a Yamaha grand piano, which he also used to trigger MIDI devices live.

When working in film scoring, the piano often became a central element to his work, and there is no clearer example of this than the extraordinarily haunting theme from Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.

Sakamoto was heavily influenced by Asian music, while also citing Claude Debussy as an enormous influence on his work.

“Asian music heavily influenced Debussy, and Debussy heavily influenced me,” Sakamoto was quoted as saying on his official website. “So, the music goes around the world and comes full circle.”

Despite the film also starring the global superstar David Bowie (then at the peak of his commercial fame following the release of Let's Dance), there was never any doubt that it was to be Sakamoto who would write the score.

“We never wanted David Bowie to write the score,” said the film’s producer, Jeremy Thomas (as quoted here). “It would have been a cliché for him to write the score and secondly, he didn’t want to do it. But also Ryuichi Sakamoto was always going to write the score for the film. He’s an enormous rock’n’roll star in Japan. [Director] Nagisa Ōshima told him to write the score as if he was [his character] Captain Yonoi and he did.”

Sakamoto hit upon the divine melody by chance, when searching for a particular ‘timeless’ motif that wouldn’t obviously date.

“I had read the script and knew the story, and I thought about how to come up with a special Christmas song that’d be played in a tropical Asian island,” Sakamoto said in 2018. “That’s a strange concept in itself. And then you add in war. But anyway, I was thinking logically about it for weeks. One afternoon I was sat in front of the piano looking for an appropriate melody. I was unconscious for a while. Then the melody was written. Right in front of my eyes."

There are several versions of the main theme to this film, including versions which make greater use of acoustic instrumentation, but we are going to concentrate on the music theory that underpins the original theme from the soundtrack; a layered tapestry of acoustic piano and early 80s music technology, including a Prophet-5, LinnDrum and Fairlight CMI.

For the moment, we are going to dive in at the point where we hear the main theme for the first time. We’ll come back to the introduction later

In its most basic form, the pianistic inspiration is pretty obvious. The right hand plays the melody, which is set in the key of Bb minor.

Adopting Asian influence, the melody is completely based around the minor pentatonic - starting on the note Eb, it rises up to F, back to Eb and then down to Bb, before settling back on Eb.

If we analyse these first five notes, the role of the note Eb is central, yet it arguably plays against the harmony.

We’ll ignore the synthesizer chords for the moment and concentrate on the harmony which is provided by the left hand on the piano.

The influence of Claude Debussy is obvious here, as French piano composition from this era often found the left hand playing extended chords as arpeggios, a popular device which Sakamoto similarly exploits here.

Coinciding with the start of the main theme, the left hand plays a low Gb, followed by Db and Bb. This first chord provides us with a beautifully-voiced chord of Gb major. The second arpeggiated chord (playing Ab, Gb and C) adopts a similar style and arrangement, for a chord of Ab7, before the final arpeggiated chord (Bb, F and Db) brings us home to Bb minor.

These chords are repeated, but not before the left hand plays two higher pitched triads of Bb minor and F minor, before dropping to Gb to repeat the cycle.

The coupling of the French accompaniment with the pentatonic melody, creates the perfect hybrid. It has minimalist sensibilities, thanks to considerable degrees of repetition.

With our analysis of the harmony, we have purposely left the pad-like and higher pitched synthetic elements out of the equation. These also appear in a similar guise during the fade-in introduction, so let’s revisit this element now.

These upper musical colours offer jazz-like chord extensions, which add a tremendous amount of sweetness to the overall harmonic impact. Arguably, part of this extension format is added by the melody too.

Take the very first chord of the theme - Gb Major - if we take the first note of the melody into account (Eb), it arguably turns this chord into Gb add13.

However, the synth pad element adds all sorts of other notes, as a form of cluster, with one of the most important notes being F, which is the Major 7th of Gb. Hence, this first chord, adopting the synth-cluster, could also be described as Gb major13.

As with all harmony, especially harmony with a heavy influence from jazz, chords can be described in various ways. However, we cannot ignore one of the strongest elements of this theme, which is that in its most reduced and pianistic form, the simplicity adds to the glacial beauty of the piece. The synth and chordal extensions are merely icing on top.

The initial theme adopts another form of jazz construction, being in a form similar to an AABA, 32 bar jazz-form.

Turning to the B section, it takes a slightly darker turn, with a melody which is played in unison, but two octaves apart.

The chordal accompaniment here is more sedentary; Abm7, followed by Gb major 7, Abm7 and F7sus, which resolves to F7, before returning to the main theme in order to repeat the A section.

Calling upon Sakamoto's influences again, this final A section adds a further Asian colour. If you listen closely, you can hear the melody is joined by an additional note, a perfect 4th below.

This is a highly recognisable and archetypal trait of traditional Asian music, and one that serves to enforce the melody and harmony further, as well as adding a notable flavour.

Given that this fantastic theme was to become one of the film’s calling cards, it was decided that Sakamoto should add a vocal to the track, resulting in the single Forbidden Colours in August 1983.

The theme remains identical in form, structure and harmony, but with the addition of a beautifully haunting vocal, provided by friend and co-creative David Sylvian, the former frontman of Japan (who'd only recently broken up).

In an interview with Sakamoto on the film's Blu-Ray release, he stated that originally, he asked his co-star if he wanted to take the lead. “I really wanted to work with David Bowie, so I asked him to sing on this but he didn’t want to. He said that he wanted to focus on this project just as an actor, purely as an actor. I understood, so then I asked another of my friends, David Sylvian, to work on this and he said yes. He did it beautifully.”

Sakamoto had previously worked with Sylvian, both as a solo artist and as part of Japan, occasionally playing with them live.

The connection, through influence, was very obvious but the addition of the vocal to the theme not only added another dimension to the material, but added a valuable marketing tool. The single made the top 10 in the UK and became perhaps the most enduring legacy of the (underrated) film.

Ryuichi Sakamoto continued to work as a solo artist, throughout the 80s and 90s, beyond his time with the Yellow Magic Orchestra. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence was the film which launched his scoring career. Film composition became an increasingly important part of his life's work, and he was awarded many gongs, including an Oscar for 1987’s The Last Emperor.

Sakamoto’s sad passing in 2023 left us with an extraordinary legacy of cinematic, emotive and highly original music, amongst which sits themes that have transcended their original purpose. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence in particular remains his most evocative gem.

It’s one of his biggest songs – and now considered a classic of the retrospectively created yacht rock genre – but Christopher Cross says that his 1980 hit, Ride Like The Wind, actually owes a big debt to Paul McCartney.

Speaking on the Questlove Show, Cross has now revealed the true origins of Ride Like The Wind, his debut single, for what he thinks is the first time – specifically, the famous instrumental turnaround that occurs frequently throughout. He says that this came to him while he was onstage performing a fan-favourite McCartney composition that was released in 1974.

“So we used to play at a club, you know, covers and stuff like that,” says Cross. “We were doing 1985 [Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five], the Wings tune. And we played four or five hours a night so we’d extend tunes – it was a dancefloor – so we're playing 1985, it's in C minor, and we’re getting into a jam, and people are dancing, and I started doing that [sings turnaround from Ride Like The Wind]. And people, I noticed that they were really getting into it, you know, and it was another level of energy.”

Sensing that he was onto something, Cross says that he decided to expand the turnaround – which he saw that people were responding to – into a full song.

“So I took that part, and I went, ‘you know, there's something about this that's got the thing,’ so then I wrote the tune around that,” he confirms. “I had that part first, and then I wrote the verses. And I don't think I've ever told Paul that. He's probably gonna say ‘I should have gotten royalties.’”

Cross is clearly joking when he says this – or half-joking, at least – and we can’t honestly say that the two songs are similar enough to warrant McCartney calling his lawyers any time soon. They are both in C minor, though, and once you know the backstory, there is something about Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five’s rhythm that strikes you as similar.

What’s more, Cross is adamant: “The seed of the song came from 1985, McCartney,” he reiterates. “Yes, I ripped him off.”

Elsewhere in the conversation, Cross also discusses the guitar solo in Ride Like The Wind, and his decision to play it himself rather than offer it to one of the many great players that he had in his orbit (Steve Lukather, Larry Carlton, Eric Johnson and Jay Graydon, for example).

Despite being buried in the mix somewhat, the solo is highly regarded, but Cross says that he’s not sure how it ended up being him that took it. “Maybe Omartian [Michael Omartian, producer] said ‘Hey, you should play a solo on something,’” is his best guess.

Cross goes on to suggest that, given the company he was keeping, he was always slightly reluctant to put himself forward for a solo spot, this is also the recollection of Omartian himself.

Speaking to Mixonline in 2015, he said: “He always wanted someone else to play a solo, and I’d say ‘no’. I’d say, ‘Dude, play the solo,’ and he’d just burn it up. After we were done with the record, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen both wanted him to play guitar on one of their records, and he was so intimidated, afraid to do it, and he never did.”

It’s been confirmed that Taylor Swift will contribute a new song, I Knew It, I Knew You, to the soundtrack to upcoming Disney Pixar movie Toy Story 5. Inspired by the ongoing journey of Jessie the cowgirl, who has been part of the Toy Story universe since the second film, It will be released this Friday, 5 June, ahead of the movie's release on 19 June.

I Knew It, I Knew You was written and produced by Swift and her longtime friend and collaborator Jack Antonoff – putting to bed any rumours of a creative break-up following his absence from Swift's most recent album, The Life Of A Showgirl – and is said to mark a return to Swift’s “country roots”. Its announcement comes after a series of ‘TS’ billboards appeared in LA, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Toronto, Mexico City and London over the weekend; these were indeed – as many fans speculated – a play on Taylor Swift and Toy Story’s shared initials.

Discussing the Toy Story franchise and the making of I Knew It, I Knew You, Swift said on Instagram: “I’ve always dreamed of getting to write for these characters who I’ve adored since I was a 5 year old kid watching the first Toy Story movie. I fell instantly in love with Toy Story 5 when I was lucky enough to see it in its early stages, and I wrote this song as soon as I got home from the screening. Sometimes you just know, right?”

Indeed, but by hitching her songwriting horse to Jessie’s wagon, Swift has some big creative hooves to fill. The cowgirl in question already has her own song in the shape of When She Loved Me, which was written by frequent Toy Story musical contributor Randy Newman for Toy Story 2 and sung by Sarah McLachlan.

A beautiful, heartbreaking tale of loss, When She Loved Me is a proper tearjerker. Indeed, McLachlan told the Zach Sang Show last year that she sobbed the first time she heard it, and immediately knew that she had to sing it.

“It’s so quintessential Randy but the melody is just built for my voice,” she explained. Of the song’s emotional impact when placed in the context of the movie, she added: “It’s gutting – I remember watching it in the theatre just ugly crying and my daughter looking at me like, ‘what is wrong with you?’”

She’ll find out – and we don’t have long to wait to discover how Swift has channelled Jessie’s character, either. “It’s incredible just how meaningful it’s been having Taylor write and perform this song,” says Toy Story 5 director and screenwriter Andrew Stanton. “Her connection to Jessie and the immediate way she understood what the character was going through was undeniable. The song is so deeply connected to Toy Story. So much so that on first listen, it instantly felt like it had always belonged there, like a long-lost family member. It was kismet.”

However it sounds, you can pretty much guarantee that I Knew It, I Knew You will be a huge success – destined to go to infinity and beyond, you suspect. As well as appearing on streaming services, it's also available to buy as a CD single that includes the song as it appears in the film, a special acoustic version and a special piano version, all with unique vocals and production

Back in the ‘80s, Stock, Aitken, Waterman (SAW) were the kings of UK pop, creating evergreen hits for the likes of Kylie Minogue, Rick Astley, Bananarama and Donna Summer.

However, SAW were also criticised for building something akin to a musical assembly line – not for nothing were they known as the Hit Factory – and stretched their credibility at times by producing records for ‘artists’ such as Pat and Mick (British radio DJs Pat Sharp and Mick Brown), Big Fun and The Reynolds Girls.

As such, eyebrows will doubtless be raised now that it’s emerged that Mike Stock – one third of SAW alongside Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman – has been speaking in less than glowing terms about some of today’s popstars, saying that they’d have struggled to make an impact in his heyday.

“Put Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter back in the 1980s and they couldn’t have got arrested,” he tells the iPaper, arguing that, in today’s streaming-centric music industry, where major labels have shares in Spotify, less thought goes into the songs themselves.

“They don’t rely on record sales any more,” says Stock. “They can control the apparent success of an artist. They’ve got the whole market sewn up and can put out anything and it will get a million streams a day. They don’t have to worry about the song.”

Warming to his theme, Stock says: “And Taylor Swift, the doors to her have been thrown wide open. I don’t particularly like her as an artist. I don’t think she’s got a great voice or anything. I just see a very pale artist. And I think the same of Sabrina. It is soft pornography. What else to call it?”

Well, we’re sure Carpenter’s millions of fans would call it pop music, but let’s move on – what about the UK’s own Harry Styles?

“Well, it’s a good name for him, that, because he’s all style.”

Ouch.

To be fair, Stock isn’t the only person to say something along these lines, although when the Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant questioned the standout quality of Taylor Swift’s music in 2024, during an on-stage interview for The Guardian, in 2024, he was rather more measured with his words.

"Taylor Swift sort of fascinates me as a phenomenon because she's so popular and I sort of quite like the whole thing," he said. "But then when I listen to the records - we [Tennant and fellow Pet Shop Boy, Chris Lowe] both have the same feeling actually - for a phenomenon as big… where are the famous songs? What’s Taylor Swift's Billie Jean?"

Stock’s comments, though, are still surprising when you consider that SAW were once criticised by the music press – “They were constantly slagging us off” – for releasing a production line of songs that sounded the same. And for every I Should Be So Lucky or Never Gonna Give You Up, there was an I'd Rather Jack.

He doesn’t agree with this characterisation of SAW, though: “Everything was handmade, handcrafted, specific to designed for particular artists. It was never anything off the peg.”

While Stock concedes that he “can sound like a Grandad,” with his ‘it was better in my day’ comments, he’s still backing himself. He’s currently working on the debut album by Suzette Charles, a former Miss America, and says that it will stand out in today’s pop market because it doesn’t use “vocal computers that take all the soul and the light and shade out of everything.”

Olivia Dean's rise has felt nothing short of meteoric. The release of her debut album Messy in 2023 was that rarest of things in the current era - an album (remember those?) that became instantly iconic amongst young people.

But Dean's talent-timeline started much earlier than 2023, as she began writing songs at the age of 16 while also busking on the Southbank in London and attending the prestigious BRIT School.

Attention soon followed from the likes of BBC Introducing and Amazon, for whom she won their Breakthrough Artist Award of April 2021. But between those milestones, the road to recognition was long; “I think it’s easy for people to think that things happen overnight, but nothing does. It’s just a lie. It takes time and life experience to make something that will last a long time,” she told Dork.

Signing to EMI, Olivia released a genre-hopping first album; the aforementioned (and quite brilliant) Messy. With it came a staggering amount of publicity, most of it praising the fact that a pop artist was working on a wider stylistic canvas than was typical.

“When I titled my album Messy, I wanted precisely to explore different musical genres,” Dean told Numero in 2023. “I think what I really fear is the day I will stop having fun. When I will no longer feel anything while I sing. Sometimes artists lose themselves a little, and their passion for songwriting fades away. It’s a kind of breakup. Before I signed with a label, I was simply writing songs at home for my own pleasure, without ever imagining that people might actually listen to them.”

Released on March 28th 2023, The track Dive was the third single from Messy, and soon became a contemporary neo-soul classic.

Penned by Dean herself alongside songwriters Bastian Langebæk and Max Wolfgang (who also co-wrote additional single, The Hardest Part), Dive was an obvious love letter to her formative influences, with a modern, buoyant energy that became infectious.

“This song is just one of those honest songs,” Dean said of the song’s lyrical theme in an interview with Genius. “It's really pure and from the heart. I think people like to fall in love even though they say they don't. I was listening to Diana Ross. I was listening to the Supremes. I'm very like a Motown-head. I went through a phase of writing a lot of quite sad breakup music and I was like, 'I want to write something light'. I was falling in love which is, you know, crazy. But a nice feeling and it's just really changed my mindset. I think I'm happier because of it."

It’s obvious that Dean’s personality and lyrical frankness are big components of why Dive became such a success, and the reason her devotees adore her so much more generally. “A barometer is if I wouldn’t say it out loud, then I probably wouldn’t use it as a lyric,” she told Dork. “I like to base everything in reality. I’m not a great abstract person.”

But beyond the giddy euphoria of the song’s love-infused lyrical theme, just why does Dive work so well?

Let’s take a closer look at what’s going on in its arrangement.

The first overarching element, is that it has an innate sense of familiarity; it feels like we’ve heard it somewhere before.

Feeling sunny and optimistic, Dive is very much a sum of parts. By Dean’s own admission, she took influence from artists such as Carole King, Diana Ross and of course the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. High benchmarks, but there is an extra element that resonates through Dean's vocal delivery. Herself.

The instrumentation reflects music from the classic era of soul. The rhythm section has been treated with a degree of lo-fi processing and EQ that provides a fittingly retro flavour, in much the same vein that Mark Ronson engineered with Amy Winehouse on the sublime Back to Black.

The drums are imbued with a vinyl crackle that also nods toward the DIY, sampling scene. Meanwhile, the song’s kinetic bass pins down the song’s movement, and adopts a pseudo-muted tone, straight out of the 60s.

Of course there is a horn section providing the odd stab and harmonic accompaniment; a sensibility normally reserved for big band or string section writing. With a further nod to Motown, an upright piano punctuates eighth-note chords, reflecting the halcyon age of Motown.

The instrumentation only forms part of the picture, as the uplifting harmony adopts an extraordinary sense of familiarity too.

Dive does rely fairly heavily on chord IV moving to chord I, and it does so using extension harmony - a trick that is common in jazz and soul.

The home key of the song is G Major, but Dive opens with the prolonged use of the extended chord Cm6. The horns sustain the chord, with a swell into the first bar of the verse, accompanied by a sampled repetition from the drums.

The chords used in the first four bars of the verse adopt a degree of ambiguity, as the piano is quite far back in the mix, performing in a relatively improvised way. There is certainly an implication of C Major9, followed by G Major9, which is then repeated, as each chord plays for a bar each.

The next few bars break up the movement, by employing Bm7 and Em7, both for two beats at a time, before landing on Am7(9) for a full bar.

Once again, there is familiarity to this pattern, which repeats three times before we hear the return of the opening chord Cm6, leading to the final bar of the sequence, on C/D.

One musicological characteristic employed throughout Dive, is the sense of movement from major chords to minor chords, and back again.

Anyone familiar with the classic Cole Porter standard Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye, will know the lyric; “From major to minor’, in which Porter references the song’s harmony very literally. There is similar harmonic movement in here, and given Dean’s fondness for the classics, we would put some fairly serious money on the fact that she was influenced by Ella Fitzgerald's amazing interpretation and delivery of this song. If you don't know it, you should definitely give it a listen. In a time long before autotune, Fitzgerald's performance will stop you in your tracks!

As we hit the chorus section of Dive, we are treated to some beautifully simplistic vocal harmonies, adopting a basic triadic formation, with a chord sequence which repeats from the previous section, albeit with an abridged ending.

As we get further into Dive, we hear an incredibly unique and subtle bridge section, in which the instrumentation breaks down, before building back up again.

Quiet and subtle repeating notes occupy the horns, while the same rhythm is doubled in the backing vocals, albeit at a higher pitch.

In actual fact, the bridge is heavily dependent upon a device which has been around for hundreds of years, and was a key device used in the work of composers such as Bach. A dominant pedal, as it is known, is where the dominant note (in this case the note D) is held or repeated continually, over a series of bars.

The idea behind this popular compositional device is that it creates tension, which is exactly what we hear in Dive’s bridge. Of course, what goes on above the pedal adds to the build, and in this case, we hear a repeating of the chord C/D (or even C Major7/D) for a bar, and a chord of Bm7/D.

In other words, the note D remains the constant in the bass, while the harmony moves around above it. Throughout this section, the instrumentation builds, leading us back to the final chorus.

The beautifully lilting nature of this song’s central vocal melody - supplied by Olivia’s characterful voice, coupled with its joyously familiar instrumentation and harmony, helped Dive to bed itself in the minds of millions. It quickly became a radio and playlist staple, and with good reason.

It paved the way for her 2025 follow-up, The Art of Loving, and its similarly ebullient hit, Man I Need.

If neo-soul is part of the future of pop, we are all in!

The brainchild of Blur frontman Damon Albarn and artist/illustrator Jamie Hewlett, the fictitious band Gorillaz were quite a unique concept when first introduced to the world via 2001’s Clint Eastwood. Today, in a world dominated by virtual artists and AI-generated tracks, the overtly non-existent conceit of the group now feels highly prophetic.

What clearly wasn’t virtual was the band’s music, which was painstakingly created with a variety of real human creative contributors, spawning a wide array of brilliance across the band’s impressive and diverse discography.

The pseudo-anonymity of Gorillaz has allowed Albarn to explore music avenues previously denied to him, blurring himself and his collaborators amid the project's animated protagonists, 2-D, Murdoc Niccals, Russel Hobbs and Noodle.

It was 2005's second album Demon Days that really pushed Gorillaz outside of the realm of quirky Albarn side-project and into being a household name.

When the incredibly infectious first single from the album, Feel Good Inc, dropped, it was obvious that the band’s production and arranging game had been significantly stepped up, thanks in part to the contributions of artist and producer Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse.

Albarn had heard Danger Mouse's iconic Grey Album and was entranced. As we noted in our lengthy song story last year, the pair hit it off during a phone conversation which led to an invitation to hook-up and try out a few tracks.

Working at Gorillaz’ Kong Studios and 13 in Essex and London respectively, the free-flowing sessions led to the ebullient tone of Feel Good Inc. “I didn’t think that many people were going to get it. Given the way radio formats are set up in the States, I didn’t see any one song that could really fit in anywhere, and that always hurts a major label release,” Danger Mouse stated.

But Feel Good Inc. would end up clearly being a song that worked extremely well, hitting the top 10 in 16 countries (it reached #2 in the UK) and entering the regular rotation of radio stations and clubs across the world.

There’s a reason that Feel Good Inc. has stuck around, and that’s largely down to its arrangement.

In a virtual interview with MTV News in 2006, Albarn explained (via his band avatars) that he realised the song would be a standout from the beginning of the process. “I saw it's potential from the very first beat,” Albarn said through the guise of virtual basist Murdoc. “It was like, panning for gold. Amongst the brown murky waters, I saw this track all shiny and glimmery, shining like a big rock of gold. It said, 'Play me, play me!' and that, I knew soon as the De La Soul boys dropped their glorious rap about Motowns and ghost towns. This one was gonna explode."

In an interview with Ultimate-Guitar.com, Damon mentioned that the band used one of Danger Mouse’s drum machines in the production of the song. Closer scrutiny reveals a heavily gated sound, which also has the attributes of a low sampling rate.

Danger Mouse is a well-known user of the legendary EMU SP-1200; a classic sampling drum machine, with a maximum bit-depth of 12bit, so it's a fairly safe bet that this is the machine behind the track.

One of the hookiest elements of the song is undoubtedly the downright incredible bass line. This 4-bar part runs throughout the introduction and verse sections.

At first listen, it sounds as though the bass part is doubled by a guitar part, one octave higher. This is a throwback to a classic arranging feature, which was made popular by composers such as Henry Mancini. It's been cited by many artists in their own work, including bands such as Steely Dan.

However, a closer listen reveals that rather than a doubled guitar part, the bass part seems to have an octave pitch shifting effect applied, with the effected part an octave lower than the upper original part.

There are a few other clues, such as the accuracy of some of the articulation and slides across parts, as well as a subtle and small amount of latency (at least to our ears), between the upper and lower parts.

While we are on the subject of this inescapable riff, we have to consider its key and overall tonality - which is not as easy as you might think.

The song itself is rooted in Eb minor, which is a strange key for a guitar-based song, given that the lowest note on a regular guitar and 4-string bass is an E natural.

Before addressing the chords themselves, we have to consider the upper guitar parts, as used in the verse structure. This is another curious element, as there are degrees of de-tuning littered in a number of places, particularly within a couple of the guitar parts.

The first guitar part is the most obvious, picking out 6ths above the bass riff, but a second guitar part appears further into the verse, which also adopts some interesting tuning.

As we previously mentioned, the song is rooted in Eb minor, but the picked ‘6th’ guitar part suggests the use of the note G, instead of Gb.

