David: Before the song came out,
Nas would always come downstairs
and he was like, "Guys, this is gonna be a new moment."
Denzel: "Call Me By Your Name" is a song
that's fully based on intuition.
There was no real part in the entire process
that we were really like thinking about
what should go here? What should go here?
David: We've never made anything else like that.
And after doing that, we've been doing that more and more.
Denzel: I feel like a majority
of his life has had so many points of fear and hiding.
Once he let that go,
we let the fear on our side go even more.
Denzel: This time, last year Nas was able
to just be making ideas and like every day, we'll
wake up and he's already sent us like three ideas
of things that he's just recording on his phone.
We hit up Apple and got him like a laptop.
Halfway through like the first couple months,
he was like, "would you guys be down
to like executive produce my debut album?"
And we're like, you know, "of course."
We basically took all the equipment that we had.
Like, we rented some, we shipped some out from New York
and then we built like a makeshift studio in the first spot
that we went to.
And then we were there for a little bit,
then he's like, I don't know,
maybe we need a different vibe.
So we would have to like pack up everything,
like every cable and then build it in this next spot
that wherever Nas chose.
Three different houses.
David: And then ended up coming here towards the very end.
The house that we made "Call Me By Your Name"
in happened to be kind of similar to the one in the movie.
Denzel: So that night that "Call Me" started,
me and Omer are just recording like
this completely other song
that may or may not even make the album.
But in the middle of like one of the takes,
Nas was just like, "Wait, pause it.
Okay, record this. Call me when you want,
call me when you need," out of nowhere.
And then we go back to like recording the other song.
We were like, "Maybe we should work on that thing.
Like, let's go back to that."
Basically all the melodies in that song,
all the harmonic things that Nas is doing
with his voice was like done on that night.
When Nas first did the hook idea for "Call Me,"
he was just like, "Omer what guitar chords go with this?"
And then Omer wasn't even like, "Oh, what key is this?"
He was just like.
He did a couple other parts like this one right here.
After Omer put down that guitar part,
we just kind of looped it out,
and then Nas was doing just like a melody run
on top of that.
And the bass is from like that melody run.
Yeah, that's the same bass from "Mo Bamba,"
and "Panini" and everything.
It's just a good bass,
like when you find a good one, like why change it?
David: Why change it?
Denzel: In the second verse,
the bass is like intentionally over distorted.
David: We just looped the record out a bunch of times.
And you know, like Denz was saying earlier,
just Nas would go for like 20 minutes.
And that's been something that we've done almost
on every single record.
And then we all sit down together
and pick out our favorite parts.
I wanna say it was the next day.
It was me, Roy and Omer in the studio
with Nas.
And we had talked about it a little bit
before we got in about recording like live percussion
and just like seeing what was around the house
and just recording into voice notes
and trying it on the ELA-M and all kinds of things.
Essentially as the song progresses,
as you can see in like the verse section,
we have a little less claps layered,
chorus a little bit more.
Post chorus we have the most.
So I'll play a one by one in the post,
just to kind of see what's going on.
Denzel: And then in certain parts
where like the song is building,
we'd just chop up and just change the pattern a little bit,
and just make little moments out of the specific parts
where things are needed.
David: Omer did the speaker percussive shaker thing
with a piece of paper and we just put it on a speaker
and we were just like shaking it back and forth
like a shaker.
Denzel: Me and Nas come in one day
and there's like keys on the table
and he's like shaking the keys
and then we chopped it up and like that's the high hat.
There's like voices in the background, but we were like,
"Oh the voices are kind of like doing like a rhythm too,"
so we just kinda didn't try to over clean it
and left those in.
David: We ended up getting a version done
that was just really those elements going on.
And we knew we wanted to keep working on it,
but I would say where we really started adding on,
was when we were working
at another studio for the first time.
We'd had this band Hello Yellow in,
recording drums and guitar and bass and even piano,
everything like live.
We used that as an opportunity
to get into a real studio and record the banjo that we had.
We literally just had Omer do like a whole,
I remember he just like freestyled
through the whole entire song,
and then we all sat down together
and just picked out parts
that we thought would work the best.
So I'll play all the banjo parts together.
Denzel: It's funny because it's a banjo,
like on a song that shouldn't have banjo.
And like there's even parts where Omer is really going in
on the harmonic minor Phrygian scale stuff,
but on banjo.
And then parts like this.
This plugin is really what's making the banjo
not sound like a banjo, Mega Verb.
And then we also auto tuned the banjo
because that's also hilarious.
When Nas previewed the song initially,
and it went crazy on like Twitter and like all social media,
that's where the instrumentation stopped.
David: We probably had the record, you know, 85, 90% done.
It was just like bringing it across the finish line.
Denzel: This entire extended version of this song
came very much later
around the time that the video was getting done.
In this first half of the bridge part,
we did all the keys parts.
It was dope, but it was like maybe it needs
like another part.
So when Nas was writing out the bridge and like tracked it,
then we laid in this like vocoder,
going along with the chords, but with Nas' vocals.
David: Nas is a very hands-on artist.
He's a huge part of how the overall record shapes
and ends up coming.
Denzel: So essentially what Nas does is record each section,
maybe like 50 times.
We'll have to listen to every one of like the 50 or 70 takes
of each word and be like,
well this one is more perfect
but this one like has more grit in it or has more pain
or has more emotion in it,
and then we'll go do that for like every single word
and every single layer throughout like the entire song.
We're playing the bridge and we were like feeling it out.
Like thinking like, "Okay,
what goes in that part?"
Like maybe there's like a Nas vocal
that's like chopped up or something.
And then David just plays it, like kind of randomly,
and we were just like, "Oh!" It was like...
David: After this journey that we went on
from the beginning to the end of this record,
this is "Call Me By Your Name."
Denzel: After Nas recorded the second verse,
we stood outside and we were like,
he's really like putting this level of himself
like on it that it's definitely gonna change
a lot of conversations.
David: Nas essentially created a music video that said,
"If I'm gonna be myself and truly be myself
and really express my full sexuality,
then I'm okay with going to hell."
There's real hatred towards people
that are simply just trying to love.
We wanna keep that conversation going.
And if we have to put it in people's faces
for them to pay attention,
that's something that we're all signed up for.
Denzel: Working with Nas at this point,
in this capacity, makes us even double down
on everything that we've ever believed,
like coming up to this point.
David: We have a personal goal as well
when it comes to how black producers are treated
in the pop space or seen in the pop space.
Denzel: This is our first step into the pop space
in a real way.
David: This was a big goal of ours
to really change the conversation around black producers
and really show that, yes we can live in the pop space
and we don't wanna go anywhere.
David: When the pandemic hit, we had all these plans.
We were gonna play at Coachella with him
and all these things and like the pandemic hit,
and we had been in the studio a little bit before,
but I think when we finally had
to just like surround ourselves
with the same walls every single day,
and we were literally coming in five days a week,
six days a week, talking every single day.
And that's what truly made us,
I feel like brothers on like a whole other level.
Just being able to come in
and like there was nothing else that we had
to think about or work on.
It was just like having fun, making music together
and just like thinking about creating this overall project
and this album.