Listen to the isolated vocals of Julian Casablancas on ‘Hard to Explain’ by The Strokes
Few songs capture the depth and urgency of The Strokes’ debut album quite like ‘Hard To Explain’. A motoric pulse of compressed drums, gritty guitar lines and talk-box vocals, the Is This It cut is a shining example of the New York group’s infectious brand of hyper-listenable garage rock.
“Was an honest man / Asked me for the phone, tried to take control / Oh, I don’t see it that way
I don’t see it that way / We shared some ideas / All obsessed with fame, says we’re all the same / Oh, I don’t see it that way / I don’t see it that way,” so begins one of The Strokes’ finest recordings. ‘Hard To Explain’ sees frontman Julian Casablancas explore the shallowness of fandom, the importance of difference and his frustration at being unable to express his genuine thoughts and feelings through a half-remembered conversation with a girl from Carolina.
The Strokes first recorded ‘Hard To Explain’ with Pixies producer Gil Norton but felt the results were too clean-cut. They subsequently approached producer Gordon Raphael, who had produced their Modern Age EP. “Julian came in and asked me…’I want to use a drum machine for these songs, you know. I wrote them on a drum machine and I love the drum machine, but what the hell should I do, because I don’t want Fab (Moretti) to feel bad and have to sit out,'” Raphael recalled during a conversation with Daniel Sarkissian. “And because I was listening to industrial music all through the ’90 and even through the ’00s, I said, ‘Dude, turning drum machine is a piece of cake'”.
“I knew that to make a drum sound like a drum machine, I couldn’t have guitar bleed – I couldn’t have the normal live sound that I had on the rest of the album. I had the drums played by themselves so that I could build them up as a machine.” According to Raphael, that technique is why three of the songs on Is This It, of which ‘Hard To Explain’ is one, sound so different in terms of texture.
You can check out Casablancas’ isolated vocals below.