This is pivotal, being the third of a chord of Eb/Ebm, so this singular note switches the song from a major to a minor tonality. Whether accidental or intentional, it promotes a sense of ambiguity in the harmony, in line with the song’s thematic sense of doubt.

Working with the bass and guitar parts, we can suggest a harmonic progression consisting of Eb minor (or major, depending on your viewpoint), Bb minor, Ab minor and Bbm/Eb (aka Ebm add9).

Adding to the general guitar-led construct, there is the occasional interjection from synthesizers. The most obvious being the heavily LFO pitch-modulated chord, that we hear at the end of each four bars.

A less obvious interjection comes from a filter-modulated lower mono synth part, which occasionally intrudes into bass territory.

Lyrically, Albarn seems concerned with the illusion of contentment within a consumerist, disposable society. An illusion that shrouds a deeper unhappiness.

As our writer Fred Garratt-Stanley perfectly articulated last year in his song story, “Feel Good Inc. expertly interrogated damaging developments in how the modern music industry and broader capitalist culture operate. It communicated its ideas with catchy, inventive sonics that connected with the masses.”

City's breaking down on a camel's back
They just have to go 'cause they don't know wack
So, while you fill the streets, it's appealing to see
You won't get undercounted 'cause you're damned and free

The first verse adopts more of a spoken lyrical approach, performed by Albarn (in the guise of 2-D) using a Shure 527B CB radio microphone to create a grainy, lo-fi texture (a typical choice for his vocals across Gorillaz' back catalogue). The chorus provides us with a beautifully-constructed vocal, backed by a slight change in the song’s harmony.

The chords in the chorus are very similar to those used in the verse, but without the dominant presence of the bass riff.

We become fully reliant upon the guitar parts to indicate the harmony. The continuous rhythmic strumming of the tranquil acoustic guitar, employs chords of Ebm, Db, Abm, Bbm7, all of which are played for a bar each. As we reach the end of the chorus, the final chord is replaced by an extended 3 bars of Db.

Lyrically, Albarn expresses the overall theme of the song in breezy fashion, with a recurring allusion to windmills (that were also depicted in the song's entrancing music video)

Windmill, windmill for the land
Turn forever, hand in hand
Take it all in on your stride
It is ticking, falling down

Albarn explained - in the guise of guitarist Noodle - a slightly stylised reason for this constant windmill-alluding; "My attention wandered. I played something more acoustic, just something that reminded me of the countryside," Albarn/Noodle told MTV News. "So I wrote down some key words to help with the lyrical imagery. 'Windmill' was one of them. It was a trigger to symbolise a different time and also a reference to the 'dark, satanic mills' that William Blake wrote about in his verse of 'Jerusalem.' I remember that it all started when I was reading the ingredients of the back of a [potato chip] packet."

Meanwhile, in the arrangement, an additional production twist enters into the chorus, as either a guitar or keyboard part has been heavily layered with some form of harmonizer, which results in the high shimmering effect that we can hear throughout its duration.

As we reach the second verse of the song, it falls to the featured artist, hip-hop outfit De La Soul, to entirely handle this section.

They are also responsible for the outro, and the incredibly infectious laugh that we hear right at the beginning of the track, provided by member Vincent Mason. In true De La Soul style, they combine elements of spoken and sung vocals, with emphasis on particular lyrics.

All of these arrangement choices were vital in shaping a song that has racked up a seriously impressive 2.6 billion streams on Spotify alone. In 2026, Feel Good Inc. remains a perennial playlist staple that, by dent of its timeless production (and fronted by its ageless band) never seems to date or fall out of fashion.

It's not unusual for collaborations to take place in dance music - some might say it’s the norm - but 2017's Feels was quite a notable collision of superstars. Essentially performed by a studio supergroup, the track's players consisted of Pharrell Williams, Katy Perry and Big Sean, led by the uber-talented Calvin Harris.

The impressive collective all shared writing credits for the song, along with additional composer Starrah (aka Brittany Hazzard), but Feels started life as a relatively simple demo, which Harris presented to Katy Perry following a fortuitous encounter at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party.

"I saw Calvin actually at [the] Vanity Fair Oscar party,” Perry told Ryan Seacrest Wednesday back in 2017. “We just bumped into each other and he's like, 'Oh, you know, it's so funny, I think I have a song that maybe you should come check out. I was like, 'Cool,' because we'd always meant to work together for years and years and years."

But context is key here. A few years earlier, the two had a relatively public Twitter spat, triggered by Harris pulling out of an appearance on Perry's California Dreams Tour at the last minute, citing set production issues.

"Calvin Harris will NOT be joining in on the fun and has CANCELLED last minute", Perry posted on Twitter back in 2011. Cue a series of back-and-forth bickers in full public view that led most to assume that the pair had burned their respective bridges

Following this long-awaited air-clearing meeting, Calvin played a basic demo of the backing track of Feels to Katy. She was immediately was struck by it.

"It was time to put all that behind us. Then he played me this one part for this new song called Feels and I was like, ‘Oh yeah.' This is like my favourite song off the record. I was just down to do it."

The Feels-wheels then began turning as one of 2017’s biggest summer hits started to be crafted into shape. Built around an Earth, Wind & Fire-recalling bass groove, the tune had a lightweight, danceable energy and a salvo of hooky toplines. These elements eventually made the tune irresistible to millions

Dropped shortly before the release of the parent album Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1, Feels became an instant international success story, hitting the top of the chart across Europe and the UK and the top 20 of the US.

But, beyond the name recognition of its roster of collaborators - what was it that made the song work so well? Let's dive in to its inner workings…

Feels utilises a two-bar sequence, which provides the backbone for verse, pre-chorus and chorus elements.

There is an opening introduction, which is heavily infused with reverse effects, all based around the single scale of Em pentatonic, before we hear the two-bar chord sequence in a short introduction, and the first vocal part.

The main chord construct is based around Em for 2 beats, A and Em/G for a beat each, then F#m7 is followed by B major, both for 2 beats.

This chord sequence is a relatively common and basic progression, but it offers a strange sense of reassurance and familiarity, particularly given its extensive usage throughout the duration.

The use of Em/G after the A major chord is an interesting device, acting as a passing chord, which breaks up the sequence slightly, although plenty of heavy lifting is done by the arrangement, which we will come onto later.

With three amazing artists working alongside Calvin Harris, each individual adopted clearly defined roles within the song.

The verses are sung by Pharrell Williams; each verse contains two sections, which are clearly defined through the use of different melodic content, alongside the developing lyrical content.

There is therefore an argument to make that the latter part of the verse construct could be presented as a continuation of the verse - although it’s commonly described as the pre-chorus bridge.

Either could be considered correct, with the former carrying more weight, thanks to the continuation of the same chord progression.

Either way, Pharrell's vocal performance is lyrical and soul-like, juxtaposed against the rhythmic and punctuated arrangement. The lyric pertains to being present in the moment, and enjoying the fleeting happiness of a relationship.

Now nothin' ever last forever, no
One minute you're here, and the next you go
So I respect you wanna take it slow
I need a mental receipt to know this moment I owe

As we reach the chorus section, Katy Perry takes centre stage, with a melodic (and often mis-heard!) line that starts on the note F#.

No, she's not singing 'Don't be afraid to catch fish'. It's actually;

Don't be afraid to catch feels
Ride drop top and chase thrills
I know you ain't afraid to pop pills
Baby, I know you ain't scared to catch feels
Feels with me

Beyond its lyric, which reinforces the 'you only live once' theme, this part adds something quite unexpected musically, as it brings a 9th to the chord of Em. This is only realised in Perry's vocal part, leaving the instrumental components to carry on as before. It's one of the strengthening attributes of the chorus melody.

Having been treated to two rounds of verse and chorus, we reach the formal bridge section. Continuing the strength by definition, Big Sean provides an extensive rap over this new section.

The simplistic progression here begins with a chord of Em7, which is played for 3 beats. The note D, within this chord, is played right at the top of the harmony, allowing the note to drop by a semitone to a C# for the final beat of each bar, thus creating a chord of Em6.

This subtle deviation is kept back for the second part of the bridge section, remaining somewhat muted and elusive during the bridge’s first half.

The bridge section is a full 16 bars in length, and while the Em7/Em6 groove occupies most of this space, bars 7-8 and 15-16 present a rising figure, employing chords of Am, Bm, C and D, before we head to the chorus outro.

This rising figure is also further embellished by the use of additional chords, which move down and up. This promotes the sense that we are ascending back to the home chord of the key.

As well as being a notable and successful producer of great repute, Calvin Harris is also a little bit of a gear-hound. This might explain why he listed the equipment that was used in the making of the track at the end of the song’s vibrant promotional video.

This provides us with some fantastic clues as to the instrumentation used at various moments.

Beginning with the drums, Harris lists the Linn LM-2 (a misnomer, it's actually officially named the LinnDrum) drum machine as the unit providing the percussive backbone.

It's a basic construct, of kick on 1 & 3, and snare on 2 & 4.

This is further embellished with live claps, which accentuate the fourth beat, alongside the snare.

There are also some 8th note hi-hats in play, but these are often masked by a live tambourine part, which is something of an outlier. This part does not seem to lock in terribly well, which suggests that its presence is more of an instrumental colour than an exacting rhythmic entity. It’s also quite a way to the back of the mix.

Despite the basic drum construct, the underlying feel of the track is supplied by Fender Stratocaster and Gibson SG Custom guitars, bolstered by a Yamaha upright piano.

These components provide continual offbeats, with the occasional rhythmic embellishment which supplies the lilt and feel of the track, drawing influence from reggae and ska.

There is also an additional Wurly electric piano, which tends to cement the harmony by playing on the beat, although not all of the time.

Between these elements, there is wonderful interplay as they are woven together rhythmically. They also work to flavour-up the chords; sometimes the Wurly plays in a higher inversion, against the piano's lower inversion, for example.

The bass part is played live by Harris, on a Ibanez 1200 Bass, and performs two roles expertly. Firstly, it underpins the harmony, but stylistically it adopts hints of funk, with the occasional octave leap.

Undoubtedly, one of the total strengths of this song is in the simplistic, repetetive feel of the arrangement.

It is a textbook example of what can be done with limited instrumentation - and a hypnotic circular groove, garnished with instrumental colour.

Oh, and a cast list of the music industry's biggest names bringing the song to life certainly does no harm.

As we alluded to earlier, the song's basic groove was consciously derived from Earth, Wind & Fire’s iconic Let’s Groove Tonight, so much so that Maurice White and Wayne Vaughn of the original band were credited as co-writers.

Listen to the two tracks side-by-side and you'll see why…

When it was released on 21st November 1980, Steely Dan’s seventh studio album Gaucho was reported to be the most expensive album ever recorded. Over a two-year period, the band's fastidious co-leads, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, pushed perfection to its very limit, with a revolving door studio policy that resulted in the absolute elite of the American musical fraternity being called upon to record each song, before the next set of equally masterful musicians turned up the next day to do it all again… and again…and again!

There were some major bumps in the road on a technical level during the process though. Gaucho was released as a seven-track album, with several additional tracks being dropped along the way.

One song (The Second Arrangement) was accidentally erased by the engineer, wiping out several months of work in the process. Alternative versions of the same song were deemed to be inferior, so the track was consigned to the Steely bin!

Despite these issues, the world was finally presented with a musically dense record that many would eventually hold as the gold standard of audio engineering.

Opening many an audio (and muso-) phile's favourite LP is the track that's receiving our analysis today, Babylon Sisters.

As if to endorse its perfectionist’s charter, Babylon Sisters was mixed 274 times before Fagen decided that he was happy - and that’s not before the prolonged 50-second fade-out took more than 55 attempts to get just right. (Mixes back then were manual affairs, with all hands on desk!)

The infectious groove and beautiful drumming that defines the track, begins with a legendary half-time shuffle. Also known as the ‘Purdie Shuffle’, it was the trademark of venerated kit-legend Bernard ‘Pretty’ Purdie, he would often arrive at sessions with two banners, which he placed either side of his kit while recording. One of which read, 'You done it!' and the other stated ‘You done hired the hit-maker’ - playing on his storied career which had been replete with success.

The concept behind a half-time shuffle, is as the name suggests; the kick and snare effectively play at half speed, employing the primary elements of kick on beat one and snare on beat 3.

Meanwhile, the hats shuffle, much as they might play under normal circumstances, but with the addition of numerous snare drop-sticks. The tempo remains the same, but the half-time groove makes the pace feel half-as-slow.

"The way a locomotive kind of pushes and pulls, that's what I was feeling," Bernard told us back in 2019. "I played it for my music teacher, Mr Leonard Haywood, when I was a kid, and he tried to stop me. 'That's not the way to play a shuffle,' he said. But I heard what I heard - whoosh, whoosh, whoosh - so I kept it. Eventually, he said, ‘OK, you work on that. It could be something… but not today.’ [laughs] That’s all right. I knew I’d get my chance.”

Purdie embellishes his shuffle continually, particularly in the intricate hi-hat part, providing a beautiful blend of open and closed placements.

After just two stellar takes, Purdie was done.

“We did two takes, and after the second one, he put on his overcoat, and he walked in the control room and said to everyone, ‘Well fellas, that's it!' And he left! It was amazing,” remembered guitarist Steve Khan in an interview on his own website. “We were all relieved, because we knew we had played great.”

With Steely Dan sifting through their Rolodex of L.A.'s finest musicians to make Gaucho, we have to highlight some of the other key luminaries that brought the final version of the track to life.

Chuck Rainey played bass guitar, having worked with Don and Walt on previous projects, most notably the beautifully playing on the track Peg, where Rainey apparently hid his playing technique from the duo.

They didn't want any hint of slapping, yet that's exactly what they got. Somehow, Chuck got away with it!

On Fender Rhodes and Clavinet, jazz legend Don Grolnick rustled up a host of classic lines, which may or may not have been improvised.

The point is, he made them sound so laid-back in performance that they sound utterly effortless. It's a similar story with the aforementioned Steve Khan on guitar, whose contribution feels smooth and chilled, yet laden with detail.

Leading the horn section, Randy Brecker, who supplied the notable trumpet solo, while playing alongside Tom Scott on alto and tenor sax.

Apart from being another stellar player, Scott is also the composer and performer of the best known of the Starsky and Hutch themes. (There were three themes across multiple seasons).

Bizarrely, two bass clarinets are employed, adding a darker colour to the chorus section, played by George Marge and Walter Kane.

The all important thick, textural backing vocals were supplied by Lesley Miller, Toni Wine, Lani Groves, Diva Gray, Gordon Grody, and renowned R&B and jazz vocalist Patti Austin, with percussion supplied by Errol Bennett.

Donald Fagen notably supplies the lead vocal, with Walter Becker taking a backseat from playing duties. This is not a stance that continued throughout the album, where Becker made contributions on guitar and bass, with Fagen also playing Rhodes and synth on several other tracks.

Despite having the crème de la crème of musical talent on-hand, Don and Walt were continually frustrated by players not hitting precisely what was directed.

Many musicians were disappointed and upset that their contributions did not make it to the final cut of the album. One such musician was the Dire Straits' guitar hero Mark Knopfler, who was recruited to help lay down licks for Time Out of Mind.

After recording 10 hours of material, his contributions did not satisfy the pedantic pair.

“It was a strange experience," Knopfler said in Brian Sweet's Steely Dan: Reelin' in the Years."It was like getting into a swimming pool with lead weights tied to your boot.”

Back to Babylon Sisters, and the track has to be one of the most complex pop songs (if we can call it pop) that has ever been written and produced.

It is well known that Fagen had been listening to plenty of jazz around this time, notably artists such as Keith Jarrett, and this influence is pretty overt across Gaucho.

Jarrett himself was fully aware, and sued the pair over copyright infringement for the album’s title track. It was settled out of court, with Jarrett later being credited as one of the composers.

On the one hand, the structure of Babylon Sisters could be considered fairly conventional - containing introduction, verse and chorus - but many of the section lengths have been mutated. The introduction runs to 22 bars - not your usual 4 or 8 bars and away!

It's a difficult task to dissect every harmonic twist and turn of this song in a single article, in fact it has been the topic of lengthy analysis over the years, with its heavy use of chordal extensions. So we're going to zoom in on two elements, beginning with the introduction.

One trait which presents itself for the most part of the song, is the presence of the bass part, doubled on the Rhodes. The Rhodes is continuously played in an interval of a perfect 5th.

Trying to identify exactly which key could be regarded as Babylon Sisters' home key, is quite a challenge, as there are various modulations which muddy the waters.

However, the first intro chord is Gb5, which plays for two bars, before shifting to Cb5 and Ab5 for a bar each. This then shifts to Fb5 (E5 if thinking enharmonically), Abm7 and Ebm9(11).

What makes this more complicated, is that the open 5th element and specified chord alters, with the presence of the meandering Rhodes melody which is played over the top.

This changes certain chords, I.E. Ab5 becomes Ab Major, with the addition of the note C, which is also embellished with a turn.

Without getting too hung up on the complex nature of the intervening harmony in the verse, we're going to skip over it to talk about the chorus, and think about the chords used alongside the lyric, ‘Babylon sisters, shake it’.

This motivational line is slightly less complicated, presumably so not to overcomplicate the chorus element. By this stage, we are rooted in D minor, having modulated!

The classic vocal line rises up from the note A, taking in the notes C, D and F. These are the notes found in a chord of Dm7, all the time accompanied by the open 5th lower part in the bass and Rhodes.

In the second bar of the chorus, the lower part rises a semi-tone to Eb5, with the upper part of the Rhodes and the vocal, employing the chord Eb, followed by F/Eb. This creates a very strong rising movement, which is particularly effective when backed by the thick vocal texture.

In order to fully grasp the harmonic complexity of this track, you will probably need a fairly good understanding of how to work with jazz harmony, and particularly the use of chordal extensions.

It's one of the reasons why Steely Dan have always been held in such high regard by so many musicians. Much like jazz, their output is not to everyone's taste, but if you’re looking for an artist that works far beyond the frontier of conventional music theory, then you should really listen to Steely Dan.

For our money, Babylon Sisters (and the Gaucho album as a whole, for that matter) is undoubtedly one of the first places you could go when diving headlong into the Dan-verse.

There are some hefty bangers in the Britney Spears back catalogue, but when it comes to naming the best of them, Dua Lipa seems pretty sure.

The star revealed her top Spears smash in a high-concept video for Vogue, in which she was required to prepare cocktails that pair with some of her favourite songs.

Around halfway through, she started mixing up a Basil Smash (that’s gin, lemon juice and some “simple syrup”, in case you were wondering), a drink that Lipa first had at the festival that she and her family host every year in Kosovo, a place that they have strong ties to.

This, reckons Lipa, is a cocktail that makes you feel “very excited, silly, giggly and fun,” – and that’s where Britney hit from 2003 comes in.

“I need to hear Toxic at the end of every single night when I'm feeling like that,” says Lipa. “It's one of my favourite songs. I think it's one of the greatest pop songs ever made. It makes me feel nostalgic, but also at the same time, if it came out yesterday, it would be an absolute smash.”

She’s not wrong - Toxic sounds as good today as it did when it was released, more than 20 years ago – but its writing process was anything but straightforward. In fact, according to co-writer Christian Karlsson, its various parts might never have coalesced into a song at all.

“Before Toxic became a song, basically, it was, like, 10 beats I was working on on just one given day,” he told Music Week in 2018. “I had the strings on a loop, and then I left it to think about it. The next day I came back and I listened to it and I was like, ‘This is impossible to make a song out of, but I love it!’”

Luckily, Karlsson persevered: “I didn’t know how to make it a song but I wanted to try, so I immediately looked to get some acoustic guitar in there,” he says. “It was all piece by piece – it was all about trying to make that freaking string thing work in a song without making me nuts. I’m happy we did that.”

Cathy Dennis, another of the song’s writers, also struggled with it, later telling Songwriting Magazine that the process was “sheer torture”.

“I beat myself up for seven days, not sleeping,” she admitted. “The melody came first, then I had this puzzle of trying to fit words to the right number of syllables. It was really weird. I kept writing and then re-editing myself again, and again, and again.”

Despite these initial difficulties, in hindsight, Toxic sounds like an obvious hit single, but when it was offered to Kylie Minogue, she decided to pass on it (she’s since referred to it as “the fish that got away”). What’s more, it wasn’t an immediate ‘yes’ from Team Britney, either.

“We didn’t know it was going to be a big hit or anything, because we didn’t even know if anybody was going to take the song,” Karlsson remembers. “I sent the song out to the first artist and we didn’t hear anything back. When I was in a session with Britney, I played it for her and her A&R and they were like, ‘We’ll get back to you.’”

Fortunately, Spears and her team saw sense, and Toxic went on to become one of the star’s signature songs, topping charts around the world and winning her a Grammy.

“Britney just has that tone of voice that, no matter if you like it or not, you know that it’s her,” says Christian Karlsson. “I like that you’re never going to think it’s another artist, you’re going to know that it’s her. I think that’s the most valuable thing, more than maybe being the best singer in the world – to have that tone that is recognisable is worth so much.”

Dua Lipa is one of many artists to have praised Toxic in the intervening years, and the song has undoubtedly had an influence on the sound of pop in general, proving that quirky writing and production doesn’t have to be a barrier to commercial success.

“I think Toxic resonated because it was just fresh-sounding, in so many ways, within pop music when it came out,” reckons Karlsson. “It was both original and very strong in the melody. The production was also something that people thought was very new. I think the Bollywood string thing really grabbed people’s attention.”

Beyond his legions of dedicated fans, the name Kevin Parker may not be immediately recognisable, but this dextrously talented, multi-instrumentalist's artist identity of Tame Impala, has become synonymous with a modern strand of psychedelic indie, infused with elements of electronica and synth pop.

Originally from Perth, in Western Australia, Tame Impala attracted a strong homegrown crowd first, but it took a little longer for the rest of the world to pick up on the unique musical magic that Parker was conjuring.

Parker began working on the third Tame Impala album Currents three years before it finally saw the light of day, following the breakthrough success of his aptly titled previous album Lonerism. Its first song, Let it Happen established the LP's themes of transition - both lyrically and musically.

“I think most of that song was put together at different times,” Parker told Under the Radar in 2015.

“When I was on tour, actually. I remember it came to me, I think I was walking to my hotel room in Oklahoma. And then the chorus, I was at a festival in Hungary or Turkey. And then the midsection, the jam bit, I was on a train. I had my laptop on a train in France, going to Toulouse. With that song, one thing led to another. I was just jamming by myself in the way I do, and I put it on a loop to see what sounds cool. I just see where it takes me”

As a live entity (with help from other musicians), Tame Impala could easily be the band's name, but in the studio, Parker was (and is) lord and master of his own domain - taking on all composition, recording and production duties himself. Sometimes, however, he might call upon the talents of other individuals to undertake processes such as mixing.

As its lead single, Let It Happen quickly became one of the most successful tracks from Currents, winning the APRA award (an Australian award for excellence in songwriting and composition) for the song of the year back in 2016.

Lyrically, the song was purposefully ambiguous. “There’s this part at the end where I’m singing through this keyboard sampler thing, almost like a vocoder but not really. And the first take I did, I was just singing gibberish and making sounds with my mouth just to test it out,” Parker told Under the Radar.

“I didn’t even know what I was saying. I was saying words and stringing sentences together that weren’t really words. I left that for months and months, always planning to go back and re-record it with real lyrics. And I only did it a few days ago, a week before mastering. I’m totally contradicting what I said before, but I couldn’t get back the same groove I did when I was speaking in tongues. So I had to make the decision, like, ‘I’ll just leave the speaking in tongues version on the album'.”

Dissecting Let It Happen musically must begin with highlighting the hypnotically repeated note C#.

Its presence as a single note, played in an almost funk-based rhythm, is one of the common threads throughout the course of the song, which is initiated from the very beginning.

Moreover, the harmony shifts around the C#, as heard in the chords which make up the chorus, although in a slightly less obvious twist, Parker employs three bar phrases, which in itself creates a slightly unsettled form.

Chordally speaking, the opening section relies upon the following chords; A major and F# minor (7), for a bar each, followed by G#(sus4) for 2 beats, before resolving to G# major.

The sequence changes slightly on its repeat, with the final chord becoming G# minor. It's also interesting to note the presence of the 7th, on the chord of F#m, as this is supplied in the background, by the synth pad texture.

We've already mentioned the irrepressible nature of the repeated C#, which is at the forefront of the mix, and appears to be played on guitar with added distortion.

Residing alongside this is a synthetic texture, and notably a bending of the note C# at the end of each third bar, shifting the C# down to a C natural.

