On this episode of Five Rules for the Good Life, Darin Bresnitz sits down with Al Doyle, one of the musicians behind the sounds of Hot Chip & LCD Soundsystem, and the co-founder / co-designer of Relax and Enjoy Studio in Shoreditch, London. Al shares his Five Rules for Making Music You Like. The conversation moves from childhood piano experiments to the very different recording philosophies behind his two bands, and the thinking that goes into producing music that lasts. Along the way, he talks about the discipline of listening, the power of simplicity, and the confidence it takes to trust your own instincts in the studio.
What makes Al’s rules interesting is that they apply to so much more than making music. They are about creating anything. Writing, painting, cooking, filmmaking, building a business, hosting a dinner. The mechanics are different, but the mindset is the same. Start with something you actually like. Keep the structure simple enough so the idea can breathe. Spend more time paying attention than constantly tinkering. Learn enough about your craft that you can rely on yourself when things get complicated. And when the crowd pushes you toward something safe or expected, sometimes the best move is to lean the other direction and see what happens. Creativity is rarely about doing more. Most of the time it is about knowing when to stop and trust the thing you already made.
Transcript
Introduction
Hello and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life.
I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz.
It is always a pleasure when I get to sit down with today’s guest, Al Doyle, who is a member of both Hot Chip and LCD Sound System and a designer and owner of Relax and Enjoy Studio in Shoreditch, London.
He’s here today to share his five rules for making music you like. He talks about the importance of listening and not changing too much, the fundamentals of being both ambitious and self-sufficient, and that sometimes doing nothing is the best way to make something happen.
He shares some amazing insider stories about making music, the different approach to recording from his two bands, and we share a few laughs about what really goes into making music that you like.
So let’s get into the rules.
Getting Started
Al, it is always a pleasure when we have the chance to make time and chat with each other. Thanks for coming to me live from the studio.
You’re very, very welcome. Yeah, I’m sitting in front of my upright piano. Really bringing class to the show. It’s all I can do to not start playing some jazzy chords in front of you, so you have to appreciate my restraint.
I also appreciate that you’ve been making music almost your entire life. Do you remember the moment when you first made something that you actually liked?
Yeah, I was playing piano from when I was four or five years old, and I definitely remember hammering out some stuff on the piano that I enjoyed going back to, really raucous, hammering, childlike piano music.
I love it. In terms of actual songs that I can remember... I fall out of love with things that I’ve made very, very quickly, I think. When you’re actually making something, the moment of creation is so emphatically all-encompassing and scintillating, and then leave it 20 minutes like, oh my god, now I’ve got to do some actual work to put this together. It just sucks all the joy out of it again. It’s something that I’m battling with every day.
You’ve been lucky enough to also record and create music and go through that process all over the world. Is there something you’re looking for in a space or an environment to be creative? Or is it different vibe for different project?
Making my own studio was an answer to that very question. There was lots of places that I’ve been to that were very close to what my ideal recording space would be.
Obviously, DFA was a huge thing for me when I first came to New York City. Philippe Zadar’s studio in Paris, which is called Motorbass, was a very, very inspiring space. There’s another amazing studio that belongs to the keyboard player in Jamiroquai called Angelic, which is a country retreat studio on a farm. Those kind of places have been on my mind.
Being able to see all these different studios and knowing what worked and didn’t work, I have to imagine fed into what went into building Relax and Enjoy, which is the studio that you built with James. Why was it so important for you to create a space for other musicians to make music?
There is an indulgent thing that we do in Hot Chip and in LCD, which is basically write music in a studio. A lot of bands, they will have to do some kind of writing elsewhere in their bedrooms or like the way that Hot Chip used to do.
The space can be very inspiring for making music if you have the time to allow the instruments to show you where to go. We’ll just go to a synthesizer that we’ve just bought or we’re in another studio that has something that we’ve never seen before and just by the act of trying out that instrument learning how it works you will inevitably write a song through that process because it’s just this voyage of discovery with the instrument brings up stuff that you end up recording and can be the kind of seed of an idea.
