the making of fur and gold by bat for lashes - featuring natasha Khan and david kosten
Intro:
Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums, told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim.
Bat for Lashes formed in 2006 as the musical alias for Natasha Khan. She had grown up in Hertfordshire, England and studied art at the University of Brighton. After graduating, she taught as a schoolteacher while writing songs and performing as Bat for Lashes. Her manager, Dick O’Dell, got her a publishing deal and connected her with producer David Kosten to work on some demos. The first Bat for Lashes single, “The Wizard” was released on her own label in early 2006. After signing with Echo, Khan and Kosten began working on a full-length album together. Fur and Gold was eventually released in 2006.
In this episode, for the 20th anniversary, Natasha Khan and David Kosten reflect on how the album came together. This is the making of Fur and Gold.
Natasha Khan: Hi, I'm Natasha Khan. I'm also known as Bat for Lashes and today we are talking about my first album and the making of the record Fur and Gold. It was method and it kind of sounds really pretentious when you talk about it separated from being in the studio. But I took it on as a role that I had to inhabit. And personally, I felt like I was in this sort of dreamlike, seance space in terms of holding the vision in my mind. And I was extremely clear and, and probably could be quite abrupt and particular about what I liked and didn't like. And because I was fiercely focused on this idea and this place that I wanted the record to come from. And so it was this strange kind of like subconscious dream-like liminal space that we were inhabiting, whilst also being really silly and having a laugh and all the studio banter and all that, which just keeps you sane because you, it is a crazy space to be in. And this sort of like dream-like space contracted with very practical setups and things we had to do to achieve this sound. And like going out into the woods, it was all because I meant it, you know, like I felt it. And when I was singing those words, I wanted it to be fucking perfect.
So I guess I was like 26 or 27 years old. I had been a preschool teacher and I came out of art school a few years prior to that. And when I left university in Brighton, I'd done music with visual arts, so I kind of started writing the songs that were to be some of the songs that appeared on the album, some Bat for Lashes tracks. And I'd been playing live gigs in Brighton and around the area, some in Paris, some in London, trying to kind of hone my craft. And luckily, my first manager, Dick O’Dell, who I was with for seven years, he found me one night or sort of approached me and helped me get my first publishing deal. So, you know, we got the publishing deal and we started looking at how to record the demos that I had. And I'd kind of like, I'd gone to San Francisco and done a second round of songwriting to complete the album. And then I came home with these 10 tracks, 10 or 11 tracks, and then we were ready to start recording sessions. So yeah, that was the lead up to meeting David.
David Kosten: Hi, I'm David Kosten and I am Natasha's co-producer on Fur and Gold. My route into this was completely not conventional in the sense that I was drafted in initially by the boss of the publishing company to see if I had an interest in co-writing with Natasha.
Natasha Khan: Really? I don't even know that. I didn't even know that. They're always after a bloody co-write.
David Kosten: So this seemed to be, I don't quite know exactly what their thoughts were on what they thought Natasha was going to be or wanted to be, or what they thought Natasha ought to be or anything like that. But for some reason I was at a point in my life where I think I'd produced three or four artists, not particularly successfully, but I'd released my own music as an artist and they thought that I was prime material to get on with Natasha and help things along on a songwriting front. And it became clear within about three seconds of meeting Natasha that there was no fucking way that was happening.
Natasha Khan: (laughs)
David Kosten: And she wasn't remotely interested in co-writing, I think probably with anyone. But when I was listening to those demos that the publisher played me, it didn't make any sense anyway. I could hear instantly that there was a whole record there. It might not have been the jazz hands pop record that maybe somebody might have thought at some point Natasha ought to be making as of, you know, something intensely commercial. But it sounded to me like a brilliant, and like I say, Natasha had absolute zero interest in me marching in and saying, “Let's make a pop record of some sort.” Cause I don’t know what else he would do. What's the point in co-writing when there's already a very cool record waiting to be made? The thing that wasn't there was like a sort of four on the floor banger and I didn't get it. And it made sense that Natasha had no interest at all in that. So then we just ended up with, I had no value or use to this project whatsoever, unless it was, I suppose on a production level. And even that I think was like a kind of, “Well, why don't we just do like a little tester?”
Natasha Khan: Tester yeah. Yeah I remember coming into your tiny studio with, I think we tried out three tracks or something. And I mean, this was, all of this leadup was completely unbeknownst to me. I just thought I was going into meet a producer and I don't even remember.
David Kosten: Are you serious that…”?
Natasha Khan: Yeah.
David Kosten: Are you serious? You didn't know about that bit? That's mad that we didn't discuss it at all. Maybe your beloved manager…
Natasha Khan: I think he was probably protecting me because I would've, he knows I would've got cross.
David Kosten: Hit the roof. Yeah. So as will become clear, there are a number of instances of Natasha becoming quite cross. And we can…
Natasha Khan: (laughs) Dump me in there.
David Kosten: Take these off one at a time. Must be, this is my opportunity to.
Natasha Khan: Oh my God. He always gets me in trouble. He delights in it. Look at that chuckle.
David Kosten: (laughs) Yes.
Natasha Khan: Yeah, I'd gone in and, yeah, I'm sure they probably got me to meet other producers cause I, but I just have no recollection, cause I remember meeting David and thinking…
David Kosten: Okay, no, no, no. This is bullshit.
Natasha Khan: Why?
David Kosten: Because, because the CD that you made for me, the demo CD that Natasha printed that said, “Demos for David” was a CD-R with like a stick on sleeve. And when I picked it off, it said, “Demos for James Ford” on it.
Natasha Khan: (laughs) That was not for that record. That must have been Two Suns, no?
David Kosten: No, no, it was for that record.
Natasha Khan: Oh my God. That's hilarious. Well I never met him. I never met him because, although David's trying to throw me under the bus, it was because I met David and decided I wanted to work with him. But thanks (laughs).
David Kosten: But the one, tell you, one thing we did do, we went to the place, we made the album to do the demos. Which was crazy amazing to be able to go and do.
Natasha Khan: Right, yeah.
David Kosten: We did all four of those songs so that was the idea. We did four songs in four days as the demos to see if we were gonna kill each other.
Natasha Khan: At Jacobs.
David Kosten: And I had this studio in the countryside. Yeah called Jacobs and all four of those songs made it onto the album pretty much exactly as the demos, I don't think, apart from a couple of little mixed tweaks. That was it.
Natasha Khan: Mm-hmm.
David Kosten: They're the demos. So I guess we got on and James Ford had his CD revoked.
Natasha Khan: Didn't get to meet me (laughs). Didn't have the pleasure.
David Kosten: Yeah.
Natasha Khan: Obviously the original demos were all done at home by me with Abi Fry on viola and Caroline Weeks, adding some backing vocals, guitars, and, you know, we were kind of, as a group of girls in the sort of initial band we were playing. Those songs for a while before I even got the deal. So, and at home I'd done a load of kind of preemptive demos, which didn't make it onto the album, but songs called “Howl,” “Rosie,” “Carrie,” “Blood Red Shoes,” like these kind of mini CDs that I was making for, to sell at shows. And then, yeah, I guess when I wrote, I remember writing “What's a Girl to Do?” on my bedroom floor. Like I used a little QY70 and I had Logic and some plug-ins and I remember bashing a boot on my desk and using hand claps and things. So I had kind of sonically, I had definitely thought about the world and tried to do it in my own very lo-fi way. And I think David, you must have heard those early demos, cause I don’t know whether we did any from scratch in Jacobs, but I think most of them had been like the parts, the string parts and things we had already sort of written with Abi and stuff?
David Kosten: Yeah, I think this was, there were lots of sort of revelatory things for me in working with Natasha with, there were a lot of firsts and one was here, we had music where all the parts pretty much had been worked out in advance and every single one was perfect. There was nothing to do really in terms of there being parts where it just didn't seem like it helped the track at all. It was all really good and although I think we did do some of those tracks from scratch at Jacobs, those demos, there were lots of really good demos that I was played. Even in that very first meeting before meeting Natasha, when I was in the office of the publisher, I remember being played a demo of, “I Saw a Light,” which essentially was the same thing. It didn't change that much. It didn't need to, you know, it was done as a song and as a concept, it was there. And all we really did together was take it from sounding a bit like a demo to something that sounded like a finished piece. It must have helped hugely that so many of these songs had parts that were, had been fleshed out with other musicians and practiced live and sort of played out live. Because I'd come off the back of working with bands, doing two or three band recordings and a couple of albums with solo singers, and every single part on those records was worked out in the studio. And it was really hard. It was agonizingly hard sometimes. And yet here was a record where the songs were great, all the parts were great, and you had an artist who had a vision for every single component of this work.
Natasha Khan: I remember like, you know, the demoitis, kind of attachment to some really terrible MIDI sounds that I had, I made basslines out of and stuff. And I think there was a compromise that we, sort of like, we started to develop an understanding that I wanted the tacky shit sounds. But David quite cleverly explained to me that if we added like a bass underneath the shit bass, I liked with nice subs and kind of a nice rounded sound, that that would be kind of disguised. But it just gave this bottom end and like three dimensionality to the parts. And so quite a lot of it was also combinations of quite hi-fi beautiful sounds or nice, you know, analog sounds combined with quite sort of thin, small electronic sounds. And we sort of quite quickly started to develop this really nice world that was combining archaic sounding things with really modern things and tacky things with really beautiful things and the effects we, like, we used the space echo quite early on and we got very attached to that as like a character of the story of this album. And the, you know, upright piano, it just had, you know, we'd put things through old amps and just, we very sort of like quickly realized we had quite similar taste in terms of sonics that had a story behind them and things that meshed together to create a third unheard of thing, like sounds that started to create a world of their own. And that was really exciting to have someone on my side that was a technician and an engineer and a producer, somebody that understood sculpting sound because I could see it and explain it in terms of weather and colors and scenes and characters. And with David I started, you know, I had done music production at school, but I think my confidence started to build in terms of like discussing how to EQ and pan things and what kinds of reverbs did we want, you know, a quick delay on this thing. And I just sort of watched him at work and described things and watched how he did them. And that was a really nice blossoming kind of, you know, language that we started quite early.
David Kosten: Yeah, I think that's very key to the whole thing having worked, isn't it? That there was a sort of shared language and I felt the freedom to try and bring the things that I'd learned doing my own thing and working with with other artists. And I brought them in and I sort of understood, I learned that, God, I learned so much making this record. I learned that not everything you bring is gonna make it. And even some things that you think are brilliant are not gonna make it. And it's not even necessarily cause they're not quite good ideas, they just don't fit what the artist…
Natasha Khan: There's so much space.
David Kosten: Yeah, yeah, we wanted space on the record. And the artist doesn't necessarily feel that is appropriate to the lyric of the music. And this was a completely, there was a new way of working for me that was based on feel and color almost of, you know, “I want this to feel like X,” you know, “I want this to feel like a forest. I want this to feel like kids being naughty underneath a duvet.” You know, it was all about descriptions of magical sounds, smells, colors, feelings. And that was how the music was described to me and then it was me translating that into, “Well I think that probably means that we should try this.” And so we tried lots of things and lots of them made the cut, you know, lots of the kind of brave silly ideas actually worked and we just, we had a little group of whichever studio we were at, just sort of an assistant or a couple of people that were helping us sort of running around with microphone plugging in and positioning and all that sort of stuff. And we, yeah, we just sort of came up with ridiculous ideas, tried them, “Oh, that worked, onto the next.” And suddenly things that began to build and sort of feel like it was a unified sound. It was hard work, but it didn't feel like it was a grind or anything other than, you know, really enjoyable doing it even if we had the odd row. It's good having a row.
Natasha Khan: I had created this little universe in my mind. And then I was, you know, I entrusted David to kind of help me make it technicolor and like panoramic. I kind of wanted it to feel like the inside of a Steven Spielberg film and also having been at university, would learn about quite strange sort of avant-garde recording techniques. And he was so up, you know, we discussed recording outside, I really wanted to record outside and for “Horse and I,” we, David helped to set up this 40 foot lead or whatever. And I think I've walked out into the forest and you can hear raindrops when you isolate the vocal and twigs cracking. And then I did like some thin sort of operatic singing like in the woods. And then, you know, we set up microphones in the garden where Caroline and I ran up and down screaming and whooping and shouting and like just being really childlike and that, you know, we put that on the end of “The Bat's Mouth,” the sort of jubilant crescendo at the end of the song. And like David said, you know, cuddled up under comforters and sang really quiet backing vocals. It felt like we were kids, like the house itself, Jacobs was, it had sort of like loft beamed rooms and it felt quite Peter Panish and I don’t know, there was something very English countryside magical about it. And I just, you know, I loved the room I was staying in the, there was a fireplace and we had a lovely girl that cooked food for us and we all ate dinner together and then we'd just be like, “Right, what's next?” And I'd just remember feeling like it was this little treasure chest, like this kid's chest that we would open up for each song and just think about the most fun, magical, weird and wonderful way we could capture the spirit of that song. I'm writing a book at the moment about my whole life, but this process, particularly at this moment, I'm doing the Fur and Gold days and I just, I look back on it so fondly because my dissertation was the artist preoccupation with childhood. And I delved quite deeply into the darkness of childhood, the trauma of childhood, the magic and the kind of dreams and nightmares and the awe of childhood and all of that was kind of like concentrated down into this gang of girls and David and a couple of engineers. You know, like, I don’t know, I felt like all these magical childlike people were gathering together and contributing to this album. Yeah.
David Kosten: The amount of estrogen that that was going on.
Natasha Khan: (laughs)
David Kosten: I think I was, cause this, our assistant in the studio was a girl as well, wasn't she?
Natasha Khan: And I liked that. I wanted women all around me, even though it wasn't that music industry at the time. I was like, “This is awesome.”
David Kosten: Just had some grumpy guy in the control room complaining about something or other. I'm not sure Natasha realizes quite how unusual what we were doing was. When, I guess, compared to the most of the other records that I'd made up till then. And since that are very fraught and often are very difficult and there's a lot of…
Natasha Khan: Overthinking.
David Kosten: Overthinking and emotional harm caused in trying to sort of birth these things. And actually because so much of the work had already been done, that the sort of the writing work was all in place, including, like I said, all these kind of beautiful musical parts by parts and guitar parts, and so much, at least half of it was written before, probably two thirds was written before this. We even got to the studio of all these elements that were needed, and here we were in this sort of 18th century country manor with a big garden and somebody to cook for us. And we had, I don’t know how long we had, I think it was a couple of months that we were there. And this is just ridiculous to be offered to do this with music that is this creative and not unconcerned with trying to be chart friendly. It was just, “Make it really good and interesting and unique and push, push as far as one could to deliver, you know, what the lyrics and the songs were asking for.” And it was so unique. And one thing I, as well, Natasha was talking about, you know, “I wanted it to feel like,” or “I wanted it to feel like we were recording outside” or feel like, you know, we were in a particular place and it was like the sort film equivalent of, sort of VFX equivalent of using practical effects in a way. It was like, “I would really love to have the sound of the forest.” Well, hang on, we are literally next door to a woodland area. 40 feet lead, i was not. That was 400 feet.
Natasha Khan: Oh, was it?
David Kosten: This was literally hundreds of feet of cable. Took us an hour or more connecting every single cable in the studio, including next door studio where we stole all their mic cables to go from the control room all the way out the house, round the back of the house, and positioned the mic somewhere where it wasn't gonna get ruined. Sort of vintage Neuman classic mics that if the owner had been there, they would've…
Natasha Khan: Had a heart attack.
David Kosten: Had a total heart attack to see their sort prized possession going into the, like a sort of slightly…
Natasha Khan: Damp English woodlands.
David Kosten: Damp English woodland, yeah. So all these things, it was kind of fun. “Oh, I want it to feel like in a bed with my friends being, you know, sort of hiding.” “Okay, let's run the cable from the control room up to the bedrooms.” I mean this, some of this was just to get Natasha off my back like, “Fuck’s sake. What the hell are we? How am I gonna do that one? Well, let's actually just do the thing that Natasha wants and assume that.” This was a new concept to me as a producer, just actually just doing what the artist wanted to do. It's like, “Let's just do that then.” And it, every time it worked, and I'd never done like, “Well, this needs a weather sound. Okay, let's record the weather. Let's find a sound of the weather.”
Natasha Khan: Mm-hmm.
David Kosten: And it fucking worked.
“Horse and I”
Natasha Khan: “Horse and I” came from a dream, so I dreamt that a horse came to my window and I kind of lifted up my sash window on like the third floor. But he was there and I got on his back and it references back to my teenage years when I looked after a horse for a couple of years after this sort of family tragedy. And I rode bear back in the woods around, in Hertfordshire, where I grew up, most nights after school, and I'd go before school to muck out the horse and groom him. And I sort of developed this relationship. And on those rides alone, I listened to many albums and educated myself at the age of 12 or whatever. I was in lots of albums that my godfather Danny Thompson had dropped over. So Nick Drake and Kate Bush and Neil Young and The Cure I was really into. And so it made sense that it was the first song on the record. It's kind of a manifesto or like an initiation ritual, a rite of passage song about being chosen to go on this horse and ride into a forest where you are crowned and told that you are the chosen one and you've gotta make this thing. And so I got up in the morning after this dream and I had a harpsichord sound on my keyboard and just sort of wrote this really rhythmic harpsichord part. And then the words came out really quickly and I remember inviting Abi around and we kind of talked about the, I think I'd put like a midi bass pluck underneath it. And then she led that with her, with her viola. And we've kind of arranged the string part over the top and then it was done. You know, but there was something about that song that it had to come first, you know, like once we had made all the songs, it naturally was an opener. Yeah the galloping, I think David and I kind of, I don't remember who played that snare drum part, but Lizzie in the band had been playing like a snare drum kind of thing over the top. But I think we got someone who could properly play it to do that. And yeah, there's sort of a heartbeat and a gallup, which is obviously related to the horse theme. And this kind of like, you know, knights of the round table, like there's this kind of knightly, harpsichord, medieval aspect. Yeah, and I think when David and I did it, we did do the, you know, the long lead out into the forest and all these lovely kind of atmospheric sounds open up the whole album before the song even starts. You hear all the wind and the rain and all of that. So yeah.
David Kosten: I don't remember that much about the making of this particular track, but there's key things. There's sounds and pointers on that song that travel across the whole record, like opening with those weather sounds, you know, that was a fundamental idea that became a thing on this record, was using natural sounds and found sounds and weather noises and incorporating those into a music track. In quite often very clear sort of unsubtle way in terms of how prominent those things were. The other thing that I remember very well, was there's a sound that sounds exactly like a theremin fairly early on in that song. And I remember watching Natasha sing that sound. That sound is not a theramin, it is Natasha Khan in full theramin singing mode and being absolutely astounded. Cause it, one of the great things about being a producer is when you watch somebody doing a vocal pass or recording something and it's that good that you know that that particular moment that you've just witnessed is going to be on a record and that's gonna be the take. And also knowing instinctively that this is gonna be a record that a lot of people are gonna like. And I remember that particular moment being one of those where, I think it took one go or one or two goes. There was no effort whatsoever to get that. It was just, I think we wanted a theremin that that was the thing we were trying to create. That you were sort of, yeah that melody. And we didn't know how to do it. We didn't have anyone there. So I think it, one of us just said, “You do it or I'll do it,” you know? And in you went and we just bunged a bit of my sort of go-to echo box on it and that's it. And it was such a great moment. Like, “we can move really fast by doing nearly all of this ourselves. You know, we can play between the two of us. We can play lots of stuff. We've got brilliant people that already know all their bits we can just motor through and there's no kind of waste here. We're just doing good things. And if the idea doesn't click, that's fine. We've got other ideas, we'll move on. You know, we'll do that.” So yeah, having Natasha nail the theremin in one go pretty much, and it sounded that good and that kind of magical and sort of evocative. Yeah, that was important.
No one would necessarily know what goes into making a record like that, but it's complicated and there's a lot of moving parts. The reason it's so damn good is that the artist drove a fricking hard bargain. That's why it's so good. There was no plan B, it had to be this.
“It's my first album. I've waited a long time to make this record. I know what this record should sound like. I don't necessarily know exactly how to make every element of this, but that's what you are meant to be here to help me do, and fulfill this really pretty complete vision.” And we're talking about somebody that showed up to the first meeting with a really thick book to explain how this album was gonna be. That's where it was at. It was, open the first page, and you just, you had visual references, you had sonic references, you had James Ford. I mean, my CD-R.
Natasha Khan: (laughs)
David Kosten: You had a lot of reference material to listen to. “I love the way this vocal sounds.”
Natasha Khan: Drawings.
David Kosten: Lots of drawings, but there was a lot of practical help, you know, things to try and draw because there, you know, you tried things out and hadn't necessarily got exactly what you needed. So you wanted to cover all bases, make sure there was no room for error.
Natasha Khan: Yes.
David Kosten: And within that, then once the trust was, and I, you know, it took a little while to sort of, to get Natasha's trust and you're sort of constantly re-earning it. But once it was there and you're firing on all cylinders and you're coming up with an idea. “yes, let's do that. Let's try this. Yes. David, I like that one out of your seventy four ideas, let's try that.”
Natasha Khan: And I was very suspicious of anything that sounded trip-hop. And I remember him trying to
David Kosten: Oh God, yeah.
Natasha Khan: And I remember him trying to put across some sort of Massive Attack-y style ideas, which I had loved Massive Attack. And at that point in time though, it was very uncool for me to like them. And now I love them again. But we had huge rows.
David Kosten: This was the worst insult you could possibly…
Natasha Khan: Yeah we had big rows and I did feel initially that I was pushing him and testing him a lot because I was like, “I'm not gonna give this gig to any so and so. Like, I need to know that you understand what I want to do and that you get what I'm saying.” And if he suggested something that was really out of my room, I would feel like personally offended, that he didn't get it. You know, like it was so important to me. And I was probably like, yeah, quite tough at times. But yeah, that was the only way.
David Kosten: At the time, it might seem difficult and painful or kind of just like hard grind occasionally to sort of get through the problems. But that's, like I said, the problems is where the magic is. Cause then you overcome them and once you've done that, you look at each other and go, “That worked, we move on to the next thing to fix.” And nothing makes it onto the record that wasn't liked or loved even. There's nothing on any of those records that didn't pass the test. So it's all stuff that had been given the thumbs up by the artist and felt like that's working. So it became clear that even if there was a row, it was just because we both wanted it to be really good. There was no ego particularly. It was just, “This has to be really good. So how are we gonna do that then?”
“Trophy”
Natasha Khan: Gosh, “Trophy.” I mean, the main thing I remember about “Trophy” was that we'd been playing it live quite a bit and it had this really low MIDI bass, you know, and it's just that, a beat, vocal, and then strings that come in and out, which was kind of this similar palette to a lot of the songs. But I'd asked Josh T. Pearson from Lift to Experience to come in and he rocked up in his cowboy hat and rhinestones and like pointy boots and like mad blue eyes and a wizened beard and, you know, came in and just, I really loved his voice and I loved his guitar playing. But he only came for like a day or two, I think. And he put down an amazing guitar part on “Trophy,” like really kind of unhinged and, you know, kind of screaming guitar and then added to those, “heaven is a feeling I get,” such a low backing vocal that I could barely reach. And so we had the idea of getting him to add his like Texan drawl singing, preacher man kind of singing to that. And it was really nice cause the album, it was really nice to have a male voice in certain parts. Like he also sang on “Seal Jubilee” and just having that kind of counterpart voice, cause it's such a feminine sounding record, I think. But the darker songs, I really enjoyed having, you know, more grungy guitars and stuff. I didn't want it to be slick guitar. Having come from like loving Nirvana and Sonic Youth and stuff, he sort of brought a bit of that careening off the road kind of feeling. And he felt like that as a person as well, a bit unhinged, but lovely. And I just, I kind of enjoyed his energy on the record. It was quite different to anything else other people were contributing, don't you think, David?
David Kosten: I mean, for somebody turning up probably, I think it was less than two days he was there, you know, a day and a half of studio time maybe, he made a big impact. And he kind of, he brought a sort of an edge to things, but he also, he made us try even harder cause he bowled up with a sort of confidence in his coolness. There was just something, there was a vibe about him that was a little intimidating and we wanted to look good, you know, and make best use of his, of what he could bring.
There were lots of things that, about those opening two songs that felt like we were essentially capturing the live set. I remember going to see Natasha play in Brighton way before we made the record and those two really stood out, “Horse and I,” and “Trophy” and essentially what you are hearing there is not a million miles from what I heard at the gig, but things like Josh bringing that guitar and how you can hear the metallic strings and you can hear this gravel and the weather noises on “Horse and I.” All these elements elevated it from being essentially like what you get if a band plays live and then just tracks a live record. It became something much more than that. As soon as we added these amazing sort of extra musicians and sounds and there was lots of luck as well. I'd just bought an incredible old vintage guitar amp. Yeah, I bought an amazing 1961 Selma guitar app.
Natasha Khan: Oh yeah.