The eclectic fusion of instrumentation that has become Tame Impala's calling card, is part and parcel of his recognisable sound. It's difficult to dissect exactly which guitar equipment has been used on this track, but we know that Parker has a modified Fender Stratocaster in his arsenal, along with a Vox AC30 amp, Dunlop JDF2 Fuzz Face pedal and Boss BD-2 Blues Driver pedal.

Any of these elements, or even a sum, could be responsible for the overdriven nature of the repeated C#.

Alongside the guitar elements, this album made notable use of two synthesizers, both of which provide unique vintage identities.

It's fairly likely that the Roland Juno-106, noted as one of Kevin's favourite synths, is responsible for the pad-like and chordal elements, although he is also the owner and user of the lesser known Realistic Concertmate MG-1 synthesizer.

Originally produced by Moog Music for Tandy (Radio Shack in the US), the MG-1 was an entry-level monophonic analog subtractive synthesizer, which offered all of Moog’s qualities, but at a mass-market price, and more readily available at music stores.

It wasn't enormously successful, hence it became a cheap secondhand option, which has now become an underrated classic, thanks in part to its use by artists such as Tame Impala.

As it feels appropriate to describe the opening of the song as the chorus (as it contains the repeated line ‘let it happen’) the verse section feels more subdued by comparison.

The verse adopts a more traditional 4-bar form, although there is further ambiguity, due to twists and turns in the synth pad harmony.

The verse starts with a chord of D# minor, for a bar, followed by a chord of B major, also for a whole bar. We then hear a chord of C# major, which seems to be held for two bars, although the bass moves in the second bar, creating a harmony of C#/F#. In guitar circles, this chord could also be described as F# Maj9 (omit3) - it just depends on your preference, which we tend to think depends on how your harmonic brain works!

This sequence repeats, but changes slightly when we hear the third chord, with a bass drop to an F natural (more accurately described as E# in this setting, due to enharmonic transposition), before rising to F#, as before.

Given the relatively simplistic harmony within this song, its development is fairly reliant upon builds in the arrangement and production, in common with so many other contemporary songs.

When the chorus returns, Parker includes numerous embellishments which change over time. These include rising scalic passages in the synth parts, with new riff-based material in the guitar parts, as we head toward the end of the song. It all adds to a sense that the song’s cauldron of elements are bubbling up, particularly as the album version of this song extends to nearly 8 minutes.

But, as we’re fond of asking our friends over at Prog Magazine, does this lengthy, oddly-arranged song count as ‘prog’?

In Kevin Parker’s eyes, absolutely.

“I guess, actually, Let It Happen is prog in its purest form. I stand by that one as decidedly progressive,” Parker told The Skinny.

“When I was writing it, I got the sense that… you know, like you’re on a train? There’s different scenery that you go through. A city, then the middle is some weird tunnel, and you come out the other end and you’re in the country. It has that landscape, you know? That must have something to do with the essence of prog?”

One much discussed production technique, which becomes a particular feature later in the song, is the ‘glitching’, which is designed to sound a little bit like a skipping, scratched CD - not something we have to worry about in 2026.

While it's unclear exactly which method he employed to create this effect, it is achievable through a number of different production techniques, all of which can result in the exact same effect.

Firstly, there are glitch plugins, such as iZotope’s Stutter Edit 2 which make light work of creating glitch-style repeats, which might have previously been meticulously edited manually, which is of course another option.

It's also possible that the glitch elements were triggered or sequenced manually, using sampling software, although this method would require a large degree of preparatory programming.

Let It Happen is an excellent example of a song which demonstrates how much creativity you can unlock with just a little equipment, the spark of an idea, and a whole lot of ingenuity.

For Parker, being bound by genre isn't a concern. Instead, he lets his ideas develop and grow organically. Let It Happen then could be said to be a statement of creative philosophy, as well as one of his most spellbinding pieces of music.

“You work on something for so long, and you listen to it and you get so involved in a different realm of the music that you lose all perspective of what it sounds like to hear it for the first time and what it will sound like to other people and what they think it will sound like,” Parker related to Under the Radar. “For me, by the time I’m finished with an album I have absolutely no idea what it sounds like. I have no idea what genre it is. I have no idea what people will say it sounds like or what category it will be put in. To me, it sounds totally different from anything ever."

By the time Stevie Wonder released Superstition at the end of 1972, the former child prodigy had solidified himself as a songwriter and performer of significant importance.

Right before the release, a string of other notable songs which included the invigorating Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours) and the sparkling My Cherie Amour were blazing new ground for the former Motown star.

In Wonder’s growing canon, traditional soul arrangement tropes were giving way to fresh approaches and more expansive instrumentation. Namely, this was offered by the Rhodes electric piano, Hohner Clavinet and of course, the hi-tech sounds of synthesizers.

Superstition is taken from the album Talking Book - one of many classic albums by Stevie. In a recent poll conducted by the BBC, Superstition was voted the most popular Stevie tune, quite an accolade for a song that rubs shoulders with so many other classics, scattered across the decades.

Despite being signed to Motown, it was around this period that Stevie began to assert more artistic control over his work. He was the driving force, but had the help of a couple of key industry figures.

Bob Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil became Stevie’s production team. Both were technically adept and highly capable recording engineers.

Malcolm was the more musically-inclined, while Bob was an exceptionally talented sound designer and programmer, which was just as well, as the fourth member of the team wasn’t so much a musician… more a synthetic entity!

TONTO was an acronym for The Original New Timbral Orchestra - a massive, custom-built multi-timbral and polyphonic synthesizer system, which integrated elements and instruments from Moog, ARP, Oberheim and EMS, along with many others.

It was a unique, one-of-a-kind system which was extensively used on much of Stevie’s output from this era, under the guidance of Bob and Malcolm.

“Stevie came in and we showed him the instrument [TONTO] and he put his hands all over it,” Bob recalled in a lengthy interview with Anthony Marinelli. “And then he started trying to play chords on it and he said ‘Malcolm! Bob! What’s wrong with this instrument? It only plays one note at a time!’"

After explaining that the version of TONTO that Wonder was playing was monophonic, Margouleff says, “Stevie got it in a second. We started recording that weekend - we recorded like 15 or 16 songs. We went completely bonkers.”

The sessions for Superstition took place at Electric Lady studios in New York. Formerly a facility co-curated by Jimi Hendrix (before his death in 1970), Electric Lady was designed to be an artist-led environment; the perfect space for unfettered musical creativity.

Also in town was guitar legend Jeff Beck, who was keen to make good on a deal with his label CBS.

“I said I loved Stevie's stuff, so they [CBS] quietly broke it to him that I was interested in doing something together, and he was really receptive. The original agreement was that he'd write me a song, and in return, I'd play on his album, and that's where Superstition came in,” Beck was quoted as saying in The Guitar Greats by Stuart Grundy and John Tobler.

“They met each other face-to-face in the studio,” recalled Margouleff. “Stevie said ‘if you play on my [new] record [Beck would end up playing guitar on Lookin' for Another Pure Love] I’ll give you a song.’ And first off he was going to give him Superstition, which had already been recorded.”

Contrary to Margouleff’s recollection that the song had already been recorded, Jeff Beck remembered that he himself was present during the song’s initial creation, and was in fact pivotal to its birth;

"One day I was sitting at the drum kit, which I love to play when nobody's around, doing this beat," Beck was quoted as saying in Jeff Beck: Crazy Fingers. "Stevie came kinda boogieing into the studio: 'Don't stop.' 'Ah, c'mon, Stevie,' I can't play the drums.' Then the lick came out: Superstition. That was my song, in return for Talking Book. I thought, 'He's given me the riff of the century.'"

Recording the studio take of Superstition relied on a setup that included the aforementioned TONTO, a Rhodes, a Clavinet and drum kit in the live room, along with an open ‘hot-mic’, so that multi-instrumentalist Stevie could quickly and easily go from one instrument to another, which was conducive to speedy multi-tracking.

The beat went down first - and relatively quickly. Stevie's drumming style could be described as a little freer than contemporary studio drummers, but even so, his sense of time and rhythm allowed him to record without the use of a click track. Once complete, the bass part was added, supplied by a Moog synthesizer.

This raises an interesting question, from the perspective of instrumental performance. As any bass player who has to regularly play Stevie Wonder tunes will attest, many of his classics are recorded in keys which are less helpful to guitarists and bass players. There are a couple of reasons for this. In the case of Superstition, Stevie worked in the key of Eb minor - one semitone below the lowest note on a standard 4-string bass.

This may have been partly to do with the range of Stevie's voice, which was capable of producing effortlessly high vocal lines. However, as we all know, Stevie is visually impaired, and his ability to feel the black notes on a keyboard also influenced his choice of key.

Another classic example is I Wish which, much like Superstition, adopts a keyboard/Rhodes riff which is also centred completely around Eb minor.

If you wanted to choose a demonstration track for the Hohner Clavinet, you would be hard-pushed to find a better example than Superstition.

Apart from the drum intro, and the repeated Eb bass, the opening Clavinet line introduces an infamous and highly identifiable riff. It's no coincidence that it is wholly reliant upon the black notes on the keyboard, being based around the Eb pentatonic minor scale.

However, once the main riff is heard for the first time, Stevie introduces further Clavinet lines, which work to compliment the main riff.

There has always been some debate about exactly how many Clavinet lines are being used at one time - but it's at least three (possibly more!) If you listen closely to the recording, you can hear the Clav’s spacing in the stereo spectrum, along with the use of effects. There’s extensive use of wah pedal, alongside delays and reverberation.

Analysing Superstition in conventional song form prevents challenges, as it’s open to interpretation.

Given that the opening lyric of the song is “Very superstitious…’, do we consider this the chorus?

Our inclination is to think of it more as a series of verses. There are plenty of hooks, but anything we might call a conventional chorus is missing. This unlikely form is perhaps something that many a casual listener hasn't noted before, as it takes absolutely nothing away from the overall makeup and impact of the song.

During the first eight bars of each verse, the instrumentation and arrangement remains fairly static, but once we reach the second eight bars of each verse, things get a little more enthusiastic and involved on the playing front.

The bassline changes, moving away from its sedentary and repeated Eb, to a full-on classic line which is echoed, to a large degree, by the horn section consisting of trumpet and tenor saxophone.

The horns are bright and exuberant, complete with flourishes and trills at high-points of phrases.

Under normal circumstances, doubling between horns and bass might not be such a great idea, but thanks to the extended interplay between the Clavinets, the bass and horn combo provides amazing spirit, in the way that a horn line can so often lift a song.

After four repetitions of the horn/bass riff (8 bars) the song finally switches chords, but beware, because this short bridge section is often played incorrectly.

The first chord we hear moves up to the dominant chord of Bb7, but it is the next chord that is often misheard, being a chord of B7 flat5, not the more obvious and mistaken B7.

The sequence returns to Bb7, before dropping to A7 and Ab7, before finishing the section with a chord of Bb alt - this is another popular Stevie chordal device, where he plays a straight major chord, but raises the fifth by one semitone, hence this chord includes the notes Bb, D and F# (also known as an augmented chord.

Returning to the main Clavinet riff, the song settles back into its groove, before commencing the second verse, but not before the horns have provided another classic linking riff line, which moves downward in pitch, and employs the technique known as a ‘fall’.

This is where a horn player might play a note, and then fall off the note either quickly or slowly. In this instance, the falls are quick and sharply accentuated, punctuating through the Clavinet-based backdrop.

Later in the song, we do hear an instrumental bridge, which is based upon previous bridge content from the song, but with a slight change in the groove, as Stevie leaps over to a ride cymbal.

Whichever way we dice this up, Superstition is one of Stevie's ultimate classics. As the production team wanted to push the boundaries, they not only produced a stereo mix, but also produced a quad-mix! Apparently it sounded fantastic.

Despite its obvious brilliance, at the time Stevie didn’t quite realise he’d created such an outright classic, evidenced by the fact he was prepared to gift the song to Jeff Beck.

Whether Beck was intrinsic to its creation or not, one thing was clear - everyone around Stevie told him that he should under no circumstances let go of the song.

“The powers that be, including me and Malcolm, said, ‘Steve, you have to do this song. You cannot give this song to anybody’, Margouleff recalled. “But, in the meantime, before that happened, they did a demo of it where Jeff Beck played the drums. And when Berry Gordy heard about that, from what we hear, he said ‘Steve, don’t do that. You need to keep that song for yourself.’”

Motown pushed Wonder to release it as a single, but - as a man of principle - he still allowed Jeff Beck and his new trio, Beck, Bogert & Appice to record a version of the song and release that as the priority. Stevie would release his version as a single too, but, as he later shared, assumed that Beck would get the first shot at success with the song.

"Motown decided they wanted to release Superstition. I said Jeff wanted it, and they told me I needed a strong single in order for [Talking Book] to be successful,” Wonder said in an interview with Ben Fong-Torres. “My understanding was that Jeff would be releasing [his version of] Superstition long before I was going to finish my album. I was late giving them Talking Book. Jeff recorded Superstition in July, so I thought it would be out."

But a series of delays in the Beck camp meant that Stevie’s sublime version of his song would be the one to land on shelves first, on October 24, 1972. As lead single from Talking Book, it was well ahead of Beck's take (belatedly released in March the following year).

"He played it to Motown, and they said, 'No way is Beck getting this song, it's too good'", an understandably frosty Jeff was quoted as saying in The Guitar Greats. "They had the right to say what Stevie released at that time, I lost the song as an original."

Although a degree of bitterness ensued, Beck and Wonder would later reconcile and even duet on the song at the 25th anniversary of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010.

The popularity of British synth-pop outfit Talk Talk was something of a slow burn. Despite a constant stream of albums throughout the 1980s, the group seemed to be continually denied the kind of success that they hungered for. They would, of course, later be chronicled as a shining creative force - an inventive alternative to the more ephemeral synth-pop of the era.

The title track to the band’s second album, It’s My Life, was released as a single in January 1984. Surprisingly, this extremely effective song reached a meagre 46 in the UK chart, but elsewhere, more promising results proved that Talk Talk's work had legs.

In the US, It's My Life struck a notable chord, and reached number 31 on the Billboard Chart, their highest position to date. The track - and parent album - did quite well in Europe, too. But, the UK maintained a frosty disposition toward a band it was difficult to pigeon-hole.

It was released again in Britain the following year, but this time only managed to climb to a depressingly undeserved 95 in the UK chart. Britain, clearly, wasn't having it.

It took the release of Talk Talk’s greatest hits album Natural History in 1990 for It’s My Life to finally gain traction on home soil, peaking at 13 in the UK chart. This was largely thanks to a number of DJs realising that it had the same BPM (126) as many club favourites, ensuring it was more widely played at nightspots across the country.

Further recognition came much later, with the beloved No Doubt cover of the song.

Gwen Stefani's vibrant vocals and on-trend pop-punk arrangement helped thrust the song to an incredible number 10 in the US chart in 2003 - exposing an entirely new market to the genius of this Talk Talk gem.

Talk Talk were always a little bit different; despite the bemused incredulity of publications such as Smash Hits, who described Talk Talk as “…yet another synthesised pop group, complete with singer who wants to be Bryan Ferry…” Talk Talk were much more than another chart-hungry pop conceit. They drew influence from a number of creative quarters, and had considerable production and songwriting chops.

The group’s perennially shy lead singer and songwriter Mark Hollis initially studied psychology at university for 18 months, before drawing the conclusion that the course wasn't for him.

His interest in the complexities of human behaviour was not wasted though, and recurred as a theme throughout his work as a musician. It’s My Life is a good example. Its lyric stressed the importance of retaining hold on individuality when in a particularly angst-ridden relationship.

As with Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, It's My Life has become something of a post break-up staple. Best belted out at the top of your lungs after several large glasses of wine…

Tim Friese-Greene produced the record, and would eventually become a fully-signed up member of the band, co-writing many further Talk Talk cuts.

The stylised playing of bassist Paul Webb was a signature component of Talk Talk’s output, predominantly through the use of fretless bass. Playing fretless was a fashionably unique calling card for bass players such as Mick Karn from Japan, and Pino Palladino, who was a regular band member for Paul Young.

Drummer Lee Harris completed the band, known for playing both acoustic and Simmons kits, although drum machines were often used in production too.

Synths and tech infiltrate and influence It’s My Life in a number of ways. There is plenty of Roland Jupiter-8, with other probably instruments being the Oberheim OB-X, Fairlight CMI and TR-808 drum machine.

Despite being often labelled as a synth-pop outfit, synths had begun to make Hollis’s blood run cold. He became more vocally anti-synth over the ensuing years.

“You see, when we made It's My Life, we had to rely a lot on synthesisers,” Mark Hollis said in an interview with fan website, Within Without. “Now, I do not accept that we are a synthesizer band. Synthesizers mean electronic things to me, and I don't think we have any sort of relation to that. We used synthesizers on that album because from an economic point of view it was the only way we could do it."

He was even more forthright in a 1986 interview with Electronics and Music Maker; “In terms of the first two albums and the live field, synths are simply an economic measure. Beyond that, I absolutely hate synthesizers. To me, the only thing that was ever good about them was the fact that they gave you large areas of sound to work with; apart from that they're really bad - horrible. I can take their existence from a live point of view now, but if they didn't exist, I'd be delighted.”

Back to the song itself, and beyond the electronic elements, there are also plenty of live and acoustic additions within the track too, provided by guests Robbie McIntosh on guitar and Morris Pert on percussion.

We can also hear Yamaha’s CP-80 stage piano, which was a firm staple for pianistic output during this period, largely thanks to its convenience when used live or in the studio.

One interesting facet of the song is that it begins on an eighth-note/quaver anacrusis. This entry from the outset immediately throws the listener off-balance, before quickly adjusting as the 1st bar of the song settles into a regular backbeat, with the snare on two and four.

We've already mentioned the beautifully complex bass lines that form part of Talk Talk’s DNA, with It’s My Life being a shining example. It also offers some twists and turns, if we consider its position against the underlying harmony.

We are going to think of the harmony in a relatively pianistic way, although there are other relevant ways of describing the same chord sequence, particularly if you prefer guitar symbols.

Firstly, the song opens with a chord of Eb major - not the most obvious chord for many commercial tracks, given that it lies a semitone lower than a guitar's home key.

It’s a less obvious choice for fret-based musicians, although popular with keyboard-based musicians. We hear Eb major for two bars, before shifting to a chord of Db major and Ab major (add6) for a bar each, although the movement between chords is handled very fluidly

When we hear the chord of Db, the chord moves downward by a tone, while the bass part moves up to the note F, placing the chord of Db in a 1st inversion, before rising to Ab for the final chord of the 4-bar sequence.

You remember the anacrusis at the beginning? This continues with each chordal entry, providing a push into each bar as the chord changes, it’s a regular move in the jazz and funk domain, but feel incongruous here.

We also hear a repeated entry from a lead synth, using the notes F to Eb, although this entry also throws us off, timing-wise, with the last entry in sequence occurring earlier than in previous instances.

One of the unique twists in this song occurs at the pre-chorus bridge. After the final chord of Ab in the verse, there is a preparatory dominant chord of E major which is held for 2 bars, before modulating to A minor for the bridge.

Although this has nothing to do with our previous home of Eb, it sets us up nicely for the following seismic harmonic shift.

We shift to the next series of pre-chorus chords, which are held for two beats at a time; Am, F/A, G, C. We land on a chord F, which is held for six beats, with two further beats shifting to a chord of G, before the sequence is repeated.

Much like the structure to the verse, many of the chords are ‘pushed’, using further anacrusis.

There is an obvious similarity between the pre-chorus bridge chords, and the chorus, with the repeated use of Am, Dm, G and C, with the first and third chords being pushed, leaving the second and fourth chords to land on the third beat of each bar.

At the very end of the chorus structure, which repeats to enforce the hook, we land on an eventual chord of Fm for a full two bars, before heading back to the verse.

There is something incredibly endearing about the music underpinning this song; the shift between the key of the verse and chorus is substantial, modulating by an interval known as a tritone, (AKA the ‘Devil’s Interval’!)

It's an unrelated harmonic shift, and under normal circumstances, one that would make us feel uncomfortable, but it is handled so seamlessly in this context, you barely notice the switch.

If you have ever taken the time to look this song up in video form, you will doubtless have stumbled across the bizarre visual accompaniment, featuring all sorts of wildlife, alongside a less-than-happy Mark Hollis.

As a form of protest against lip-syncing, the band decided to create a video which could be played as an accompaniment to just about any music track in existence.

Directed by Tim Pope, the video made use of existing material from the BBC wildlife documentary Life on Earth, as well as new footage of Hollis standing in front of animals at London Zoo.

Animated composite overlays included ‘virtual’ tape over Hollis’s mouth, as well as squiggly lines and even animated sperm. EMI insisted that a second video was made, in which the band mimed very badly, intentionally highlighting the banality of the process!

John Oates has reiterated a claim made by his former bandmate Daryl Hall that Michael Jackson took the groove from their 1981 hit I Can’t Go For That and used it as the template for his own Billie Jean, which was released a year later.

Speaking in a new episode of the Rock & Roll High School podcast, Oates says: “[Michael] came to one of our shows in LA and he said he liked to dance to it in front of his mirror in his bedroom. You can hear, he obviously wanted to do something like that for Billie Jean and he did his own version of that groove.”

This comes after Hall said something similar to Mix way back in 2006. “No question about it,” he noted of I Can’t Go For That’s influence on Billie Jean. “Michael Jackson once said directly to me that he hoped I didn’t mind that he copped that groove. That’s OK; it’s something we all do. [Eddie] Van Halen told me that he copied the synth part from Kiss On My List and used it in Jump. I don’t have a problem with that at all.”

Hall repeated the claim in 2018 in an interview with The Guardian, adding that the conversation took place during the We Are The World recording session.

“I got talking to Michael Jackson and he said: “I hope you don’t mind. I stole the groove from I Can’t Go for That for my song Billie Jean,’” Hall remembered. “I told him: ‘Oh Michael, what do I care? You did it very differently.’”

“I can’t say I’d ever noticed but he was quite insistent. Of course, I went away and listened to Billie Jean. And sure enough, it was our groove.

Discussing the origins of that groove in the Mix interview, Hall said: “Remember the old Roland CompuRhythm box? I turned to the Rock and Roll 1 preset, sat down at a Korg organ that happened to be lying there and started to play this bassline that was coming to me.”

This classic pop moment could easily have been lost, though, had it not been for a quick-thinking engineer who must have realised that Hall was onto something.

“It’s the old recording studio story: The engineer heard what I was doing and turned on the tape machine,” Hall confirmed. “Good thing, because I’m the kind of person who will come up with an idea and forget it. The chords came together in about 10 minutes, and then I heard a guitar riff, which I asked John, who was sitting in the booth, to play.”

Sadly, Hall and Oates’ relationship now appears to be broken beyond repair, with the two men trading barbs in the press after Hall took legal action against Oates in a bid to prevent him from selling his share of the duo’s publishing rights. This case has seemingly now been settled, but there’s no sense that it will lead to a reconciliation.

Discussing the situation in his Rock & Roll High School episode, though, Oates suggests that he’s trying to stay positive about it all.

“It’s always bittersweet when a relationship falls by the wayside, of course. But look at the legacy that Daryl and I leave behind. We left a musical legacy that very few people could match. You know what, that’s pretty good in a lifetime I would say.”

Whether you’re a bedroom beatmaker or a top-tier songwriter, you’ve probably experienced writer’s block at some point. Inspiration is a finite resource, and it’s not always there when you need it most, so it helps to have a few time-tested techniques in your back pocket to get things moving when you’re stuck in a creative rut.

That’s the idea behind Session Cards, a new venture from Tommy Rush, a songwriter and producer with credits on music from The Weeknd, Madonna and Travis Scott.

Pitched as a “hit-making system” that promises to “change how you write records”, Session Cards is a pack of 144 cards, each one displaying a different “session move”, a strategy that’s intended to help you move through a creative impasse and send you on your way towards finishing a track. "I spent my entire career searching for this, and it didn't exist, so I built it for myself," Rush says.

Organized into 11 categories, the cards offer advice tailored to a variety of creative contexts, intended to solve common problems that arise during a studio session. Categories like Chorus, Melody and Lyrics are targeted at specific stages of the songwriting process, while the Rescue cards act as an “emergency kit” for when “the session is dying”.

The Lyrics card previewed on Session Cards’ website, for example, offers up a suggestion for when “the song has too many ideas”. “Finish: This song is about ____,” the card reads. “Every line must support that sentence. If a line doesn’t support it, cut it.”

