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, your way.

Glass animals is a band from Oxford, England. They've released three albums since forming back in 2010.

One of their biggest hits is the song Heat Waves, which came out in June 2020.

It was certified gold in a bunch of countries and platinum in Australia where it hit number one.

Dave Bailey is the singer, songwriter and producer of the band. He won the UK's Music Producer Guild Award for self-producing artists of the year, and he's produced songs for other artists too.

In this episode, Dave tells the story of making Heat Waves over several months, first on his own and then later with his bandmates, Josieward, Ed Irwin Singer and Drew McFarland.

Here's Glass Animals on Song Exploder.

I'm Dave from Glass Animals. May 2018 is when I first started something and I didn't feel like there was any pressure to make another Glass Animals record. We weren't in a rush.

I was going into the studio every day, long hours, just getting crazy synths, just finding sounds. I have this exploratory phase before actually making an album for the band, which is just me eating lots of cereal and doing nerdy things, twisting knobs.

I was in this studio complex in North London called The Church. There were some bigger artists in all the other rooms and I was in this little basement room. I was ready to go home and had a long, very unsuccessful day in the studio.

I always use this fishing analogy of Aloe Guthries where he always said that writing songs is like fishing.

You change your bait, put some fresh bait on, you can move your boat to a new spot, you can get some new line, you can try all these tricks but mainly you just catch tires and weeds and weird fish that you can't eat.

I'd had a whole day of that just catching weird fish, but I was fine one more.

I always have a guitar plugged in and a microphone, I think I just hit record, picked up the guitar and that's when I started like fumbling around.

I've been reading some gimmicky book about songwriting and it was about how you can kind of get these longer chord phrases that tell a story and I was like, let's try something like that.

I was trying to get this longer chord phrase and started newtling around trying to find eight chords that fit together and had some kind of arc that took you on a bit of a journey.

It was about nine minutes of fumbling and then I played that chord pattern and I said, oh that's cool, so I'd play it over and over again.

They had this very reflective quality but then it resolves quite well that chord pattern and it feels like, I don't know maybe like coming to terms with something or acceptance and I think that's probably where the lyric came from.

I think one of the first things that came out of my mouth was that vocal line. It was layer night and I was thinking about all those people that I miss.

I do all sorts of things to my vocal when I'm recording these raw ideas because I think like many people I really hate the sound of my own voice.

Sometimes I pitch it down and active, sometimes I pitch it up and active and I don't know, I just have all these tricks to kind of disassociate yourself from you.

This was kind of around the time that I started using auto tune to do that for me.

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