It might have been released almost a year ago, but Messy - the sixth single from Lola Young’s debut album, This Wasn't Meant for You Anyway - is still everywhere. Having topped the UK singles chart and reached number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, it’s just hit another milestone by summiting the Rock & Alternative Airplay chart for the first time in the US.
It’s a tune, alright, but one that, in musical terms, is actually very simple. Explaining how she wrote Messy on her acoustic guitar in a new Behind The Track video from Mix with the Masters, Young says: “It was just the C shape, moved up, and it’s literally just that - that’s the whole song”.
Young goes on to explain that Messy was written at a lower tempo than it ended up being recorded at. With the original idea crystallised, she headed to 64 Sound studio in LA, where she worked on it with producer Jared Solomon, William Brown (drummer and co-producer), and Conor Dickinson (co-writer and producer).
As so often seems to be the case, work on Messy began in earnest as the group’s studio time was drawing to a close, and when all else seemed to be failing.
“The last day, we attempted three songs that were all horrible sounding,” says Solomon. And we were all like ‘dude, this is not working’. We were struggling.”
It was at this point that they turned to Messy, but Dickinson was keen to switch up the arrangement. “We wanted to do something with energy and she wrote it like slow and folky,” he recalls. “It was kind of a sad thing, and I was like ‘why don’t we take that and speed it up and put some ‘70s drums on it and then we’ll have something with energy and just see how it feels?”
Despite a slight concern that the increased tempo could make the “wordy” lyrics difficult to sing, the team recognised that they were onto something as soon as they started playing it. In fact, such was the vibe in the recordings they made that day, some of those takes made it onto the record, despite the fact that Young was tired and losing her voice.
“Even in my vocal take there’s a little bit of slight imperfection, but that massively just makes the song what it is and also relates back to the meaning of the song, which is that imperfections can also be - in some ways - really special, and even more enticing and interesting than something that’s perfect,” she says.
In fact, Young suggests that she wanted the finished song to sound as ‘live’ and spontaneous as possible, and that meant recording in a more old-school way. “It’s not like one part that we’ve looped; we’ll play the whole track, so there’s a lot of different moments, special moments that poke out,” she points out. “Someone will be playing and there’ll be just like a little lick or a little riff that kind of pokes out throughout the song.”
Messy is just a two-chord pattern, though, so Solomon says that everyone was focused on dynamics to ensure that interest was kept up. There’s plenty of ear candy in the mix, too, some of which comes from a Yamaha CS-60 and a Korg MS-20, which creates the kind of swell that could easily be mistaken for a guitar. A spring reverb was used to concoct that effect.
Backstreet's back (sort of)
There is plenty of actual guitar on Messy as well, though: a country chug and a melody line that Solomon says sounded uncomfortably familiar.
“As soon as I played that I was like, ‘damn, it sounds like Backstreet Boys’. I just remember playing that and I’m like, ‘that sounds like I Want It That Way’. And then I didn’t do the ‘way’, because if you do the ‘way’, you gotta pay them a lot of money.”
Listen out, too, for an arpeggiated Roland Juno-106: “There was a cool little Easter egg that happened, I remember,” says Solomon. “It was kind of at the end of the day. We had a Juno-106, and we had Will play chords and we were doing like an arpeggio. The 106 doesn’t have an arpeggiator on it, but I guess our engineer, Tyler, he hooked it up to Pro Tools, so it was like clock-synced, arpeggiated or something with Pro Tools.
“It was a weird thing, but instead of an arpeggiator playing only one note at a time, it was playing the whole chord and arpeggiating the chord up octaves instead of just doing a normal one-note arpeggiation. It was so weird.”
Weird or not, Messy has resonated with a lot of people since its release, and is unlikely to be disappearing from the airwaves any time soon. And for Young, the lesson is not to overthink things.
“You don’t need to be so super perfectionist,” she says. “You can just put songs out and see what happens. I think that is really important to do.”
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