Another card titled Motif Recycle provides a solution for when “the song feels like separate parts”: “Steal a tiny melody fragment from the chorus. Hide it earlier (intro, verse, background). Bring it back louder later. The listener won’t know why the song feels like ‘one piece’ – but they’ll feel it.”

If this all sounds rather familiar, then that’s because Brian Eno had a similar idea all the way back in 1975. Eno’s Oblique Strategies are a pack of creative suggestions designed to help artists break through mental roadblocks and approach their work from a new angle. (They’re also a third of the price.)

How are Session Cards different, you ask? “Where Oblique Strategies offer a philosophy, Session Cards give you the exact move a platinum producer would make right now,” the website reads. “Oblique Strategies are abstract suggestions for any creative field. Session Cards are specific, executable moves built for music production and songwriting on professional records.”

While Session Cards may well have some reasonable advice to offer songwriters and producers, we can’t help but feel a twinge of skepticism when judging their usefulness against their optimistic price point: a pack of Session Cards will set you back $149, and that’s a 25% discount on the price they’ll go up to after “Edition 001” sells out.

The Session Cards website justifies their exorbitant price by pointing to the fact that studio time can cost anywhere from $50 to $500 an hour, reminding us that “one dead session” could waste more than the price of a pack: “Pull a card, the whole room pivots, and the deck pays for itself in minutes,” it says, reassuring us that the cards come in a “premium rigid display box” and have a “studio-grade finish” that “holds up in actual sessions”.

“This is information I would have given anything to have when I was starting out,” Rush says. “I was going to keep it private forever. The producers and writers I work with saw me use it and wouldn't let it go. Eventually enough of them convinced me it should be in every room. It's the cheat code.”

While we’re inclined to take anything that promises to offer the “cheat code” to writing hit songs with a substantial pinch of salt, Session Cards is an intriguing concept, and much like Eno's Oblique Strategies, they could provide a helpful nudge in the right direction when you're feeling creatively stalled. Whether that nudge is worth $149 is up to you.

Find out more on the Session Cards website.

Kids with perfect pitch are having a moment. A week after Jay-Z casually dropped into conversation that his daughter, Blue Ivy, has it, Jennifer Hudson has been speaking to viral 8-year-old musician Lake Anthony about his note identification talent.

In fact, it seems that Lake is something of a musical prodigy. Inspired by Charlie Puth – more on him in a moment – he’s been entertaining social media users with his guide to making a beat using chopped up samples from the phrase ‘water please’ (among many other videos), and he’s been playing drums since the age of 4 and singing since he was 5.

Lake also has synesthesia, which means he’s able to ‘hear’ colours – Pharrell Williams is also blessed with this gift – but it’s his perfect pitching that Hudson was most interested in when she had him on her chat show. “I can identify any note,” Lake told her. “Like, somebody can play a note. I'll say what it is or you can ask me what a note is and I'll sing it.”

Which brings us to Charlie Puth, who also has perfect pitch. So, what would little Lake ask him if he met him?

“I would probably say, I would do a perfect pitch battle with you,” he said. “And then I would also say, ‘If I win that perfect pitch battle, I get to open for you and if you win, you get to open for me.’” The lad’s got some confidence, for sure.

You can probably guess what happened next. Yep, out came Charlie Puth to take up the challenge. First up, he played a selection of chords on the piano, all of which Lake identified correctly. Next, the roles were reversed, and Puth was able to name all the chords that Lake played.

So, who won? It felt like an honourable draw, but we’re guessing that Puth would be happy to give the flowers to his young challenger in this case. Expect to see him opening a Puth show soon, and then ruling the musical world in about 10 years time.

Puth is in the midst of promoting his new album, Whatever’s Clever!, which features the combined talents of yacht rock legends Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins on one song. He also talked to Hudson about his popular YouTube channel, which serves as a useful education resource for anyone who wants to learn more about music and production.

“I want to inspire people to open up their phone and open up GarageBand and make that song that they have in their head that they're being told that they can't make,” says Puth.

Finalising the last few bars of a project or adding those all-important finishing touches to a mixdown can be an intimidating prospect for all of us, from those at the beginning of their journey into music production to artists with hundreds of releases under their belt.

The question of when exactly to wrap it up when you’re building a track is one that’s puzzled artists of all stripes, from bedroom beatmakers to hit producers, and each one has different methods for knowing how to make this crucial decision effectively.

We’ve spoken to more than a few experienced music-makers over the years, asking each artist how they conclude their creative process and decide when a track is well and truly finished. Here’s what they had to say…

1. Anthony Naples

“I read this in something Kieran [Four Tet] said in an interview. He said that what makes him a producer is that he can decide when something's done. I feel like that was really ingrained in me early on. Just because you might think, this is too simple, or this doesn't look the way that other people's music looks on the screen… but it's like, no, just listen to it! Does it sound like a piece of music or not? Okay, if it does, then it's done. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that.”

2. Kelly Lee Owens

“Although I’ll often towards the end go on very deep in terms of automation, and nudging things around, I know the place I’m trying to get to. I know when to say when, and that’s usually when the flow is right, when I can listen back and not need to change anything. I think that comes with a trusting of self.”

3. Hermitude

”When you listen back and you’re scrounging for ideas to put in it, you’re done. If I can’t hear anything, time to let go. Completing is usually the hardest bit, but it’s a nice vibe not to try and over-cook things. When things are a bit rough around the edges, it’s more interesting for the listener, rather than a fully-polished piece. People like to hear your humanness.”

4. Christian Smith

"So much time is wasted by producers that have tons of half-finished productions. At the end of the day, one finished song is better than 100 half finished! I have often been in situations where I've been listening to the same loop for over 10 hours and ended up not knowing if the track is good enough.

"One way I usually overcome this is by making the song all in one session and mixing it down the next day. If it passes the 'day after' test, it's usually good to go, and mixing down tracks with fresh ears is obviously the way to do it.”

5. Lone

“The track is finished when I can listen to it without wanting to change anything. I often fall into the trap of finishing a track, exporting it and thinking I'm done with it only to then listen back the next day and realise there's slight tweaks needed - or sometimes whole changes! I guess I'm quite an impatient person so I always want to finish the track and move on to something new. There's something about catching a vibe quickly and then moving on which has always appealed to me.”

6. Mafro

“A track is finished once I can listen through it without getting bored. There are only so many arrangements that work, so if you’re not sure just reference another song you like. If you are adding things and they are either unnoticeable or making the song worse, that is a sign you’re probably done.”

7. Haider

“The saying ‘art is never finished, only abandoned’ is ever so true, especially in the age of computer music where you can constantly revise and re-edit things. In the past it’s been really difficult for me to know when a track is finished as I can get stuck in the mindset of ‘just one more element’ forever. It’s for this reason I tend to bounce my tracks off people whose opinions I really trust to listen to a track and tell me if they feel it sounds finished or not.”

8. Mason Maynard

“I never really know when a track is finished as most of the time I’m trying to expand and make it as best I can. But for me I feel like they ‘get away’ – I may play them out and if the reaction is good then I can live with letting that one go.”

9. Claude Vonstroke

“For me it’s finished when I start adding things that do not affect the quality. At this point I usually turn the other direction and mute a few tracks to see if I can actually subtract some things. It’s always good to do subtraction exercises as well as addition exercises… ask yourself, what do you really need to be in there?”

10. Noga Erez

“It's the big question. My answer at the moment is: ‘deadline’! Our nature is to continue trying to perfect a song; that can go on forever. It’s because, really, finishing something creative is always about cutting a process in the flash. We think we can do better but at some point we just do different. Even if you don’t have people setting deadlines for you, setting them for yourself is important. It makes the process itself better too. Knowing something had an ending puts everything in perspective.”

11. Objekt

“Once I’m past the sketching stage and throwing ideas at the canvas I’ll always open up the bounce from the last session, listen to it – ideally in iTunes, make notes and timestamp whatever needs changing. That could be something as major as getting rid of a whole section to a new bassline or something minor like there’s a little bit too much frequency on the snare.

“Once I have half a page of notes on what I want to change, I’ll go into the DAW project and be pretty strict about only changing the stuff I’ve written down. Once that’s done, I’ll bounce another copy and start the whole process again until I get to a point where the notes are essentially negligible. Then I know the track is done.”

12. Morcheeba

“The point when I want to top myself is usually a good indicator that the track is finished. It is best not to overwork things; it’s either good or it isn’t.”

Having Beyoncé and Jay-Z as parents, there was always a pretty good chance that the couple’s eldest daughter, Blue Ivy, would have some kind of musical ability, and that would seem to be the case.

In an interview with British GQ, Jay-Z has revealed that as well as being a singer, actress and dancer, 14-year-old Blue Ivy has also been developing her piano chops.

“Blue is a crazy pianist, but she won’t let us get her a teacher,” he says. “She doesn’t want it to be a job.”

There’s more, though: “She has perfect pitch,” says Jay-Z. “If she hears a song, she’ll be like, ‘Play it again,’ and then she’ll teach herself.”

The ability to be able to identify or sing any note without reference is a rare gift; it’s estimated that only around one in 10,000 people have it. While some consider it to be a learnable skill in young children, and you can teach yourself ‘relative pitch’ via ear training, perfect pitch is generally viewed as something that you either have or you don’t.

Jay-Z certainly seems to believe that, when it comes to identifying songs by ear, his daughter has an innate gift – “That’s just talent, she doesn’t work at that,” he says – but he also praises the work ethic and determination that led to her playing a starring dancing role on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour.

“She worked at this, and it makes me proud that she fought for something that she really wanted to do,” he says. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to get her off that stage now.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Jay-Z discussed the partnership that his company, Roc Nation, has with the NFL to produce the Super Bowl Halftime Show. He reflected in particular on the 2025 performance from Kendrick Lamar, and the pride he took in him being the first solo rap headliner.

He also praises Lamar’s decision to take a risk: “He could have made it a little easier on himself. The artistic choice to play the new album was brave in front of that big of an audience.”

“I had high respect for him already,” he continues, “but, like, even more my respect was like, ‘He’s really about what he says he’s about.’”

Inevitably, Jay-Z was also asked about the ongoing rap feud between Lamar and Drake, which culminated in Lamar’s hugely successful 2024 diss track, Not Like Us. While accepting that battling is part of hip-hop culture, he suggests that the time may have come to park the public squabbling.

“We love the excitement and I love the sparring, but in this day and age, there’s so much negative stuff that comes with it that you almost wish it didn’t happen,” he argues. “Now, people that like Kendrick hate Drake, no matter what he makes. It’s like an attack on his character. I don’t know if I love that. I don’t know if it’s helpful to our growth where the fallout lands, especially on social media.”

Countless electronic musicians suffer from getting stuck in a loop – endlessly starting ideas but never seeing them through. Today, we’re here to help you break free of writer’s block and finish more projects than ever before.

For all of their flexibility and power, our modern, computer-centred studio environments can often work to hinder productivity as much as drive it. The sheer scope and choice can be overwhelming.

We have access to millions of potential sounds, software recreations of practically any piece of gear you can think of, an unlimited well of samples and sources of inspiration – all of which can be endlessly edited, saved in multiple reworked versions, recalled instantly. It’s easy to get overloaded with choices and information; and that’s before we even consider the distracting peril that comes from constantly being connected to the internet and social media.

These are just some of the factors that can result in the infamous ‘writer’s block’. It’s not a condition that exclusively affects music makers, but it can hinder us – particularly solo producers – in some specific and unique ways. Symptoms include overworking a simple musical idea into an overblown mess, abandoning projects that are 80-90% finished to start something new, or cold sweats and sleepless nights at the mere prospect of turning an eight-bar loop into a six-minute record.

Some musicians are lucky enough to only experience these struggles on occasion, whereas for others it becomes an endless cycle, preventing them from completing anything musically worthwhile. How can we train ourselves to break out of this loop and become the sort of artist that naturally develops unfinished sketches into full-blown releases? How can we develop a workflow that lets us naturally turn our basic ideas into satisfying arrangements?

In this article, we’re going to take a look at some of the problems preventing you from finishing music and discuss strategies to help overcome them.

Why is it so hard to finish a track?

There are certain conditions specific to electronic music-making that can make writer’s block a particular problem. To understand why, it’s important to consider that the act of making music has changed dramatically over recent decades.

Back in the earlier days of recorded music – and still commonplace throughout a lot of rock and pop – multiple professionals would be involved in the creative process, each focusing on a specific role.

The artist(s) themselves would channel all of their efforts into writing the song, a studio engineer would be responsible for tracking, someone else might mix the separate tracks together, and a final person would master the record and deliver the finished product. Potentially all overseen by one or more ‘executive’ producers. Each individual could fully concentrate on their assigned task without deviation, whether it be creative or technical.

For a lot of modern music-makers, these separate roles have now merged into one. Solitary individuals try to tackle each part of the music-making process within the same studio session, working on every element of a track from writing through to sound design, mixing, arrangements, mastering and even the artwork and logistics of a release.

There’s an undeniable freedom to all of this, and it certainly allows many creative artists to shine in a way that could well be throttled out of them by the traditional world of major studios and record labels, but this jack-of-all-trades approach can mean that we’re constantly interrupting the creative side of our brain (responsible for generating ideas, composing, jamming and arranging) by allowing the logical/technical side of our consciousness to take over.

To overcome this conflict, be aware of your own habits and divide sessions into focused ‘jobs’: for example, if you’re creatively jamming and composing, don’t try to EQ and compress each sound there and then. Likewise, set aside a dedicated mix session once creative tasks are complete. Compartmentalise sessions and you’ll be able to reach the frame of mind needed for that task.

The challenge of solo creativity comes down to more than simply getting distracted, though. A creative process that involves multiple people also allows us to respond to ideas in a way that’s hard to do by yourself. It’s far easier to bounce ideas between two or more people than it is to endlessly work on them by yourself. That’s why, aside from the tactics we’ll examine below, collaboration with other creatives remains a great way to boost your musical output.

A certain amount of discipline is key too. Set yourself a target of a set number of hours in the studio, then do everything you can to finish a track in that time; focus upon speed and the ‘big picture’ broad strokes; switch off from any technical aspect (mixing, synth design etc) and keep the momentum going as you race towards the finishing line. The goal is to reach a zen-like state of mind where the track pretty much writes itself – something that only comes through practice and discipline.

5 rules to help you finish more tracks

Regularly finishing creative projects takes self-discipline. Try following these workflow rules to help motivate yourself.

1. Don't abandon anything

If you reach an impasse with a project and can’t get it over the finish line, don’t simply delete your work. Make sure to save your in-progress projects – and label them clearly – so you can return to them later.

It’s amazing how returning to something a few days, weeks or even months later can allow you to see it from a fresh angle. Better still, bounce out individual elements from the project, such as beat loops, chords or riffs, so that they can be used as later ammo.

2. Don't hoard half-finished ideas

Perhaps contrary to that last tip, don’t get into the habit of simply filing away every project and ending up with a hard drive stuffed with an ever-growing stack of half-finished tracks. Enforce a hard limit on how many projects you allow yourself to have on the go at any one time.

For example, set a maximum of ten projects you’re allowed to keep, and when you reach this limit, force yourself to adapt or finish an existing idea before you’re allowed to start anything new.

3. Set deadlines

Most of us find we work quicker and more efficiently if working towards a deadline. This can make it much easier to finish a track when working towards, say, a delivery date set out by a record label.

Even if you’re working independently though, try enforcing deadlines on yourself. Create tracks specifically for a gig or DJ booking, or aim to finish a track every week or month. Be realistic though; deadlines can be great, but equally can have a negative effect on your outlook if you repeatedly miss them.

4. Remix yourself

Starting from an existing finished project and rearranging it is often a lot easier than creating something new. Try starting with a track you’ve previously finished and using it as a basis for your next track.

Somewhat counterintuitively, this can actually be a great way to prevent yourself repeating ideas. The rule you need to set here is that your new track must be completely different from your starting project, thereby forcing you to up-end your previous sounds and track elements.

5. Stick to the plan

It can be easy to get distracted by a new idea halfway through making a track and end up completely changing the feel of your original idea. This could create something great, but also result in losing something good just because it no longer feels fresh.

Avoid this by devising a plan of what you want your track to be before you start, for example ‘130bpm percussive techno tool’, ‘beatless synth jam’, ‘peak time DnB’. Stick to this original aim, filing any new ideas that arise along the way to one side for a later date.

3 strategies for creating finished arrangements

Learning how to flesh out tracks is key to becoming the sort of musician who finishes every idea. Most electronic musicians have experienced getting ‘stuck in the loop’; creating simple 16- or 32-bar phrases, but then losing motivation when it comes to turning these into full length arrangements.

Working quickly is crucial. Rather than listening to one looped section for hours, getting even just a rough arrangement down can help overcome one of the major hurdles in the track finishing process

1. Start arranging early

Make a habit of sketching out an arrangement early on in your creative process. As soon as you have a few fundamental building blocks – for example, a chord progression and basic beat – duplicate these across your timeline to create the foundations of a full track. Delete elements as necessary to designate an intro, outro and breakdowns. Break your arrangement up into 8-bar sections and colour code or label these for easy delineation.

Your aim now is to change the energy of your track in some way each time you reach a new section. As a rule of thumb, there are three ways to do this: add an element, remove an element or change an existing sound – for example, changing the instrument used to play your lead melody, or moving part of your bassline up or down an octave.

Knowing when to add and when to take something away is a matter of personal preference. The classic method, in dance music at least, is to build energy by adding new elements up to the breakdown. However, there’s no reason not to try inverting expectations or making multiple changes at once.

2. Finding the hook

One important step when it comes to developing a track lies in establishing what element provides the focal point, aka the hook, of your track.

This should be the most distinctive element of your composition. In a pop or rock song this would usually be the lead vocal, but when it comes to electronic or instrument music, the hook could be any number of things, from a lead synth riff to a bassline or even, at the more percussive or experimental ends of dance music, a particular percussion sound or rhythmic pattern.

Whatever genre you’re working in, however, you should be able to identify a specific focal point for your track (even the most ambient music is likely to put a specific sound or texture to the fore above others).

The reason it’s important to identify this focal element is it will inform a lot of your decisions when it comes to arranging. For instance, your hook will likely be something you want to build up to, meaning you may choose to remove it from your track’s intro and breakdowns.

It will also provide the basis from which to create elements like counter melodies. For example, if you have a descending synth riff as your lead hook, try creating a counter melody that ascends through the same scale, with a rhythm that works around, rather than on top of, your lead line. Introducing this in the background after two or four repetitions of your lead will help add depth and keep your lead hook fresh.

3. Transitions and automation

Following the steps above will allow you to turn your ideas into a basic arrangement, but the result will likely sound rather static and abrupt – like a collection of loops strung together, as opposed to a finished composition. The key to changing this lies in creating dynamic movement both within and between sections.

The easiest way to do this is by using transition FX. These are things like white noise sweeps, pitched risers, crashes or reversed cymbals – elements that can be placed at the start or end of a loop in order to create a pull-in or release to signify the change in your track.

When it comes to sketching out arrangements, it can be handy to have a stock of these ready to go; creating FX from scratch can be a fiddly process that will slow you down when you’re trying to get your track laid out.

Even if you’re just using placeholder FX that you plan to replace when it comes to applying finishing touches, having some sort of transition in place will go a long way towards giving your arrangement the correct ‘feel’, and could help inspire what elements need to be added or removed for the next section.

Try using a dedicated studio session to create your own pack of custom transitions, or simply reach for one of the countless ready-made sample packs available, like this one from SampleRadar.

An equally essential technique for introducing movement to an arrangement is through automation of sound parameters and effects. The most obvious example of this is by automating the cutoff point of a low-pass filter to make a lead, bassline or chord progression brighter as a track builds.

Realistically though, there’s an endless list of parameters that can be adjusted to change the tone of a track and build dynamic tension, such as a synth’s pulse width, or the decay time of a reverb or rate of an LFO. Even subtle sonic changes through simple modulation will do a lot to keep listeners hooked.

For quick arranging, try setting up a few effect returns with some extreme effects that can help create builds, breakdowns and transitions. In-your-face reverbs or delays are great for this, as are multi-effect tools like Cableguys ShaperBox or SugarBytes Effectrix.

4 quick tips

1. Commit early

Commit early: bounce plugins or external instruments down as audio as soon as you’re happy, to avoid endless tinkering and reworking. If you need to make changes later, get creative with effects or editing.

2. Get hands-on

Get hands-on with the automation process by mapping key parameters to your favourite MIDI controller and performing changes in real time.

3. Use reference tracks

Use reference tracks for creating arrangements. Load a release you’re a fan of into your DAW and make a note of where builds, breakdowns and significant changes occur.

4. Small changes add up

Instead of transition FX, signify changes in your tracks with edits to the current pattern. Try cutting out the kick drum for a bar before the change, or creating snare rolls that ramp up in pitch and/or timing.

6 tips for completing mixdowns

Once creative hurdles have been overcome and you’ve conquered the arrangement, it’s time to turn those sketched out ideas into a finished track. But the process of mixing a track and fine-tuning sounds can often be as daunting as creating the track itself. Reduce the pain and effort required to mix your next track with these time-saving tips...

1. Don't be afraid to outsource

Before we get into the practical mixing tips, let’s get one basic point out of the way first: if you’re really struggling to mix a track, there’s no shame in getting someone else to do it for you. There’s a longstanding and misguided stigma within electronic music that in order to be a ‘real’ producer you need to handle every part of your track creation from end-to-end.

The truth, however, is that even amongst professionals, not every musician’s skillset includes both the creative and technical sides of making music. A lot of talented and successful electronic musicians make use of a third party for mixing and mastering their tracks. Rather than being a concession, there are actually a lot of benefits to having a second set of ears working on your creation. Often somebody coming to your track ‘fresh’ will be able to pick out issues or suggest ideas that you’ve missed through overfamiliarity with it.

Obviously, getting a professional to mix your tracks comes with a cost, which is a factor that could understandably put many independent musicians off the idea. There are potential ways around this though; try connecting with other, similarly minded musicians and organising a ‘track swap’ where you each offer mixing advice and support.

2. Reference!

One of the quickest and most effective ways to make mixing decisions is to reference your work against well-produced commercial releases that you like. It’s one of the best ways to understand how pros achieve sonic consistency, and set yourself a benchmark to work towards when writing and mixing club music.

Gather a pool of reference tracks, load them into your latest mix project, then flick between your mix and the reference tracks, comparing as you go.

As referencing is such an accepted technique nowadays, you may want to make the process more convenient by investing in a dedicated ‘mix comparison’ plugin such as Sample Magic’s Magic AB, Mastering The Mix’s Reference or iZotope's Tonal Balance Control 2. Once loaded on your master bus, these plugins allow you to load in multiple songs, set up loop points, then A/B between your DAW audio and said tracks with the click of a button.

3. Set up preset chains

Most DAWs let the user combine and save effect patches in some form, as with Live’s Effect Racks or Logic’s Channel Strip presets. Use these to create and save combinations of effects that you can apply to any use cases that crop up regularly in your tracks, such as drum busses, auxiliary effects or master processing.

If you’re not sure where to start, there are plenty of preset chains that can be downloaded online, both for free and commercially; and your DAW itself likely has some decent presets too. Be aware that these sorts of effects are very context dependent, so don’t expect a single ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution right off the shelf.

4. Three-reverb technique

It can often be a struggle to balance multiple spatial effects in a mix, often leading to the whole thing feeling washed out or muddy. An efficient way to balance reverbs, favoured by some pro engineers, is to use a combination of just three reverb types set up as return effects, each aimed at different-sized spaces or reverb styles.

The classic approach is to use short, medium and long reverbs, typically with decay times of around <1s, 1-2s and >2s respectively. It works well to mix up reverb types too; algorithmic room reverbs work well for short verbs, plates are great for mid-sized sounds, and hall reverbs for the longer effects. Send each element of the mix to these by differing amounts to create space.

5. EQ is your friend

There’s a minefield of potential EQ mistakes that can really affect the sound of your overall mix. One common one is overzealous use of high/low-pass filtering on individual channels within a mix. Typically, it’s desirable to use high/low-pass filters for removing unwanted frequencies, freeing up headroom within the mix and increasing clarity of individual elements.

This can be a great technique if applied carefully using gentle filters; however, many digital EQ plugins offer much steeper filter types which can potentially make the individual elements of the mix sound too separate. A good rule of thumb would be to use 12dB/oct or 18dB/oct filters for high/low-pass work as this setting will offer you the best compromise between removing unwanted frequencies and retaining a cohesive, musical sound.

Paying careful attention to what frequency the filters are applied at is also crucial – filtering out too many low frequencies from individual elements can lead to a thin-sounding mix for example, while overdoing the low-pass filtering can remove too much air resulting in an overly dull sound.

