Imploders: That Time Kanye West's Producer Ghostwrote for Randy Newman

Part of a new series I'm testing, looking at heavily hyped debut records and their muted impact upon release.

Welcome to my Substack! I’m Joshua Copperman, also known as Hannah Jocelyn, also known as Fell From The Tree, also known as the writer with a surprisingly supportive mom, all things considered? I’m calling this The Only Times I’ve Ever Known as a reference to Billy Joel’s “Summer Highland Falls” - the full line is “they say that these are not the best of times, but they’re the only times I’ve ever known.” And I’m trying to make the best of these times. Follow me for interviews, reviews, and other antics.

First, a quick thank you to Todd L Burns for featuring my Substack on the Music Journalism Insider :)

I’m still figuring things out, including how frequently I want this newsletter to be as I continue freelancing and searching for full time work, so I’ll be testing out different series and ideas here. Thank you for your patience, I did not expect to get this many subscribers this quickly!

IMPLODERS

There are a lot of books, articles,  and YouTube videos about one-hit wonders. With this series, I want to look at albums that were marketed and poised to be hits but for whatever reason disappeared from view. Essentially, no-hit wonders. I’m going to look at Emile Haynie’s We Fall, a lavish breakup album.

I don’t want this series to be another music writer canonizing forgotten albums they heard in high school, so I’d love to hear about albums you thought would blow up (either recently or from years ago) but didn’t. I love a good challenge.

I chose this album because of the wild guest list. If you wonder how Lana Del Rey, Brian Wilson, Sampha, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Julia Holter fit (or don’t) on the same album, read on. 

BACKGROUND:

Emile Haynie is a producer who, after gigs with different rappers through the 2000s, broke through on Kanye West's "Runaway" with Jeff Bhasker. He also helmed most of the production on Lana Del Rey's Born To Die. As much as he has a consistent style, it's largely melancholic, dramatic beats  -  there are almost always strings involved, MIDI or real, as well as various distorted yelps. Even when he doesn’t produce albums, tracing the influences of virtually any moody pop record from the past half-decade (Twenty One Pilots, Khalid, Joji) will lead back to something he did. 

After a particularly intense breakup and a meeting with Interscope head John Janick, he began a six month stay in the Chateau Marmont hotel to work on his own music, recruiting friends, heroes, and newfound inspirations.

There are a LOT of interviews with Haynie—it’s the kind of press junket you get when you're on a major label like Interscope. There’s a formula to them: Hayne wonders aloud "what if [literally any successful person] played on this song,” then he pesters his connections until the successful person relents. "Who To Blame” has the most telling story: Haynie had never heard Randy Newman's Sail Away, but once he did obsessively message Newman's goddaughter until an initially reluctant Newman agreed to sing. The result is Newman singing a pastiche of himself, written by a man who hadn’t even heard Newman’s early work until recently but felt entitled enough to force him onto the record.

WHAT DOES IT SOUND LIKE?

Like Pet Sounds but Brian Wilson is Blackbear. 

The mix is so loud and wide that everything sounds equally flat - there is chamber reverb on every vocal and every instrument, as if Phil Spector momentarily left prison to learn Pro Tools. The actual Brian Wilson appears in the opening song, but it’s hard to hear him when Colin Blumstone, Larry Gold’s strings, and sound effects are all drowning him out. “Falling Apart” is still a highlight because of how well it nails the time-lapse-montage-where-the-progatonist-is-empty-inside feeling. (There are probably better examples than the 2011 Arthur remake. but it was the first thing that came to mind). 

Most of the record lacks that same statement of intent, no matter how much Haynie throws at it. There are a dozen Rufus Wainwright vocals competing for space on “Little Ballerina” but in service of an interminable, monotonous refrain. Nate Ruess from Fun. - one of the initial co-conspirators of the project - is obviously Melodyned on “Fool Me Too,” abd bit in the fun way he was in “Some Nights.” The Andrew Wyatt-led “Nobody Believes You” is the most confusing song - is it a Tom Jones pastiche? Are they singing over remixed SpongeBob Squarepants production music? Didn’t he use the same drum beats on the last song?

