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

This episode contains explicit language.

Duolipa is a Grammy-winning singer and songwriter from London. Her second album, Future Nostalgia, came out in March 2020.

It hit number one on the charts in 13 countries and it was shortlisted for the UK's Mercury Prize.

One of the songs on the record is Levitating. Duolco wrote it with some of her closest collaborators, including producer Steven Cosmonack, aka Cos.

In this episode, Duol and Cos break down Levitating and explain how Duol's childhood memories shaped the song's sound.

My name's Duolipa.

The day I wrote this song, I actually know the exact date Levitating was created on the 28th of August 2018.

I guess I had just started writing for the second record. Still figuring out where I wanted to go with it, but knowing what my album title was going to be, which is Future Nostalgia.

I knew I wanted to touch on my childhood influences and a lot of my childhood influences are really songs and music that my parents listened to.

A lot of jumeric-wise prints, blondie.

When those songs are played, now that just brings back such a rush of fun and exciting emotions and all I want to do is dance and immediately takes me back to when I was a kid.

I wanted to play on that emotion and that feeling and those memories and create something with a fresh modern twist.

I'm Cos. I'm the producer of Levitating.

Cos is such an incredible instrumentalist and producer and artist in his own right and we've worked together for a really long time.

Usually before we go into work, I'll spend a couple weeks or a month just like coming up with ideas to play when we hit the studio.

Before the session, I'd kind of like sent him some notes and some stuff that I've been inspired by.

She definitely had the idea of blending a lot of old stuff with new stuff.

I just thought like the best way to reinterpret the past was just use old instruments.

I had been looking for this synth forever called the Roland VP 330.

I'd probably been looking for six, seven, eight years and then one day I found it in Tokyo, got it back to Toronto.

I just plugged it in and it's literally the first thing I played was like what turned into Levitating.

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