“What’s interesting about this song is there’s actually very little going on”: Watch Jack Antonoff break down Sabrina Carpenter’s Please Please Please
Jack Antonoff has peeled back the curtain on his production work for Sabrina Carpenter's chart smashing hit, Please Please Please, revealing how he used the works of ABBA and Electric Light Orchestra as a reference point for its dreamlike synth sound.
The track peaked at number one in the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and topped charts across the UK, Australia, Ireland and more. Its influences of disco, country and pop see the track utilise acoustic guitar, a sturdy drum beat, and synth work utilising a classic ARP.
In the new video for Variety, Antonoff explains, "That reference point of ELO or ABBA, one of the great hallmarks of that is you have incredibly organic, 'I hear a person playing guitar, I hear a person playing drums, I hear a vocalist,' and you hear a human being struggling with a machine. I love that sound.
"I always wanna play things in some way like it's the first time I've played them. And one thing that gives, Please Please Please great character is this grand push and pull between things that are gritted and on time, and things that are like floating around. It makes you feel a little bit drunk, a little bit dreamlike."
He further expands, "[You have] that interplay between hearing a human being very humanly, playing an acoustic guitar a full take all the way through, and then hearing a human being express humanity through a synthesiser by not feeding MIDI, not feeding click, you know? I'm playing an ARP, and this is the hallmark of the whole song, right? So if I have a super tight LinnDrum, then I start playing around with something that is not locked to tempo. The lockness of the LinnDrum makes the song looser, because now I know where the beat is perfectly."
He adds, "What you start to feel is these exciting moments that to me are very reminiscent of ELO or ABBA where there wasn't the technology to make things too great and so people are expressing themselves on synthetic instruments and it gave this song an incredible character."
As for the main chorus, it consists of a large vocal stack. "What's interesting about this song is there's actually very little going on, what you really have is one lead and you have three stacks beneath it. So it's a four stack, but it's not."
Antonoff continues, "Essentially what I'm doing here is instead of using too much reverb or delay, I'd rather just have someone do a few more takes that I can spread out. You have two harmonies, doubled each. So the entire vocal stack of the chorus, which to me in my head sounds like the heavens opening up, is literally eight vocals, and three of them barely count. The only other thing I have going on is I have that stack running through a copycat and a space echo, which I'm manipulating in real time. So the EQ of this, the tune, the pitch, it 's all getting fucked with."
You can watch the full video below:
