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- [00:19]
A
The piece we're hearing now is by the 20th century composer Charles Ives, who is known for his intricate sound collages that wove together fragments of existing music into his original atonal compositions. In this piece, Ives frequently quotes Beethoven's famous fifth Symphony. You know this one? Now see if you can spot this motif in Ives's Piano sonata. It's a direct quote placed in a completely different context, leading to an entirely different musical outcome. Even though Beethoven's melody appears throughout the entire piece, you never say Ives was ripping off or stealing from Beethoven because the motif is so clearly transformed. Ives recontextualizes Beethoven's motif, dressing it up in modern clothes, creating a fascinating musical conversation between the past and present. Now, fast forward 100 years, and this instinct to recontextualize and transform fragments of existing music has evolved into one of the most important musical innovations of the 20th sampling. Sure, the technology's changed. Musicians now manipulate recorded audio instead of rewriting notes. But the underlying principle is the same shared by Charles Ives and countless musicians before him. Indeed, sampling today has become its own fully realized art form, complete with its own distinct styles and subgenres, each with its own techniques and its own masters and its own Beethovens and Ives. And as we've witnessed all season, Daft Punk are among the most skilled, innovative, and tasteful producers to ever touch a sampler. But even within their vast and impressive sample repertoire, one song stands above the rest. A song that's not only among the most technically impressive achievements in their own catalog, but one of the most ambitious and virtuosic feats in the entire history of sampling. Created in collaboration with another sampling legend, Todd Edwards, it's a track built from over 40 sample fragments drawn from roughly 25 different sources, pushing the long standing art of musical quotation to its absolute limits. The song is called Face to Face, and I can't wait to break down every single piece of it with you today. From the Ringer Podcast Network, this is dissect long form musical analysis broken into short, digestible episodes. Today we continue our deep dive into Daft Punk's entire catalog with our final episode on 2001's discovery. I'm your host, Cole Kushner. This episode is presented by AT&T. AT&T believes in connecting people to greater possibilities, and they do that through a network that keeps you meaningfully connected to those who are important to you. Friends, family, and more. So the moments that matter feel closer and clearer because it's not just about being more connected. It's about being better connected wherever life takes you. When the connection matters, it has to be ATT. To find out more, head to att.com connecttochange@&t Connecting changes everything.
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- [04:31]
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Last time on Dissect, we took a tour through Discovery's middle section. From the high of crescendolls to the sentimental ballad in Something About Us. Today's episode takes a similar approach as we'll be covering Voyager, Fairness, Quo, Short Circuit and, as I teased at the top, the masterwork that is face to face. It's a stretch of Discovery coveted by Daft Punk's most loyal fans, many of whom would argue it's every bit as good as the album's hit heavy opening. Now, we've got a lot to cover in these incredible songs, so let's jump right in with track 10, Voyager. Like many of the song titles on Discovery, Voyager clues us in to the cinematic spirit of the instrumental track. With Thomat and Gimon both being born in the 70s, the name Voyager is almost certainly a nod to the NASA spacecraft twin Probes launched in 1977 to explore the outer reaches of our solar system and beyond. The NASA Voyagers were literally built for Discovery, making the reference here feel especially fitting, a reflection of the album itself, as Thoman Gimon explore new musical possibilities by blending the sounds they grew up with. The cultural fascination with space in the 1970s also coincided with the growing accessibility of synthesizers, which became the Go to instrument for scoring many of the sci fi films of the era. In doing so, the synthesizer became sonically linked with the idea of space, a connotation that sustains to this day. So with Voyager's nod to space exploration in mind, the song's wide, expansive chords, played on a vintage synthesizer, evoke the feeling of cruising through Open space in a spacecraft, a sensation that only intensifies when the beat drops. For my money, this may be the most addictive groove on the entire album. A feeling of infinite propulsion, like a spacecraft gliding endlessly through the void. Now, there's a number of elements working together to create this feeling, starting with the clear star of this groove, that incredibly funky bassline. When talking to the Face magazine at the time of Discovery's release, Thomas revealed that Voyager is meant to honor the bass guitar the same way Aerodynamic honors the electric guitar, saying the bass is the lead instrument in the track and. And usually bass is not the lead instrument. Now, it's debatable whether the bass on Voyager is an actual bass guitar or a synthesizer modeled to sound like a bass guitar. Personally, I'd guess the latter. But the fact that it's even a question is a testament to Thomas and Gimon's ability to not only design synth patches that closely emulate guitars, but also their talent at composing parts that sound native to the instruments they're emulating. Indeed, the bassline they compose for Voyager is incredibly idiosyncratic, oscillating as it does between deep supporting root notes, quick octave leaps and busy, funky staccato fills. Here it is recreated by Dan Carr of Reverb Machine, who used a software replication of the Juno 106, one of Daft Punk's most used synthesizers. Like their bassline for around the World, Daft Punk here were clearly channeling their favorite bass player, Bernard Edwards from the disco band Chicago. Here's Edwards on My Forbidden Lover, playing the same kind of groovy root notes, octave jumps and funky fills. Daft Punk also do their best impression of Chic's guitarist, Nile Rogers, who's known for his tight, percussive chord stabs. Let's listen to that same Forbidden Lever excerpt, but this time focus on the rhythmic guitar chucks.
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I don't want no other.
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Compare this now with the guitars that run throughout Voyager. While they're clearly not Nile Rogers quality, they are functionally using the guitar in the same way. Now, as great as they are on their own, isolating the synth guitar and bass parts only tell half their story. Because a big reason why Voyager's groove is so endlessly addictive is the way these instruments interact with the drum beat, which in terms of its rhythm, is pretty straightforward. A standard four on the floor house beat. Why I describe this drum beat as straightforward is the fact that the kick and snare are placed directly on the downbeats. The strong beats we naturally count along with 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. Now, the typical way to play Voyager's chords over this beat would be to place them directly on the strong beats like this. Now there's not anything wrong with this, but when too many of the song's elements only accent the downbeats, it can start to feel flat and uninteresting, especially in a dance song. And so what Daft Punk do instead is syncopate these chords. Syncopation simply means to play or accent the spaces in between the strong beats. Specifically here they do what's called a push rhythm, where they play the chord just before the downbeat on the upbeat of beat four instead of directly on beat one. Here's the same chords we just heard, only now syncopated, playing just before the downbeats. That small change makes a big difference, right? We've offset the chords just a half a beat, but it's instantly more interesting and engaging. Instead of everything landing predictably on the same beats, the chords now push against the drums, creating a sense of forward momentum that pulls you into the rhythm. The bass part is also syncopated. Its deep, long root notes play in lockstep with those offbeat chord hits. Let's listen to a back to back comparison now with the bass included. First, here's the non syncopated version. Again, nothing wrong with that, but when put up against the syncopated version, there's really no comparison. Now that we understand a bit more about how and why syncopation works, lets listen to Voyager again and appreciate how Daft Punk offsetting those chords just a half beat is a big reason why the groove is so hypnotic and endlessly propulsive. Voyager's groove is so good it doesn't need much in the way of development. Large stretches of the song are simply locked into this same part. But if there's anything we've learned about Daft Punk this season, it's that they always stash some kind of surprise in their back pocket, pulling it out at exactly the right time. And in Voyager, that time comes 2 minutes and 15 seconds into the track, precisely when it needs some kind of change. Daft Punk introduced a new harp like synth playing wide cascading arpeggios, which, as you'll remember from our last episode, are chords where the notes are played one at a time rather than all together. The chords themselves are simplified versions of the established progression, but at this point it's less about the specific notes and more about the introduction of a new texture and shape. As the arpeggios scale up and down, providing a delicate undulation that enhances the feeling of gliding through open space. This harp like synth brings a classical color into the song's retro, futuristic palette, adding a sense of elegance and lightness while preserving the dreamy cosmic atmosphere already established. It's the perfect addition to bring the track to a dynamic and satisfying close. The harp at the end of Voyager makes a perfect segue into Discovery's next track, Verdis Quo, a song that continues the exploratory space like Journey while leaning more heavily into the baroque sound that Voyager hints at. Virdis Quill begins by establishing its central musical theme, a fluttering sequential passage that draws directly from Baroque music, the 17th century European genre we discussed back on Aerodynamics Outro. While the track does not contain any direct samples, there's a few possible inspiration points, starting with a famous piece written back in 1720 by Baroque composer Georg Friedrich Handel. In this piano arrangement of Handel's piece, the opening melodic passage resembles Veridas Quo's theme. Here's just the right hand. In isolation, It's not an exact match, but both riffs use the same compositional framework. There's a repeating high note, and beneath this there's a descending line that climbs down the scale. The main difference between the two is the rhythm. Handel's is straight eighth notes, while Daft Punk's is slightly more complex. But there is an even closer match to Werdis Quo than Handel and is found in the music of Azerbaijani composer Iman Sabi Tolu. Written in 1971, this piece, one Evening in a Taxi, features a similar compositional structure to both Handel and Daft Punk, with repeating high notes set against a descending line beneath them. Rhythmically, it's an even closer match to Veridus quo, and its 1971 release aligns with Discovery's broader tendency to draw from music of the 70s. With that said, to my knowledge, Daft Punk have never referenced this piece directly, so any connection remains speculative. What does seem clear to me, however, is that Iman Sabi Tolu's composition was itself influenced by Handel and whether Daft Punk drew from one or the other. The key takeaway is that Viridis Quo's theme is rooted in baroque music, which they clearly play into by giving the melody to a synth modeled after a flute and chords to a synth modeled after a pipe organ. Now, what Daft Punk did to develop this theme is really, really cool. As we heard, the song's intro establishes the theme with a supporting chord sequence. Rhythmically, the chords appear to be pretty Straightforward, simply playing on the downbeats. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, four. 1, 2, 3,4, 3, 4. 1, two, three, four. The introduction continues like this for 40 seconds. More than enough time to get us firmly locked into this rhythm. But as the drum beat begins to fade in behind the synths, we realize we've been duped. See if you can spot what they did. Pretty cool, right? Daft Punk pulled a fast one on us. The drum beat reveals that those grounding chords are not in fact, being played on the downbeats, but rather they are syncopated. Specifically, they're pushed, played before the downbeats, just like we heard in Voyager. So what we thought was this. Is revealed as actually being this. What Daft Punk do here is something called a metric fakeout. A metric fakeout is when music sets you up to think the beat is in one place, then reveals it's actually in another. We can hear the same thing happening in 311's aptly titled Offbeat Bare Ass, where the introductory guitar plays what we think are downbeats, only for the drums to reveal they're actually upbeats. You could feel that shift, right? Even when I told you those guitars were the upbeats, your brain interprets them as downbeats until receiving additional musical information, forcing reinterpretation. Metric fakeouts like this play on a psychological concept known as garden pathing, which argues that if you receive enough stimulus details that typically result in a common outcome, your brain immediately assumes that outcome and stops scanning the details. This concept is often exemplified through what are known as garden path sentences. Take, for example, this sentence, fat people eat accumulates. Chances are, your brain first heard fat people as the subject, eat as the verb, and then got confused when the sentence ended with accumulates. But the sentence is actually fat people eat accumulates. It's pointing out that fat accumulates when people eat it. The same kind of thing is happening at the beginning of Veridus Quo. Even when you know what you're hearing are upbeats, unless you're a trained musician, it's almost impossible to hear them as such. That is, until the drums enter and force your brain to reinterpret.
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Sam.
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Now, what's cool about the syncopation in Veritas Quill is that not only are we getting push syncopation in the bass playing just before the downbeat of the kick drum, the melody is also pushed, but it starts just after the kick drum, not before it. This results in these concentrated groups of syncopation, where we hear the bass, then the kick Then the melody in rapid succession with no two elements exactly synced. So instead of them starting all together like this, they play in rapid succession like this. Like Voyager. This is for me, a big reason why Veridis Quo is so hypnotically addictive. The gaps between one instrument are always filled by another, creating a kind of interlocking puzzle that our brains can't quite settle into. And so despite the track having a highly repetitive overall structure, it's this subtle but constant unpredictability that makes it seem like it could go on indefinitely, extending Voyager's sense of drifting through infinite space. It's an aspect Thoma acknowledged directly in an interview with the Face, describing Viridis Quo as the loss of time and reality and space. And time, space, continuum, a void. Like Voyager, the title Veritas Quo also ties into the song sense of an endless journey, albeit in a more abstract way. It's a play on the Latin phrase Quo Vadis, meaning where are you going? An open ended philosophical question that mirrors the song's introspective, contemplative and almost meditative quality. However, there's also a more light hearted reading of the title because Verdis Quo sounds a lot like Very Disco, and if you flip very Disco around the same way Quo Vadis is reversed, you get disco very. Put those two words together and they form the word Discovery. It's actually a play on words Daft Punk intended to use in the live action film. They once planned around the album where the title sequence was to have the words very disco appear at opposite sides of the screen, only to cross each other and reveal the album title Discovery. And speaking of that abandoned live action film, Discovery continues with a sequence of tracks that contain the strongest artifacts of that idea, where the cinematic ending of Short Circuit clearly sets the stage for the story of the subsequent song Face to Face. I'll explain exactly how that happens right after the break. This episode is brought to you by Warby Parker. A family member of mine was trying to buy glasses online recently and it turned into a whole ordeal. There are so many styles that it's honestly overwhelming and you're just staring at these tiny pictures, trying to guess what'll actually look good on your face. Then the prices hit and it feels kind of wild to spend hundreds of dollars on something you're not even sure is going to work. But Warby Parker comes completely flipped. The experience. They've simplified everything. Quality, price, selection, all of it. And their virtual try on is surprisingly accurate. Such a game changer right now. Buy one prescription pair and get 20% off any additional prescription pairs at warbyparker.com/ that's 20% off additional prescription pairs when you go to warbyparker.com dissect. Welcome back to Dissect. Before the break, I teased the narrative connection between Discovery's next pair of tracks, starting with the high octane synth heavy jam Short Circuit. The first minute and a half of Short Circuit upholds this funky and frenetic synth jam, but exactly halfway through the track something dramatic happens as the staccato synth stabs give way to sustained wobbly minor chords that have an almost forlorn quality, a contrast from the driving mechanical feel of the song's first. We might suspect this contrasting section to be a bridge, a needed breather, before returning to the turbocharged synths that bring the song to a roaring finale. However, that never happens. The rest of the song remains in this new section, and rather than a climax, the opposite happens. The entire track begins to slowly decompose. Daft Punk create this effect through gradual down sampling, which reduces the resolution of the audio by lowering the sample rate or bit depth so the sound becomes grainy and degraded. The music gradually loses clarity and fidelity, like a machine powering down the literal aftermath of a short circuit unfolding in real time. In an interview with the Face, Thomas described Short Circuit as having a kind of drunkenness feel, where the groove is degenerating, blurred and getting more digital, like your CD player isn't working anymore. Thoma would later relate this with the imagined narrative that the album would score in their abandoned live action film, saying it's the state where you become unconscious, the robots become unconscious, and after you regain your consciousness you are more face to face with reality. Discoveries. Face to Face belongs in a museum. As I teased at the top of the episode, the song is an absolute masterclass in sampling, bringing together three of the best sample based producers of all time in Thoma Gimon and the song's collaborator, Todd Edwards. As you might remember from our Homework episode, Edwards is an incredibly influential garage house producer from New Jersey, known for his intricate micro sampling technique where he splices tiny millisecond samples into complex musical mosaics. Daft Punk name checked Edwards on Homework's teachers and even extended a formal invitation to collaborate with him on the album. That didn't pan out, but the three reconnected after Homework's release, with Thomas and Gimon flying out to Edwards hometown of New Jersey to begin work on what would become Face to Face. As Edwards told Ben Cardew for His book on Discovery. Him, Thomant and Gimon mostly hung out that first day, but that was enough to inspire Edwards to go home that night and binge sample 70 different chops to work with. The next day. He presented these samples to Daft Punk. And according to Edwards, Thomas and Gimon matched him, creating up to 70 sample chops of their own. This catalog of up to 140 samples would become the song's reservoir of source material. Thomas sat at the keyboard and altered the pitch of every sample so they were in the same key. Then they looped a simple drumbeat and began throwing samples at the wall, seeing what would stick. The end result was a complex amalgamation of some 40 sample fragments drawn from roughly 25 different sources. Most of the sample fragments are less than a second long, and because none of them were officially credited, it's been a decades long mission for the most dedicated Daft Punk fans to identify them all. Thankfully for us, they've all been found. Or so we think. And so, with massive gratitude to everyone who put in the work to uncover them, I'd like to now track them one by one, starting with the song's main loop. Now, as we begin tracking face to face samples, I'm going to tease something up front. There's something every one of them has in common. I'll reveal what that is at the end, but see if you can figure it out before I do. Alright, so let's start with the song's backbone, the drum loop, which is created from a sample of Herbie Band's 1979 song Just Go Daz. They take just two beats from this passage and pitch them down. This becomes layered beneath an original drum beat created on the Linn drum machine. Getting this final result, This rhythm section is fleshed out with a guitar part that's pulled from Electric Light Orchestra's 1975 track Evil Woman. The guitar crunches are spliced up to create this pattern. And now let's hear this sequence over the drums. This foundational guitar part is layered with another, this time made from fragments pulled from Firefall's 1982 track Body and Soul. Individual plucks are sliced out and retuned to create this sequence. There's also a tiny but important guitar sample taken from this passage of Carrie Lucas 1979 song Sometimes a Love Goes Wrong. From this, they slice out just this pitch down fragment. Now let's hear these guitars with the drums, first on their own, then combined with the main guitar part. I mean, come on, how cool does this sound already? Now the Gaps between the guitars are filled with a variety of samples, the first of which sounds like this. This is created by four total samples. The first is from the Alan Parsons Project's 1982 song Silence and I. Here. They chop out and pitch up this splice. This is joined with a sample from The Doobie Brothers 1974 song. It keeps you running from this. They slice out this fragment. Finally, another fragment is pulled from Steppenwolf's Everybody's Next One. And now the pitch matched chop together. All three of these chops sound like this. This is followed by a sample from another Alan Parsons song off the same project, Old and Wise. Now here's the pitch chop. Put this together with the other three and we get this. Let's hear this with the drums first on its own, then join with the samples we've uncovered so far. All right, so we just need three more samples to fill out this main loop, beginning with Dave Mason's 1974 rendition of all along the Watchtower. Now the pitch down chop. This is combined with the sample from Poco's 1974 song Faith in the Families. And the pitch down slice Together, the two samples sound like this. This is joined with one remaining but very crucial sample pulled from Logan and Messina's 1971 track house at Pooh Corner, back to the days of Christopher Bob. Now the pitched up chop. We'll add this to the previous two samples and we get this. Now let's hear it with drums. Then slot it in with the rest of our recreation. And with that, we've completed a basic recreation of Face To Face's main loop. I hope this somewhat tedious breakdown gave you a sense of just how intricate and skillful this kind of micro sampling truly is. At the same time, I must acknowledge that the breakdown we just did is in many ways incredibly misleading, because my reconstruction stands on the shoulders of a collective, decades long effort by fans who painstakingly uncover these sample fragments piece by piece of. And even then, the ease with which I can now recreate this sequence using modern tools undermines just how difficult it must have been to create in the first place. When Todd Edwards says they started with over 100 samples, I believe him. Because not every splice is going to work. And you can only imagine how many iterations it took before arriving at the final seamless sonic collage. This loop is an extraordinary musical achievement crafted by three of the most important figures in electronic music coming together at the peak of their powers. Now I gave Face to face main loop. All that praise and I haven't even acknowledged what is perhaps the most impressive part of the sequence, because not only is it a display of virtuosic sampling at the highest level, Daft Punk and Todd Edwards embedded a lyrical sequence within this loop, one that, if you haven't already heard, it will be impossible to unhear once it's pointed out to you. According to Edwards, the idea for this lyrical sequence and eventually the theme of the song came spontaneously from that Kenny Loggins sample we just heard Back to the Days of Christopher Robin and Pooh. Christopher Robin here is pulled from the longer lyric Back to the days of Christopher Robin and Pooh. However, when they added it to the loop they were working on, they suddenly heard it a different way. Edwards said, quote, then one of the samples was saying Christopher Robin, but it sounded like it was saying face to Face. So that became the idea of Face to Face. It seemed like that was going to be the title. With this in mind, take another listen to the loop and see if you can hear the words face to face Now. It's pretty cool, right? And clearly Daft Punk and Edwards ran with the idea because not only can you hear that recontextualized sample saying face to face now, you can also hear lyrics in the other vocal samples in the sequence. Check this out. Hear anything? I'll play it again, and this time listen for the words you are combined. We get the phrase you are face to face now. But there's actually more to it than this because there's one last sample in the passage we haven't talked about yet, one that's only played every eighth measure. It's taken from another Electric Light Orchestra track, 1974's Can't Get It Out Of My Head. The full lyric here is, they don't envy me. But the sample chop starts in the middle of Envy on the V sound. This transforms it to sound like With Me. So the full lyrical sequence spread across the eight measure loop turns out to be, you are face to face now with me. I mean, so cool. Now. Face to Face continues with a B section where Daft Punk and Edwards create a new contrasting loop with another handful of sample splices. Let's listen to the loop, then I'll break down the samples. All right, let's quickly track the sample fragments in this collage, starting with another Loggins and Messina Song, 1974's Be Free. First the original track, then the pitched up chop. This is combined with the chop from Deborah Washington's 1978 track the Letter. Together, the two samples are sequenced like this. This is followed by two more samples. First this chop from Dan Fogelberg and Tim Weisberg's 1978 song Tell Me To My Face. Then another chop from Kerry Lucas's Sometimes a Love Goes Wrong. Sequenced together, the two sound like this and now join with the others. Next, a guitar chop from Boz Scragg's 1980 song you got Some Imagination. This is followed by a quick splice from the previous With Me sample. Then a chop from another Dan Fogelberg and Tim Weisberg song, Lahona Luna. Finally, another chop used in the previous loop, the R from ur. Now let's put them together to create the second half of the loop. And now the full B section loop, first on its own, then with drums, Now with every other repetition, there is an additional sample added to the tail end of the loop, and it's another vocal chop that gets repurposed to mean something else. The vocal comes from another Alan Parsons Project song, which is the same source as most of the other vocal chops in the track, so it seems clear they are using Alan Parsons as the quote unquote lead singer. This one's pulled from 1982's Old and Wise. The original lyric is there are shadows surrounding me. The chop is a fragment of the word shadows. This is combined with a chop from another Doobie Brothers song, 1973's South City Midnight Lady. And now together with the vocal chop. So admittedly, this one isn't as obvious as you are face to face now with me, but the most common interpretation of this vocal is the word dancing, making the full B section lyrics, you are dancing. See if you can hear it. To me, this is such a fascinating exercise, one that reveals just how malleable our perception really is. So much of what we experience isn't fixed or objective, but rather influenced by context, expectation, and our own personal histories. I'm not sure I would have heard dancing in that sample on my own, but once I read about that interpretation, I couldn't unhear it. Especially given the context of a dance track. And knowing Daft Punk's long history of writing about music and dancing, it's a phenomenon Todd Edwards himself has compared to pareidolia, which is the tendency for humans to perceive patterns or meaning where none objectively exist. Like seeing faces in clouds or constellations in the stars, our brains are constantly trying to make sense of the world, to organize randomness into something recognizable and meaningful. And while those patterns may not be real in a literal sense, they become real in how we experience them, which I think actually speaks to something deeper about the human experience, how so much of our reality is subjective, how our perception of others and even ourselves, is filtered through our own history, insecurities and expectations. And it's no coincidence that these same thematic ideas show up in Face To Face's actual lyrics, which were written and performed by Todd Edwards himself. As we listen, I want you to think about who he might be singing to.
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What's going on? Could this be my understanding? It's not your fault I was being too demanding I must admit it's my pride that made me distant all because I hope that you'd be someone different there's not much I know about you it will always make you blind
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but
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the answer is in clear view
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it's
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amazing what you'll find face to face
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all right, so Edwards enters the song singing, what's going on? Could this be my understanding? It's not your fault I was being too demanding I must admit it's my pride that made me distant all because I hoped that you'd be someone different at first blush, it would appear that Edwards is talking to a partner, a love interest, admitting his own faults and their fading relationship. He blames his pride for expecting them to be something other than what they are, likely something that more closely aligned with his specific desires or needs. Rather than allowing them to exist freely, he wanted them to conform to his expectations of who they should be, and resentment and distance grew when they didn't. This thread continues in the next section, where he sings, there's not much I know about you. Fear will always make you blind. Edwards realizes his pride was simply a mask for his fear, which didn't allow him to connect with this person's true essence. He never saw them for who they truly were, and this leads to the revelation of true sight, he sings. But the answer is in clear view. It's amazing what you'll find face to face. With the masks of ego and pride removed, Edwards can finally see this person for the first time, the starting point for any genuine and lasting relationship. It's an incredibly insightful comment on the personal baggage we often bring to our relationships, where our own insecurities distort our perception of another, where the flaws we see in others are actually a reflection of the flaws in ourself. And this was exactly the idea behind Edwards carefully crafted lyrics, because according to Edwards himself, Face to Face was originally meant to score the cinematic battle scene between the heroes and villains in Discovery's live action movie, which came with a twist ending Once the smoke cleared, it was supposed to be like a big mirror, and they realized that they were fighting themselves the whole time. They were their own enemy. So when I wrote the song, I wrote it with the idea that it was something you could sing to yourself, sing to another person, and at the same time, me being very spiritual, it also had to fit like I was singing to God. In the same way our perception of the sampled lyrical fragments change with additional context, let's allow this brilliant revelation to influence our understanding of the lyrics as we continue into verse two.
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I turned away cause I thought you were the problem Tried to forget until I hit the bottom but when I faced you in my blank confusion I realized you weren't wrong it was a mere illusion.
- [46:00]
A
These lyrics follow the same thematic arc as the first verse, but we can now hear them with a deeper understanding, knowing they can apply to a partner, to yourself, and even to God. Edwards begins, I turned away cause I thought you were the problem Tried to forget until I hit the bottom. Here we find Edwards running in every direction at once, from his partner, from himself, and from God, avoiding what's meaningful and true in favor of protecting his pride and ego. And like it so often does, that path leads him to rock bottom, the inevitable destination for anyone who continually runs from what's real, burying themselves in distraction and denial. But rock bottom has a way of forcing revelation, and that's where Edwards ultimately arrives. But when I faced you in my blank confusion I realized you weren't wrong it was a mere illusion. What was once perceived as an external conflict is revealed to be internal, a distortion, a misreading, a self created illusion. Indeed, conflict can so often feel like something happening to us, caused by other people or divine forces beyond our control. But our power is in our perception, in our ability to change how we view our circumstances and experiences. We can choose to live behind the mask of ego and pride, blaming others and searching for faults everywhere but within. Or we can turn inward, face the mirror, and see ourselves clearly, imperfections and all. And while that can be a frightening proposition, it's also where true transformation is found. Because when we really see and accept ourselves, we become more capable of really seeing and accepting others. In this sense, almost every conflict, every struggle, every misunderstanding begins in the same place, within every battle. At its core is a face to face battle with yourself. Now, as we reach the end of this musically complex, philosophically ripe piece of art, careful listeners would have noticed something new in the passage that we just heard, because it's here, during the final performance of the Main sample loops that Daft Punk and Edwards add a new sample into the mix. Well, actually three samples, all taken from the same 1978's twin theme by Dan Fogelberg and Tim Weisberg. The three samples they grab are all flute and piano based. There's this short one, a longer passage, And another longer passage. Now here's how they're sequenced together in Face to Face. So if you're wondering how the hell this could possibly fit into the song, well, I wish I had an answer for you. This is a piano ballad with a flute lead. Some of the notes don't even make sense in Face to Face Key. On paper, this shouldn't work. And yet, as we've witnessed again and again on this album, Daft Punk are magicians, combining sounds in astonishing and unexpected ways to create musical moments we'd never heard before. It's one final stroke of brilliance added to one of the most ambitious, complex and impressive sample based songs in history. With those last three samples, we've now fully completed tracking every known sample used in Face to Face. And if you recall, I began this ambitious task teasing that every one of these samples have something in common. Did you figure it out? Well, if you noticed, I stated the release year of every song Daft Punk and Todd Edwards sampled, and every song they sampled falls between 1971 and 1982, about a decade's span. And even more attentive listeners might have noticed that actually every sample we've tracked on Discovery this season has also fallen in that same decade span. Why is this significant? Well, think about Discovery's central concept. Blending the music Thoma and Gimon discovered and loved as children, as kids growing up in the 70s and early 80s. The source material behind Face to Face, and really the entire album, comes directly from that formative era. For me, it's an incredible final detail on an incredible album. A reminder of just how deeply committed Thoma and Gimon were to their vision. Building an entirely new world from scraps of their childhood, transforming their past into something that still to this day feels like the future.
- [51:14]
B
Sa.