A great tip is to solo the channel you’re filtering and listen carefully to how the filters affect the sound before seeing how the filtered channel sounds in the context of the whole mix. If the overall sound is subsequently affected more than you’d like, try backing off the filters a touch.

Try using our frequency map, pictured above, to get a sense of where each element should sit on the frequency spectrum.

6. Visualise it

If you’re not blessed with monitoring that accurately reproduces low sub bass or shimmering high frequencies, a frequency analyser such as Voxengo’s excellent (and free!) SPAN will allow you to cross-reference the sound coming from the speakers with a visual indication of what your low/high-pass filters are doing.

AI-powered transcription software is on the rise: just a few months ago, we reported on the launch of Songscription, a platform that promises to convert any audio file into sheet music, tab or MIDI, with disappointingly mixed results.

The latest company to make a move into the field is Klang.io, an AI-focused music software brand based out of Karlsruhe, Germany. Last week, Klang.io launched Transcription Studio, a suite of AI music tools built for transcribing multi-instrument recordings.

Transcription Studio accepts audio files, microphone input and links from YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, and its creators claim that it can detect and separate multiple instruments in any recording before analyzing these to produce an accurate transcription.

Transcriptions can be cleaned up in the software's Notation Editor before being exported in PDF or MusicXML formats as sheet music, GuitarPro files for guitar tablature, or MIDI to bring over to your DAW.

Transcription Studio is equipped with multiple modes targeted towards different purposes: Universal Mode is designed to cover a range of instrumentation that includes vocals, piano and guitar, and Single Instrument mode is built to produce detailed transcriptions of solo recordings.

Classic Mode is geared towards orchestral instruments like strings and woodwinds, while Rock Mode – still currently in beta – is aimed at bands hoping to transcribe complex, electric guitar-heavy arrangements.

Klang.io also offers a VST3/AU plugin that the company says is capable of detecting up to eight different instruments within a mixed audio recording and generating separate unquantized MIDI files for each.

While most of the major DAWs offer some level of audio-to-MIDI functionality, Klang.io's multi-instrument conversion – if it does what it says on the tin – could be a step above the capabilities offered by software like Ableton Live and Logic Pro.

“Transcription is an essential skill in music that, until recently, has only been accessible to those with traditional musical training,” Klang.io founder and CEO Sebastian Murgul said in a press release.

“Klang.io’s mission from the beginning has been to create AI-powered tools that can unlock this process for everyone, and provide a streamlined access point for music makers or performers of any educational background or genre to use it to learn, communicate, and collaborate more effectively.”

Klang.io's AI tools are available on a subscription basis: for $8.49/month billed annually or $19.99/month billed monthly, you get access to both the Transcription Plugin and Transcription Studio in your browser. You can also test Transcription Studio out for free on recordings of up to 20 seconds with no registration required.

Find out more on Klang.io's website.

As modern classics go, 2016's 24K Magic, the title track of Bruno Mars' third studio album, is a solid entry in the canon, made all the more surprising by its heavy cribbing from funk and classic 80s musical stylings.

The song is a sum of parts, the result of the efforts of songwriters and producers Philip Lawrence, Ari Levine and production quartet The Stereotypes, as well as Mr. Mars himself, of course.

Written during the flush of success following the release of 2014’s monster-hit Uptown Funk, Mars was honest about the commercial drives which lay behind the making of this track when interviewed by NME. "We wrote 24K Magic when Uptown Funk was No 1. So if you hear the same spirit in that song, that's why. I'd say that it was always in the back of my mind when we were doing it. It was to get me to this record. It's a bridge."

Production team The Stereotypes recalled that, for the initial sessions for 24K Magic, Mars clearly spelled out the feeling he was trying to capture. “He was like, 'Guys, I want to dance,’” The Stereotypes’ Jonathan Yip told Billboard. “[He said] ‘I want it to feel like when I was back in school at a school dance. You know, in the club these days, people aren’t dancing anymore. They’re in their VIP booths with bottles, and they’re standing against the wall, or just looking at the DJ. What about times when we would be with and with a girl, or a guy and a guy, or a girl or whatever, and they’re dancing together? And not just sitting back just drinking. I want that feeling back.' It immediately excited us because we were like, 'Yeah, I remember those times - those times were awesome.'"

24k Magic is a relatively simple song in arrangement-terms, allowing the groove to shine through. As Bruno wanted, the music wills the listener to dance.

To our ears, the rhythm track feels multi-layered, with live and electronic elements implying a total 80s-reverence.

There is a heavy presence from a LinnDrum (or at least samples that bear a significant resemblance). We’ll return to the intro later, in favour of the first main section that we hear - the chorus.

The snare plays a 2 and 4 backbeat (at a tempo of around 107BPM) while the kick emphasises beats 1 and 3, crucially with a ‘skippy’ element that intersects with the bass line.

It’s as punchy as it gets, but there is a classic little musical feature which draws upon the funk influence. At the beginning of each two-bar groove, the first beat employs a kick and elongated open hi-hat for the entire beat.

This has the effect of making us wait for beat 2, before the smack of the snare and the hi-hat closing and continuing its subdivision.

There is some very extensive use of claps too, and even additional drum elements, laid a little further back in the mix, with obligatory drum fills and even the use of some interesting percussion.

The Flexatone is a vaguely comedic instrument, that in this setting is used a little like a cymbal crash. It's identifiable as a metallic rising sound on the first beat of certain sections of the song.

The main constituent components providing the backbone for the song’s harmony are a monophonic synth bass coupled with a huge synth brass patch.

In tune with the producer’s wishes, there is a certain simplicity to the harmonic makeup, but one that is incredibly impactful, thanks to the attack of the synth brass. Being heavily influenced by jazz funk, the harmonies include many chord extensions, which are often repeated or subtly altered.

The first two chords of the chorus are Fm11 and Bbm7(9), which could also be described as Cm7/F and Bbm9, depending on whether you’re a guitarist or keyboard player.

These chords are then repeated, with a chord-per-bar for 6 bars, but at the tail end of the 6th bar, there’s an interesting turnaround; on beats 3 and 4, we hear chords of Dbmaj7 and C7+ or C7alt, which this is where the 5th of the chord is raised by a semitone, so the note G becomes G#.

This raise is a very popular tactic for creating tension, and one that was continually used by Stevie Wonder as a turnaround for that very reason.

A video emerged of Bruno Mars working in his studio, using a couple of classic stalwart synthesizers when making this track.

Firstly, the bassline has all the hallmarks of a Minimoog, although Bruno can be seen playing this on a Moog Voyager, which is just a more up-to-date version.

In the same video, he can be seen playing the synth brass chords on a Roland Juno 106, which also makes perfect sense, being a particularly popular vintage synth for so many artists. If you are trying to recreate this sound in software, look at using a single oscillator-per-voice, and add a healthy dose of chorus, to mimic the architecture of the 106.

Another synth element that we can hear is a short and plucky synth arpeggio, which was also probably created using the 106, with delay, to give the effect of fading out with each outing.

24K Magic is a genre-juggling, hybrid of a song, which also incorporates rap-adjacent themes, thanks to its spoken lyrical content. These lyrics bestow the virtues of opulence and partying.

The high life is not everyone’s cup of tea, but it certainly struck a chord with billions of listeners who lapped up the lavish ideals. It’s also a song about impressing the opposite sex. Again, Mars was highly conscious of this when putting together the song.

“For me, 95 per cent of music is about love. That’s why cavemen were hitting stones to get everybody around the fire and get them feeling sexy,” Mars told NME. “It’s exactly the same principle, the same thing: just get people on the dancefloor, get the girls smiling.”

One highly recognisable element was created using a device called a talkbox, something which is easily confused with a vocoder, which is a different technology.

Not for the faint hearted, talkbox performance requires a degree of knowledge and preparation, as well as a fairly considerable dose of musicality.

To create the talkbox sound, you need a synthesizer to create a tone, a talkbox/pedal (which is in essence a speaker with a plastic tube attached) and a human performer!

By placing the tube to the side of the performer’s mouth, the synth sound is beamed directly in to the players mouth. Here it can be shaped and modulated by the performer, much like a filter on a synth, which includes imprinting words and lyrics on the synth sound. The performance becomes acoustic in nature, requiring the eventual capture via a microphone for either live or recorded performance.

The most notable talkbox performer of our generation had to be Roger Troutman, formerly of the band Zapp.

He made numerous, notable appearances alongside artists such as 2Pac, Dr. Dre and even Scritti Politti. The technology behind his own identifiable sound (or talkbox-of-tricks) was a closely guarded secret during his lifetime, but after his death in 1999, his trademark setup was revealed

His synthesizer of choice was initially a Minimoog, but he migrated to the now vintage Yamaha FM synth, called the DX100. Supplied only with miniature keys, the harsh digital tone of the synth was perfect for the talkbox, so much so, it remains the absolute instrument of choice in talkbox circles.

Byron Chambers (aka Mr Talkbox) is the artist behind the 24K introduction, as well as the various lead and backing harmonies that can be heard throughout. According to Chambers, he has a wardrobe full of DX100 synths (essentially backup instruments) which he used alongside a MXR M222 talkbox pedal.

The coupling of an exceptionally lush talkbox texture with very rich harmony and free-flowing tempo, creates the backdrop for the introduction.

The intro chords are directly associated to the chorus, but taking us on more of a harmonic journey. We start with a chord of Fm9, passing through Abmaj7/C, Dbmaj7, and Gm7b5, before we finally land on the dominant chord of C7#9.

All of this, with the improvised obbligato talkbox line over the top, before we hear a drum break that takes us into the first chorus.

Even as we hear the refrain ’24 Carat’ in a bridge-form toward the end of the song, there are further simple-but-effective devices at play.

A halftime feel plays across the main beats of the bar, displacing the listener’s expectation of where beat one resides. It’s juxtaposed by numerous interruptions from bass glides and flexatones again, all the time playing on the same harmonic devices and similar chords.

There is no doubt that if you look at the constituent components of this song, in terms of harmony and groove, the core elements could be regarded as relatively simplistic. Herein lies the genius, because the hooks are so strong. It’s this simplicity that lets the groove shine through.

“[Bruno] is the first one at the studio, last one to leave,” said the Stereotypes’ Ray Romulus in an interview with Billboard. “Ultimately all of those decisions were up to him - when it was ready to be released and everything like that. He put in countless hours of work even when we were gone just to make sure it was at the standard he wanted it to be”

She might be a social media-savvy 26-year-old who built her profile on TikTok, but musically, Icelandic singer-songwriter Laufey has more in common with the jazz-leaning artists of the past than many of her pop contemporaries.

Indeed, she’s just indicated to BBC Radio 2’s Vernon Kay that she’s also been taking performance, arrangement and production notes from some of the great musicians that inspired her by ensuring that her songs are full of light and shade rather than just crash, bang and wallop.

“Music in general right now I feel has lost the art of dynamics. There’s so much storytelling that can be embedded in a song through just having it very soft and then growing it,” she says. “Two choruses that are exactly the same can sound totally different if one is played soft and one is played very loud.

We’re sure that a lot of traditionalists will be able to get on board with this. The loudness war may have peaked, but there’s still a sense that a lot of big pop songs come in loud and never let up. Laufey, though, is a big fan of the slow build.

“My producer always jokes that when he looks at my vocal track it starts really small and throughout the track it just gets louder and louder,” she laughs. “It starts small and it ends big.”

It’s reasonable to assume that some of Laufey’s desire to stick to classic principles stems from her upbringing, and the diversity of the music she was exposed to.

“I remember, growing up, I thought adults didn’t listen to pop music, because my home was just filled with jazz and classical music – a lot of world music, too,” she explains. “And a lot of Brazilian music, too, which I think is one of the reasons I love writing in that style.”

There were downsides to all this variety, though – not least that it took a while for Laufey to truly find her musical identity.

“I grew up feeling so confused about who I was as a musician, because I felt like I had such a mixed background – a mixed cultural background but also a mixed musical background,” she confirms. “I love pop music but was studying jazz and classical, and I always felt like I had to pick a lane. But the two Grammys that I’ve won have been for albums where I’ve mixed all those things together and been able to be completely myself, and so that’s what the Grammy means to me the most – it’s just an award for being the most ‘me’ possible.”

Winning those awards, says Laufey, has made her feel liberated.

“I definitely feel like I haven’t had to follow any rules of anything,” she explains. “ I feel very free when I make music now, which is really lovely. I remember when I was just starting out, when I was uploading my first song on the internet, there were all these boxes and you were meant to tick the genre, and it was like ‘pop’, ‘singer-songwriter’, ‘jazz’, ‘classical’, and I was like, ‘I don’t know! I have no clue.’ And now I don’t think about that anymore.”

As well as being able to jump between genres, Laufey is also comfortable playing multiple instruments, giving her the luxury of being able to flip between them when she’s songwriting.

“I do a mix of piano and guitar,” she says. “Piano’s the instrument I grew up playing, so I’m a little more familiar. Guitar is sometimes fun for me because I’m not following these really strict rules that I’ve had since childhood, so I kinda just play around and it’s like ‘Ooh, I wonder what chord’s gonna come out?’”

As well as chatting, Laufey also performed in the BBC Radio 2 Piano Room, giving us two of her own songs – Lover Girl and new release How I Get – and a cover of Both Sides Now, the Joni Mitchell classic.

“I think it’s one of the most beautiful songs ever written,” she says. “I love Joni Mitchell, and these lyrics are just… everybody should study these lyrics. I think this is a perfect song.”

Miley Cyrus is making a fresh attempt to have the copyright claim brought against her in relation to her 2023 hit Flowers dismissed before it goes to court.

To recap, Cyrus – along with Gregory Hein and Michael Pollack, Flowers’ co-writers – are being accused of ripping off Bruno Mars’ 2012 song, When I Was Your Man… but not by Mars himself. Instead, the challenge is coming from Tempo Music Investments, which previously purchased a ‘piece’ of When I Was Your Man from Philip Lawrence, one of the song’s co-writers.

The case has been rumbling on since 2024, and Cyrus’s legal team tried and failed to have it thrown out in 2025. However, they’re now having another go, saying that no one should be able to claim ownership of "commonplace tropes in breakup songs," and attempting to discredit the arguments of Anthony Ricigliano, the musicologist being used by Tempo to help them make their case.

In fresh court documents first obtained by Billboard, and then shared by Music Business Worldwide, the top level argument from Cyrus’s camp is that “[When I Was Your] Man, a slow piano ballad, is a breakup song from the perspective of a man who regrets not doing various things he believes could have saved his relationship. On the other hand, Flowers, an upbeat, danceable pop song, is a breakup song from the perspective of a woman rejoicing in her independence and self-reliance.”

The defendants go on to say that Ricigliano “failed to research prior art, claims no similarity in potentially protectable melody, and instead relies on unprotectable pitch sequences and other random, unprotectable elements.” They also make the argument that, even if you view Flowers as a response to When I Was Your Man, which has been suggested, the ‘fair use’ defence applies.

Cyrus’s team is also using music theory to defend itself, arguing that “the melodic similarities that Mr Ricigliano identifies cannot support a copyright infringement claim and must be filtered out,” and that the chord progressions used in both songs are “basic musical building blocks” that aren’t protectable, either.

“For example, Man’s verses and Flowers’ chorus each include A minor, D minor, G major, and C major chords, but Mr Ricigliano admits that is merely a commonplace ‘circle of fifths’ chord progression,” argues Team Cyrus. “ He also raises that both songs use an additional chord with a B pitch, but the chords used are different, and the similarity is commonplace.”

Cyrus’s team goes on to argue that the ‘grand pause’ before each song’s chorus shouldn’t be subject to copyright, either, as this is another “musical building block” that “simply means silence”.

There’s some detailed comparison of the lyrics, too, and the argument from the defendants that “besides being about a breakup, the ideas of Flowers are completely contrary to those of Man.”

Tempo is yet to comment on this latest development, but Billboard reports that it will have the chance to respond to the court next month.

More than 25 years after the release of her last solo album, former 4 Non Blonde Linda Perry has finally announced her next one. Let It Die Here will be released on 8 May, but before then we have the first single, and it’s a song that you’ll almost certainly be familiar with.

We’re talking about Beautiful, the Perry-penned ballad that became a huge hit for Christina Aguilera back in 2002, but has now been reclaimed by its writer.

“When I wrote Beautiful, I had no idea I was struggling inside,” Perry says now. “‘I am beautiful no matter what they say.’ ‘They’ represents the insecurities we all face, the fear that makes people unkind simply because someone or something is different.

“Beautiful is about self-expression, being free to be whoever you want to be. ‘Don’t you bring me down today.’ Don’t you dare try to make me feel less than, not good enough, or ugly because I don’t look like you. Don’t treat me like I don’t matter just because I do not speak or think like you. I will shine in every single way, and no one can take that from me, you, or anyone.

It’s believed that Perry originally intended to release Beautiful herself, then later considered giving it to Pink. However, she ultimately decided to let Aguilera sing it after a moment of happenstance.

Aguilera had shown up at Perry’s studio with her entourage with a view to writing with her, but was told that her team would have to wait outside. “Not allowed in my studio,” Perry told American Songwriter in 2021, “so she was really shy [and said] ‘Can you sing a song or something to break the ice?’”

“I had just written Beautiful – I sat down at the piano and started playing,” Perry explains. “And then I just heard her little feet get closer and closer, and by the end of the song she was like, ‘Can you demo that and give me the lyrics?’ And I’m like all, ‘Huh? Why?’ And she’s like, ‘Because I want that for my record.’”

That record would end up being Stripped, which Perry would ultimately contribute several songs to, but the singer-songwriter was initially dubious about giving Beautiful – a song that focuses on issues of self-esteem and insecurity – to a megawatt star like Aguilera.

“I’m looking at this, you know, ‘hot chick’ that’s got everything going on – or at least that’s what you think – and she’s wanting the song about being Beautiful? How vain is that?”

The penny dropped, though, when Aguilera returned to the studio to record Beautiful, with her one allotted friend in tow. With the tape running, the vulnerable singer turned to her friend and said ‘Don’t look at me’ – a spoken line that you can hear on the finished track.

“And those words at the top opened up a whole world for me,” says Perry. “Because I realised that this beautiful girl that’s on the charts, everybody knows her, is just as insecure as I am. That was pretty amazing, so Christina Aguilera, thank you for those words because it really did change my whole concept of what Beautiful really meant, and it was about someone struggling with the fact that maybe there is beauty beyond your visual.”

Such was the rawness of that original take that it’s the one that was used on the record. It’s believed that Aguilera wasn’t happy with her vocals and wanted to re-record them, but Perry insisted that they went with her first attempt because it had the imperfection and vulnerability that was required.

Why revisit the song now, though? Speaking to Consequence, Perry says that she hadn’t originally planned to record Beautiful, and that the decision to record it herself only came after the rest of her new album had been completed.

“And then I’m like, ‘Oh, this is about my journey with my mum, and how fucked up she is, but how it all helped me become who I was, you know, who I am,” says Perry. She decided that her journey “wouldn’t be complete” without Beautiful being on the record.

Rather than trying to reinvent the song, Perry has stayed pretty faithful to the original, but with a few key differences.

“I’ll just do the exact version I did for Christina, but I won’t put strings on it, I’ll put Mellotron, and I’ll add more guitar, but at the same tempo [and in] the same key,” Perry decided. “It is pretty much the same structure, the same intent, but Christina, she’s not me, you know? And I’m not Christina. I just basically did the Linda version of that song.”

Lo and behold, Perry’s team (they weren’t allowed in her studio, presumably) loved it, and it was decided that Beautiful mkII (or should that be Beautiful 0.5?) should be the single that reintroduced Perry – who, for the past 25 years, has been mainly known as a songwriter and producer – to the listening public.

Let It Die Here will be released on 8 May, the same day as the documentary film of the same name, which tells the story of not only Perry’s wildly successful career, but also her struggle to find purpose and meaning in it all.

There are an enormous number of accolades that can be placed at Kraftwerk’s door. Their impact on the future development of electronic music making was profound, and their anticipation of the computerisation of the studio was beyond prescient.

Even their earlier output sounded way ahead of its time, with a level of creativity which casts a significant shadow across swathes of contemporary production.

After producing three highly applauded and successful albums in the 70s (Autobahn, Radio-Activity and Trans-Europe Express), Kraftwerk - Ralf Hütter, Florian Schneider, Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos - wanted to produce an album that would serve as a response to the rise of dance and disco culture. That work would become the seminal The Man Machine, released in May 1978.

At the Paris album launch, newly updated mannequins established Kraftwerk’s ‘robot’ concept, with four dummies sporting newly-fashioned faces to resemble the band, at a considerable expense of 4000DM per mannequin. That’s around $13,500/£10,000 in today’s money.

The use of the dummies stressed a theme that the band had been pondering for years - the increasing interplay between man and machine.

“That’s what Kraftwerk is all about: the harmony between man and machine,” Kraftwerk’s co-head honcho Ralf Hütter told the LA Times. “We play the machines, and sometimes the machines play us.”

The robots have remained part of the Kraftwerk persona ever since; doing interviews and even performing a segment of their own in live shows.

We are all familiar with the concept of jamming with friends, where you might try out musical ideas in a band context. Kraftwerk were no different - aside from the fact that they would often let the machines do the playing.

According to long-time label manager Maxime Schmitt, Kraftwerk would often attend writing sessions with pre-etched material, setting their sequencers running and letting the ideas gestate for hours at a time, before Florian might stand up and add another sequence…

If we take an analytical look at the title track from The Man Machine, it's easy to understand how it might have been birthed within such a jam session.

The track opens with an almost wooden, semi-Hi-Q electronic percussion sound, in a one-bar rhythmic loop. This provides the distinctive hook which runs through the entire song. This element also provides the rhythm for the iconic melodic riff which follows.

Possibly due to the nature of the technology of the era, The Man Machine is relatively sparse in terms of its arrangement.

Rooted in F minor (although it's a little bit out of tune with A440 tuning) the classic riff begins on the minor 3rd (aka Ab). With no other harmonic elements on offer here, it is left to the riff to drop down to the note G and F, to give us clues about its harmonic home.

The end of the riff rises up to a Bb, providing the hint of a sus chord, or nudge in the direction of chord IV (Bb).

As the bass enters - using a fairly filtered synth sound - it also employs the note Ab more than the root note F.

It's only when we hear the 2-note chord, playing both an F and Ab, that we can be sure about the harmony. We can't be entirely sure which synth was responsible for this part, but given the era and their synth preferences, it's likely that an ARP Odyssey would have played a role here.

Being duophonic in operation, the Odyssey would have allowed 2-note chords, allowing an oscillator per voice.

It would've also been the perfect machine for the promoted synth texture, which is based around an ever shifting filter cutoff, probably provided by Sample & Hold routed to the cutoff, although there does seem to be a degree of manual cutoff shifting here too, as the filter rises and falls with each 2-bar phrase.

You can’t fail to notice that the opening track on this album (The Robots) and this closing track (The Man Machine) rely heavily on a vocoder for the vocal melody. It’s one of the classic Kraftwerk calling cards.

Vocoders are a fascinating technology, which have always been heavily linked with the sound of robots. In essence, you speak into a microphone which is patched through to a vocoder, and play the note that you would like your melody to sing, using a synthesiser.

You don’t even have to be able to sing, as spoken lyrics (or other elements such as drum grooves) imprint their modulation and shape on the carrier wave, provided by the synth part. The result is a pure robotic performance - at least in terms of sound.

As many artists have demonstrated, vocoders can sound very soulful, but it was Kraftwerk’s heavy utilisation that undoubtedly inspired a massive number of subsequent users, from Stevie Wonder to Daft Punk.

Returning to our track in focus, the vocoder melody begins on the note F, before rising up to Ab & Bb. This contrasts the main synth riff and bass part, which begin on the note Ab.

This solidifies the harmony, where we appear to alternate from a bar of Fm to Bb, with a chord to-a-bar. This continues through the verse structure, which in pure Germanic-techno style is fairly light on lyrical content.

Man machine
Semi-human being
Man Machine
Super-human being

As we move to the chorus section, the vocoder provides a rising arpeggio figure over 2 octaves, remaining on a chord of F minor, with the odd additional note thrown in for melodic interest.

We also hear the repetitive lyric, ‘The man machine, machine, machine, machine…’ etc. You get the picture!

In fact, the lyric became an artwork feature on the cover of the album, which is still used in the video content for their live shows.

Meanwhile, there is also a slight jolt in the harmony, as we rise up a tone to G minor, where the same chorus based tricks are employed, before dropping back down to F minor.

