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TRACKS UNTOLD: DORIAN ELECTRA’S ‘MY AGENDA’ with Dorian Electra, Count Baldor, Will Vaughan & Weston Allen
🕑 Added 2021-02-17 20:01:53 +0000 UTCIn this Lux Cache track breakdown series, we ask artists, producers, engineers and songwriters to uncover the creative process of their work in their own words. In this chapter, flagrant icon and genuine pop superstar Dorian Electra unpacks their single ‘My Agenda (featuring Pussy Riot & Village People)’ from the 2020 project of the same name, alongside producers & writers Count Baldor, Will Vaughan and Weston Allen -- sharing exclusive behind the scenes footage for premium subscribers.
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Cover art for Dorian Electra’s ‘My Agenda’, image by Dorian Electra and Weston Allen - self-released
LC: How did all of you come into contact, and when did you first start working together?
CB: Highbury and Islington Wetherspoons circa late 2019 after a Dorian show with GFOTY. First started working about 2 months later. We made a song about dungeons and tried to make some Gregorian style dubstep, which sounded sort of good / sort of horrible.
WV: I think I first met Dorian around summer 2017, they were over here in London and a mutual friend (the legend Charlotte Rutherford) hooked us up for a writing collab. We wrote a song called Strip Mall (which I think only ever had one live outing) before trying again on Career Boy.
WA: I met Dorian through Mood Killer in 2013 and started working with Dorian in 2014. Everyone else I started working with in 2018? 2019?
LC: Could you talk about the history of your writing camps, the people involved and the general workflow when approaching writing?
DE: Usually we have this big list or whiteboard of potential song title ideas that I would have compiled previously. Sometimes I have musical ideas/concepts like for example “M’Lady” - I was like… this one should start with a harpsichord and be pretty minimal and repetitive and have guitars. But I never ever come to the camps with any pre-existing melodies or project files, always just concepts. Then people split up into different rooms however they want and start playing around with stuff, then when they’re ready, they’ll call me in for a “vibe check/chord check” where I confirm whether or not I’m into the chord progression or if it should be revised hahahaha (this became a huge joke for us especially at the Las Vegas writing camp) and then if I’m into it - sometimes we’ll try to pair it with a song concept or title. I haven’t worked with a whole bunch of topliners, but Mood Killer and Weston have been in two of the three camps and wrote a bunch on My Agenda. They’re so great with lyrics and having been friends for so long, they understand the twisted inner workings of my mind so they’re my absolutely favorite people to collaborate with lyric-wise especially. It’s also often not always this structured either. Sometimes producers will bring a track idea to the camp or write a vocal melody, etc. to then build on together. It’s usually super organic and my ADHD keeps me frequently bouncing around to various rooms and trying new methods of working and collaborating. There’s a lot of airdropping of different musical parts that happens, probably more so than multiple people working on the same computer.
LC: What experiences and influences went into building the thematic concepts of My Agenda?
DE: I had this phrase “My Agenda” written down for a while. I thought it was an interesting play on the “gay agenda,” the conspiratorial idea pushed by some conservative folks that part of the left has a unified ‘homosexual agenda’ that seeks to undermine all traditional “western values” of family, morality, religion, etc. and promote the LGBT way of life and it takes on this super conspiracy-theory flavor that makes it so funny and ridiculous and also so potent as a concept.
When I’m brainstorming song ideas/concepts, I’m always researching, watching history documentaries, going down Wikipedia rabbit holes - and just reading this page (fig. 1) gave me so many ideas and visuals instantly - I knew it would be perfect for a song.
“ Fig. 1: Wikipedia - Homesexual agenda “
When I heard the track Will made, with the sort of mysterious Dr. Dre vibes originally in the verses and then the intense guitar stuff for the chorus, it seemed like this could be a perfect fit tone-wise for the concept of “My Agenda” which I had initially imagined would need to be some kind of anthemic, hardcore, dark and epic vibe, musically.
Then Weston made the genius connection to this outrageously iconic and twisted clip that has since become very-memed of Alex Jones ranting about atrazine in the water supply that is “turnin’ the friggin frogs gay” (fig. 2)
“ Fig. 2: YouTube - Alex Jones: Turning the Freaking Frogs Gay “
This is where the last part of the song comes from “out here turning frogs homosexual.”
And then Count Baldor made the very aggressive “homosexual hypnosis” outro of the track.
LC: Where did the musical ideas for My Agenda start?
