With his latest album U, Baauer aims to inject good vibes into the world. It’s a sunny collage of disco, house, breakbeats and more, influenced by the sounds of 2000s dance music.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “HARLEM SHAKE”)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Speaking Spanish).
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The musician Baauer has come to terms with being the “Harlem Shake” guy. A viral dance trend launched his 2012 track to the top of the charts. Fourteen years and a Grammy nomination later, “Harlem Shake” is still his biggest hit.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “HARLEM SHAKE”)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Do the Harlem Shake.
BAAUER: And I’ve had all kinds of feeling towards the song – love, hate, being into it, never wanting to think about it again. But I try to take the most positive part of it, which is, it was just a moment that brought people together.
KELLY: In his latest album, “U,” Baauer is tapping into that joy. NPR’s Kai McNamee reports.
KAI MCNAMEE, BYLINE: “U” is an album of love songs.
BAAUER: For this album, I really wanted to, first and foremost, inject joy and love into the world in the way I could do it.
MCNAMEE: That’s Harrison Rodrigues, aka Baauer. The album is a sunny collage of disco, house, break beats and more.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “CALLING OUT FOR U”)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Singing) What am I to say. What I got to do to let you know my heart is calling out for you. Gotta find…
BAAUER: The track that inspired, in a lot of ways, the whole album is this track “Calling Out For U,” which has, like, this soul sample that’s, like, longing for somebody, you know? It’s, like, very romantic. I think that really embodies the mentality of the album.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “CALLING OUT FOR U”)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Singing) What am I to say. What I got to do to let you know my heart is calling out for you.
MCNAMEE: Singer and songwriter Aluna worked with Rodrigues on the track “One Last Time.”
ALUNA: When you listen to the whole album, I feel like it’s a whole bunch of different ways to show joy. You’ve got the funkier kind of tracks. You’ve got the one that we did, which is, like, granulated sugar.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “ONE LAST TIME”)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: (Singing) Come out with me one last time. Don’t leave me in pieces. Pick me up tonight.
ALUNA: We wanted that kind of 2000s “Euphoria.” Like, I feel like the 2000s music was often – had this, like, real buoyancy to it.
MCNAMEE: Rodrigues spent part of his childhood in London in the late ’90s and early 2000s. This latest album gets its sound from the artists he grew up listening to, like Fatboy Slim, the Prodigy, and Daft Punk.
BAAUER: Like, BBC Radio 1 was just piping in my brain all the time – on the bus, in a cab, in a shop. Like, that’s how I really learned about dance music. This album is sort of a nod to that.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “ONE MORE TIME”)
DAFT PUNK: (Singing) One more time.
KIRK FIELD: And so it was really just a feast of dance music that he would have been growing up and hearing.
MCNAMEE: Author Kirk Field documented the explosion of the U.K.’s dance music scene in his memoir “Rave New World.” After its birth in 1980’s Chicago, house music spread around the globe.
FIELD: The ’80s was a hard decade in the U.K. economically. And so we just wanted just to chill, to let our hair down and dance and just express ourselves.
MCNAMEE: By the ’90s, dance music was everywhere. And the 1998 hit “Praise You” by Fatboy Slim was hugely influential for a young Harrison Rodrigues.
BAAUER: Something that I’ll never forget was the way he samples that vocal in the beginning, and at the end of the phrase of what she’s singing, he loops the end-like syllable. Like, (singing) praise you like I should.
And that just keeps going, like, unnaturally long.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “PRAISE YOU”)
FATBOY SLIM: I have to praise you like I should.
MCNAMEE: The original vocal is cut out of a 1975 song by Camille Yarbrough called “Take Yo’ Praise.” Other elements of “Praise You” – piano chords, guitar riffs – are also lifted from other sources, then rearranged into something new.
BAAUER: That’s what got me fascinated with oh, this is a sample, and he’s looping that section. And that really got me curious.
(SOUNDBITE OF FATBOY SLIM’S “PRAISE YOU”)
MCNAMEE: Rodrigues uses the same techniques throughout “U”. One sample on the album comes from “Supersound” by the Jimmy Castor Bunch, featuring the Everything Man.
BAAUER: So fun and, like, kind of silly and funky. And just the vocals just sound incredible.
MCNAMEE: That sample became the main vocal on the track “Supersonic.”
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “SUPERSONIC”)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: When I get to three, yell, super sound. Two, three – super sound. Super sound.
MCNAMEE: Sampling is common in music.
BAAUER: I think, like, sampling at its best is when you use a track, you pay homage to it, you use it in a new way, and the originators of the sample are fairly compensated.
MCNAMEE: But sampling’s also gotten Rodrigues in trouble before. When he released “Harlem Shake” for free in 2012, he didn’t have permission to use the samples. They weren’t legally cleared. So when it went viral, it became a huge issue.
BAAUER: But everyone ended up getting a nice piece of the pie. And since then, I do not mess around with the samples. Always, everything is cleared, tied up in a nice bow.
MCNAMEE: Baauer’s latest album, “U” is out now, tied up in a nice bow just in time for summer.
Kai McNamee, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “BETTER”)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON # 6: (Singing) You make me feel better.
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