Kraftwerk were well known for their creativity in designing sonic backdrops. The Man Machine is a perfect example. Post-chorus, we are treated to a number of different sound effect soundbites, all created in an analog world. They conjure an image of whirring machines and cogs, which would've been highly representative of robot technology from this era.

Their sound design didn't just include effects though. The percussive elements which form the backbone of the entire album are integral to the sonic universe. The heavy transient of the kick drum, coupled with the slightly wooden nature of the snare, present a unique sound world which sets Kraftwerk apart from many of their peers, who were reliant upon pre-existing percussion sounds.

The recording for the album took place at Kraftwerk's own legendary Kling Klang studio. This entirely modular studio could also be packed up and taken on the road.

However, mixing for the album was undertaken in a different location. According to former member, Karl Bartos, Kling Klang did not offer a large enough mixing console for the album, so they decided to decamp to nearby Studio Rudas, where studio owner Joschko Rudas manned the desk, alongside Leanard Jackson, who was drafted in from LA. He wasn’t entirely happy about the cold winter climate of Dusseldorf, in contrast to the blue skies of California.

Jackson had earned the nickname ‘Colonel Disco’ and it was hoped that he would make the album sound more commercial.

Despite the highly critical success of the original album from 1978, it took nearly 4 years for the album to hit its highest UK chart peak of No 9.

By late 1981, Kraftwerk had released yet another seminal classic Computer World, and with the release of the track Computer Love as a single, EMI decided to place The Model (from The Man Machine’ album) on the B-side.

In a bizarre twist of fate, radio DJs started playing the B-side, leading to a re-release of the single as a double A-side. The Model hit the number one position on the UK charts in February 1982, leading to renewed interest in The Man Machine, which in turn had a positive effect on the sales of Computer World.

As we are get close to 50 years since the original release of The Man Machine, its future-anticipating techniques and themes feel more impressive than ever. We now literally have the very mechanical artificial intelligences implied across the record, churning out rendered facsimiles of human-made music.

But, we also have hyper-intuitive DAWs and many of Kraftwerk’s technological innovations now form the bedrock of the electronic music-maker’s guidebook.

We often wonder just how much of this was Kraftwerk foreseeing future trends, and how much of it was Kraftwerk taking it upon themselves to invent tomorrow.

It might have been Bad Bunny’s impressive Half Time Show that made the biggest headlines at the Super Bowl earlier this month, but it was Charlie Puth’s reharmonised version of the US National Anthem that got music theory nerds talking.

Reacting on YouTube, music educator Charles Cornell called it “one of the greatest national anthems ever,” while jazz pianist Aimee Nolte described it as “pretty much a masterpiece,” comparing it to Whitney Houston’s rendition of The Star Spangled Banner at Super Bowl XXV in 1991.

There were plenty of other dissections, too, and Pianote created a handy chord-by-chord guide for anyone who wants to unpick and emulate Puth’s performance.

Prior to the Super Bowl, Puth discussed his plans for the anthem with Armchair Expert Dax Shephard, telling him that “I have the whole arrangement in my head… I musically know where I’m going with it.”

He also revealed the instrumentation he had in mind: an orchestra, a choir and “a really warm Rhodes sound - like a Rhodes from the 1970s,” (all of these boxes were ticked) and mentioned that he planned to sing the anthem in D Major (he did).

In fact, Puth could visualise everything that was going to happen: “We can play this back after I do it and see if it was all right,” he said, adding that “I got goosebumps just thinking of it now because it feels like I already did it.”

As far as we can tell, all of Puth’s wishes came true, though perhaps he didn’t anticipate just how much discussion his performance - which also featured his new friend Kenny G, let’s not forget - would generate.

He certainly seemed happy when he stepped off stage, telling a reporter: “I think we pulled something off pretty spectacular, musically.”

It seems that this wasn’t something that came together overnight, though, as footage has resurfaced of Puth playing a similar arrangement on his Rhodes as long ago as 2021. All he needed was a platform for the rest of the world to hear it, too.

For as long as we can remember, Beck has been an artist that instantly makes the listener sit up and take note. His attention to detail, at both the songwriting and production stages, has yielded a multi-branched catalogue that many artists would be highly envious of.

After first making a name for himself with 1994's major label debut, Mellow Gold (which featured iconic slacker-anthem Loser), Beck’s most notable commercial success came with his revered 1996 genre-smushing album Odelay. Not only were sales strong, but its hip-hop meets lo-fi indie stylings signalled to the world the type of fearless, audacious artist that Beck truly was.

The success of Odelay secured Beck a considerable following of fans both in the general population and in the upper echelons of the music world. Many notable musicians continue to hold Beck in the highest esteem, such as Paul McCartney, Thom Yorke, Damon Albarn, Jack White and Sonic Youth.

With multiple aesthetic strands to his career so far, (which include his acoustic-and-strings-defined masterpiece Sea Change, an album we covered in detail recently) it’s one particular song, which underlines Beck’s ability to seamlessly dart between musical bases, that we’re focussing on today.

His buoyant 2017 album Colors was preceded almost a year prior by the single Wow, a genre-twisting summons which drew inspiration from the unlikely bedfellows of spaghetti westerns and hip-hop.

“I was working on another song when I had an idea for a flute beat,” Beck told the NME. “I picked up the mic and Wow came out totally spontaneously. I put it away and forgot about it.”

In an interview with KROQ’s Kevin & Bean, Beck indicated the the song’s construction came together intuitively after a serious of further spontaneous improvisations. “Most of this song was completely off the top of my head. I didn't write any of it. It was just us fooling around in the studio”

As Beck relayed to NME, this experimental track happened to be playing out of the studio monitors, when it was decided it would be on Colors. “Wow was on in the studio one day and someone said ‘You should put this on the record.’ I went ‘I don’t think anybody would like this.’”

According to Beck, Wow was delivered alongside some rough, work-in-progress tracks to his record company, and they urgently said, “We’re putting Wow out as a single.” As relayed to the NME, this clearly caught Beck off guard - his response was, ‘Really? ‘Wow’? Huh. Well, OK then.”

“I didn't even mean to release it,” Beck later admitted to KROQ upon Wow’s release as the record’s second single. “I was working on another song and came up with the riff and then I just started freestyling."

Almost a full decade on from its release on June 2nd 2016, and we can still remember hearing it for the first time. From the first few bars, there is a strange sense of harmonic ambiguity, as you're not quite sure where the tonal centre of the track lies.

In fact, it took us several listens to really get our heads around exactly what was going on, harmonically speaking, and that's before we've even picked apart the arrangement’s numerous shades, led by that haunting panpipe sample.

The panpipe motif evolved from the original flute improvisation that Beck hit on in the studio.

It's only once we've got our harmonic bearings that we can correctly ascertain that the first note, Eb, forms the key of the song (Eb major).

The opening panpipe phrase, has been programmed in such a way that it bends and glides between notes, dropping from an Eb to a Bb, before rising up to a D, and dropping again to a Bb.

This movement completely endorses the basic harmonic structure, which is reliant upon just two chords, with the odd passing chord later on in the song, but only during the piano part.

In terms of song-form, there is very little sung lyrical content. Verses are spoken in time, for the most part, but they feel a considerable distance away from what we would typically call rap. However it does feel apiece with Beck’s tried-and-tested (and rap-adjacent) free-flowing wordplay.

Wanna move into a fool's gold room
With my pulse on the animal jewels
Of the rules that you choose to use to get loose
With the luminous moves

The chord structure for the verses and chorus are the same, although exactly when the chords change is open to a small degree of debate, informed by where we are in the song.

Our best suggestion is that we hear a chord of Eb major, for the first 2 and a half beats of bar 1, which then shifts to a chord of Bb major for the last beat and a half.

In the second bar, the rhythm is the same, but we hear a first inversion of Bb (Bb/D) for the first beat and a half, before returning to a root chord of Bb again. The cycle then continues, but with heavy reliance upon the melodic detail that we first heard at the beginning in the panpipe.

Not only does the bass largely follow the direction of the opening panpipe phrase, but huge synthetic horns appear halfway through the song, endorsing the same melodic fragment.

During the chorus section, signified by the exclamation of ‘Wow’, there’s a high vocal part provided by Beck, based around the non-lyric ‘la-la-l-la-la’, to a harmony that enforces our structure. In each second bar of the phrase, the vocal shifts to supply an extension to the chord Bb/D add9, before resolving down to a Bb.

Let's be honest, when pulled apart to its core musicological constituents, it's relatively simple. But that’s not to say the arrangement isn’t incredibly clever.

As we approach the end of the song we hear a piano really emphasising the intrinsic harmonic structure. It’s not until we reach this point that we're completely sure where we are in the harmony, at least on a first listening. Stable ground at last.

Wow undoubtedly draws influence from hip-hop, informed by something of a renaissance that was occurring in Los Angeles at the time. Artists such as Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper had begun to gain wider prominence for their lyrically-dense and intricately produced records. In fact, Beck had hoped that Chance may make a guest appearance on the track, but it wasn’t to be.

There is no more notable example of this hip-hop influence than in the choice of kit for the song’s arrangement - which lean heavily on the use of Roland TR-808 drum machine sounds.

Apart from the trap-style 808 snare and hats, Beck’s co-writer and producer, Cole M.G.N. also opted to use the highly identifiable 808 kick sound as a bass for the track.

Its punchy definition is perfect for accentuating both rhythmically and harmonically, even if full reproduction may be masked if listening on smaller speakers or headphones.

Another very solid influence for the song stems from the soundtracks of westerns, a facet that presents itself in a couple of guises.

Firstly, there are constant references to ‘Giddy up’ in the lyric. This in turn influenced the promotional video for the track, which featured cowboys and horses. There is also a western musical reference; in a clear homage to Ennio Morricone, we occasionally hear Beck whistle a slightly out of tune version of the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

This musical fragment is very small, which also explains why there is no reference to Morricone as composer on the track (five notes in a setting such as this, do not infringe copyright!) It’s tastefully ambiguous, but a knowing nod.

When Colors finally dropped a year later it became very clear that the rest of the tightly-produced album bore little in common with the more free-flowing nature of Wow. Its absence of guitar and traditional instrumentation also marks Wow as something quite sonically different to its Colors siblings, which included the kooky pop of the title track and the euphoric, hands-in-the-air anthem Up All Night.

Beck might not have realised that he was creating one of his most popular singles on that day of impromptu studio fun, but the story of Wow is another example of how letting your instincts guide you, and following the music, can often lead to the most life-affirming songs.

NAMM 2026 was absolutely dominated by AI-discourse. There were many eager music tech companies looking for new ways to incorporate the alleged world-changing potential of it. Then, there were those generative AI-oriented outfits trepidatiously floating around the show, subtly attempting to integrate themselves within a cautious industry.

While AI is, of course, a broad topic, a widespread perception for many in the music-making sphere is that AI is an existentially damaging force. What's more, is a pervading feeling that this disruptive new power should not be engaged with in any capacity.

It’s a view largely fostered by the rejection of copyright-infringing, generative AI-platforms, evolving into a mass lumping-in of anything labelled with those two little letters as aspects of the same malevolent entity. Even the stuff that may actually be pretty useful, is frequently tarred with the brush.

We were intrigued then, when we were personally invited at the show to check out a markedly different kind of AI-driven product. Allegedly designed to help human users become better musicians, this new product sought to arm piano and keyboard-leaners, and not replace any part of the human-instrument relationship.

In fact, this new tool - designed by Seaboard and Equator-maker ROLI, is entirely built around tightening that bond.

Ostensibly a smart AI piano teacher with a difference, we were told that this intelligent educational software monitors every nuance of the user’s playing, and verbally guides with smart, tailored feedback, angled at improving playing ability over time.

ROLI's AI Music Coach works in tandem with ROLI’s Airwave hand-tracking device to monitor all 27 joints in each hand, which are visualised on-screen at 90 frames per second.

It also works particularly well with ROLI’s vividly-coloured Piano to guide users through a range of colour-labelled exercises and challenges. Hand placement on the keybed is depicted on the screen in realtime, while the interface is entirely speech-based.

As we sat down in ROLI’s refreshingly quiet, dimly-lit (but aesthetically on-point) demo room, CEO Roland Lamb positioned this writer in front of the software, and willed me to explain to the new software who I was, my piano ability-level, and to choose a genre to angle the lessons around.

After communicating that I was more of a 17-takes kind of guy, my first test was to try and match the vocal melody of Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy, depicted on screen as a series of coloured blocks falling down into place over the respective piano keys, with my jittery hands visualised in real-time by Airwave, illuminating which finger should be on which key.

A few quite surprisingly stern responses were issued my way when the concept of an index finger mysteriously vanished from my head - but as Roland explained, this software replicates a real teacher - and evenly balances the fun with the firm.

“The sweet spot is a place where it's not too easy, it's not too hard.” Lamb told me. “You're being challenged in the right way and you're being encouraged, and it's like if you're being challenged too much and not encouraged enough, it doesn't work. In the same way, [it doesn't work] if you're being encouraged too much and not challenged enough.”

A polite way of saying my own playing needed a fair bit of challenging…

Once I managed to snap into gear with the required rhythm, I realised that this particular song-learning aspect was starting to rekindle dim memories of the era of Guitar Hero, albeit with a discerning brain behind the scenes keeping a watchful eye on what I was doing (and I'm not talking about Roland…)

Eventually expanding into chords and more nuanced polyphonic melodies felt like a dopamine-triggering challenge.

As Roland explained, this ‘gamification’ of the learning process has been carefully designed by ROLI to help those who are practicing on their own to improve their technique on a daily basis, merging discipline and play to alleviate the feeling of it becoming a tedious slog. A particular concern for young people just starting out in their journey.

“Lots of people have a certain amount of fear of piano lessons - a fear of failure,” Roland explained. “This kind of takes it away because it's friendly and you can do it on demand. And so there's a lot of ways in which the usability and convenience of a system like this will just help people get started.”

As Lamb continued, he explained how AI Music Coach can generate a personalised lesson plan, as it gathers data on your approach. “It can instantly generate new lessons and new feedback based on what you're learning or your level.”

That’s certainly something I noticed during my initial test as the piano speed smartly slowed down before gradually increasing as I got the hang of it.

Beyond learning particular popular songs, and leaning futher into the ‘gamification’ concept, we were shown one of the the platform’s on-board games, Superluminal - an Asteroids-style video game spin on piano teaching. It began by firing increasingly rapid single notes - which could only be ‘shot down’ by hitting the matching coloured key.

Ultimately, this became dual notes and chords. If the basic song-learning approach got the dopamine trickling then this was akin to a tidal wave. Built with the addictive ethos of a classic arcade game, the instantly absorbing nature of the experience was gradually achieving that age-old trick; teaching without the student even realising they're being taught.

The clear objective here is to facilitate the brain-mapping of the piano keyboard (and the linked notes of a key) via this atypical, addictively fun context, and not through hours of joyless repetition.

“You chose to play that game in C major,” Roland points out. “Maybe if you were working on [learning] a song, you know, in G flat, [AI Music Coach] would be like, ‘Why don't you play that in G flat’, so that you're learning more.”

“Or it might notice that you often make mistakes when it comes to your ring finger,” Roland continued. “A lot of people do, [it’s] the hardest finger to control. So, it might suggest an exercise to build strength or dexterity in your ring finger. It’s going to become incredibly targeted, and it will have insights that real human teachers can't have because they don't see.”

Roland went on to show us another facet of AI Music Coach, a more classically-angled view which guides the player through virtual sheet music.

“I’m a jazz musician, and I'm learning how to read music,” said Lamb. “This is really helpful for learning; I can choose different sections, it can help me adjust to the speed. We think that that is a really nice thing, because it can just work at so many different levels of the music-learning journey. There's a lot of conversations about AI, and particularly sort of [generative] AI for music. but we think this is the sort of best and first example of using AI for human interaction, teaching and learning in music.”

That leads us onto the potentially provocative elephant in the room; the fact that in 2026, the denial of AI-infused products as a matter of principle might scare away potential customers. Did Roland and ROLI contend with that concern when developing AI Music Coach?

“I'm not worried about it,” replied Roland. “But, I totally understand it. Here at ROLI, my philosophy is that AI and technology can be powerful as long as you use it in the right way, and our mission is to use AI to enhance the humanity of humanity. AI can actually help us to be more human by doing things like teaching us the piano and giving access to people who either don't live near a teacher, can't find one or can't afford one.”

Roland stressed that this product is not just for people who can't access a teacher. It's also for people who already have a teacher and want extra tuition between lessons.

“Often practicing is lonely and you're not sure if you're doing it right. I like to think that when you're practicing, you kind of are the teacher and the student at the same time. You have to impose discipline on yourself which is very difficult, because you don't necessarily even have enough information. It’s actually that relationship between being the teacher and the student at the same time that makes a lot of people give up. What [AI Music Coach] is doing is delegating the teaching or coaching function to the AI, and then you can just focus on learning, which is where you should be when you're learning. I think it's a much more efficient model.”

While our time with AI Music Coach was somewhat brief, it was pretty apparent that this hyper-engaging way of getting to grips with a keyboard certainly feels like it could be a satisfying antidote to the often daunting formality of traditional piano lessons.

However, the software - slated for release in the Spring - isn’t quite fully ready-to-go yet…

In our demo there were a handful of technical gremlins - including a slight crash requiring a restart, a mis-hearing of my name and the voice recognition software interpreting my Northern English accent as being Welsh-language (although to be fair, it later made up for this in having no problem swiftly adjusting to Lamb’s pivot from English to Japanese).

These hiccups aside, ROLI’s attempt to redefine AI and re-contextualise it is an educational aid is certainly refreshing. A proudly AI-labelled product that is centred around empowering newcomers to improve their own abilities is an ambition that’s hard to sniff at.

In a more formal statement, released via ROLI’s press team, Lamb was quoted as saying, “We are so excited about this breakthrough in music learning. The combination of hand tracking, advanced voice capabilities, deep musical knowledge, and a range of engaging experiences results in an entirely new type of practice. It’s more fun, but also more effective, because the AI Coach can give you feedback on your technique. And anyone can use it. You don’t need to be able to read music to learn, you don’t even need to be able to read. We think this is an important human-first use of AI. No AI slop.”

ROLI told us that the closed beta of the AI Music Coach opens today, with current Airwave learners eligible to sign up, along with Airwave preorders as they are activated.

A public beta will open by the end of March 2026, with usage limits still to be determined. The company is keen to emphasise that the AI Music Coach will be a cornerstone of its ongoing learning-angled experience. We’ll report back with more info when we have it. Find out more info here

There are many bands that have influenced commercial music, but finding an influential band with equally influential players, composers and producers at the forefront of their artistry, that's a rarity.

Chic was formed in the mid-to-late 1970s, by legendary musicians and producers, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards. The two were kindred spirits; both obsessed with music and playing. Both men were steeped in the jazz tradition and had an enormous understanding of the richness of jazz harmony.

They met and played together in 1970 as session musicians in The Big Apple Band.

Drawing inspiration from England’s blooming glam rock scene and bands such as Roxy Music, the nucleus of Chic was formed in 1977, with the recruitment of drummer Tony Thompson, and - in the background - there was keyboardist Raymond Jones.

During the late 70s, Chic were getting plenty of attention - notably some of it negative. They had released Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah) and had a US No.1 hit with Le Freak, but an American-wide backlash against the disco genre, culminating in the Disco Sucks campaign in 1979, stood firmly in their way. Nevertheless, Chic released the glorious Good Times during that same year.

Rodgers has always been very honest about his starting points for the song. When growing up, he was heavily influenced by Kool and the Gang, not least of all because his cousin was one of the founding members.

He recalls hearing the track Hollywood Swinging and citing this track as direct inspiration for Good Times.

The classic funk guitar part played on Good Times, was played by Nile on his now legendary white 1960s Stratocaster, with a hardtail bridge.

Nicknamed ‘The Hitmaker’, NME estimated that the guitar has been played on a whopping $2 billion worth of music, albeit with a little help from Nile!

Good Times only really uses four chords, but their description depends how you approach the harmony, as these chords are influenced by the position of the bass against the chords.

If we start with the chorus, which unusually happens to be the first section we hear, we start with a chord of Em7, for one bar. This then subtly shifts to E7sus4 for the second bar. Demonstrating similarity, the third bar drops to A7sus4, before shifting to A13.

These chord descriptions refer predominantly to the guitar part, but taking the position of the bass into account, and the inversions played in the keyboard part, we could consider the last two chords as alternatives; the third chord becomes Em7/A and the fourth F#m7/A.

In many respects, this subtle alteration in chord voicing between the instrumentation is a crucial part of the Chic sound, informed heavily by the use of inverted chords from jazz. This is the process of shifting the pattern of the notes used in a chord to a different voicing.

Among their many production tools and tricks, Chic would double parts, particularly in the keyboards (Rhodes and piano), but with each element maintaining its own identity.

In Good Times, the Rhodes adopts a fairly static persona, reinforcing the harmony with its classic mellow tone, while the piano punctuates and accents, with the odd heavily syncopated note jumping out and creating interest for the listener.

Good Times was recorded in NYC at the iconic Power Station, in a session which was engineered by a young Bob Clearmountain, now a mixing and mastering legend in his own right.

There is no doubt that one of the most influential aspects of the song lies in the bass part. This is entirely down to the genius and exceptional playing of Bernard Edwards.

“I wrote Good Times the morning we recorded it,” Rodgers told Uncut magazine. “Bernard was a little late to the studio, but I'd already written out the charts for everybody in the band. We were playing when Bernard walked in. He asked the engineers, 'what the hell is that?' The engineer said, 'I don't know, something Nile wrote this morning.' Whenever Bernard was late, he was like a puppy dog with his tail between his legs. Typically, what he and I do is we'd copy each other and then develop our parts after that."

"We'd been trying for years to come up with this walking bass line, putting it over and over again on all sorts of songs but we could never get it right. But that day, I started screaming 'Walk!' over Tony's drums. Bernard said, 'What?' I was shouting 'Walk!' On that particular day, he walked."

Bernard’s spontaneous bassline was impressive and highly imaginative. Bob Clearmountain was bowled over.

“Before they came into the room for a playback, I thought, ‘This has to be a hit. How could this not be a hit?’ Clearmountain told Tape Op. “They came into the control room for playback. Bernard Edwards, the bass player [and producer], was standing next to me. I turned to him and said, ‘Where did you come up with that amazing bass line?’ He turned to me and said, ‘Oh, you like that?’ Like he didn't know.”

At this point, we could say ‘… and the rest is history’, but Bernard’s irresistible bass line has gone down as one of the all-time classics, influencing many other artists, notably Blondie, and Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust. Undeniable bedfellows, even to the ears of non-musicians.

Another unique element of the song, is the first thing that we hear. The piano glissando was apparently played on a Rhodes, sweeping from the lowest note on the instrument to the very top. It does sound bizarrely like an acoustic piano, rather than a Rhodes, possibly because of its unusual production treatment.

The Power Station studio provided an amazing reverb space, the only problem was, it emanated from the ladies bathroom!

So, the Rhodes glissando was piped into the tiled space, and re-recorded with the natural reverb applied. Apparently Nile and Bernard liked the shimmering effect that this unique space could provide.

The drums, that are provided courtesy of Tony Thompson, are relatively simplistic, at least on the face of it.

The kick part sits firmly in sync with the bass part, while the snare sits on 2 and 4, but with no ghost notes or drop-sticks - just the backbeat!

Meanwhile, the hi-hat locks completely with Nile’s guitar, with just the odd accent as part of the groove. It really is beautifully played.

Another part of the unique Chic sound employed the use of violins. These are particularly prominent in the chorus structure, as they punctuate the vocal part, with stabbing single note falls, juxtaposed with a sustained rising countermelody which we hear in the verse structure.

Of course, the track would also be nothing without the classic vocal sound, provided by Alfa Anderson and Michelle Cobbs, with a high male vocal from Fonzi Thornton. The song was always designed to be an uplifting track, reflecting and moving on from the tough experiences of the recession of the 70s.

This uplifting notion is exploited heavily in the lyrical content, borrowing phrases such as ‘Happy days are here again’ and referencing roller skates, which drew on the phenomena of the roller disco, which was then hitting peak popularity in 1979.

The next part of the story came later in the year, with the release of Rapper’s Delight by The Sugarhill Gang.

Now recognised as one of the first ever high profile rap singles. The track's undeniable and exceptionally extensive use of Good Times’ bass line, as the musical bedrock for the rap vocal, resulted in Bernard Edwards and Nile Rogers rightly being equally credited as writers of the work.

Not bad for a couple of wannabe jazz musicians who ended up leaving a substantial stamp on the language of funk, disco and the earliest days of hip-hop.

