Inside Track: Dua Lipa

Photo: Caroline Polachek

Danny Harle has made a career out of taking pop music seriously, culminating in a key role on Dua Lipa’s hit album Radical Optimism.

“At one point, my dad did me the immense service of putting an iMac with Logic Express in my bedroom, without saying anything. I played with it for years and years and years. Towards the end of my second music degree, the stuff that I was making in Logic felt like play and my real music, because I was not preoccupied with it being heard one way or the other. It was a pure version of what I wanted to hear. There was not even a sense of it having to sound like a genre or to fit into anything. I realised that’s the way for me, and I continued in that vein.

“My main instrument now is Logic Pro X. I more or less gave up playing acoustic instruments at the end of that second degree, because I had become honest about what music and sounds I truly like. They tend to be sounds from the electronic music world that don’t reverberate like an acoustic instrument. I like recordings that are produced as if they’re in a kind of dream space, with music that does not sound like it is from this world, but from a different planet. When I choose a reverb, I prefer infinite, crazy spaces. That’s where I like my music to exist. I call it my ‘mind palace’.

“I play acoustic instruments again, but abandoning them for a while was part of distilling my musical voice. It was so affected by my classical and jazz education, with the fetishism of technique and technicality, that it got in the way of composition. My hands would fall on the bebop patterns and licks on the bass guitar that are the focus of the jazz community, and this forced my compositions into a pastiche. It felt wrong. I came to the conclusion that any compositional voice of mine had to be carried by sounds that really express how I feel. And the sound that I resonated with the most is the super saw.”

Danny L Harle obtained a Bachelor of Music degree at Goldsmiths College in London in 2008, and a Master of Music degree in composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 2013. He seemed set to follow his father John, a well‑known saxophonist, composer and producer, into a conventional career in jazz and classical music. Instead, Harle junior took a sharp left turn and went deep into electronic and pop music, eventually forging a successful production career with credits that include Chic, Caroline Polachek, Liam Gallagher and Skrillex. Most recently, Harle was a co‑writer and co‑producer on every track on Dua Lipa’s chart‑topping Radical Optimism album.

Harle’s musical outlook is unusually iconoclastic and multifaceted. His influences include Stravinsyk and Glaswegian hardcore producer Scott Brown, and he was the first Guildhall musician to graduate on electric bass as his main instrument. He combined mediaeval and baroque music, free jazz, and anything avant garde. Having been involved in many radically different experimental projects, including video game soundtracks, he eventually signed to the arty electronic label PC Music.

“Being part of the iconoclastic PC Music collective from London got me attention,” recalls Harle. “We really liked pop music, which was very controversial at the time. There was a climate in which liking pop music was a rebellious thing to do. We loved the aesthetics of pop, we loved the synthesizers, and we love the extremeness of it. So we made music that was avant garde‑leaning, but with pop music aesthetics, which was not really done at the time. Then I did a song that got on Radio 1. And then we signed a deal with Columbia. It escalated from there.”

Flower Power

The song was 2013’s ‘Broken Flowers’, Harle’s first release on PC Music, which made it to the BBC’s Radio 1 playlist after it was re‑released on an EP in 2015. A year later, Harle released a single called ‘Ashes Of Love’, featuring singer Caroline Polachek.

“Caroline was in a band called Chairlift at the time I first worked with her, and was looking for a way to get a solo career going. We have a creative chemistry that serves as an outlet for my classical education, as well as my more esoteric music references. I was finishing my master’s degree during my time with PC Music, and in a way that took me by surprise. I found an outlet for all this virtuosic classical stuff and my electronic stuff in my work with Caroline. Her voice is like an instrument, and in electronic music the voice tends to be used as an instrument, with singing lines that resemble synth lines, which I like a lot.”

After 2017, Harle’s production and writing credits expanded into tracks for Charlie XCX, Superfruit and Chic, with two tracks on the band’s ninth album It’s About Time (2018). “As a bass player, Bernard Edwards is an absolute hero of mine. The Chic thing came about through me doing a song with Nao, and then she did a session with Nile Rodgers, and he liked the song. The next thing I knew, my bass playing was on a Chic album, which was a really bonkers moment. Though in this day and age, it’s hard for anything to sink in properly, because everything happens online and there’s little face‑to‑face interaction.”

Harle tried to advance his production career by doing in‑person sessions, but eventually realised that this was not the sticking point. “I’ve done hundreds of sessions in my life that have gone horribly wrong, and for a long time I could not work out why. I would go to LA and work with anybody who’d written a hit song, and it was a disaster. I realised eventually that I could only work with people who like the same sort of thing that I do.