Even when it works, it sounds washed-out and frequently distorted. I searched for a higher-quality file thinking something went wrong with the Spotify encoding, only to face the same issue after downloading a single lossless file from Qobuz. After downloading the Apple Digital Master (still lossy but with better quality control), I concluded this album might just sound terrible.

OH NO, IT’S A SONG CYCLE

The chord progression of “Falling Apart” reprises several times throughout the album, but the motif doesn't represent anything. It's just because this is a Big Album, so it needs motifs. Most of the others are lyrical, including being fooled/being a fool, and sorting out the ‘blame’ after a breakup.  (It turns out that the chord progression was just Pachabel’s Canon all along?)

Haynie said that the women on the record are meant to show ‘both sides’ of the breakup, but Lana Del Rey’s turn doesn’t exactly suggest any motivation of her own: "All that I want is to make your money grow." “Come Find Me” suffers from the same issue. What’s her internal world like? Why did she sleep around? We don’t even know what happened beyond the hints on “Nobody Believes You” and the references to “chasing fame” scattered through the album. Julia Holter repeats lines about “[skipping] too fast away” from the relationship and how “as long as it’s the same, I cannot stay,” but we don’t know what these phrases mean. Any woman on this record sounds like what Haynie thinks she’s thinking, rather than a genuine second character. It all reminds me of the famous Margaret Atwood line about “a woman with a man inside watching a woman.” This might be the point, but that perspective doesn’t make for a more compelling listen.

Haynie also calls the ex a “little girl” on every other song, which is condescending and especially bizarre once he puppeteers Randy Newman into repeating it on “Who To Blame.” “Nobody Believes You” could work if the insecurity was intentional (“I re-read all your poems/Thank the Lord that I’m alone”), but on an album whose selling point is its raw emotion it’s hard to believe Haynie chose now to use even basic dramatic irony. It also has one of the worst one-liners I’ve ever heard in any song, ever: “Such a low watt bulb that's in your dome/It's a wonder that you figured out your phone.”

WHY IT SHOULD HAVE CAUGHT ON

The amount of people involved. The amount of advance press. Haynie’s pedigree. And who doesn’t love expensive-sounding breakup albums!

WHY IT FAILED TO CATCH ON

I listened to this album back in high school, thinking it would help with a messy, if platonic, breakup of my own, but even then I felt something was off about the lyrics. Yes they were filled with vitriol and volatile emotions, but that’s not it; there’s a place for music that expresses ugliness, even unintentionally, even without remorse. On We Fall, all the orchestration obscures a record about only one man and his breakup. There’s nothing universal about its approach; there’s nothing relatable about their story.

But nobody told Emile Haynie that, because the amount of guests and the amount of work indicates he thought his bitterness would resonate. It’s like the next level of I Have Friends, I Definitely Have Friends.  (Or, to quote a review I think about a lot, it’s like convincing said friends “to get in a spaceship, pick the world up, and drop it on some poor girl’s fucking head.”). We also still don’t know what happened, just that people were hurt, and the in media res might have worked if the details weren’t also so specific. Instead, it’s just frustrating, both sonically and thematically. 

Any moments at redemption are more than welcome, especially the lead single “A Kiss Goodbye.” After the usual distorted orchestral work, orchestration drops away, Sampha leading an improvised verse with “did it ever occur you forgave yourself before I did?” -- there’s more nuance in that one line than the rest of the record. 

There’s something fitting about the sound of the record, then. The baffling mixing decisions and the undying bitterness of the lyrics equally corrupt the masterpiece We Fall aimed to be.

WHAT COULD MAKE IT WORK?

For me personally, I would love more songs like “A Kiss Goodbye” and “Falling Apart,” with an equal amount of bite and reflection. I suppose in the midst of a breakup, a prospective listener wants someone to understand what they’re going through, to dwell in the complicated feelings that come from losing someone you love. Those feelings deserve as vast a backdrop as they can get, but the record goes too far. The orchestration obscures the raw emotions, then the wall of sound hinders the big choruses. It’s impressive that the record maintains its identity through all its guests, but that’s the problem; it’s only one identity, all different manifestations of the same person’s single-minded pettiness.

I hope you enjoyed this unnecessarily deep dive into an album from five years ago! Next time we’ll have an interview with one of my favorite new bands, so stay subscribed.