David Kosten: I think a couple of weeks before we began the record. And it was an amazing find and I still got it. I was using it today in the studio, and it's just the most incredible atmosphere machine. And that one guitar amp, the sound of that amp, we used it over everything. So much percussion sounds through it, vocals through it, not just guitars or pianos through it. It was a push button machine called a selector tone. And you push a button and it gives you a very specific sound that worked for some things and not others. And it really, yeah, it brought an enormous amount.
Natasha Khan: I think I had a very healthy suspicion of the record industry and kind of selling my soul to the devil at the crossroads. You know, like this feeling of monetizing something that I had inherently carried inside of myself since I was a little girl. And so the lyrics that, you know, “The trophy that I made for us in fur and gold, got into the wrong pair of hands and truth was sold,” it's about something becoming a commodity that to me, was so precious. And it's about, you know, when I first moved into the record industry and became professional and signed my deal, I really struggled with this idea that, of being commercial, of selling out, of taking money for like my wares, you know, and I felt that I was so sensitive about it. I didn't want anything to be taken. I didn't want to like, I didn't want to upset the gods, you know, like there was some feeling and yeah, “Creatures of mercy shoot them down and set me free.” Like, what was it like, “The queens and the court jestors clapped, adored.” It's all like this sort of the emperor's clothes, you know, like this idea that you go on stage and everyone's just adoring it and they want it and they want you, and it's kind of vampiric and so yeah, that song is just like a little warning to myself about what I was getting into, I suppose.
David Kosten: I wonder how we captured that sort of naivety as well, that there's a childlike quality to all this stuff. Just thinking about you talking about the kings and queens and there's a sort of clapping sound through it and there's a sort of nursery rhyme quality and a sort of grim fairytale quality to all these songs. And I know we were trying to capture that, but I don't feel like we agonized over how to actually do it.
Natasha Khan: Well, I do think it was inherent, it was already there. I feel like for songs like that because I'd been listening a lot to the Langley School's Music Project, like this 70s album of little kids singing all like David Bowie songs and stuff. And I've been reading kind of, Women Who Run with the Wolves and I'd been, you know, I was kind of, it's really hard to describe like what particular sound made it feel fairytale, cause there was, it was kind of in the blood of everything. And so every choice we made, even though we didn't necessarily talk about that or want, we didn't say we wanted that, but it was just that whatever sonically sounded right. Had this naive, yeah sort of, yeah, like not overthought and sort of quite charming.
David Kosten: There's an innocence to it. It doesn't feel, yeah, it doesn't feel like a particularly knowing record or a knowing sound, it feels like, it's almost like a discovery that children have made in a, like a sort of Picnic at Hanging Rock kind of discovery record.
Natasha Khan: And even the claps on that, they weren't kind of, we didn't sync them up perfectly and put them through, you know, like chop them up and all of that. All the claps were kind of like just me layering claps over the top of each other. And sometimes they're out of time and they're further away or closer. And it kind of gives this, not shambolic, but like yeah, there's not an over done, there's a loose looseness to it.
David Kosten: Yeah. I've never been obsessed with making things perfectly in time. That seemed like an obvious way to sort of mess this up would be to clean it up, edit everything, just because you can, we didn't edit everything into sort of perfection at all on this record. The opposite really, sort of leaving things as sort of, as unkempt and sort of unnatural as we could really.
“Tahiti”
Natasha Khan: So I basically, I had like the first bunch of demos, so from the gigs David's talking about, there were those early, more sort of fairytale-ish songs. And then I kind of, I met Devendra Banhart and decided to go to San Francisco and jump on his tour bus and sing back up for him from San Francisco to LA, like all down the west coast, like Pacific Highway coast. And then there was a man on the bus called Tahiti, who I think he'd just broken up with his partner and it was like a terrible fallout. And all I remember about him was that he just, he was a, had these beautiful blue eyes, but he often would wear very dark sunglasses and you'd just see tears like coming down from underneath his sunglasses while we were sitting on the tour bus and all these kind of redwoods and amazing coastal views whizzing past the window. And just him looking out the window with these tears.
That song is about us being this kind of little band of vagabonds, like “community saw the best in me, exchanging the common heart for the salt in the sea,” like it was just this kind of sea salt infused sad atmosphere that he brought. And so yeah, I just, the whole song is literally the right hand of the piano just repeats over and over and there's kind of these bass notes that change it. Nothing really happens musically. And that happened a lot on the songs in these records, there's not very much first chorus verse, I don't think there is a middle eight at all on the whole record. It was, I suppose, like my dad's Pakistani, I've been thinking about this while writing the book, but he played harmonium a lot as a kid and he, you know, Pakistanian and Indian music focuses on drones and also like my love of Debussy and these kind of like rolling classical pianists. There's something about songs like, yeah, “What's a Girl to Do?” and “Daniel,” and, you know, all these sort of subsequent songs, they all just have like a loop that goes through and then a bassline will come in and change it. In the chorus, it kind of changed it to a place that you weren't expecting. And so I played the piano and then Abi came in with her viola plucking kind of gypsy sounding parts that was syncopated and into playing with my piano. And then it was just these low octave chords. Caroline brought that in when we played, Abi and I played it to her and she, you know, she kind of tuned her autoharp to it and then she just had these flourishes and that was really nice. And yeah, it's just a song about that time.
David Kosten: There's a crucial thing that we've not talked about yet, which Natasha can sort of cover her ears over, which is the melodies on this record are so damn good. And “Tahiti,” I think that might be my favorite cause the melody is just outrageously beautiful. It's so pretty. And that chorus with that lyric is so heartbreaking. But it's just the melody one after the other. You know, we talk about, we’re three songs in and it doesn't let up, every single song. I think we let some go, maybe from the record that didn't feel like they were part of the package, but there's not one that doesn't have a melody of this sort of quality. And I pushed Natasha really hard, you know, we always did this. And that's a key part of it on the singing, to get the right vocal and, and work really long and hard to get to generate the right vocal performance is there, but sometimes it’s just really easy. So “Tahiti,” that's a live recording, that whole music track.
Natasha Khan: Oh yeah we recorded it all together.
David Kosten: We recorded the vocal later. But all of that music, it took a little bit of setting up, you know, but it's all done in one room. Piano to the grand piano, piano
Natasha Khan: The Autoharp, the viola and the piano. Yeah.
David Kosten: Yeah and I was in the room too, while they were doing it, sort of trying to hold a microphone.
Natasha Khan: Over the autoharp.
David Kosten: I think I had a mic that we moved from one person to another over the autoharp and then shifted to the plucking. It was quite basics of, although we were in a really amazing place, some of the, just because we wanted to move quickly, I might have a rage at it taking too long to set up four microphones. “Well, we don't need four mics. Let's just have two and I'll hold one and I'll point it at the other, the next thing, cause it means we can record right now and just get it done.”
Natasha Khan: Mm-hmm.
David Kosten: But I do remember recording that one. I think we did two or three takes and it was after setting it up and it was just ready to do the vocal. And then maybe we, you know, I'm sure we spent some time.
Natasha Khan: We did the BVs with the girls.
David Kosten: Yeah we probably spent a lot of time getting the right set up to get the vocals right and get enough takes to, to be able to, to choose the best ones. But yeah, as recording speed goes, “Tahiti” was probably the easiest one of all to actually capture and it's, and my favorite, I probably did the least work on that one and had the least input, but I really love that one. It's so gorgeous.
“What’s a Girl to Do?”
Natasha Khan: “What's a Girl to Do?” was kind of an accident. I'd sat down on my Yamaha QY70, which was my writing tool for most of the demos of the first two albums or the kind of like beaty ones I suppose. But it had like a page where you can do like four bars and then it would loop. And so I went in with, again, with my harpsichord sound and I'd fucked up and I hadn't put 1/4 it was on 1/1. And so I went to place, I'm like, “do, do, do, do,” whatever I was gonna do. And it just went, “do do do do do,” and it was looping on this really short one loop and I was like, “Oh my God, actually…”
And I put a little, like beat and then the bass line under that and suddenly it was just like, “This is awesome.” And I'd been listening to the Shangri-Las’ “Walking in the Sand” and like Kim Gordon's, you know, “Kiss me in the shadow of a doubt.” Like, and I was just something so like dark about those girl group songs and I knew that this was gonna be a dark kind of pop song about breaking up with someone. And yeah, my instinct was just to talk about it cause I loved how, you know, the Shangri Las had done that and it had that kind of 50s motorbike, tragic accident off a cliff kind of feeling. And then I remember David saying that I sounded like Jenny Agutter from The Railway Children. I was like so happy about that. She's this really lovely English actress from the sixties and her voice is so well to do and, and a kind of husky and, and listening back to, I do sound quite posh and nicely spoken, which is sort of funny cause it's such a dark song. And then for the chorus, I added that bassline. I was just like, it really needs like a sung chorus that you can sing into your hairbrush in the mirror. You know, like thinking of Karen Carpenter, these sorts of things. And, and the (sings) “a-ha” backing vocal was just hammy, like on purpose. I was sort of making a bit of a joke and part of me was like, I loved it, but I also was a bit embarrassed about having written something, so to me, so Poppy. And we often came up against that, David and I, like, I didn't want something to have poppy beats on it, or I didn't want it to have a cymbal crash at the beginning of the chorus cause that's like embarrassing. Or, you know, I was reluctant in many ways to push the pop end of my songwriting, but that one just, you couldn't deny it. And so we had to give it, you know, the treatment it deserved in the end.