“I’ve got friends who are producers who have had great success by doing countless sessions with new people every day. I almost fetishised the idea of that being the thing that I would be good at. But I really am not. I’m not actually a versatile producer, where I can just write or produce a song in any style. In hindsight, I should not have been doing these more generic sessions. I should only have been doing sessions with people who I have an artistic chemistry with. That was a gradual process of self‑discovery. It took a long time to work out, and only through going through all the pain of it going wrong did I find a way to make it go correctly. In fact, Caroline Polachek was the first artist I produced who I really gelled with.”

Where Is It?

Harle co‑wrote and co‑produced nine of the 14 tracks on Polachek’s debut album Pang (2019). (Other co‑writers and co‑producers on the album are Andrew Wyatt and Dan Nigro, who both recently appeared in this magazine.) Harle continued his production career with credits like yeule and Flume, and in 2021 released his first solo album Harlecore. This was followed by production credits for Liam Gallagher, Skrillex and Polachek’s second solo album, Desire, I Want To Turn Into You (2023). This, in turn, led to Harle working with Dua Lipa.

“My solo album helped me artistically exorcise my love for a particular type of melody, and music. The crazy thing is that since I’ve done that album, I don’t feel the need to do that music any more, though I can still DJ my stuff and I love it. I made my statement. I’m working on my next solo album, which will be very different. My artist projects are an expression of what I want to hear in this world and things that I find beautiful. I need to do that. It’s like having something to say in a conversation. It’s very hard work, and very satisfying when you worked out what the thing is you’re trying to say.

“I want to only make three solo albums in my life. I want to express my eclecticism, and I’ve realised that it will take three albums to do that. One day I’ll be able to hold these three albums and say, ‘That is who I am.’ But I definitely don’t see myself as an artist, in the traditional sense, where your project is everything you do. I’m more a musician, and working with other people is a fantastic outlet for my other abilities, some of which I can’t put into my own artist projects. This is particularly satisfying, because when I hear somebody else’s voice I get very excited by all these things I can do with it.

“My work with Caroline is a good example. She does all the lyrics, and I contribute to the melodies and the rhythm of the melodies and the way in which they interact with the instrumental. She also contributes to the arrangements and the production, because she’s a fantastic producer. ‘Bunny Is A Rider’, the first single from her second album, started off with drums, a strange ambience that I’d created, and samples of my daughter laughing that I found particularly amusing because she’s laughing quite hysterically. I found a way of making that fit into the rhythm of these drums.

“I also play bass on the track. The way I produced the drums almost makes them sound like they are outside, with this voice note ambient thing that gives the track a sense of place. People find it quite mysterious when music feels like it’s in an unknowable place. As I said before, often one of the first questions I ask myself, in terms of what I’m trying to achieve, to give a track a sense of character, is: ‘Where is it?’ Even if it isn’t in my ‘mind palace’, fine, but I like to give it a secure sense of where it is. So with that song, it’s got quite a specific character, also because of the boldness and ambiguity of Caroline’s lyrics.”

Bunny For Nothing

‘Bunny Is A Rider’ was released in July 2021, and although it wasn’t a big hit, has become quite influential. “The writing and production of that song led to a very particular approach to the mix, which was done by Geoff Swan. I asked for some very specific stuff, because there was a bizarre frequency spectrum in the track that needed a completely different, revitalised approach. I have never curated a mix in such detail. I wanted Geoff to be very careful in the 3.5‑5 kHz range and to allow space for the sub to open up in the chorus. This required slightly unconventional approaches to be done in the mix.

“This song also made me realise that you can have stuff that’s very quiet in a mix. You don’t have to have everything up front. Some high‑frequency things can be very quiet. The voice‑note field recording of mine that’s going through the background is actually side‑chained to the kick drum. It is a technique used by Massive Attack in the song ‘Teardrop’, and also by the Neptunes in Snoop Dogg’s song ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot’. It’s a technique that I really like, but I did it in a slightly different way, and it is part of what creates the ambience and the character of the song. I’ve been told by other mixers that they have used the song as a template, and the album was nominated for a Grammy.

“‘Bunny Is A Rider’ also caught the ear of Dua Lipa. In fact she really liked the whole of Caroline’s second album. So Dua took a chance with me, and had me in the studio for every session for her new album. Andrew Wyatt also worked on the Caroline project, and I did some work with him on the Liam Gallagher record. He also joined Dua’s team.”

