An hour with music ambassador Pharrell Williams at Jungle City Studios, up aloft the High Bandage and a advanced arrangement of new construction, feels like a accessory anatomy of time travel: He can affix an mp3 amateur to the console, about-face the monitors up to jaw-rattling volumes, and comedy you pop music from the abreast future. These are the advance he’s accounting for (or co-written with) assorted singers, beats he’s fabricated for assorted rappers, a alternative of sounds he’s crafted that could become radio fodder over the advancing months. Aback we meet, he’s authoritative adjustments to “ATM Jam,” a clue for Azealia Banks’s accessible album, and there’s affluence added of his assignment to follow. A tough-as-nails Jennifer Hudson song with a Rick James feel. A not-dissimilar allotment for Miley Cyrus. A cut for Mayer Hawthorne that would complete like seventies smooth-rock kings Barbarous Dan akin if we hadn’t aloof been talking about how abundant Williams loves Barbarous Dan, and akin if he didn’t angular over afterwards and say, “Sounds like Barbarous Dan, right?” A almanac with resurgent Destiny’s Child accompanist Kelly Rowland. And my favorite, an amazing cardinal from Kylie Minogue, which Williams ability booty added pride in, because he makes a point of arena it afterwards announcement the artist, afresh asks me to assumption who’s singing: “That’s Kylie Minogue!” This is aloof the music he can share; about above it lies the music he can alone adumbration at (like new assignment with Beyoncé), and the actuality he can’t akin altercate yet (he afresh tweeted a photo of himself in a flat with Jay-Z and Frank Ocean).
At 40 years old, Williams still has the lean, adolescent air of a boyish skater, as admitting he could alloy in with the kids in Union Square. But I’m academic the allegory he would accept to call this alert acquaintance would not be time travel; it would absorb visiting a appearance abode and browsing through abutting season’s clothes. He employs a accomplished lot of appearance analogies to explain what he does with music. They’re circuitous and thoughtful, featuring Mark McNairy, Rei Kawakubo, and altered methods of ambience Swarovski crystals, and they may be hardly abreast by the business actuality who’s actuality to admonish him to acknowledgment the tenth ceremony of his accouterment line, Billionaire Boys Club—but the axial advance is that autograph and bearing songs for added artists is a lot like designing their clothes: “I anticipate about the person, area they are in their life, what they’re activity through. I anticipate about what’s activity to attending acceptable on their body. So I’ve got to put the appropriate fabric, the appropriate print, the appropriate weight and feel. And afresh I’ve got to dress the window.” That Kylie Minogue song, for instance: Williams was aggressive afterwards Minogue, aback confronted by some added burning matter, anticipation she’d be affected to abolish the recording sessions. So he congenital “The Winners,” a bemused backbone canticle whose verses all begin, “I was activity to abolish …”
He has abounding beginning designs forthcoming, which is not a accompaniment of diplomacy to booty for granted. Ten years ago, it was a given: Aback then, he and Chad Hugo, the aggregation alleged the Neptunes, were the best acknowledged and abounding assembly auteurs during an era aback actuality a assembly auteur seemed like pop’s accomplished calling. Any accustomed hour of songs on pop, hip-hop, or R&B radio was about affirmed to affection assorted examples of their work: hits by Justin Timberlake, Usher, T.I., Britney Spears, or No Doubt; massive, grandparents-dance-to-them-at-weddings smashes like Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” and Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot”; somewhat added dainty favorites like Clipse’s “Grindin’ ” and Kelis’s “Milkshake.” It is difficult to enlarge aloof how abundant the complete of American accepted music, post-millennium, had to do with their anhydrous funk—crisp, minimal, and pointillistic, abundant on blipping synths and Williams’s blast drums, generally abnegating bass curve in favor of alveolate abandoned spaces.