DE: Will had put in these orchestra hits at the end of the chorus made it feel very classic boy-band to me and in my head I was getting an image for a music video with a giant gay military boyband marching/dancing down the street. (For me, a really good/interesting song will always start conjuring up music video imagery in my head as it’s being written… often the visuals and song concept and music are so inextricably linked for me, and this song definitely did that right away). Weston came up with the line “out here flexin in my rainbow suspenders” as a joke that had all of us laughing with how ridiculous and horrible and cringey it was.... but then... we were like... no wait we actually HAVE to use it....that’s way too stupid iconic
Count Baldor added this really eerie writing sound effect that felt to me like someone furiously jotting down conspiracy theory notes and we had to throw in some frog noises as a riser in the beginning of course. Also we thought a marching sound effect would compliment the building energy of verse 2 leading into the second chorus and also directly illustrate the lyrics (“Have you seen my army marching down to city hall? You can always spot us by the way we walk as we’re plotting to take over and destroy you all.”) This is the line where I really imagined the mix of stereotypical “gay walk” (which is absolutely a “thing” in the public consciousness ((fig. 3)) and a menacing military march. And I love the juxtaposition of those two ideas.
” Fig. 3: Vice - Why Do Gay Men Like Me Walk This Way? “
WV: We were coming to the end of our time at the castle and I was feeling the pressure a bit to find, like, a big power song.
There was a big storm going on at the time, icy rain beating down on the castle windows, we’d had no hot water, no WiFi, little sleep, we were isolated from the outside world on top of this hill and I’d near enough totalled the one mode of transportation we had and I really think you do can hear all of that in the opening chords.
Dorian Electra ‘castle’ writing camp. UK, February 2020
CB: Will had started a haunted sounding rock/rap type demo on his laptop and headphones at the dinner table of the castle (adjacent to the cabinet dedicated to fecal art). He sent me the stems and I started jamming over them on my fav roland plugin JV-1080. Beginning with the little trills.. clarinet, harpsichord, bells etc.. (heard at 0:20 and 0:47).
I think we decided we wanted to have the verses be quite spooky and eerie sounding and then the chorus to be really heavy. So we had Wills guitar chugging as the main element of the chorus. I then added in the outro with ‘Vegas Bass™’ which I made alongside Dylan at the last writing camp.
Nadya’s brostep section came a few weeks later. I made that section kind of as a joke whilst Dorian and I were sending ideas back and forth and then we realised that it was actually quite legendary behaviour to keep it in.
LC: The instrumental for My Agenda references industrial metal, anthem rock & bro-step - all married together through distortion. What methods and techniques did you explore to produce this track?
DE: The whole musical ethos of this project was let’s see how many of the most disparate sounding things we can combine together in a way that feels really really good. I have actual ADHD that I think carries over a lot into my creative process of wanting things to be faster, shorter, changing from one thing to the next very quickly is necessary to hold my attention and for me to find something engaging and exciting. Even with my own voice, I like to be constantly changing the sound of it and how I perform, shifting formant not just from song to song but sometimes even over the course of singing a single word. I also love using the element of surprise in music as a way to shake up expectation and create something that can be new and maybe jarring but hopefully ultimately bizarrely satisfying for somebody.
Of course all musicians want to make music that people will like, and making things accessible is always part of my goal. But for this project overall I think I definitely focused on that less than I did for Flamboyant, and I wanted a chance to just go crazy with it and push some of these musical ideas to the extreme. Another theme for the record overall was taking these super hardcore intense often very testosterone-heavy feeling genres and sounds and playing with those in a fun way. I don’t like when music takes itself too seriously… but i also love really intense serious music… so I think we tried to combine all of that in some way.
Cover art for Dorian Electra’s ‘Flamboyant’, released July 2019.
WV: We’d been playing around with a lot of old skool heavy metal ideas, listening to a lot of Medieval Steel and Call Of Duty soundtracks and Count had made this brilliant early Eminem type beat in the days before and I think I tried to bring all those moods together in the original demo. It was then a case of getting them to all work together amicably, which was strangely easier than it really should have been.
CB: Personally I am super lazy and mostly just use presets and splice samples for a lot of stuff (I actually used a fabled Kai Whiston sample in this song) and try to be more selective about instruments that work together.. Then I’ll add effects and tweak presets a little bit. The verses are pretty simple in construction. We used a really simple reese bass with some pitch bending to add some movement. There’s also a pad that sort of drones up and down in pitch.
Will’s demo initially had a plucked string over the top. This got replaced by the Type O Negative-esque bell sound you can hear in verse 2. This changed to make more room for the vocal and keep it as the main focus. The chorus is just a filtered 80s’ bass, Will’s guitar, vocals, drums and the classic ‘rainbow suspenders twang’ sound effect aka a comedy boing sound effect I stole from YouTube.
For Nadya’s part.. the pre dubstep section is basically me plugging and unplugging my guitar which I then used Ableton warp to quantize. I then chopped that up and bass boosted with EQ. For the dubstep section.. I got a load of Virtual Riot samples. Pitched and reversed some of them. Arranged them into an order that I thought sounded cool / extremely brostep, added airhorn. I then grouped the channels and added heinous amounts of distortion and then bass boosted that as well.