Every now and again, we come across songs that stand out from the vast majority in that style or genre, remaining significant anomalies as the era passes and the context changes.

If we look closely at these outliers, however, we typically find that the production style or sound palette still retains some signifiers of the artist's established genre.

However, the chord progressions and melodic elements used, while not unique or groundbreaking, are often uncommon to the genre or niche. This allows artists and producers to use, what we call ‘crossover songwriting’ techniques' to subvert the listener's expectations. The results speak for themselves.

In order to better understand what makes a song stand out from the rest, we'll highlight a few examples. The first is Pendulum's Hold Your Colour, an example of a drum and bass song that uses melodic and harmonic elements that could easily fit into genres like alternative or metal.

Example #1 - Hold Your Colour by Pendulum

Rather than relying exclusively on synthesizers or samples, Hold Your Colour sets itself apart from other DnB tracks right from the intro with the inclusion of guitarist Andrew Goddard and bassist Jon Stockman of Karnivool. In addition, the style of the vocals and lyrics step outside the realm of what we usually expect in a typical electronic music track.

That being said, the key to the song's unique emotional depth lies in its harmonic ambiguity through the use of modal interchange.

In practice, this means that the main progression doesn't reside in a singular key moving from Bb to G to Gm to C to D (also interpreted as G → Bb → Gm → C → D).

At first, the movement between Bb and Gm is typical of G minor (aeolian mode), while the non-diatonic shift from C major to D major has a uplifting character in this context. However, it's the G major to G minor switch that creates a noticable colour change and releases the accumulated tension.

From the intro section, the atmospheric guitar riff (with delay) creates a rhythmic foundation for the vocals, tracing the chord movement from Bb to G/Gm, while the single line of guitar underneath contextualises the composition around G.

Up until the build-up section (around 0:56), we haven't yet firmly established the song's genre. However, this is immediately revealed by the energy of the drum pattern, while the distorted guitars emphasise that non-diatonic shift we mentioned, giving this section an epic, almost triumphant feel.

The true magic of Hold Your Colour lies in the way the transitions wash away harmonic tension, which awakens new energy for the ears of the listener and for dance floors alike.

In the first clear ‘DnB' section (around 1:29), we are presented with a deconstruction, as the arrangement gets stripped back and the distinctive dotted-note LFO synth introduces metric dissonance through syncopation.

What's interesting here is that the energy doesn't drop. Instead, we are freed by the sudden lack of harmonic layers, almost as if we've been unburdened.

As it happens, this is a false state of security because just as a new melody is implied, the song enters a reprise that reintroduces the vocals and guitars from the intro section. This unexpected change feels like being submerged underwater - a thematic concept that runs throughout Pendulum's body of work.

While many high-energy EDM tracks explode into obvious melodic hooks, we are presented with subtlety and understated harmonic duality. Why it's so effective is that it becomes like a Trojan horse. We were never expecting this level of musical depth within a DnB song, and simultaneously can't get enough of it.

Example #2 - Enjoy the Silence by Depeche Mode

Historically, when making some of the most iconic songs in popular music history, the songwriting and music production processes were sometimes completely separated, like opposing hemispheres.

A perfect example of this is Depeche Mode's immortal anthem Enjoy the Silence.

Believe it or not, the song began as a rather moody and poetic love ballad, with a combination of mysterious chords and powerful lyrics written by Martin Gore.

This initial demo was presented to the band in 1989 during the Violator sessions where keyboardist and arranger Alan Wilder and producer Mark ‘Flood’ Ellis were inspired to take the song in a new direction.

Wilder envisioned Enjoy The Silence as an uptempo four-on-the-floor track with a pulsating bass line which would later come from Flood's Roland System 700 synthesizer.

Although Gore was completely against the idea at first, Flood's careful creative coaxing gradually won him over and he began to align with Wilder's vision. In the recording process, one of Gore's key contributions was the scintillating guitar line that plays before each verse.

This was again a point of contention, because Gore felt that using guitars moved away from Depeche Mode’s established identity as a synth-pop band, particularly after the recording of the (now classic) Personal Jesus, which was uncharacteristically built on a guitar riff.

However, after some badgering, Flood managed to convince Gore to pick up his guitar once more, and the first thing he played was that perfect minimalistic guitar riff we hear on the record.

More than anything, this tale demonstrates the power and importance of collaboration, because this melody is so intrinsic to the song's identity and serves as a natural bridge between the tropes of a synth-pop song to the more wider-appeal anthem it became.

The sonic choices made in the production phase are an essential part in the transformation of Enjoy The Silence, drawing from Wilder's orchestration training and Flood's gear knowledge.

At the core of this process is a selection of starkly contrasting analogue and digital instruments.

The call and response between the guitar and choral stabs is a foundational relationship that gives the composition a much larger scale.

Meanwhile, the way the guitar and ARP 2600 pad from the chorus are cleverly mirrored by digital samples from the E-mu Emulator II in the bridge section (around 1:59) seemingly alludes to a journey taking place.

Then, after the final chorus repetition (around 3:24), Wilder creates a symphonic motif with the digital choir voices, which is then harmonised before the horns come in for the final fanfare (around 3:44).

Although some of these instruments might sound a bit basic by today's standards, they were certainly bold choices back in 1990.

However, it's the song's melodic voicing and arrangement that take it out of the synth-pop genre, allowing Enjoy The Silence to break ground into new territory.

This was further exemplified through the subsequent reinterpretation by Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda in 2004, taking things into a darker and heavier direction with his nu-metal and heavier industrial-inspired version.

Example #3 - Walk This Way by Aerosmith and Run-DMC

Another way to create a song that crosses over into new markets is to take an existing song and recontextualize it through the lens of another artist. Although it may have been done before, one of the most significant cultural moments occured when Rick Rubin had the idea to turn Aerosmith's Walk This Way into a fully-fledged collaboration record with Run-DMC in the mid-1980s.

The song still divides opinion today, but at the time it brought rap to a far wider audience, as it got played on rock and pop-orientated radio stations that would never typically give this new style of music the time of day.

From early on in his involvement in New York's hip-hop scene, Rubin saw definitive parallels between the movement and punk. Whether it was the immediacy of the creative process or the DIY spirit, he identified closely with the street art form that would soon become the global phenomenon that continues to shape culture to this day.

At this moment in time, the DJ was central to hip-hop from a creative standpoint, finding ways to select existing songs and isolate sections without vocals that allowed MCs to rap over them.

One of the ways to do this was to use two copies of the same record with a pair of turntables and a mixer, and rhythmically cue up sections and sample stabs from the song in a new arrangement created through performance.

As you can probably guess, one of the records that DJs used in this way was Walk This Way. If you listen to the original version of the song, you immediately hear why, because it starts off with a perfect drum break, followed by that famous guitar lick.

This means that Rubin's inspiration for the Run-DMC collaboration would have come from hearing this song in this new context and seeing the crowd's reaction.

He also felt a sense of duty because, for many years, the raw street sound of hip-hop was not reflected in the records being released. Instead, the majority of early rap records were copy-cats of The Sugarhill Gang - using disco and R&B style instrumentals as backing tracks.

To say that Aerosmith's trajectory was dipping in the mid-1980s would be an understatement, but Steven Tyler and Joe Perry showed up at the studio on their label's request and laid down vocals and guitars over the programmed drum beat with scratching.

Run and D had just finished working on their new album, Raising Hell, and it was difficult to convince them to now create what was essentially a cover song.

Nevertheless, they took Rubin's advice and learned the words and ended up creating the first multi-platinum rap record ever released.

“Everybody flipped out. Me and Run were so puzzled, because the reaction was overwhelming,” said DMC (aka Darryl McDaniels) as quoted in this article from our sister site, Louder. “We didn’t think it was going to be a big hit, but people were loving it.”

Naturally, the newfound success of the rap-laden version of Walk This Way breathed new life into Aerosmith's career, which eventually led to the band signing a further deal with Columbia Records in 1991.

Rather than attempting to make a hit record, Rubin saw producing Walk This Way as an 'experimental exercise'. The idea was to showcase the fact that rap was musically progressive in an exciting way, and this creative outlook stood him in good stead, fuelling a diverse music production career.

In subsequent years, Rubin furthered his genre-enmeshing with the likes of The Beastie Boys, Slayer, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, Johnny Cash, and a huge number of other artists.

So what can we learn from these feats of breaking out of conventional songwriting tropes and reaching new audiences? A key lesson is that collaboration is key and fortune favours the brave.

In the initial creative phase, it's easy for artists to become protective and sentimental when it comes to preserving the integrity of their concepts and ideas. It's also important to note that an artist might not always be the one with the most expansive vision when it comes to their own songs, so creative relationships are essential.

Today, we have advanced stem splitting and pitch shifting tools that allow us to quickly re-imagine any song in any style of music we can imagine, so there’s more scope to easily diversify what we do.

When we move away from viewing a song as a finite entity, it opens up the possibilities to explore it even further as an artist and perhaps reach new audiences in the process.

As so much of the media we consume on a daily basis revolves around trends, it makes sense to use this to our advantage. However, rather than simply following in the footsteps of our favourite artists and bands, crossover songwriting gives us the power to diversify our creative output, which avoids stagnation and enables growth.

So, to put it in an even more straightforward way, if you’re a synth fanatic, all it takes is for you to pick up a guitar (and vice-versa), and you are presented with a completely fresh way of expressing your idea.

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.

Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith had a lot in common. They were both the middle child of three sons, both grew up in a depressed part of the city of Bath in the late 1970s, and both were raised by single mothers. They were also heavily influenced by artists such as Peter Gabriel (particularly his third album) and David Bowie.

Mad World was the duo’s first hit in the guise of Tears for Fears, climbing to the dizzy heights of number three in the UK chart in 1982. Its origins were a fusion of lived experience and emotions, with a sound similar to a song that was then lighting up the airwaves.

“We were living above a pizza place on Barton Street, near the Theatre Royal in Bath,” The song's writer, Roland Orzabal told Songwriting Magazine. “I was looking out of the window and seeing these people go on their merry way to work and the whole rat race thing. Being an adolescent who’d never had any real responsibility other than at school, I was critical of [all that] so I wrote Mad World. A song came on the radio, it was Girls On Film by Duran Duran, and it had this rhythm that I stole - not that theirs was original!”

Orzabal’s detached observation of the ‘rat race’ was imparted by the song’s opening lines.

All around me are familiar faces
Worn-out places, worn-out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere

Beyond his skepticism of the ‘rat race’, Mad World was also quite a personal piece for Roland. As he told The Guardian, “I had suffered from depression in my childhood. My dad had been in the second world war, had electric shock treatment, suffered from anxiety and was abusive to my mum. I kept a lid on my feelings at school but, when I was 18, dropped out of everything and couldn't even be bothered to get out of bed. I poured all this into the song.”

This autobiographical element is starkly evident in the song’s second verse:

Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello, teacher, tell me what's my lesson
Look right through me, look right through me

Initially, Roland and Curt had been members of a five-piece mod power-pop/ska band called Graduate. But, a brief two week tour of Germany was enough to inform the soon-to-be TFF duo that the touring life of motorways, vans and lugging gear, was not for them.

With artists such as Gary Numan, Depeche Mode and OMD influencing the charts, the focus was shifting away from guitars to electronic technology, and Orzabal and Smith split away from the band, delving headfirst into a strange new world of synthesizers and drum machines, even though the guitar was at the heart of the original writing and demo phase for Mad World.

“When I wrote Mad World it sounded pretty bad, to be honest with you," Roland said to Songwriting Magazine. "I couldn’t sing it very well, because my voice is designed for acrobatics and drama, enunciation and doing crazy things, and shooting up into falsetto. So I wasn’t sure about the song at all.”

Ultimately, it was Curt who ended up taking the song’s lead vocal. “Mad World was easy for me to sing because I could relate to Roland's lyrics. We were both the middle of three sons and had been brought up by single mothers with absent fathers,” Curt told The Guardian.

A chance meeting with keyboard player Ian Stanley proved pivotal. Also residing in Bath, Stanley met the duo, and offered them the opportunity to use his home studio equipment, then consisting of a fairly state of the art Roland Jupiter-4 and CR-78 CompuRhythm drum machine, an MXR pitch transposer and, most importantly, a multi-track tape machine.

The pair’s love of Peter Gabriel prompted them toward some immediate experimentation, which Stanley was a little sceptical about at first. They tried recording drum parts in reverberant rooms. Varying tape speed further augmented their results.

The opening of Mad World centred around a basic percussive groove, which sounded completely unlike anything else. According to Roland Orzabal, they recorded it via the CR-78 at much faster tape speed; slowing the tape down to create a completely different sound. Throw some acoustic drums into the mix and the arrangement had a distinctive rhythmic bedrock.

One of the common traits of early synthpop centred around simplicity. In some instances, minimal arrangements were dictated by the equipment available. This as an aesthetic that is integral to unpicking Mad World.

After the initial intro, we hear our first hint of the chordal structure of the verse, initially supplied by a single note on a synth. With a note/chord occupying each bar, we hear the notes F#, A, E and B, all in octaves and played in a low register over the first 8 bars of the verse.

The sequence is then repeated, but with the addition of a further singular note, much higher in register. This starts to give us a hint of the background harmony, although we have already received many clues from the lead vocal part.

F# minor is followed by A major, E major and B major, which we hear in a further two cycles, making another eight bars.

In total, we hear the sequence four times, adding up to a full 16 bars. The synth part is sustained against the punctuating rhythms, continuing from the introduction section.

As we move to the pre-chorus bridge and chorus sections, the harmony becomes more static, but uplifting too, thanks to the use of just two chords. F# minor is followed by chord IV - B major.

This is particularly pertinent, as the major tonality of chord IV provides an element of brightness, contrasting the slightly depressed nature of the vocals (by Roland Orzabal’s own admission!)

The use of these two chords, one bar at a time, continues throughout the chorus section. Following its sense of simplicity, the chorus continues to adopt minimal sensibilities, with the continued repetition of the phrase ‘mad world’.

If we analyze this further, the chordal movement rises from F#m to B, whereas the vocal line falls from the note A to an F#. We have the downward vocal of ‘mad world’, juxtaposed with the optimism of a raise in the harmony, to a major chord IV. It’s gorgeous stuff.

As the arrangement develops in terms of instrumentation, a piano part plays in the chorus, in intervals of a 6th. This figure moves downward in pitch, before resting on the chord of B, before also introducing an added 4th to the harmony, much like a sus4 chord.

The resulting chord, which consists of the notes F#, D# and E, over a B in the bass, implies a further feeling of optimism within its heavily repeated pattern.

By the time we reach the third verse, we hear a slightly different arrangement. In the first instance, it is entirely instrumental, with lots of curious synth sounds making brief entries in various locations of the stereo spectrum, in a verse form which is only eight bars in length, rather than the previous 16 bars. This hastens the return to the bridge and chorus before we reach the end of the song.

A couple of decades on, and Mad World received an admirable makeover and rearrangement from Michael Andrews and Gary Jules, released in 2003. In a much slower and far more pianistic form, the song was used in the sci-fi/horror masterpiece Donnie Darko.

Seizing an unnerved, post-9/11 zeitgeist, this version of Mad World oddly became the UK Christmas number one in 2003, fighting off cheerier competition from the likes of The Darkness. With its success, more people were made aware of the oft-forgotten brilliance of this early Tears for Fears hit.

“That was probably the proudest moment of my career,” Roland recalled in an interview with The Guardian on the success of the 2003 cover. “I was in my 40s and had forgotten how I felt when I wrote all those Tears for Fears songs. I thought: 'Thank God for the 19-year-old Roland Orzabal. Thank God he got depressed.'

Released in 1984 as the closing track on the movie soundtrack album of the same name, Purple Rain is one of Prince’s signature songs. However, although it has the great man’s magic sprinkled all over it - not least in the form of an epic guitar solo - Prince didn’t write and record it in isolation.

Purple Rain has just been given a new lease of chart life thanks to its use in the finale of Netflix series Stranger Things, which was released at the turn of the new year. Without giving anything away, we can tell you that, along with When Doves Cry, another track on the Purple Rain soundtrack, it plays a crucial role in the show’s denouement, and the song has now stirred the emotions of a whole new generation of listeners.

It could have sounded very different, though, without the involvement of Prince’s band at the time, The Revolution.

The story goes that Prince originally sent an instrumental of what would become Purple Rain to Stevie Nicks, wondering if she might be able to write some lyrics and collaborate on it. However, with a certain amount of regret, Nicks turned him down.

"It was so overwhelming, that 10-minute track … I listened to it and I just got scared," she told The Guardian in 2011. "I called him back and said, 'I can't do it. I wish I could. It's too much for me.' I'm so glad that I didn't, because he wrote it, and it became Purple Rain."

Prince then brought the bones of the song to The Revolution. “He just said, ‘I have this song idea, and it goes a little something like this,’” recalled guitarist Wendy Melvoin in an interview with Vertex Effects.

Describing what he played them, she says, “It’s like this little country tune, played with triads on the piano. He had the melody and he had words, and he said ‘What are you all going to come with? What can you do? What’s your thing on this?’”

Melvoin’s ‘thing’, it turned out, would be crucially important, as she took those simple triads and extended them.

“I thought to myself, ‘how do I make those chords bloom with this very simple melody?’” she remembers. “And I stretched the chords out.”

What Melvoin means is that she took those triads that Prince had played - Bb, Gm, F and Eb - and added colour, playing the progression as Bbsus2, Gm11, Fadd9 and Ebadd9. “I call them bluer notes,” she says of her changes. “I gave it more blue notes.”

Speaking to The Guardian, Lisa Coleman - Melvoin’s close musical collaborator and keyboard player with The Revolution - remembered that Prince’s ears pricked up when he heard what Wendy was doing.

“He was excited to hear it voiced differently,” she said. “It took it out of that country feeling. Then we all started playing it a bit harder and taking it more seriously. We played it for six hours straight and by the end of that day we had it mostly written and arranged.”

Fellow Revolution keyboard player Matt Fink also remembers it being a team effort. Speaking to John McKie for his 2025 book Prince: A Sign o’ the Times, he said: “When I heard Purple Rain” I thought ‘He’s got it’. What was great about Purple Rain is that he had the chord progression, he had the lyrics, [but] they weren’t finished. He took the song into rehearsal and we’re jamming it and we’re running through the chord progression and I’m playing the high singing part with the right hand and next thing you know he’s singing along to it. That’s part of the song.’”

Purple Rain was performed for the first time on 3 August 1983 at the First Avenue nightclub in Minneapolis, with Wendy’s guitar intro stretched out for several minutes. It was the recording of this performance that formed the basis of the finished version that you hear on the album and see in the semi-autobiographical movie.

And, although it isn’t true that Purple Rain is “a song the girls in the band wrote, Lisa and Wendy” - the line Prince’s character The Kid delivers just before it’s performed - it’s also fair to say that both they and the rest of The Revolution were heavily involved in its creation.

Such is the sonic force of Raye’s single Where Is My Husband! that it would be easy to assume that it was recorded in a studio packed with musicians. However, co-writer/producer Mike Sabath has revealed that the number of players and instruments involved was actually surprisingly small.

Speaking in a new Mix with the Masters series that breaks down the song, Sabath lets us in on the secret of its production. “Even though it sounds gigantic in terms of the amount of instruments, this song is literally drums, bass, fresh elements.. and then one of the greatest singers of our time,” he says.

It’s probably the last of these that’s had the biggest impact on Where Is My Husband!’s slow-burn success. We first got to hear it way back in June 2025, when Raye opened her Glastonbury Festival set with the song, but it wasn’t actually released until 19 September.

Despite charting highly right from the off, it took until 2 January 2026 for Where Is My Husband! To reach number 1 in the UK, and it’s just hit its peak in the US, too, rising to number 13.

Raye herself previously discussed the complex vocal arrangement in the song in a couple of Instagram videos, and Sabath is clearly in awe of her talent. “She’s just ridiculous,” he says at one point, before adding that Raye created the bridge arrangement on her own while he was out of the studio for the day.

“I was like, ‘This is either too much or like the sickest of all time,’" he says of hearing it for the first time. “And it ultimately ended up being super great.”

Sabath also discusses the closing section that follows the now iconic ‘Your husband is coming’ spoken line (delivered by Raye’s real-life grandmother), noting that “I felt like it wanted to have this moment that felt like it could soar over 100,000 people.”

Going back to Where Is My Husband!’s beginnings, Sabath remembers that the song started with the drum groove (drums are his first instrument), that was created with the help of the Addictive Drums plugin. He also explains why the finished song starts with a drum roll: “When there’s a drum roll, you are presenting something. You are making a statement - you’re beginning the show.”

“That to me helped me understand the function of this song,” he continues, adding that it made him realise that this was the first song that needed to come out from Raye’s second album to reintroduce Raye as a “global queen superstar.”

The full series is available to subscribers now on the Mix with the Masters website.

One thing certain about 2026 is that the ongoing debate about the place of AI in music will continue to rage. It’s a subject virtually every high-profile artist has been asked about, with many - such as Brian May, Kehlani and country singer songwriter Breland - being openly critical.

Now Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan of Slipknot has made his feelings known and put himself firmly in the pro camp. In a new interview with The Escapist, the percussionist and co-founder of the metal icons has said he’s “employing it 190%” and has described it as “a professor in my pocket who only wants to do what I ask it.”

For Crahan, AI doesn’t just mean tools such as ChatGPT that have come to market in the last few years. He says: “I’ve been using AI my whole life,” claiming that he has used technology to turn “thousands and thousands” of poems he’s written since he was young into new creative forms, by saying: “Here are my words. Don’t change them. Don’t alter them. But show me some different ways to sing it.”

Partly, claims the Slipknot man, it’s a matter of expense. “What’s the difference between me pulling out my pocket producer… or me trying to get a famous producer that might not even work with me and could potentially cost me $150,000… who will only give me one or two ways – I’m not mentioning any names!”

Crahan does note that the human element is still the most important facet: “But it’s still going to take me to sing it. And it will never be like it was,” he adds. “None of it can work without you, the human. It’s a giant oracle… but it needs you.”

It should be pointed out that not everyone in the Slipknot camp feels the same way. When interviewed by Kerrang Radio about the subject back in 2023, Corey Taylor said he “can’t stand it.”

The frontman said of AI: “It’s an even worse example of technology taking over for talent than what I’ve been ranting about for years with Pro Tools and tuning and using the same sounds. And people keep going, ‘Oh, isn’t it cool?’ I’m, like, no, it’s not cool. What are you - out of your mind?”

It’s the debut hit that launched a multi-decade career. A track that’s testament to a band’s tenacity, talent and more than a little right time/right place, good old-fashioned good luck. It’s spawned multiple unlikely cover versions. It's The Guardian’s greatest UK number one ever. And it reached number one in the UK 40 years ago this week.

While an all-time classic today, it’s worth remembering that in its day, West End Girls was just an unlikely English rap track from an unlikely new synth duo (just as synth duos were going out of style) and a song that had unequivocally flopped all across the globe a year earlier.

The original version of West End Girls was produced by U.S. Hi-NRG producer Bobby Orlando for his own Bobcat Records and released through ZYX in Europe. The story goes that vocalist Neil Tennant, then the Associate Editor of UK pop magazine Smash Hits, was on assignment to New York to interview The Police in advance of their Shea Stadium gig in August of 1983. However, spotting a gap in his schedule, he sneakily stole some downtime in order to visit someone he’d much rather be speaking to.

Using the magazine’s sway, Tennant had secured an audience with Orlando (aka Bobby O) and, after hitting it off, Tennant played a demo of his unnamed band’s hit-in-waiting, Opportunities, recorded at the Camden 8 studio.

It was audibly inspired by Orlando’s work of the time, and a flattered Bobby O enthused that they should make a record together, and just three short weeks later Tennant, plus keyboard player Chris Lowe, were in Unique Studios off Times Square, New York with a publishing deal and an in-progress instrumental attracting Orlando’s attention.

Here today, built to last

“I had written a rap and I thought I could do it over this music. It was the first time I ever sang West End Girls,” Tennant explains in the band’s 2006 Life In Pop documentary. “Chris hadn’t even heard it over the music.”

“I was staying at my cousin Richard’s house outside Nottingham and he and I had stayed up watching some kind of James Cagney gangster film on the television,” describes Tennant regarding his rap’s origin.

“I was sleeping in this tiny single bed and for some reason the line ‘sometimes you’re better off dead, there’s a gun in your hand and it’s pointing at your head’ came into my head. So I got out of bed and wrote it down on a piece of paper.