That complete appropriately absent some of its acquirement on the charts, by which point the Neptunes were already diversifying into new enterprises anyway; by the about-face of the decade, they were recording and touring with their alive band, N*E*R*D, and Williams was alive on projects like the soundtrack for the activated blur Despicable Me (or, as of aftermost year, allowance account the Oscars broadcast). Lately, though, he’s aback to accumulating high-profile abandoned assembly and songwriting credits, and some of the songs they’ve been absorbed to accept absent far from the frosty, snap-and-clack address of the old Neptunes sound: They’ve been, one notices, appealing lush. A song with Frank Ocean appearance ablaze keys and Stevie Wonder accordance (“Sweet Life”); a clue with Kendrick Lamar is befuddled and bass-driven (“Good Kid”); the alliance distinct he formed on for Destiny’s Child sparkles calmly forth (“Nuclear”). He fabricated a close blow of a song with the Malaysian accompanist Yuna (“Live Your Life”), a clue for Rick Ross that’s abundantly a tumble of vocal-jazz harmonies (“Presidential”), and a buttery disco cut with the bandage Scissor Sisters (“Inevitable”). The chat Williams uses for this development is color. “I’m consistently aggravating to accomplish what I feel is missing,” he says, “and there was a lot of basal actuality for so long. It was like: Boom. Pssh. And I could just”—he makes that allurement complete again, this time miming a gun to the head. “It was aloof too much. So I bare color. Everybody abroad was like steely, minimal. I was like color, rainbow, abounding altered versions of the rainbow. Rainbow, but with tertiary colors. Rainbow, gingham print.”
The advance of gingham-rainbow Williams ability be that soundtrack for Despicable Me, for which he wrote and performed a few cuts of artless sunshine pop; the music he’s fabricated for the accessible aftereffect is abundant on active Motown sounds and consciousness-expanding articulate harmonies. “I’m aloof in that place,” he says, “because I feel like aggregate is so, ‘I’m super-mad! Cocaine! I’ll shoot you! These breed is on drugs!’ And I aloof feel like there’s so abundant added to life, you know? I grew up in an era aback bodies would allocution about everything, and akin Kermit the Frog had a hit. Random shit, like, ‘She’s got Bette Davis eyes’—and that was a hit!” As he’s arena songs, he pegs the era he’s reminiscing about as addition amid 1976 and 1983, aback he angry 10; he talks about “reefer music,” the kinds of adequate songs he assembly with bodies casual about joints; at one point, he decides he needs to acquisition DVDs of the old appearance Solid Gold.
He’s not the alone one harboring such impulses—more than a few of the accomplished decade’s pop and R&B mainstays assume to be bottomward against the silky, “mature,” and nostalgic, with big ambitions for both the harmonies and the sentiments. To apprehend Williams acquaint it, though, the body of his assembly assignment isn’t about actuality in blow with the appropriate sounds; it’s his role as a stylist, a apprentice of character, and a able enthusiast of added people’s spirits, addition who can aces out a vocalist’s aspect and accouterments it accordingly. He’s a adequate attendance (you can brainstorm him bonding with abrupt rap goons and boyish pop stars alike), quick to apprehension capacity about others and let them apperceive that he’s noticed. Within account of affair me, he’s asked about my shoes, and active my glasses in an continued allegory about how appearance conveys spirit: “It’s the way of a actuality that’s their personality. It’s not that he’s a ‘happy’ person—there are a lot of blessed people—but his way of actuality happy, his way of cutting a shirt, his way of speaking to her; that’s what makes her adulation him.”
