Regardless of your thoughts on pop music in the current age, there is no denying that there is a wealth of incredible talent operating in the commercial world, both in terms of the artists themselves and their production/writing teams.
One of the most successful artists of recent years has to be Dua Lipa. As an artist, she prides herself on her vocal and performance prowess – and works with a talented team in the studio to construct her blazing bangers.
Nowhere is that more apparent than with her exceptional second album, Future Nostalgia from 2020. Laden with hits (and album tracks that sound like hits!) the musical colour and production flair is top-drawer. Re-listening to this vibrant record has inspired us to lift the theoretical lid on the album’s lead single, Don’t Start Now.
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Production and writing credits for the single fall to Dua Lipa herself, Caroline Ailin, and – one of the most prolific chart songwriters of the last ten years – Emily Warren. Ian Kirkpatrick also contributed to the writing, while acting as programmer and producer through his DAW of choice, Cubase.
The track started life while the four were on a writing retreat at Emily Warren’s writing cabin, based in Wyoming. The team were tasked with replicating the success of her 2018 smash hit New Rules, inspiration was somewhat lacking however. That is until, the team (sans Lipa) visited a local bar, in the town of Jackson Hole which just happened to be hosting a disco night.
A late night of glittery retro-tinged fun heavily influenced the direction of the track which was speedily rustled up the very next (likely bleary-eyed) day. The new arrangement was built atop a disco style of programming, particularly in the drums and bass, which bore the influence of a night on the illuminated tiles most explicitly.
“The next morning, we woke up, and were like, ‘We have to make a disco song. It’s the most fun to dance to,’” remembered Emily Warren in an interview with Rolling Stone. Dua herself had been similarly exploring new genres, and was onboard with the new direction.
Despite this disco leaning, we have to admire just how fresh the production sounds although it was entirely created in the electronic domain.
The exceptionally punchy drums, particularly the kick and snares, play an essential role as the backbone for the track, alongside a bass part which sounds entirely live. If only! It was programmed by Kirkpatrick, using the stock Native Instruments Scarbee Bass plugin, specifically the MM-bass patch. It just goes to show how realistic samples can sound when you understand the roles instruments play in different genre contexts.
“Many people s**t on pop music. They think it’s a lesser form of music,” Kirkpatrick told Sound on Sound. “But I actually think it’s the most mysterious and advanced, because you have to make the most amount of people happy. It’s like a riddle, and there are no rules.”
A bright acoustic piano sound provides an essential role, particularly in certain sections of the song, where it is doubled with synth pads and sustained synth basses. The production relies upon the arrangement to emphasise sections, so let’s take a deeper look at the structure of Don’t Start Now…
There is a heavy association between D major and its relative minor, B minor. These keys share the same key signature of two sharps, which also explains why they are such happy bedfellows in the context of a song such as this.
For the moment, we will move past the four-bar introduction, which harks back to one of the main sections in the song. Once beyond this, we immediately hit the first verse.
The arrangement begins very simplistically, but equally effectively. Breaking down to just bass, drums and vocals, the bass part follows harmony that we hear more fully later in the song. Working with a chord per bar, we hear Em7, Bm7, G and D.
By way of a turnaround, the final chord is for only half a bar, before shifting to a chord of A, as a pivot back to Em7. The sequence repeats 3 times, making up 12 bars.
This chordal structure is orchestrated more fully when we hear the same sequence in the chorus section, although this doesn’t happen immediately. There is a very recognisable bridge section between the verse and chorus, which we could simply describe as the piano bridge – you can guess why!
Making full use of the chordal sensibilities provided by an acoustic piano (at least in sampled form) the rhythm breaks down to just hand claps, later joined by a tambourine, and a very cool synth-vocal sound, which sounds a little like a rhythm guitar.
The chords in this section are Bm7, D, Em7 and Gmaj7, but, in a beautifully syncopated rhythmic arrangement, the final two chords are preceded by D and F#m7 respectively.