For the vocals, we used autotune (obvs) and this interesting plugin Sega Bodega showed me called jjp-strings and strings which basically compresses the fuck out of stuff and adds a small room reverb type effect. It can be pretty harsh sounding but nice when you cut out the high end a bit. For the choral section at 2:05 Dorian sung a bunch of takes, individually doing each harmony which was then tuned and panned, to create a choir effect, then we added reverb to sound like a church. The outro is basically just Vegas Bass™. It has a horrible resonance which kind of sounds like part of an umru snare. A bunch of people complained about it when it first got used cause it sounds so horrible. I personally like it.. but we toned it down a little for this part.
WA:I got really hooked on My Agenda immediately. I remember the original demo had a really pronounced baroque synth that was giving me strong ‘Forgot About Dre’ vibes. I loved watching Will and Tom work on this one.
Behind the scenes of Dorian, Will, Baldor and Weston writing ‘My Agenda’ : still from ‘TU002: CASTLE DORIAN SESSION’ mini-documentary - shot by Daniel Mutton exclusively on Lux Cache.
LC: How did My Agenda develop from those initial sessions?
DE: I had known from the beginning that I wanted this to be a project with a lot of features and I knew that I really wanted to collab with Pussy Riot. Actually originally, we had Pussy Riot do a verse for F The World but then we thought My Agenda would be an even stronger fit. It was Weston’s idea to bring on the Village People - which I always thought would be obviously amazing and literally perfect thematically for all the weird nuanced meaning of this song but super impossible so I hardly even considered the idea for real. We actually do have the same booking agency though, so my agent Parker was able to reach out to them and turns out they’re also big Pussy Riot fans which is amazing and definitely helped it all come together.
Count Baldor had put together a few different musical sections that we pitched to different people beforehand, but ultimately ended up deciding on a crazy distorted dubstep section for Pussy Riot and to have Village People on the choruses because that would be best suited to their anthemic signature stacked vocals. .
WA: I love unexpected features and creating a marquee for a song to bring in listeners. Like hooking people with: ‘what on earth are the Village People and Pussy Riot going to sound like together?’ Not many songs these days have names/features that really make you do a double take.
I wanted the Village People on this song to sing the chorus because I knew they’d be literally the most perfect fit thematically for the song. They work as a part of My Agenda on so many levels. What other gay militaristic supergroup “infultrates” mainstream society with anthemic queer hits like them? I was shocked no one in the scene had collaborated with them, they’re so iconic.
Dorian and I met and worked with Nadya a bit in 2017 and then toured with Pussy Riot in 2018. Nadya’s just one of my favorite people ever and you can literally just hand her a song and she’ll give you something incredible. My favorite part of the song is her screaming ‘gay propaganda’.
CB: Aside from the Nadya’s section, the track remained pretty similar to the original sessions.
I ended up fleshing it out with various sound effects that I got from Splice and other sources. I love adding sound effects to songs to make it sound atmospheric or like a tv show or something. In this song for example I used an audio recording of some frogs, literally just fading up in volume, as a build in the intro, referencing the ‘turning frogs homosexual’ lyric.
I also used a sound effect of someone writing with pencil (which I then layered and panned for stereo mode) To make it sound like the character of the song was frantically ‘planning/plotting’ to fit thematically with the lyrics. This then became part of the overall percussion for the verses as I'd found a part that was quite rhythmic.
LC: How has working with collaborators in writing and production changed since you first started your careers? Why do you feel this community style of collaboration is important to the process?
DE:Every single person brings a totally different vibe or sound to the table and something new that can challenge you. Sometimes I’ll even conceive of songs in terms of the producers I’m working with before the songs are made. Like for example “oooo what if we did a song with a Will Vaughan guitar moment on the chorus and like a Count Baldor type bendy midi flute over that?” My brain has been trained to think creatively in terms of collaboration.
CB: I love collaborating cause it’s always more fun. I get bored of doing stuff on my own or end up being too critical of it. It's nice to get input from other people.
WV: I think for me personally, starting out from, like, the “artist” angle, I felt like if you didn’t do everything yourself then it wasn’t a genuine representation of what you were and you were kinda cheating. But then I grew up and realised that was dumb and that you make much better music when you collaborate. I can’t remember the last time I worked on a song completely by myself now. It really challenges you to push yourself in ways you wouldn’t otherwise and you just never know what’s going to happen. Everyone’s got their own musical background, influences and tastes and embracing all of that is key to moving forwards.
WA: It especially helps for experimentation. Everyone has their own strengths they can add to a project or even a song. I think it also helps with fatigue. Sometimes it helps to just sit back and let someone else have a go at it while you recharge creatively or stand back and rethink the song as a whole.
An exclusive mini-documentary for Dorian Electra’s My Agenda is available for Premium Subscribers up on the Lux Cache Patreon, featuring early demos and behind-the-scenes footage of the track’s production at Castle Dorian -- shot by Daniel Mutton.
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Dorian Electra is a singer/songwriter/pop-star based in LA.
You can stream/purchase their new project ‘My Agenda’ everywhere and follow them on Twitter and Instagram: @dorianelectra