When people come in to this place that’s one of the things that we want for them especially younger kids that maybe only have ever seen some of this stuff as plugins and software versions or whatever they’re like oh my god you’ve got a real csa team it’s like oh yeah here it is i
I love that.
So immediately they get their hands on it and start using it in a way that we would never have imagined. And that’s actually inspiring to us. And then the whole thing feeds into itself. Everything’s turned on. Everything’s able to be recorded at any time. It’s supposed to be a little playground.
Creating that playground, having all the toys and tools and the actual approach of making music that you enjoy and have a good track record of making is why I’m so excited for you to share your five rules for making music you like.
Rule One: Make What You Like
The very first rule...
It’s so simple, but people, myself included, always seem to ignore it when they’re getting into the creative process. What’s your rule number one?
This rule was something that I actually came up with talking to Nick Millhiser from LCD because he’s also a producer and we were just talking about working with other bands. I can tell that they’re trying to get somewhere to something and there’s a level of frustration and
The rule is anyway, make what you like. Try to remember what is it that you’re making that is in any way similar to something that you actually like.
People come in here, they always want to add stuff. And I was like, OK, tell me anything that you like that sounds like this.
Yeah.
And I will happily pursue this way of working because people come in with their influences like I want it to sound like Prince or I want it to sound like a can or whatever. What you’re making sounds nothing like that.
Take that little step back.
I was working with somebody the other day, the drums started to sound like breakbeat or something like some kind of trip hop thing. I was like, guys, I know that you don’t like this music. Why are we doing that? Why are we here?
It’s a question that really stops people and makes them reconsider in a slightly less confrontational way than maybe I’ve just described.
Rule Two: Stick to a Vision
Part of your guide as a producer and as someone who’s been through the creative process before is showing people how to keep their perspective and not get distracted by trends or things that they might want in the moment, but won’t last in a long time, which makes up a big part of rule number two.
Stick to a vision of popular art as a generosity of effects on a simple frame.
So that’s a quotation from Clive James. He was actually talking about Louis Armstrong, but that quotation is about Big Spiderbeck, who was very beloved of Louis Armstrong and him talking about his style of playing quite austere style as opposed to slightly more florid playing from louis armstrong.
It just really got me thinking about that in terms of music but also in terms of art in general specifically he describes it as being popular art so i’m not really necessarily talking about the deepest kind of art sure this idea that you have
And in elaborate frame, like the pop song, this contained little space in which to put your idea across.
Yes.
And then within that, you get to do all of your special effects.
That has really stood with me as a framework for what all of this stuff is. You’re not trying to get too complicated. You’re not trying to change things. this mechanism around your work you’re just trying to give something to someone again that word generosity within there I thought was really important because it’s this idea of no this is something to be enjoyed something where I’m trying to give something to the people that are listening to me I had that as a phrase that was always in the back of my head when I was making things
Like verse chorus verse as i’ve heard it sung before.
Yeah yeah yeah exactly.
Rule Three: Listen, Don’t Change
A lot of times when i listen to the art of making music you’ll hear with some of the most famous songs is that it wrote itself in 10 minutes it just came to me in a dream and it was done.
Yeah.
Being able to pull something from the ether and then sit back and just let it be yeah is a fundamental of your rule number three.
Rule three, listen, don’t change.
This is something that I learned for sure from James Murphy. Also, I believe that he himself learned from Marcus Lampkin, whose artist’s name is Shit Robot.
Basically, hardship. Everybody goes into a room. Everyone’s playing all the time. Just this absolute deluge of great ideas.
I go into the studio with James and we will sit around for the whole day and work on the sound of a woodblock.
Of course. I believe it.
Just these two different ways of working. But I really recently have been feeling as though the correct way to work is to work on that ratio, work on the ratio of listening to versus adding. And you should be doing 10 times more listening than you are making changes or adding stuff.
And when I was with Marcus Lampkin, he actually does this more than James. He’ll just sit there, he’ll listen and listen and listen and listen. And then he’ll be like, we need to do this thing to this song. And it’s like, oh my God, dude, you nailed it. Cracked it.
Yeah.
And sometimes something is just fine as it is. And you’ve got to have that strength to just leave it as it is.
The other very instructive story that I had with regard to this was Pete Shelley working with Martin Russian. He just left the Buzzcocks on his first solo thing that he did. And he had this song, Homosapien. You know this song?
Mm-hmm.
He basically had what he called the demo of that song and he brought it to Martin Russian. And Martin Russian took it to the studio and he played it. And he had Pete Shelley with him there and he’s like, I just need to listen to it again.
And he played it again. And then he played it 20 times in a row. And then he just said, yeah, that’s fine. You should just release it just like that.
I love that. That is just such a cool story because it’s this godlike producer and he’s like, no, I don’t want to touch this. This is great. And it was a massive hit, you know.
There’s so many times that little voice in his head is like, you’ve got to do something, but actually you don’t always.
Rule Four: Be Self-Sufficient
You can go to another level by being able to work on your own music, produce your own projects, and be able to have the confidence within yourself to know that when you go out on the road or play a show or build your own studio, you can really blow other people out of the water, which is a big part of your rule number four.
Be ambitious enough to be self-sufficient and be self-sufficient enough to make other people scared.
With LCD, we would try and turn up to places with everything. There was nothing that we relied upon other people for. Even when we didn’t have the level of crew that we had, there was enough knowledge within that group of people that we could do anything that needed to be done and fix any problem in audio, deal with keyboard. People deal with the promoters, do all that kind of stuff.
You’ve got to know that there’s going to be a time after that, and that comes down to your ambition, to know that it won’t last forever. But in the meantime, you’ve got to actually do it.
Yeah. No one’s going to do it for you.
And if you don’t do it, then you will not be afforded any respect.
If you actually can go above that and be so self-sufficient that everyone’s like, oh, whoa, you guys actually know more than us.
So...
And then that’s when people get, I mean, scared is kind of the wrong word, but it’s having that level of respect that borders on reverence.
I think that’s a lot to do with James’s own personal aura. And also just because he genuinely is the most savant level engineer that I’ve ever encountered.
Rule Five: Contrarianism Can Be Your Savior
Being self-sufficient. Having that ambition, sticking to a vision of making what you really want to make, really bubbles up to creating work that you actually believe in.
And your fifth and final rule talks about the importance of sticking to your guns, especially when you’re making something that the mainstream might not like.
What’s your rule number five?
If in doubt, turn on the herter. Contrarianism can be your savior.
Sometimes things just go wrong. Sometimes people are just not on your side and you’re playing to the wrong people.
In that situation, there will be a very strong instinct that you have to do whatever it is you think those people might like, but don’t do that.
The thing to do in that situation is find the thing that you enjoy doing that they won’t. Otherwise, you’re just on a hiding to nothing.
Don’t try and second guess your audience, I think is the deeper part of what that is.
If there’s something that you enjoy, even if that thing is busting out incredibly piercing knife-like white noise at people get after it then go for that you’re guaranteed to make at least yourself happy whatever else you do you’re not guaranteed to make them happy you know.
Alexis is amazing at that he’ll just happily just play the most intimate music against the people that are just so shouting over him and he just continued to do that has this just level of belief that I absolutely love and it’s not something that I have personally but it’s something that I in a weird way admire and want to have for myself a little bit more so that’s why I wanted to make it part of the rules.
Closing
Al, I appreciate your rules and all the music that you have shared with the world. I know that you’re hitting the road this year.
We are on the road with LCD. We’re going to be touring America. Have a look and see if we’re playing anywhere near you.
Looking forward to having you back in LA. It was great to see you last time and can’t wait to hear some of this music that you like so much once again.
No problem. It’s my pleasure talking to you, Darin. Thanks for talking to me.
