Rogét Chahayed: Doing what I do. I'm
trying to find rifts and musical melodies and things that kind of
stick out. And I feel like "Kiss Me More" is like the perfect loop.
Yeti Beats: It was early
one morning. I woke up and I just was going through the beats and this one stuck out to
me and I decided to just try to rework it and open the session. I literally brought it to
the studio that night and Doja heard it and was like, "I love it. I got a song about kissing."
Yeti Beats: I met Doja at an early age.
She was 16. I was introduced through an intern at my studio, by her a demo
version of “So High” that she recorded into her computer. She came through the studio and then
eventually her mom came and talked to me. Almost from the first time I met Doja I just knew. I
was like, "Man, she just has incredible unique talent. Just needs to keep making songs." The
track just kind of happened naturally really fast, you know, added a couple of things after
we recorded the song with Doja and it was easy. Oh man, maybe it wasn't easy, but...
Rogét Chahayed: It was. We just have fun when we make music.
Every time never feels like we're in a session or there's a pressure to make a hit song.
He really liked it when I started playing it and was like, "That sounds really dope. Let's roll with that."
Yeti Beats: The keyword that I gave Rogét that day when I was
looking for loops or sounds or chord progressions and was... I was looking for something cute.
I think we were trying to make some cute beats.
Rogét Chahayed: One thing I'm very big on musically is phrasing, you know? A solid start, a solid middle and
finish. And I feel like this chord progression, this loop, has a nice, complete phrase.
Yeti Beats: We made like a version of the beat
that is at 95 beats per minute. It was like a slower version.
I pretty much knew that it wasn't the right vibe when I played it for Doja, like at three separate
occasions and she didn't gravitate towards it. I really loved the chord progression. So as we
got further along in making the record, I kept thinking about man, maybe we need like another
up-tempo song. And I was going through my folder of beats and I was like, "Man, this one's still
really, really good. Maybe I should speed it up and maybe make it a little like funky or disco-y."
So I opened it up. And the first thing I did was speed up the tempo to 111.
Rogét Chahayed: The way that it was sped up on Ableton
sort of gives it this natural twang a little bit on the guitar has a little bit of like just sauce.
Yeti Beats: The second thing
I did was add like a four on the four, kick drum, just a basic sound.
Yeti Beats: The next thing I added was bass. My favorite bass sample. It's something that I actually
sampled from a live bass loop. It's like a
disco funk bass. I use Simpler in Ableton and I just play it out.
Yeti Beats: It made it sound a little funkier. The bass was brighter and sounded more like a live instrument.
And then we ended up getting some extra stuff on the bass from Carter Lang,
my homie, and I have a bunch of tracks that are drums, but some of it are layers, you know,
kicks and snares and stuff like that. So I'll just try to solo each one of the drums.
Yeti Beats: My friend Jerry Lewis himself was there when I was making this and
he added some drum sounds to it that really made it thump.
I added the woodblock. It's from the original session I
did with Rogét, which is something I added as a extra rhythmic element.
Most people don't know there's a little vocal in there, but it's in there.
I think I went back and started to add more elements from the original,
starting with the woodblock. And then I think I put this sound in.
Rogét Chahayed: This sound was like a punchy synth sound from the Prophet X that I added after the guitar.
I thought the contrast of having like sort of a legato guitar and like the kind of
staccato punchy synth made it like a nice, just musical contrast that blended together well.
Yeti Beats: For the transitions,
I added the slide guitar, which was a Rogét sound.
On the hook, I decided to play a little Nile Rogers influenced
lead guitar. And you can hear that right here.
Yeti Beats: At the end of the day, it ended up looking like this. Super blessed that Doja liked it
and wrote a cool song to it. Here it goes.
Yeti Beats: She's an amazing rapper and a great, amazing singer too. It's cool to work with someone
who's just so versatile. Big shout out to Doja for believing in the song and for the team,
for standing behind it. To see it come to the level that I always imagined that it would be at.
Rogét Chahayed: I ended up working for Dr. Dre in 2014. So, you know, I was like an on-call keyboard player at
Aftermath. You know, after that happened, I ended up meeting Dram a few years later
and we finished his album at Yeti's old studio. And that's when Yeti had asked me like, "Hey,
I'm working with this incredible artist, Doja Cat. Do you want to come in and work with us?"