David Kosten: It's, it's quite a, a quirky pop song, isn't it? But it's got the elements that give you that longevity and that instant quality that's of hook is there from the very, very first that harpsichord sound is an amazing hook. And so is the “Be My Baby” drum thing? Yeah, that's a hook in itself.
Natasha Khan: Mm-hmm.
David Kosten: You know, from the get go that I remember recording that.
Natasha Khan: Me too.
David Kosten: There was three of us. I can't remember which, I think maybe I was tambourine. I'm not sure think I was, but there was,
Natasha Khan: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I was tambourine, I think.
David Kosten: Were you? Oh, were you tambourine?
Natasha Khan: I loved tambourine, yeah.
David Kosten: Yeah. But there were three of us doing that. It was like a snare and, and it was all just on one mic in this very shiny wooden room. And my really regrettably primitive miking technique where I just bunged everything through the same sort of very sort of overloaded compressed chain. But that's the sound that is that sort of classic, I'm like the sort of pound-shop version of Phil Spector. That was the sort of cancelrise Phil Spector with my sort compressed.
Natasha Khan: We also put kind of 808 beats and you know, like the actual beat is kind of just old hip-hop samples.
David Kosten: Yeah so that was quite nice to mix these sort of fifties drums with hip-hop samples. And it's a funny mishmash isn't it, of stuff, but it worked. I love all those sort of backing vocals. They're so hilariously dramatic.
Natasha Khan: Melodrama.
David Kosten: Yeah, pure melodrama. And there was a sort of knowing element and sort of a playful element to this. And you see that in the video too, which you did so well with, with Dougal (Wilson) directing this sort of classic video on the bikes with all the sort of furry animals and stuff. It was very funny, but also just weird. It wasn't necessarily a conscious thing, but you ended up with this sort of strange, magical, playful record. It had all these sort of very cool elements that sort of, that gelled without, it didn't feel like it was trying hard at all. It just felt very natural. And that one was one of the later ones, I think we recorded, but it really was, “Let's go and record the drums. Oh, he set the volume too high on the mic, but fucking hell, it sounds amazing, but with a huge original plate reverb.
Natasha Khan: Yeah they had real plate reverb.
David Kosten: Yeah and it added that authenticity. That is a really nice tangent to this very dry, simple hip-hop beat on an old drum machine.
Natasha Khan: Mm-hmm.
David Kosten: That song is great fun.
“Sad Eyes”
Natasha Khan: Because we, most of the parts were written, it was really nice because the time that we probably would've spent on trying to write parts, which I didn't wanna do anyway, was spent on the negative space and what the atmosphere of that would feel like. And I think recording the room, like when we did “Sad Eyes,” you know, I was like, “I need whiskey.” Cause I was so sad when I wrote that song originally and David got me like a big cup of whiskey at like 10:00 AM or something. I was like knocking about this whiskey (laughs). But the track itself is so sparse and it sounds so beautiful. Because I was getting into character, we were able to kind of take the narrative of each song and I felt that the persona of that song would like take over me and sonically David would match that with like this lovely way of micing the room. And this like old upright, I don't think we chose the posh piano very much, that we quite liked this old sort of sea shanty, creaky upright sound and then, you know, things like we'd go then and put it through a tiny telephone speakers and weird, you know, using weird old mics. And so it became so much about the air around each song. And when I listen to the album, it does feel like it's a three dimensional space that you enter and you can feel the sound of the room. You can feel the sound of the woods. You can feel Caroline and I running around like panning left and right. You know, there's
David Kosten: Mm-hmm.
Natasha Khan: There's so much space in there. It's such a real place. It exists as a place and it's, that was really fun.
David Kosten: Well, we were super lucky as well cause the place we recorded was just incredible. The rooms in that studio were essentially living rooms that were, you know, two or three hundred years old. They had an ambience and a kind of reflective quality that had been honed. That studio had been running for 40 odd years and Bowie had been there, The Smiths recorded all their records there.
Natasha Khan: Radiohead.
David Kosten: Radiohead, and the roll call for that place was absolutely insane. But the actual audio quality that we were getting there, an old Neve desk, these amazing mics, these beautiful sounding rooms. If you wanted to, you could capture this sense of three dimensional space really well.
Natasha Khan: It's a pretty tough song. I have very rarely revisited that song. It was so kind of vulnerable and I suppose songs like “Laura” that follow, you know, like there's kind of these occasional piano ballads where I just lay my heart on the line and I don't really know what else to do with it. So that song, I pretty much just played it on that upright piano. And then I think at the end, David and I worked on the (sings) “sad,” you know, like the backing vocals all layered up and David, you put it through some really nice tiny speaker or something that made all the backing vocals really crackly and lo-fi and weird sounding. And, but that drew it into the rest of the record. But actually to me it's the one that sonically is the most different. You know, it's one that's kind of like sits in its own space on the album and I suppose it was in homage to people like Carol King and, you know, like those sort of seventies piano playing women that I'd loved as a little girl as well. And also Cat Power. I'd been really, I was really into Cat Power as a teenager and I loved her Covers Record and I really, you know, and I love Lou Reed and I don't know, there's just something about those sort of sad seventies sounding piano songs.
David Kosten: Do you remember us playing this to your manager (Dick O’Dell) when we finished it?
Natasha Khan: No. No. What happened?
David Kosten: I remember he cried a lot and I'd never seen this guy be as emotional as that. He was quite an emotional…
Natasha Khan: He's very sweet. Yeah. Sensitive.
David Kosten: He's very sweet. But I remember him listening to that and I turned around just thinking he might think it was quite good and he was just bawling at the back of the studio, and he obviously had invested, I remember he thought that this might be the hit. I remember him talking to me about this being the song, and I didn't think that was the case at all. I thought if there was anything that was gonna succeed commercially, there were other better options. Like, “What's a Girl to Do?” maybe, or, you know, certainly not that one. But I knew it had a certain power, but he'd invested a lot of thought into this or hopes into this song. I was nervous that he wouldn't like it. But I remember him, you know, me turning around. He was just sort of broken, sort of broken manager at the, at the backs of tears, “Tahiti” style tears rolling down his cheeks. He was a key part of the making of this record.
Natasha Khan: Yeah.
David Kosten: Because he supported Natasha and me so much.
Natasha Khan: He fought off the opposition a lot. Yeah.
David Kosten: Even more than that though, he gave us confidence and whenever I would moan to him about how appalling Natasha was, he would sort say something to sort of, to get around that. And I'm quite sure Natasha had gone to him and said, “Oh my God, this guy, he makes everything so mid nineties, it's horrendous, you know?”
Natasha Khan: (laughs)
David Kosten: And then so, but so he was like a sort of, yeah. He was a go between, a key of the personnel.
Natasha Khan: Mm-hmm. Yeah. He was a go-between.
David Kosten: He was a supporter and he was a huge fan as well. He really, he was a cheerleader for everything we were doing and every time he visited, he was so brilliant, was enthusiastic and so supportive and just our biggest fan.
Natasha Khan: Yeah.
David Kosten: I was used to managers. I'd worked on a few records, including some with some really well-known people. And I was used to managers turning up and it just being horrendous. And the artist would behave like a dick, trying to impress the manager. And the manager was trying to impress the artist and it was just, it was never a good thing with a manager coming to the studio. And every time he came to the studio it was a joy and he would make us feel amazing. Like we were 10 feet tall and we were actually really good. And he would cry and it wasn't terrible. He would, yeah, he would say how amazing it was and what brilliant work we were doing and oh my God, this is so great. He was just, yeah, he fucking ruled in that he was passionate in that process.