Calling him a able enthusiast is, for the record, no exaggeration: He’s brimming of absurd acclaim for those he likes. Barbarous Dan’s Donald Fagen (“I’d put The Nightfly in my top twenty”), rapper Q-Tip (“He aloof walks on air”), artisan Hans Zimmer (“like a walking Da Vinci”), J. J. Abrams (“a genius”), his own employees. Aback he appear a book aftermost fall—Pharrell: Places and Spaces I’ve Been—it was about added people’s work, from Zimmer and Kanye West to Anna Wintour and Buzz Aldrin. (Williams is into amplitude biking and science fiction but, amazingly, not the appearance you’d think: “I’m so terrible—I called my label, Star Trak, afterwards Star Trek, and I don’t akin apperceive the atramentous lady’s name.”) He keeps underlining what a advantage it is to be about such people, which seems at aboriginal like the affectionate of affair one repeats to break humble—until he describes the time, in the backward nineties, aback he aboriginal presented advance to Busta Rhymes for consideration, and you absolutely account the ascendance of the Neptunes, two junior-high accompany from Virginia Beach, into the pop world. “All these people,” he says, “they were like deities. It was like actuality on Mount Olympus, area Apollo and all the gods were. Anticipate about it: Busta’s articulation is not ordinary. You don’t go to academy with a guy like that, and you don’t apperceive anybody’s dad that sounds like that. But actuality he is, in the abounding complect dreads. Chewing gum, account a sports magazine, alert to these tracks, not akin attractive up one time, and I was so honored, because it was Busta.” (One of the beats Rhymes alone became Kelis’s memorable admission single, “Caught Out There,” a complete it’s now adamantine to brainstorm acceptance to anyone else.)
At the moment, though, his better acclaim are for French ball duo Daft Punk, whose much-acclaimed new anthology appearance Williams on two tracks, singing his own melodies and harmonies—one of them, “Get Lucky,” already looks like a adversary for song-of-the-summer status. “I cannot accept that I was a decimal, a breach in that equation,” he says. “Forget it. ’Cause I’d be there aloof to authority up the equals sign, and I got to be a digit.” Alive with Daft Punk sounds … rigorous. “Everything is concise, precise, gridded. There are no gray areas for them. They don’t accept settling. They accept in accomplishing it 200 added times than the antecedent 200.”
You’d anticipate do-it-400-times perfectionism would be commodity new for Williams, whose continued discography attests to aloof how bound he can about-face out acceptable songs—the account abounding admirers had of the Neptunes’ workflow complex Williams jetting about capturing ideas, singing bedfellow vocals, and actualization in videos, while Hugo, aback home, did the assiduous architect assignment of finishing and polishing. Williams says he’s actual particular, though; commodity like a less-than-perfect boom complete will nag at him. “It’s like if you’re backward for work, and you bandy on socks—they’re both Nike socks, but one has a gray toe. No one’s anytime activity to see it, because it’s in your shoe. But that fucks my accomplished day up.” The better gray toe of all turns out to be Williams’s own career as a vocalist, which started with choruses and hooks he recorded as placeholders and demonstrations, alone to accept artists—like Mystikal, on 2000’s “Shake Ya Ass”—figure they articulate acceptable abundant to leave as is; he can’t accept to some of them afterwards actuality reminded of the abundant accompanist he’d planned to alter himself with.
In the case of one Despicable Me song, the adopted accompanist would accept been Donald Fagen—a absolute celestial aback it comes to butter-smooth, jazz-inflected, harmony-rich studio-rattery. There’s still affluence of neck-snapping ballyhoo in Williams’s latest accumulation of work, but we can probably, he says, apprehend added of that blush and arrangement and harmony, whether it’s in maximalist Solid Gold electro-funk, affected disco, or gray-skied softness. (Or agleam all-embracing hit-making: Some of his added alluring jobs afresh accept been for huge-scale pop and ball acts like Gloria Estefan, Adam Lambert, and British accompanist Mika.)
One can’t advice acquainted that Daft Punk, too, absorb their new anthology dispatch abroad from billowing arena-rocking and added into adhesive bendable bedrock and light-stepping disco. And the clue on it that Pharrell gets abnormally gushy about—the one that’s “going to change your life; not your mind, your life”—is “Touch,” featuring vocals from Paul Williams, the seventies singer-songwriter whose best-known song is still “The Bubble Connection,” Kermit the Frog’s big hit. It is, Pharrell says, “the best song I’ve heard in years. It’s bewitched and majestic at the aforementioned time. It is unbelievable. It fabricated me emotional. I didn’t apperceive that sounds could be put calm that could do that to people.” He lifts up from his skaterish drape on a couch and leans in, afraid his head, addition agog babble architecture up: “He’s one of the best writers—Paul Williams is one of the best writers ever.”
*This commodity originally appeared in the June 3, 2013 affair of New York Magazine.
