Early on this year, Sombr was riding high off the success of his hit single Back To Friends when he sat down in his home studio and came up with a drum groove that would shape his next track – the UK No.4 smash Undressed. Here, the LA-based star breaks down how the song ended up rocketing past 380 million Spotify streams alone, and talks lyric writing, indie music and why feeling pressure is only natural…
INTERVIEW: Miranda Bardsley
What makes up a ‘legendary indie rock song’? Some smacking drums, good melodies, a strong chorus and a bridge. That’s it. That was my reference when I made Back To Friends and Undressed, and for everything going forward.
Undressed was the first song I wrote this year. It was just after I’d dropped Back To Friends, which was my most successful song at that point. It was having a lot of success on streaming, and I was feeling really confident because of that, so I just thought, ‘OK, let me make another one.’ And it pretty much initially all came together in one evening in my studio in my house in LA.
When I’m writing, I always start with a drum groove, that’s the inspiration for a track. Then I’ll lay down guitar or piano over it, so in the case of Undressed, it was guitar, my Gibson Les Paul.
I was just playing around for about 30 minutes, trying different melodies until I landed on the one you hear in the intro. I remember playing the guitar riff and thinking, ‘OK, that is fucking great.’ From there, the song just made sense, it flowed.
When it comes to lyrics, I have this huge notepad where I write down thoughts and concepts; I have probably 1,000 notes on there. So, when I have a beat, I look at the notes and figure out what flows the best. For this, I had something like, ‘I don’t want to get undressed for a new person all over again’ written down – which was a recent idea – and it just worked with the instrumental. I wasn’t trying to make a song about that kind of thing, but that’s what the song turned into.
So, that’s how I write choruses, then the verses will be a kind of freestyle. I’ll loop the instrumental and make these sort of syllable sounds along to it. With the first verse for Undressed, I thought of something like, ‘Ooh Ah Eeh…’, which became ‘You had a dream’ – getting those sounds right is almost just as important as the lyrics themselves!
On that first day working on it, I wrote the verses, choruses and I posted it on the internet. It became my most viral snippet leak to date. Then the next evening I sat down for 15 minutes and wrote the bridge – which is often the final thing I write in a song.
At that point, I had the bare bones of the song done and recorded; in the actual song you hear today, the guitars, the riff, the bass, the drums and all the vocals are from those initial takes I did in my bedroom.
Then I brought it to Tony Berg at Sound City, my one and only collaborator and dear friend. Tony is a genius when it comes to gluing things together and making a good production into a great one. He’s also my mentor for sure – introducing me to new music, films and pushing me to be a better writer. Together, we pulled in some amazing instrumentalists like Benny Bock, Mason Stoops, and Kane Ritchotte – who are all incredible – to work on the track.
We layered the drums with Kane to make them way fatter, Mason did all this atmospheric guitar stuff and Benny added any additional keyboard layers – he did crazy work on the bridge and he’s so good at transitions, people often think it’s an orchestra when they hear [his work] but it’s just him on a synth. By the end of one studio session together, the song was complete.
I feel like so many artists say, ‘Oh, I just make music to make music, I don’t think about the numbers,’ but at the end of the day, if you’re putting yourself out there, doing it as a job and you have an audience, you have to sell tickets and stream well. It’s hard not to feel a sense of pressure at least in the back of your mind – it’s human! But it’s not the first thing I think of, that will always be the art itself. That’s why I got into music; I never expected to make a career out of it. And with Undressed, we were all just shocked and super excited; it was like, ‘Wow, this is really good shit here.’ We all knew it was special, especially because it had already received such a great response online before we even finished it.
It makes me very happy that a lot of alternative music is going mainstream and topping the charts right now. I’m biased because I’ll always be an alternative, indie lover; that’s who I am, but I think there’s definitely a resurgence. And I’m so grateful these songs have given me a crazy foundation to put out music that I’m really proud of, and that will hopefully touch many people.
It’s hard to predict the future, but at the end of the day, as long as I can do what I’m doing I’m happy, whether I’m touching one person or 40 million with it. And Undressed and Back To Friends have allowed me to do that.