Natasha Khan: He was passionate about music and I think that's why we worked together, cause we just nerded out so much on Kate Bush and you know, like we're just the big fans of great musicians. And just a quick side note, you know, this thing of him being kind of a mediator between David and I, David and I's relationship is pretty edgy at times. Like, and it still is like, you know, there's kind of this, there's a friction there and I think we did need Dick to kind of help manage that at times, but that's why we worked so well together. You know, there has to be that chemistry and that kind of like push pull and, you know, we are not easily impressed by each other, and I think, you know, until after the fact that, but I think there's just kind of, you know, that has set us in good stead because, and I remember us Dick saying this to me and, and I think say us saying it to each other that anything that's worth making is not gonna be easy. It was fucking hard. Sometimes it was so grueling and so emotional and just we bashed heads on things and we couldn't agree on certain things, but because we both wanted it to be great.
“The Wizard”
Natasha Khan: “The Wizard” was about kind of like cult leaders and sort of the hypnotic sexuality of certain types of men I'd met and how I could see how that could translate into a Charles Manson vibe. You know, having been in LA and visited these sort of culty seventies groupie parties and stuff. And “The Wizard” is all about, you know, that hypnotic, seance trance space that people get into when they're led by a wizard. You know, someone who's got powers.
David Kosten: That's our first song. That's the first thing we ever did.
Natasha Khan: Mm-hmm.
David Kosten: That's our demo. Day one.
Natasha Khan: Yeah I think, that was really fun because “The Wizard,” we'd been playing live and I, you know, there's a marraca, there's this low bassline, there's weird kind of telephone sounds at the start, which were on my QY, like on the sound effects bank or whatever. And so we kind of did have these strange elements, but again, it was very, very sparse. And I remember taking it in to David and just really nice touches like, you know, he added this grain and reverb to the marraca. We kind of both looked at each other. It was like, “Well, this sounds cool.” And then, you know, like, I think we rerecorded the bass with a really nice, or maybe Ben came, someone came in and played the bassline and we merged that with my MIDI bass. And that was kind of the first, one of the first times we'd merged the basslines and realized that we got a great bottom end as well as a really characterful tone doing that. And I really liked the way David captured my vocal. It felt really intimate and clear and he sort of understood the mid to high EQ part of my voice. Like other people, you know, have tried to compress that or, I don’t know, they just don't understand where the kind of sweet spot of my vocal is. And I think David instinctively picked that out straight away.
David Kosten: But that song just is basically as he brought it, I don't think we did very much to that, apart from that sound that is so present there that that's that guitar amp, it's like just we're putting everything through that amp except the vocal. And this, I think this is a crucial thing on this record as well. That microphone we used for Natasha's, I think it was on pretty much every song. It's so expensive. When I signed to, Warners as an artist, I dumped half my advance on buying a couple of crazy good microphones and one of those was the thing that we recorded all the vocals on. And it's, yeah, I still use it. It's extraordinary how transparent, how you feel like you are…
Natasha Khan: I'm whispering in your ear.
David Kosten: Yeah, you are so close. I mean, Natasha's literally singing all those vocals, it's not like a sort of conventional micing thing of giving a bit of distance. It's literally, you're almost in the microphone.
Natasha Khan: Mm-hmm.
David Kosten: Then sort of dealing with whatever problems that might present. But you kind of, the intimacy of all those vocals on this super super hi-fi, it's a handbuilt valve mic, but it was incredibly clear sounding. And that's a key part of the sound of the record, is these intensely lo-fi 20 pound eBay microphones recording live sounds that are being amped through a really sort of crusty 1960s guitar speaker or that shaker sound is that amp with the reverb on it.
Natasha Khan: Valves.
David Kosten: And so many, yeah, all these, these sort of bits that are kind of sometimes on the edge of not working properly. But then in front of that, standing in front of it, you've got this vocal and it adds that sort of juxtaposition element where the lyric and the vocal itself is pushed right in front of you, like you're having a performance and everything else is sort of in three dimensions behind the singer, and the lyric is there for you to sort of just get instantly.
I think Natasha had a thing for like some skinny floppy haired men in corduroy trousers.
Natasha Khan: (laughs)
David Kosten: So my vision of “The Wizard.” It was essentially one of these sort of LA hipster types in cords, sort of swanning around with a waistcoat.
Natasha Khan: (laughs)
David Kosten: Sort of commanding, commanding people to sleep with him and Natasha and her of little group of teammates of all female. Given that this was my first exposure to the whole of Bat for Lashes recording experience. Because I'd gone from the meeting with Natasha and her manager straight into this crazy residential studio and Natasha's team, the girls just appeared out of nowhere and suddenly I'm in that space with them sort of snickering about the rude bits in the wizard.
Natasha Khan: (laughs)
“Prescilla”
Natasha Khan: So that was another one that came from a dream. I had a dream that had Priscilla Presley and Chan Marshall, who's Cat Power, in the dream, and they were talking to me about like wanting to get off the road and have a family and like settle down and I got up and I had my auto harp or the auto harp that Caroline had left. Whatever key that was in, I just wrote it on my lap, like half asleep. I mean, I think there was always like a push pull for me, of half of me was like, wanted loads of kids and just to be happily married and kind of do the normal thing. But that was always grappling with this fire in my belly for going out into the world and being something different. So there's always been that push pull, and I think every record has probably touched on some of that dilemma, internal dilemma.
I think the stamps and claps. That's the one where I'd used my boot on my desk and I think I, we used my boots in the studio too to kind of hit onto a piece of wood and stuff. But the stamp and clap was really inspired by Gwen Stefani's “Ain't No Hollaback Girl.” I really was in love with that song at the time. And I'd also loved Alan Lomax and a lot of those kind of penitentiary blues songs. There's kind of that chain gang reference.
David Kosten: The only thing I would add, and this is a perfect one to mention it, is how open we both were to using demo parts. If something sounded good in a demo, it didn't need recording. And frankly, I would probably both rather not put, you know, the effort into trying to make something that was already great better and then, and then not do it. So all the things like the stamp clap stuff that is all Natasha's original demos. I think maybe on that one we tried to add a little bit of something else to it, but it was never as good. So if it's good, it's good. It doesn't matter where it comes from.
Natasha Khan: If it ain't broke don’t fix it.
David Kosten: Yeah, exactly. So yeah, that was one of many songs where there were elements that we left in from original demos that were just fine, that they sounded great.
“Bat’s Mouth”
Natasha Khan: My first boyfriend called me Batty or Bat, or Tashi Bat and like that was kind of me. So “Bat's Mouth,” it was about kissing someone and imagining these miniature wolverines and bears and creatures living in the caves of each of our mouths and how they kind of travel from one to the other or stars move across. And it was, it's a making out song really. And I, yeah, and I loved that kind of fairytale magical way to talk, describe kissing someone. And then, you know, “The caves of our mouths, the bears bellies and the air in between is spearing comets.” And like, you know, it was this like falling in love song and the refrain, “she is sure,” I mean, it's about sex and kissing and all these things, but it's got such a childlike joy to like the feeling of falling in love as well. It's a really sensual, the lyrics are quite naughty in places and it's quite sensual, but I think this like really nice, we sort of, yeah, mixed that with a really childlike abandon. So yeah.
David Kosten: Well the whole, “she is sure,” sort of overloaded, it sounds like kids singing and it reminds me, I think maybe we were, well I remember being a huge fan of "Peach, Plum, Pear.”
Natasha Khan: Mm-hmm. Joanna Newsom.
David Kosten: By Joanna Newsom.
Natasha Khan: Yeah. We did talk about that.
David Kosten: And it has this kind of choir of Joannas singing on it that's spectacularly sort of distorting and it sounds like a school concert, badly recorded kind of thing, which we really loved. Yeah and that's the, “she is sure,” definitely has that thing where we sort of were triumphant accidentally when it all sort of overloaded and had that quality, it was like, “No, we are, we're not redoing that. That's beautiful.” Yeah to have that distortion on it, it's so good. There's a lot of accidents, but you, the kind of skill I suppose, if there is one, is in sort of knowing which of those accidents to leave in and sort of embrace. That was definitely one of them.
Natasha Khan: Well, that one was definitely where Caroline and I ran up and down the garden weeping and stuff. And Abi was beautiful on that, that, especially on the final part. But the strings on there are some of my favorite strings.
David Kosten: That one might be one of the best productions, you know, that we came up with.