“Then when I got back to my flat in the King’s Road I lay on my floor one night and wrote the whole thing,” he writes in the booklet for the 2001 re-release of debut album, Please.

Orlando’s take on the song is a far rougher and more raw proposition than the polished global hit of 1985, sharing many of the tropes of his other productions of the time, such as Passion by The Flirts and Divine’s Native Love (Step By Step).

With the tech still inching out of its primordial ooze, multi-instrumentalist Orlando would wrestle with the synchronisation of his early synths, drum machines and Emu Emulator sampler, resorting to playing each robotic part by hand, while trying to sound as mechanical as possible.

And while Orlando’s take certainly still has its earworm charm, with explosive Emulator drums sampling the kick and snare from David Bowie’s Let’s Dance (as many records would go on to do), the song failed to detonate upon its release in April 1984.

While a modest US club hit, its Euro import would only reach number 133 in the UK, while just scraping the French top 30. Meanwhile, its follow-up, the Orlando-produced One More Chance, failed to capitalise, failing to chart precisely anywhere.

Sometimes you're better off dead

With Orlando busy dodging litigation from other acts, it seemed that his ‘p-a-s-s-i-o-n’ for the Pet Shop Boys was soon on the wane, and feeling trapped in a contract with a producer who never seemed to finish anything, the band made the bold move to pay off Orlando with a cut of future royalties in return for ‘one more chance’ elsewhere.

However, with Orlando’s productions as their calling card, the band were able to attract the attention of manager Tom Watkins. Watkins – the man best known for birthing Bros and East 17 – brokered a deal with EMI’s Parlophone and put them in the studio with J.J. Jeczalik and Nicholas Froome (two of Trevor Horn’s backroom boys at Sarm Studios) to make a go of Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money).

Unfortunately, their first major label release only fared a little better than their Bobby O output, reaching 116 in the UK.

What to do next?

“We wanted to release West End Girls again after we signed to Parlophone but we had to rerecord it because we didn’t own the recording,” explains Tennant and, after admiring Stephen Hague's work on the World Famous Supreme Team’s Hey DJ and Malcolm McLaren’s Madame Butterfly, had a new producer in his sights.

"We met a couple of times but I wasn't too thrilled with their material at the time,” recalled Hague to Music Technology magazine in 1988. “I did like West End Girls though, because it seemed as though Neil was born to sing it – everything was working for his voice. I also like them personally too so when EMI secured the recording rights, we began work on West End Girls and, with the band's blessing, I started to change the track.”

Hague went to town, being inspired by the original but choosing to play and program every instrument himself and even change its tempo, music and lyrics. “I wanted to slow it down, change the bar structure, and tidy up some of the lyrics,” Hague explained.

“We brought back the Major seventh chord as well, which hadn't been on the landscape for a while… I wrote the chords at the beginning and the end… I guess I should have pushed for a cut of the publishing, but I was a little green at the time,” he admitted to the 80sography podcast.

Recording took place at London’s Advision Studio in June 1985, and, thanks to the only live instrument being a single cymbal strike at 2:11 – their Studio 2 – a small but well-equipped, remix/overdub suite – fitted the bill perfectly. With house engineer David Jacobs at the controls, he and Hague set to work.

Which do you choose? A hard or soft option?

Using an Oberheim DMX the pair programmed the drums for the entirety of the track, syncing it to its own bespoke time code recorded on track 23 (with track 24 on the studio’s Otari MTR90 being reserved for driving the automation of the SSL desk).

“There was very little pre-production necessary because the previous recording of the track was there as a very thorough demo,” Jacobs explained to International Musician & Recording World in 1986. “We used the time code in case we wanted to change things, but in the event, the only thing we added was a shaker.”

As for the mis-quantised tambourine hit on bar six of both verses (the sixth tambourine hit, instead of appearing on the snare beat, pops up an 8th too early – listen carefully) jury’s out on whether this was deliberate or a glitch in the DMX.

And while there’s no mistaking that West End Girls’ is a hi-tech record with the backroom takeover of drum machines and programmable sequencers in full swing by 1985, liberating music from musicians and placing it into the hands of music lovers with good ideas instead, it’s surprising just how much of West End Girls is actually played live.

With the Oberheim operating very much in its own world, the track’s conga part – consisting of two sounds from an Emu Emulator II sampler – was played entirely by hand. Recorded simultaneously to separate tracks via the keyboard’s separate outs, the lower conga was given a repeat echo on the desk.

Likewise, the riff at the end of the chorus, was composed of a pitched-up choir sample and because “it didn't have enough attack to cut through, we added a cowbell,” Jacobs explains. This tight, rhythmic part was programmed on a Roland MSQ-700 sequencer. However, with the MSQ unable to sync with the DMX’s code, Hague and Jacobs fired in the sequence ‘live’ each time they needed it, hitting Play on the MSQ at just the right moment.

That same Emulator choir is used in the solo too. Ah yes, West End Girls’ trumpet solo – another airing of the over-worked Emulator II with the trumpet sound from its factory library. Again, it’s played live, and, with the band not in attendance, performed by Steven Hague himself.

Inspired by a snatch of melody from the sample cacophony in the bridge of the original version, Hague borrowed five notes from Orlando’s solo (“I said to Neil, well, you own the master…”) and took that as inspiration for a whole new trumpet line.

“I did it as one take. It was just me dicking around. I’m not much of a player player at all,” Hague admits. Jacobs, however, has another recollection. “It took about six hours to get the trumpet part to sound genuine, purposely playing wrong notes to make it sound more 'jazz',” he recalls. Lowe agrees, stating in the album’s re-release booklet, “He spent ages doing it.”

Another new addition to the track was backing vocals. With Tennant simply doubling his vocals an octave down during the choruses, there were no harmony parts to speak of. Thus, backing singer Helena Springs was given free reign to contribute whatever the seasoned session pro could come up with.

“Helena just sang ideas all through the track, the best of which we then sampled into the Emulator so that we could spin them in wherever we wanted,” explained Jacobs. In the end, just two of her lines made the cut, with “How much do you need?” appearing twice and “How far have you been?” three times.

Meanwhile Tennant’s own vocals were recorded with two mics, a Neumann KM84i for the verses – “to get the full bottom end” – while the choruses were recorded with a Neumann U87, “which I never use for vocals because you can't get any top out of them, but Neil's voice is very sibilant, so it worked well in this case,” explained Jacobs.

There’s a madman around

All of which just leaves West End Girls’ distinctive, thudding bass part. Again, it’s all played live, and pop TV viewers of the time will recall being introduced to Lowe, the band’s silent partner, as he battered the hell out of the bottom octave of a scissor-standed PPG Wave 2.2.

In an age where mimed TV appearances were the norm, keyboard players would more usually grasp ownership of any lead line or dramatic musical ‘event’ in a track regardless of where it came from. Guitar and sax solos would suddenly become keyboard fare… Multiple fingers would be outstretched… Arms would vigorously jab and pierce the air… And faces would be pulled as if it were their eyebrows that were making the sound.

So when Lowe opted for the repetitive chore of solemnly finger-banging West End Girls’ bassline while his right arm took the night off, audiences were – at the very least – intrigued. Indeed, UK DJ Steve Wright introduces the Pet Shop Boys debut Top of The Pop performance (video above) as, “A most unusual song from an unusual band”…

“When West End Girls started to take off, it was then that we started to think about the presentation of ourselves,” Tennant mulls in their 2006 documentary A Life in Pop. “What were we going to look like? What were we going to do? We didn’t have ‘an act’.”

But a performer chin down, dodging eye contact and radiating that he really didn’t want to be there WAS an act, and would stick in both the public’s throat and consciousness simultaneously. The band’s routine ‘non-performance’ of the song would become the talk of the playground and workplace after every ‘do we really have to?’ TV appearance.

Thus Lowe’s diligent bass duties during West End Girls’ promotion played a huge part in successfully minting the band’s much-loved, stand-offish, anti-pop ‘Mr Posh and Mr Grumpy’ Smash Hits persona that still endures to this day. “Reluctance was very much built into the concept,” Tennant admits.

And Lowe has continued in jobsworth ‘I just do basslines’ mode for practically every TV performance ever since.

And that bass sound? Not generated by the PPG Wave 2.2 and Waveterm sampling module that were routinely wheeled out for Lowe to hide behind, but the combined output of three completely different synths: A Yamaha DX7 – the de rigueur digital FM synth of the moment – a Roland Jupiter 6 – the poor relation younger brother to their flagship analogue Jupiter 8 and Roland’s first keyboard with MIDI – and an Emu Emulator II – the ‘affordable’ sampling keyboard (which still cost $8000 or about $25,000 in today’s money) which would go on to earn legendary status in Ferris Bueller’s bedroom and countless subsequent Pet Shop Boys TV outings.

“The DX-7 voice was a very low pitched, percussive sound; it didn't have much of a note but it gave the thing depth and attack,” explains Jacobs. “The Jupiter provided the body of the sound, and the Emu II was actually playing a bass drum sample, the pitch of which changed as it was played on the keyboard to add some punch.” All three keyboards were then simply daisy-chained with MIDI leads – Out to In, Thru to In – and played and recorded live.

A final dash of stereo spread via the studio staple of the time, the AMS DMX 15-80S stereo harmonizer, completes the sound, “with a setting of 0.999 on one side, 0.998 on the other and the uneffected signal in the middle,” revealed Jacobs. “When mixing to digital, it gives a kind of ADT or wavering effect that the rock-solidness of digital can lack.”

The Emulator II (this time teamed with the older Emulator I) would also provide perhaps the song’s most memorable and moody elements – its slow, legato strings. Both Emulators play the same part with the I using its Strings preset (a sound and part directly borrowed from the Orlando version) and the II serving up its more complex (and famous) Marcato Strings alternative. “There's also a third low string part that we did on the Emulator II to give it some depth,” says Jacobs.

It’s worth noting that Marcato Strings also appears all over the band’s debut album, Please, each time replacing what could/would/should have been synth chords with the ‘real’ sound of an orchestra instead. Thus, the preset would become a major part of defining the PSB’s sound and effectively gave ‘just another synth duo’ their own unique, enduring signature.

A dive bar, in a West End town

But let’s rewind to the start. Just what are we hearing in the track’s famous, instantly recognisable intro before its first explosive snare drum?

Seeking to inject some ‘street’ vibes into the track, and armed with the new Sony Professional Walkman WM-D6C – a larger, ‘pro’ version of their world-conquering portable cassette players that, this time, featured the record heads that its forebears had stripped away – producer Hague walked the mean streets around London’s Advision studio harvesting whatever the night would throw at him.

And while the D6C was still only a mere cassette recorder, its fresh-for-’84 Dolby C noise reduction does a mean job of keeping the sound sufficiently high-end even by today’s standards.

So what can we hear? Well, there’s West End Girls’ unmistakable ‘city ambience’… And that car horn… Those high heels on pavement… But there are other more remarkable and long-debated insertions too.

Ever wondered just what the girl in the intro is singing?

In every city, in every nation

Advision Studios were at 23 Gosfield Street, Fitzrovia, London, and, being in the heart of the trendy capital, had some similarly high-profile neighbours. Such as Simon Napier-Bell, the then manager of pop flavour of the day, Wham, whose Nomis Management (Nomis is Simon backwards) had their office directly opposite at number 17.

Once word had got out that George Michael and/or Andrew Ridgely would very occasionally stop by for a debrief, the narrow street between Wham HQ and Advision had acquired a 24/7 detail of weary Wham fans, ever hopeful for an encounter with their heroes.

Thus, anyone entering or leaving the studio would have to run Wham’s gauntlet, and so it was, on the fateful night that Hague took to the streets to capture London’s contribution to West End Girls.

Hague recalls approaching that night’s Wham deployment, whereupon one spotted that he was holding a tape machine and a microphone and, buoyed by the group's shared hysteria, actively worked to ensure that they were immortalised. “Get on the my-eye-cro-pho-ooown for-eeever…” they sing sarcastically as Hague passes, simultaneously becoming a part of his nocturnal recording, and a key, unwitting, uncredited performer on one of the most enduring pop records of the past century.

And thanks to detective work by mu:zines’ Ben and Kirk D. Keyes of synthroom.com (who was privy to Hague’s tapes as part of prep for planned but aborted first Pet Shop Boys live show) we can enjoy this performance, here, isolated, 40 years later.

That their impromptu vocal is perfectly in tune with the inaudible-to-them and yet-to-be-finished track is unfathomable, but the moment – forever frozen in pop – is clearly audible at 14 seconds in and, if you listen very carefully, even gets an encore at 4:04.

Tennant also describes in the Please re-release booklet how Hague also recorded one of Wham’s acolytes blurting “It’s Sting!” as he approached. “If you listen carefully, you can hear a girl at 0:05,” he says, Hague’s mistaken identity due to the fact that, like much of fashionable London in 1985, he was sporting the same spiky bleached blonde ‘do’ as the Police frontman. “Stephen Hague looks a bit like Sting,” Lowe confirms.

However, while Keyes HAS been able to ascertain that this is indeed true, and such a recording exists – the girl says “It’s Sting!” and then, disappointed, “That’s not Sting…” – this part of the tape was not used on the finished West End Girls as Tennant assumed. Actually.

Upon returning to the studio, Hague had been particularly pleased with the passing cars and the click of the heels on the street, and hastily plugged his Walkman into the desk. “I wound the tape back to the start and said, ‘Let’s just see if we’ve got anything’. I hit play and David hit play on the multitrack… And it was exactly like it sounds on the record… There were no edits, no anything… And the girl singing the little song… And the car driving away… I said ‘Shit, we should have recorded that!’ and David said ‘I did record it…’ And that was the record. I took that as some kind of sign.”

Faces on posters, too many choices

Likewise, some kind of trickery was afoot in the song’s video directed by Andy Morahan and PSB photographer and style guardian Eric Watson. The video features – in order of appearance – a deserted Wentworth Street (part of Petticoat Lane Market), bustling Waterloo Station, the South Bank, Leicester Square, and anti-apartheid protesters outside the South African embassy on Trafalgar Square.

It also memorably stars a ghostly, transparent Chris Lowe, faded in from a second take of each shot, and the duo fleetingly become a trio when, unbeknownst to the band, Tennant and Lowe are joined by a passing rough sleeper, who magically walks in sync with the track during their 0:34 reveal.

And second time around, West End Girls certainly had some kind of mojo. Following its October 28th release in 1985, the single charted in the UK on November 16th at number 80. From there it rose, week by week, 59… 40… With its number 23 position earning them the Top of the Pops debut, above. From there, a final ascent to the summit of Mount Pop ensued.

9… 5… 4… 3… Narrowly missing the coveted Christmas number one slot, before – with his Christmas bubble having burst – dethroning Shakin’ Stevens’ Merry Christmas Everyone on January 5th 1986 – 40 years ago this week.

The song would also top the charts ‘from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station’ (or more accurately Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, Norway and the States) shifting 1.5 million copies in total, and staying on the US Billboard Chart for 20 weeks.

Its success would help shift over one million copies of debut album Please in the States alone, was crowned The Greatest UK Number 1 Ever in by The Guardian in 2020 and would spearhead an onslaught of hit Pet Shop Boys singles across the decades to follow.

And, of course, it’s spawned an inevitable raft of genre-spanning recreations from – among many others – East 17, Sleaford Mods, Prayers (featuring Travis Barker), The HotRats and even West End Girls by… err… West End Girls… And special props to The Flight of the Conchords’ Inner City Pressure of course.

Meanwhile Pet Shop Boys themselves continue to record and tour to this day. New album Disco 5 out now and – in addition to their ongoing Dreamworld stadium gigs – a series of five intimate live shows at London’s Electric Ballroom are planned for April 2026, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their debut album, Please.

“People endlessly ask us what it’s like having a number one,” Tennant told Smash Hits back in 1986. “But what it feels like is vaguely nothing. It feels like having a cup of tea”.

Perhaps following 40 years of plaudits, he may be a little more effusive about his band’s biggest hit.

But we wouldn’t bank on it.

BEST OF 2025: Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that topped MusicRadar's charts in 2025.

The 1970s in the UK was a grim place, with strikes and poverty casting a long shadow over the decade. But as the decade drew to a close, the musical landscape was changing.

The mid 70s had given rise to the punk era, with bands riding the crest of the punk new wave. One such band was a four-piece called Tubeway Army, fronted by Gary Numan. Signed to the Beggars Banquet label, they had recorded a couple of singles but had made little impact.

It was around this time that Gary Numan had his first experience with a synthesiser. As the story goes, he walked into a studio and found a Minimoog in the corner, which was set to a patch that was so powerful, it made the entire room shake.

Numan immediately recognised the power that could be utilised with this innovative contraption, and set about embellishing existing songs with all-new synth parts.

Perhaps inspired by the futuristic sounds he was now keenly exploring, Numan penned the track Are ‘Friends’ Electric?

It was a curious title for a song which drew influence from dystopian novels by JG Ballard and Philip K. Dick. Thematically, Numan was envisioning a London some 30 years in the future. The titular ‘Friends', well, they were robots, called upon to provide all forms of services.

Many late at night…

As Numan recalled to The Guardian in 2014, “The lyrics came from short stories I'd written about what London would be like in 30 years. These machines – "Friends" – come to the door. They supply services of various kinds, but your neighbours never know what they really are since they look human. The one in the song is a prostitute, hence the inverted commas. It was released in May 1979 and sold a million copies. I had a No 1 single with a song about a robot prostitute and no one knew."

Numan recalls that he wrote the song on an old pub piano, that was incredibly out of tune. Not only that, but the finished article was the combination of two different songs, joined together.

“The main melody is one note sharp, since I hit a wrong note on the old piano, and it sounded better,” Numan explained to the Guardian. “I ended up recording it on a [Moog] Polymoog synthesiser played with one finger. It sounded very different and futuristic, but there was still some bass and drums in there, so people had something familiar to connect with.”

Given that Tubeway Army were originally a guitar based punk band, it's interesting that the song isn’t reliant upon guitar chords. Instead, acoustic drums and electric bass form the bedrock, while various monophonic lines imply the song’s harmony, played on the Polymoog or sung by Numan.

The song adopts a mid-tempo feel, which feels pacy, due to the 16th-note hi-hat pattern which provides drive and direction. The kick and snare drums accentuate beats 1 & 3, and 2 & 4 respectively, providing a backbeat which is almost reminiscent of a funk groove, but without the heavy shuffle feel. It's there by implication, thanks to the accents in the hi-hat part.

Meanwhile, the bass pins down the harmony; the song is a little out of tune with traditional concert pitch, but it's closest key relative is C major. From the outset, the bass part plays a basic rhythmic part, which alternates from C to Bb every two beats.

The main ubiquitous synth riff emphasises the harmony, but by using open chords or 5ths. Playing one beat at a time, the riff shifts from a C and G, to a Bb and F. this repeats, but with the final F replaced by a high Bb and E, played as 1/8th notes quavers.

The use of these last two notes is interesting, as the final E serves to pre-empt the return to a chord of C. It's also the only time that we clearly hear the third of a chord in this riff, which is the note that endorses the major tonality. It’s this use of open harmony that adds to the enigmatic nature of the entire song.

The structure of the song is also open to debate, as it does not conform to the more usual verse and chorus elements. The first vocal that we hear could certainly be regarded as the verse, but with no lyrical content in the second section of the song, it debatably means that what we could call the chorus an instrumental section, except for a hint of vocal ‘Oo’, following the synth line.

During this second ‘instrumental chorus’ section, there is a seismic shift to what we could describe as a pedal note. This musical device occurs in the bass part, sustaining an F, which remains static while the harmony above it moves. In this case, the upper synth line implies a harmony of C/F, which resolves to F. It does this twice, using an arpeggiated rising synth line, before repeating the sequence.

By way of similarity, the shift to the bridge section relies entirely on even more arpeggiated synth lines, which heavily endorse the harmony. During the first part of the bridge, we hear the implied chords of G minor 7, D minor 7, F major 7 and C major 7. While the presence of the minor chords feels entirely appropriate, the use of implied major 7 chords, with their undoubted sense of sweetness, is underplayed thanks to the use of the arpeggiation. There is no sense of saccharine here, keeping the overall production darker in style.

A further interesting trait in the section is the use of spoken word, rather than any identifiable vocal melody. It leaves the canvas free for the synth line to do all of the heavy lifting, with more hooks and melodies.

In line with many other songs from this era, the approach to harmony and construct could be construed as simplistic, but this is precisely that gives the song its strength. However, it doesn't prevent the odd portamento glide, produced on the Moog, to add further colour and interest between sections.

Are ‘Friends' Electric? undoubtedly put Gary Numan on the musical map. He was one of the first to kickstart the use of synths in mainstream pop, and is regarded as a synth pioneer, despite his continued flirting with the rockier side of music.

Shortly after this hit, he dropped the Tubeway Army moniker, before the release of his next single, Cars, which turned out to be an even bigger success!

BEST OF 2025: Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that topped MusicRadar's charts in 2025.

It might have been her vision, but Lily Allen’s West End Girl – the hit ‘autofiction’ album that documents the ‘opening’ of a marriage and its subsequent breakdown in bruising detail – was very much a team effort.

Confirmation of this can be found in the credits: there are no fewer than 10 different producers (including Allen herself) and a lengthy list of songwriting collaborators.

Now Violet Skies (AKA Hannah Berney), a songwriter from Wales who contributed to multiple tracks on West End Girl including viral single Madeline, has been speaking about her experience of working on the record, which was written and recorded in Los Angeles over a 10-day period last year.

In an interview with Grazia, Skies describes being given just a couple of weeks notice to get to the LA home of Blue May, Allen’s long-time collaborator, and says that the star had a strong outline of the album right from the outset.

“Lily arrived with the song titles, which is really very unusual,” she explains. “She would come in and say, ‘Right, I want to write a song called Dallas Major,’ and we’re like, ‘OK, let’s have some backstory.’”

Allen certainly had plenty of material to draw on, but given how personal the subject matter was, Skies had to approach the sessions with a degree of sensitivity.

“These are very real feelings Lily had,” she says. “It was very intense, some 12-hour days. The day we wrote Relapse was a night-time studio session at Blue’s house, but earlier we’d been writing Madeline, so it was very heavy, and you have to really talk through the process enough to work out what she wants to say.

“On days like that, it was like playing tennis with Lily. I’d throw some melodies or lyrics, and she’d throw some back. Sometimes she would hand me a whole paragraph of thoughts and then we’d organise them.”

This wasn’t a group of people crowded round a laptop, though – Skies says that the studio was full of people playing guitars, piano and drums.

“It felt like days I had as a teenager in a band, writing live in the room,” she remembers. “That’s not normal these days. Many songwriting sessions have less and less real instruments, it’s just a computer.”

Speaking to BBC News, Skies stressed how invested Allen was in the project, and how open she was to collaboration. She also believes that, given the story it tells, West End Girl deserves to be consumed whole rather piecemeal.

"Making this album with friends I've known for years is a massive part of the reason I'm so proud of these songs,” she says. “Please listen top to bottom."

BEST OF 2025: Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that topped MusicRadar's charts in 2025.

We can’t fully explain why André 3000 rocked up at this year's Met Gala with a grand piano strapped to his back – how could it ever make sense? – but it turns out that there was a reason. To coincide with the fashion spectacular, the star released 7 piano sketches, a brief collection of improvised piano jams.

This marked 3000’s first release since 2023’s New Blue Sun, the jazzy instrumental wind album that was nominated for three Grammy Awards. The roots of 7 piano sketches go back almost a decade, though, when André was staying in a house in Texas with his son that contained only a piano, their beds and TV screens.

Having lived with the recordings he made in the house - possibly on his phone, based on their quality - André decided that spring 2025 (“a time of year that promises that life, creativity, and possibility are ever-renewing”) was the moment to release them.

Discussing the project, André said: “The original title for it was ‘The Best Worst Rap Album In History’ and here is an excerpt from the original liner notes: ‘It’s jokingly the worst rap album in history because there are no lyrics on it at all. It’s the best because it’s the free-est emotionally and best I’ve felt personally. It’s the best because it’s like a palette cleanser for me.’”

The 7 sketches have the strong whiff of off-the-cuff noodlings, with only one – album closer i spend all day waiting for the night – having drums on it. There’s also a nod to New Blue Sun’s love of long song titles: track 3 is called ‘when you’re a ant and you wake up in an awesome mood, about to drive your son to school, only to discover that you left the lights on in the car last night so your battery is drained’.

We’ve all been there.

It’s all a long way from Outkast, the rap outfit that André 3000 made his name in alongside BigBoi and who were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2025.

You can listen to 7 piano sketches now.