Chris Walla And J. Robbins Create 'Mercury'

MICHELE NORRIS, host:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.

Can two people who have never met get together and make meaningful music? NPR's Project Song puts musicians in a recording studio for two days and documents their songwriting process.

Well, today, the two musicians are Chris Walla - he's the guitarist and producer for the popular indie band Death Cab for Cutie, and producer and musician J. Robbins. When they first met up in our studios, they knew each other's music, but the rest was unfamiliar.

Project Song producer Bob Boilen picks up their story.

BOB BOILEN: It didn't take but a few minutes for it all to sink in.

Mr. CHRIS WALLA (Musician): I mean, we're both a little terrified about it, I think, but it's pretty exciting. I think it's going to be fun.

BOILEN: That's Chris Walla. He and musician J. Robbins are in NPR Studio 4A, a beautifully spacious, wood-filled music studio. Chris and J. have plugged in their guitar amps, there's a drum kit set up and that seat will be filled later by J.'s friend Darren Zentek.

Mr. J. ROBBINS (Musician): Honestly, like, I feel like we've never played music together before, that the best thing we could possibly do is just sit down and start playing, just start jamming.

BOILEN: The song they're going to try and write and record will be based on a photograph and a word. I gave them a choice of six. They chose the word cerebral. The picture they selected is a house in a huge canyon. And the canyon is flooded and so is the house. And in this huge lake of water is a small boat. And on that boat, a dog. The sky is a gorgeous blue. It's a surreal, cataclysmic scenario that was created by photographer Tom Chambers. You'll soon hear how Chris Walla uses this image to help him write the song's lyrics.

Mr. WALLA: So, how do we write songs?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. WALLA: I'm always inclined to just write, like, a four-chord pop song…

Mr. ROBBINS: Right.

Mr. WALLA: …if not a three-chord pop song.

Mr. ROBBINS: Yeah.

Mr. WALLA: I'm hoping that you can help pull away from that.

(Soundbite of music)

BOILEN: Did you hear that little do-do-doop, that simple three-note bass line J. Robbins played? It was nothing earthshaking for sure, but it was a conversation starter, a bit like someone asking you, what's up? And Chris Walla starts to respond to that bass line, that what's up, with his acoustic guitar. Again, nothing profound. You often don't start with the profound. You just have to start.

(Soundbite of music)

BOILEN: Around this time, their drummer arrives. And with few words spoken and only a few strums played, Darren Zentek joins in the creative process.

Mr. DARREN ZENTEK (Musician): Yes. Are we rolling, Neal(ph)? One, two, three…

BOILEN: And Chris Walla, J. Robbins and Darren Zentek continue to expand the skeletal structure of the song by playing it over and over and over again, and each time discovering the possibilities with the chords and the song structure they cooked up.

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. WALLA: There's something magic in there, yet we haven't found it yet, I don't feel like. There's…

(Soundbite of music)

BOILEN: But near the end of the first day, just about six hours into Project Song, Chris Walla, J. Robbins and Darren Zentek were finding a groove, finding ways to transition from one part of the song to another. And I could see and sometimes hear that Chris Walla was working on lyrics for the song. In fact, he'd been scribbling lyrics on an old paper bag he kept in his back pocket.

Mr. WALLA: With any luck, there won't be a lot of writing to do. I think I've got this thing already sort of half in the bag.

BOILEN: Literally on the bag. In fact, where is that paper bag?

Mr. WALLA: Yeah, it's an actual bag. I started just saving bags from, like, delivery food and stuff for whatever happens to be handy. And this was a bag from Salvo Brothers Pizzeria in Madison, Wisconsin. And this is the bag that the salad came in that I've been carrying around with me for the last three days. So…

BOILEN: You got some verses?

Mr. WALLA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have two verses and one chorus. Right now I'm writing pretty literally from the photograph that we have, I think.

BOILEN: I heard you say the word mercury.

Mr. WALLA: I'm singing the word mercury.

BOILEN: Mercury.

Mr. WALLA: There's no doubt about it.

BOILEN: Yeah.

Mr. WALLA: Yeah. I don't know where that comes from or why. I don't know. But…

BOILEN: Do you care?

Mr. WALLA: Not especially. I suppose if there was a global warming or climate crisis, it could tie into that. But I don't know if it necessarily needs to be that literal. I don't know. It's a word that's got a nice shape for the spot that it's going to fall into. And that's so important to me is just having the language fit in those kinds of terms as much as in terms of, like, what the words actually mean.

BOILEN: Day one is over. There are more words to write, lots more to record. But in one day, a song has taken shape where just hours ago there were some photographs and an awful lot of apprehension.

Very early in the next morning, Chris Walla woke from his hotel room in downtown Washington, walked around the city listening to a CD of what had been recorded the day before.

(Soundbite of music)

BOILEN: He jotted down more lyrics on his paper bag. Our next and final recording day began around 10 a.m.

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. WALLA: (Singing) Fading, I'm not built to last. It's now a dozen feet deep on the courtside. I'm making toothpicks out of the mast. Calm, still, calming down at least. It's a gift of the kind that I'm giving…

BOILEN: After dozens of takes and harmony parts, J. Robbins takes a stab at some vocals to reinforce what Chris Walla had put down.

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. ROBBINS: (Singing) All of this hinges on the mercury (unintelligible) in front of me from 32 to infinity.

BOILEN: The rest of the day included a J. Robbins piano part, more guitars, the final vocal tracks, more guitars and vocal harmonies. And here's a bit of how it turned out.

(Soundbite of song, "Mercury")

Mr. WALLA and Mr. ROBBINS: (Singing) Every small thing, any small thing…

Mr. WALLA: (Singing) (unintelligible)

Mr. WALLA and Mr. ROBBINS: (Singing) Every small thing, any small thing…

Mr. WALLA: (Singing) (unintelligible)

Mr. WALLA and Mr. ROBBINS: (Singing) All of this hinges on the mercury, rising red stripe in front of me from 32 to infinity.

BOILEN: I sat down with J. Robbins and Chris Walla to try to figure out what they understood about what they'd just done. And for J. Robbins, it was the photograph of that huge canyon filled with water and a house half-flooded, tilted, perhaps floating away from a dog on a boat that sparked all that he did.

Mr. ROBBINS: This picture is a really dark scenario in a way. I mean, you could definitely see it that way because the house is dilapidated, but it has this wide open kind of optimistic quality to it.

Mr. WALLA: I mean, I felt like, in terms of writing a song, it's like, well, you can write a song that goes to the little sad thing that has the dark places in it or you can go everywhere but that. So in this case, it was that.

Mr. ROBBINS: A lot of the time, the more that you talk about what you should do in the structure of the song, the more pitfalls you run into. And the thing that Darren definitely is great about is he's - every time we've ever jammed and worked on songs, he's always been - you know, when we hit the impasse and we're like, what is it supposed to do next? Just keep playing. It'll work itself out. It'll happen. And it's always been true. And then you stop being cerebral…

Mr. WALLA: Yeah, right.

Mr. ROBBINS: …and then stuff just kind of happens.

Mr. WALLA: I'm exhausted.

Mr. ROBBINS: Yeah.

(Soundbite of laughter)

BOILEN: You can watch the creation of this song at our Project Song Web site and hear an entire song at npr.org.

For NPR Music, I'm Bob Boilen.

(Soundbite of song, "Mercury") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.