Natasha Khan: Yeah.
David Kosten: It took a while because it's got such an amazing dynamic to it and it's really moving as well. It's hard, you know, it's, it's not easy to make music that's emotionally impactful. And that one really feels like…
Natasha Khan: It crescendos.
David Kosten: Yeah it crescendos and it really hits a place towards the end where it's quite profoundly joyous as well. And that was what the whooping and the yelling running around outside was all about. Like, and the “she is sure” is the most joyous sound. And the backing vocals were all peaking and blowing out and it's like we can hear overloading. Yeah overloading it with joy. And we left that in.
Natasha Khan: Yeah.
David Kosten: But this was all recorded outside, running around, trying not to fall in the, the studio had a swimming pool in the garden and then trying not to fall in that, trying not to drop microphones into the water and get hit with, you know, costs. And it was just, it was just such an amazing evening. I remember asking for the engineers to, or the assistants to take the mics out and where to position them and just hoping this was gonna work out. But then watching the girls just running up and down and having such a brilliant time. It sounds like it, that whole episode makes such a difference to the final track, doesn't it? It's got a jubilation, really quite precious jubilation, but it feels like a really precious part of the album.
Natasha Khan: Mm-hmm.
David Kosten: That song, I think that might be, yeah that's a good one. I wouldn't necessarily put them in order of anything, but that if there was one that feels like it's quite an important track.
“Seal Jubilee”
Natasha Khan: “Seal Jubilee” and “I Saw a Light” with some of the earlier, well, the two kind of guitar ones I play on the record. Although actually we changed “I Saw a Light” from being a guitar track into a piano cause I actually used to play it on the guitar live and both of them kind of started off really small and then kind of get quite big and grungy. And I remember in “Seal Jubilee,” I really, I think I was listening a lot to Nick Cave and I was in Brighton living by the sea and I've always had a big love of the sea and nautical or sea themes.
Did I play the guitar in the studio? Was that the original demo guitar that we then put through the amp?
David Kosten: No, we recorded really, really well. We recorded it on that posh vocal mic. I actually found a version of it maybe six months ago that was pristinely recorded and it sounded amazing, but it didn't have anything like the sort of atmosphere that it has now. And it was an atmosphere track.
Natasha Khan: It also had, it had that kind of, I was really into Air's Virgin Suicides soundtrack and I love the echo on that vocal, the tape delay or whatever it was.
David Kosten: I listened to it today. It sounds so good, doesn’t it? Yeah, it's got, it's kind of, I had a really shitty old Roland Space Echo that was permanently on the edge of not working, but it just held out long enough to get all these great sounds. And it was the same tape. It was a tape that had been in there since the seventies. Never been changed. And I bought it secondhand off of some guy that thought it was, the whole thing wasn't working at all, but it, I fixed the thing that wasn't working and the tape just ran and it had this sort of crunchy quality, and you can hear that across the record.
Natasha Khan: And I'd been a fan of Steve Reich and like, William Basinski and all these funny tape loop guys and yeah, like, it just, yeah, I loved it. It sounded like the tape had been buried underground for 50 years and we'd done a something and that's what I went to. Yeah, I had that whole quality of like finding a tape in a skip or, you know, finding an old 8-track cassette or something that was degraded and definitely that sort of Alan Lomax or no the Langley Schools thing. There's some very cheap, those cassette machines where you had this sort of piano key transport controls. It had that sort of nostalgic quality to it and it was there in this sort of 70s box. You just had to disregard all the good quality recording and you just keep the tape bit. And then readjust the timing so that it fits the timing of the original. And that was the sound. It was a revelatory moment really.
There's one pertinent thing that I think is worth mentioning, cause this is key to the record as well. “Seal Jubilee” has a part in it that was difficult to get. I think we were determined to get it and I made Natasha cry getting it because I was such a fucking bully. That vibraphone.
Natasha Khan: Yeah, the vibraphone. It was really hard.
David Kosten: We weren't expert vibraphone players or you know, it was, it was tough. But there was something about that dynamic of being unafraid to push and push and push and push cause we knew that the end result might be good. And I kind of, I feel like that has colored so much of the work I've done since of that understanding that sometimes it's just really hard and you might be tired and you don't wanna play the 58th take of the vibraphone…
Natasha Khan: But eventually also I was just like, I don’t know what I can do any different. Like, what do you want from me? You know, like where you're just playing it every which way you can think of and it's like you're like, “less, less, less, more, more, more.” I was just like, “oh my,” you know, it's like torture. Because you're having to rehearse a performance rather, I was very much of the thing of like, “my feelings need to be raw and this just needs to come out how I feel it.” And if I do something, too many times there's like this rebellious part of me that gets really upset cause it feels overly thought or overly, you know, like logical or something. And I remember getting so sad and feeling broken and this was probably after a long, long day. But yeah, that was a sad, that was a low point over a vibraphone track. I mean, worse things have happened in people's lives (laughs).
David Kosten: Yeah (laughs)
“Sarah”
Natasha Khan: Yeah, we got a proper drummer in for that cause “Sarah” had always been quite minimal live. One of my favorite parts of that is the backing vocals and the lyrics were the backing vocals. I just find them so funny and I actually, I love the lyrics of this song in general. I'm sort of quite, like surprised that I managed to write a song with these words in them and that the backing vocals have like “the tarmac of a melting motorway,” in it, I just find it so weird. And I don't know, it's just a, it's definitely a funny, it was named after the book by JT LeRoy, Sarah, and it's about kind of swapping personas with somebody and this, you know, dark girl that kind of loses her faith in God.
I don’t know, I just found it to be such an odd song. But then when we added the drums that sounded more live band. And there was a version with horns on it too, which I don’t know if it came out or not, but we kind of played with that quite a lot, didn't we David?
David Kosten: I remember us not knowing exactly which direction it should go in, but it, we kind of pushed and pulled with it. Yeah, but we sort of bonded over that whole girl group thing. I think that became quite a big part of the sound of this record too. There's so many tracks that have got some element of that sort of 60s wall of sound. Layered slightly overloading backing vocals thing, and “Sarah” maybe was, I think that might have been one of the ones where we sort of discovered that for ourselves and sort of enjoyed it. I didn't know how to record a drum kit. I don't, I wasn't a drum kit engineer, but something about the shitness of that drum recording is really nice. I listened to it. It's really nice.
Natasha Khan: Mm-hmm.
David Kosten: I listened to it again the other day and it's quite hard to make a drum sound quite as papery and sort of unpro as that, but it's got that lovely naive quality. Again, I'm super proud of how bad that is and how it, how it sort of got through it.
Natasha Khan: And we, we replaced the, I'd written that bassline on like a MIDI keyboard and I remember getting real bass on that and that was really fun to hear as well. I think that was Ben's first…
David Kosten: That was Ben Christophers’ first appearance in Bat for Lash's land, I think.
Natasha Khan: Okay!
David Kosten: I remember him doing that. Yeah I think 'cause he didn't play masses on this record. I think he did, yeah bits of bass and guitar here and there, didn't he? Not very much.
Natasha Khan: Yeah.
David Kosten: He came into the picture much later for albums two and three onwards and live stuff. But yeah, that was again, sort of not really knowing what we were doing technically, but it just sounded cool.