Positive Outlook

Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism has been a worldwide hit.Radical Optimism was written and recorded between June 2022 and July 2023 at 5dB Studios in London, The Woodshed Recording in Malibu, and in Los Angeles at Westlake Studios, Kevin Parker’s home studio, and NRG Recording Studios. Kevin Parker, aka Tame Impala, was invited to join the core writing and production team along with Canadian songwriter and producer Tobias Jesso Jr and Norwegian songwriter Caroline Ailin. Engineer Cameron Gower Poole was another core member of the production crew, and various other people would come in for specific sessions, including long‑standing Dua Lipa producer Ian Kirkpatrick, who is credited on two songs.

“We wrote most of the album in 5dB in London. The ideas were written from scratch in the room. Everybody would have the confidence to have opinions about everything. It was a very creatively open environment. Most songs started with us creating a basic idea, maybe two loops, like the guitar at the beginning of ‘Maria’. Then Dua would see if it emotionally linked with any of the stuff that happened for her. An experience Dua had would always be at the centre. She is very much the through line of the album.

“The core band was pretty much the players. I played a bit of bass, and Kevin is such an astonishing guitarist and bass player, it was hard not to let him do everything. He’s a fantastic live musician, but also very skilled in making an instrument sound good in a recording, which is completely different. Making an electric bass sound good through a DI into a computer is a completely different skill to making it sound good live. We did a lot of finishing in Woodshed Studios, and many of the studio assistants are Berklee‑standard musicians as well, so they did some overdubs, like on piano or guitar, when we wanted some more sheen.”

Goblin Control

The most striking aspect of Harle’s writing and producing contributions to Radical Optimism is something he calls “goblining”. “It involves me sitting in a corner in the dark, like a goblin, with headphones and my laptop, and constantly Airdropping stuff to the main computer, with the person behind it working it into the session. I also worked like that with Skrillex. With the Dua sessions, Andrew Wyatt or Kevin Parker often were playing real instruments in the room, like a Wurli or a guitar, and the engineer, Cam Gower in 5dB, would be recording them and comping them. Meanwhile I Airdropped Cam my ideas and contributions. Sometimes I would take some of the recordings of Kevin Parker or Andrew Wyatt, and I’d edit them and then Airdrop them back to Cam. When Ian Kirkpatrick was at 5dB I was sending him stuff rather than the vocal engineer. Ian preferred to have it all in his world because everything is sort of interconnected in what he does.

Danny L Harle: It involves me sitting in a corner in the dark, like a goblin, with headphones and my laptop.

“Me goblining was part of a very fluid way of working we established that meant that things could happen very quickly. Dua could pick up the microphone at any time and record an idea and Cam would be ready. There could easily be multiple things happening at the same time, with all of us working towards the same goal. We were all throwing things in, and then there was a collective sense of whether it worked or not.

“Goblining is also a control thing. Andrew Wyatt’s very good at playing guitar and then allowing someone else to manipulate it. Whereas with me, if I have a melodic or synth idea, I need it to be realised in the way that I want it. I often sample my own stuff back. I’ve got lots of a cappellas, and sometimes I throw in one of my old a cappellas and just reverse it and just see what happens, or I’ll write a synth line with a bit of vocal melody from an a cappella.

Danny Harle “goblining” during the sessions for Radical Optimism.

“I like to throw in a chaotic element to see if it produces something interesting. I want my things to have a particular sound, and it’s much easier for me to just do that on my computer. I’ve got quite good ears and can transcribe chords and melodies just through hearing them. I can do something to them and send that over and it will just work with what they’re doing. I’m not very pro music theory, because it can imply lots of things not to do, which are actually fine. But the thing that is useful is to be able to recognise intervals.”

Collaborative Effort

According to Danny Harle, all members of the production team were involved throughout. “It was always collective. The core ideas of the song were pretty developed from the first day, and after that it was a matter of polishing them. We wrote a lot of songs and it was very difficult to get rid of some of them to distil it to the final album, which we wanted to make succinct and punchy. It ended up being only 36:35 long. Joe Kentish, President of Warner Records, also was a large part of finishing the album. He’s fantastic. He believes in new music having to sound different to make an impression.

“We took the productions and rough mixes quite far, and many released tracks sound quite similar to our rough mixes, even as some of the mixes revitalised the energy of the tracks in question. Some of the tracks were on my computer, some were on Cam’s computer, some on Ian’s computer. Extensive and very meticulous stems were sent to mixer Josh Gudwin. And then we’d all be listening to his mixes. There was a lot of nitpicking about details in the songs, like how a guitar comes in, or adding a reverse reverb, or how to change crossfades.

“Everybody was involved at all stages of the mixing process, with Kevin at the end listening remotely from Australia. Sometimes Joe would come into my studio to listen on my monitors. All this happened in an atmosphere of pure respect for everyone at the top of their game. Everybody was trying their absolute hardest, and was working to the highest standard, for an artist who was putting everything she has into it. You do it for the artist. That is what producing for other people is.”