The first chord in each pairing lands on beat one of the bar, with the second chord appearing on the 16th note push to each second beat.
This is a clever device (alongside the hugeness of pop orchestration in this section) which helps to keep the rhythm element moving, despite a slight letup in the full rhythm and drum arrangement.
Let’s rewind to the beginning of the track, and, as is now de rigueur for modern pop, the song wastes no time getting underway.
Apart from a short fade in, provided by a synth sound, the introduction section draws its chordal inspiration from the later piano bridge, although it is heavily interrupted and truncated in the third bar, before heading into the first verse.
It also underlies a sharpness in the production, where there is a tendency at the end of a number of sections to stop things dead. It creates impact, despite reducing the number of instruments we hear at this point and the overall volume.
Don’t Start Now, in common with so much commercial production, benefits from a very heavily compressed rhythm backing. This begins with the drum sounds which provide enormous impact, while being very forthright in the mix.
The snare, in particular, has been layered to create the desired colour, although there are some other more left-field components, such as the sample of a wood block and a good-old-fashioned ‘syn-drum’ sound, with both filling voids in certain locations, or providing disco-inspired drum fills.
The association between the bass part and the kick drum is prominent in the mix. According to Kirkpatrick, the MM-Bass sample was only part of the picture, as he also blended the sound with a sub-bass, provided by Spectrasonics Trillian; this plugin instrument was probably also responsible for the ground-shaking sustained bass synth in the piano bridge section.
On the vocal front, Dua Lipa recorded a considerable number of takes for the track, compiling a rough mix which consisted of approximately 100 tracks, pre-final mix down.
It’s slightly unclear which microphone was used to record the track, although we have seen mention of both a Telefunken 251 or Shure SM7. Judging by the clarity, we would suggest the former, but as we know, the SM7 is responsible for some very heavy duty vocal recording in pop history.
Dua’s vocal recording inspired Kirkpatrick to tighten-up the arrangement;
“The song went through several changes,” he told Sound on Sound. “It’s weird, once Dua put her voice on it, it helped me understand the song more, and there were more changes after that. Her A&R, Joe Kentish, said that the bridge sounded like an afterthought, which was true, so I added a vocal chop to the bridge. The first version of the drums didn’t sound as fat. I was worried that the song would sound too disco, too classic. It needed something new, to make it the perfect mix of the old and the new. I listened to the Weeknd’s I Can’t Feel My Face, and the drums on that are fatter, so I added some extra drums.”
The single became a huge hit, reaching number 2 on UK and US charts in late 2019, and received respectably high chart placings elsewhere.
Many cite the single – which was eventually nominated for three Grammys – as launching something of a disco revival of sorts in contemporary pop. The parent album, Future Nostalgia would unexpectedly drop at the outset of the COVID pandemic in March of 2020. In this new context, Don’t Start Now’s lyric would take on an affecting new meaning in the midst of the socially-distanced lockdowns;
Don’t show up
Don’t come out
Don’t start now
“I definitely didn’t plan for my music to be so fitting for a time like this,” Dua Lipa told Live with Kelly and Ryan Wednesday. “I definitely, while making it, imagined being able to go out and dance and party, but, um, you know – kitchen dancing. And if it’s rules to live by at a time like that now then I’m happy for it.”
But, despite the fame of the song, and its still enduring popularity some six years on, some musicians were largely unaware of the track upon its initial release.
One such musician is Justin Stanton; a virtuoso keyboard player, who plays with Snarky Puppy and many others. He was presented with the track, in the form of just the vocal and drum stems, and proceeded to completely re-harmonise the track, in an extraordinary rendition, which he recorded live in the studio for the keyboard tuition company Pianote.
If the original isn’t for you, check out Stanton’s re-harmonisation, for a really fascinating peek at how an amazing musician may approach the same song. It’s radical, impressive, and incredibly funky!