“I Saw a Light”
Natasha Khan: “I Saw a Light,” and it's another really personal track for me. I mean, I suppose this album had been my whole life in the making and “I Saw a Light” was sort of about dark things going on in suburbia. And one thing that's really beautiful about it is that David and I did. We sat together and kind of, I wanted to make a sound collage at the beginning of the song. There's bits of talking and there's a piece of piano that my godfather, who was Danny Thompson, musician, Danny Thompson, bass player, he had recorded, like, I think I took him over a tape of me playing piano when I was 11. Like all these songs that I'd written compositions as a little girl. And he'd kept it and transferred it onto reel to reel tape for me. And when I, he knew I was making the album, he said, “Oh, watch it Tash, you might want this, might come in handy or whatever.” And David and I listened to it and it was all these like really sweet, sad melancholy like piano songs that tiny Natasha had written. And so in the collage at the beginning, we put some of that piano. And I remember describing to David that I wanted that collage to sound like it had been sucked up in a tornado, like in The Wizard of Oz. And we spent quite a while trying to make it woof around and like pan around in this circular motion and then like get sucked into a box. You know, like, and then there's just rain sounds and then you get the piano coming in and, and to me that was just prog like heaven. I was just like, “This is so up my street.” But it wasn't trying to be prog, it was trying to be cinematic. It was cinema, like it was a, it was like seeing a film in my mind and it was perfect. And it was midnight, blue and lush green and gold and wet rainy roads and couples in cars and steamy windows and sad children, sleepwalking. And it was all these from the book that I showed David at the beginning and I just had lists of things lightning thunder, crackling radios, whale sounds, like creaky loft floorboards. And you know, like “I Saw a Light” to me was this opportunity to, I don't know, it just encapsulated my childhood. It sounded like my childhood or something. And like I said, I'd initially written it on guitar, but when we came to do it, I think I'd switched over to the piano. And I love the sort of how it goes from the top of the keyboard to the very bottom. So you start with the kind of opening chords and then that really low “dung dung” bassline. And as we'd been playing it live, Abi had, we kind of talked about John Cale and the Velvet Underground, and Abi, you know, sort of got her John Cale drone on that built throughout the song. And then we had a big marching band bass drum that we'd hit on stage, but that kind of backed up the bass line of the piano. I guess when we started doing the track listing, there were certain ones that stood out, like “Horse and I” was definitely the opener and then there was a natural rhythm. And when it clicked, it clicked. But I don't know, David, if you remember why we, I think we put, “I Saw a Light” at the end because it was sort of that, you know, like the end credits kind of song and I think all of my albums is sort of an end credits song. Yeah I don't remember there ever being any sort of question about that one not being the end.
David Kosten: Right. In fact, I don't really remember any conversations about tracklist ordering. Yeah other than it was, it was so obvious that “Horse and I” was there and “I Saw a Light” was there.
Natasha Khan: Mm-hmm.
David Kosten: I don't think it was a difficult thing to do, but that song is so fully realized. If you were trying to sort of put into audio what the vision was in that first meeting, I don't know how we could have found a better sort of vehicle for it than all these found sounds, all this melody, all this drama or all this kind of disturbed suburbia. It's all in there. And it's with a good tune.
Natasha Khan: I wanted it to be like an alien abduction E.T. kind of twilight in suburbia horror song. And I'm really proud of that one. I love how it ends, get so big and dark and you know, and I wasn't embarrassed to let it, you know, the couple committing suicide. I remember my cousin being like, “God, that's a bit of a cheesy line.” I was like, “I don't care.” Like, I just, I don’t know. I just, it was dark and I wanted it to be almost on the nose in a way. And yeah, I really love that one.
David Kosten: And that vocal performance at the end. That was the thing in that very first meeting I had where I was, that was the moment. I think I told you this the other day, didn't I? When I heard that demo and you sang it like that, that's a bellowing at the end. And I had a sort of full body, sort of goosebump moment thinking, I have to work on this record. This is something I really want to happen. It was that vocal moment in the “I Saw a Light” demo. So to hear that sort of fully complete, realized, realized, delivered, and succeed. And sort of, sounding like it was supposed to, it was thrilling. Yeah, definitely. When we were finishing that, I knew this was as good a record as I'd ever worked on or was likely to get to work on.
I remember my terror cause I overloaded that final mix. I put it through a box and I didn't realize until mastering that I fucked up. And it's the fuck up is, is is on the final master of every single track that the, like the center is distorted. But maybe there's something good about that, that even, I remember the mastering engineer saying, “Do you realize what you've done?” And he was quite…
Natasha Khan: Demeaning (laughs).
David Kosten: (laughs) Yeah, basically it was quite demeaning, but that's, yeah, Fur and Gold by Bat for Lashes has a massive sort of overload issue, but it's, that's okay. It's part of the sound of it. So that I had, I was terrified basically, that I needed to redo everything, but it was fine.
Natasha Khan: I remember, um, going to do the artwork after we'd finished the record and I went back to my childhood home and the me standing in front of a suburban house with my horse and my gold headband and everything was in front of my first love, my first boyfriend I had from 16 to 25. It was in front of his parents' house and they'd kind of taken me in in times of need. And it was just this full circle moment of seeing like this twilight blue, you know, this woman, young woman on the front cover, like with her horse, about to embark on the journey of a lifetime, something I'd only ever dreamt about up until that point. And the fact that it married so well with him, it looked like the music sounded. And I had this thing in my hand, this vinyl. And I just remember being like gobsmacked that it had come into physical reality. And from start to finish, I just always remember just feeling so surprised by it. It's like I went into some subterranean or some celestial, I don't know what it was, but I'd gone into some dream world and came out with this thing in my hand.
David Kosten: I knew from demo one when I heard that first demo. I knew that this potentially was not only a really good record, but quite potentially an important one, that could really touch a lot of people. And 20 years on, I feel intensely proud of having just been part of this music. Cause I think it's really good. I feel distanced enough from it to know, to be able to just enjoy it as a listener. And I think it's, I know it's about as good a record as I've ever got to work on and be part of. So it's a beautiful piece of work, I think. And I'm, yeah, I'm super proud to have been part of it.
Natasha Khan: So we've been talking about my first album, Fur and Gold, and 20 years later, kind of reflecting on it and remembering it and enjoying talking with David, you know, about all the processes and the production and the writing. It’s really nice to go back and look at something, having lived my life and sort of, you know, the beginning of this musical journey. And looking back now, I think it's such a realized piece of work. Cause often the first album is that your whole life up until that point. But I feel really, as a mother now, I look back on my self then and I feel like really proud and like protective and proud and kind of like, “You did it.” I don’t know. It's a nice feeling 20 years later.
Outro:
Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about Bat for Lashes. You’ll also find a full transcript of this episode and a link to purchase Fur and Gold, including the recent deluxe edition. Instrumental music by North Home. Thanks for listening.
Credits:
"Horse and I"
"Trophy"
"Tahiti"
"What's a Girl to Do?"
"Sad Eyes"
"The Wizard"
"Prescilla"
"Bat's Mouth"
"Seal Jubilee"
"Sarah"
"I Saw a Light"
All songs written by Natasha Khan
Produced by David Kosten and Natasha Khan
Recorded and mixed by David Kosten
Mastered by Tim Young at Metropolis
Published by Chrysalis Music Limited
All tracks ℗ & © The Echo Label Limited
“Horse and I”
Drums – Tim Byford
Harp – Emma Ramsdale
Viola – Abi Fry
Violin – Howard Gott, Sophie Sirota
Vocals, Keyboards, Percussion – Natasha Khan
“Trophy”
Guitar, Backing Vocals – Josh T Pearson
Violin – Howard Gott, Sophie Sirota
Vocals, Keyboards, Percussion, Drums – Natasha Khan
“Tahiti”
Autoharp, Backing Vocals – Caroline Weeks
Viola – Abi Fry
Vocals, Piano – Natasha Khan
“What's A Girl To Do?”
Bass, Guitar – Ben Christophers
Drums – Tim Byford
Harp – Emma Ramsdale
Vocals, Keyboards, Percussion, Drums – Natasha Khan
“Sad Eyes”
Vocals, Piano, Organ [Hammond] – Natasha Khan
“The Wizard”
Backing Vocals, Guitar – Caroline Weeks
Bass, Guitar – Ben Christophers
Vocals, Keyboards, Piano, Percussion, Drums, Harmonium – Natasha Khan
“Prescilla”
Guitar – Caroline Weeks
Vocals, Piano, Percussion, Autoharp – Natasha Khan
“Bat's Mouth”
Backing Vocals, Guitar – Caroline Weeks
Percussion [Special Foot Taps] – David Kosten
Viola – Abi Fry
Violin – Anna McInerney, Howard Gott, Mary Funnell, Sophie Sirota
Vocals, Piano – Natasha Khan
“Seal Jubilee”
Backing Vocals – Josh T Pearson
Keyboards – David Kosten
Viola – Abi Fry
Vocals [Sea Sounds] – Mikee Goodman
Vocals, Keyboards, Piano, Guitar, Vibraphone – Natasha Khan
“Sarah”
Backing Vocals – Rachael T Sell
Bass, Guitar – Ben Christophers
Drums – Tim Byford
Trumpet, Trombone – Tim Hutton
Viola – Abi Fry
Vocals, Keyboards, Percussion – Natasha Khan
“I Saw a Light”
Drums – Tim Byford
Guitar, Vocals [Intro] – Josh T Pearson
Viola – Abi Fry
Vocals, Piano, Sounds [Intro] – Natasha Khan
Voice [Spoken Word Intro] – Will Lemon
Episode Credits:
Intro/Outro Music:
“Look Away” by North Home
Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim
Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam