We might be getting close to the first anniversary of Charli XCX’s Brat, but the album is still appearing on the cultural radar. In fact, thanks to the endless stream of remixes, think pieces and awards that have come off the back of it, we might even be on course for a second Brat summer.
Now, songwriter John Shave has been looking back at his contribution to one of Brat’s standout tracks: the hard-hitting Sympathy Is A Knife. With its dark lyrical themes of paranoia and insecurity, it’s a step removed from some of Brat’s other big hitters, and has a few discombobulating musical quirks, too.
Having previously been part of production trio The Invisible Men and, prior to that, noughties hit factory Xenomania, Shave tells Music Week that he decided to branch out on his own after being forced to go solo during the Covid-19 pandemic. And it turns out that XCX was his first assignment.
“I got in the studio with Charli at the start of 2023,” he says. “I’ve known her now for more than 10 years, and we’ve done lots of writing together, so without even knowing what Brat was going to become, she was just a really trusted, kind person to step back into the studio with for the first time as a solo entity.”
And right off the bat, the Brat team was productive: “The first batch of sessions we did, it was Charli, Finn [Keane] and me, and they came to my studio,” Shave recalls. “Finn and I had prepped some rough pieces of music; one of the first I played turned into So I, then one that Finn brought was this really cool, clever piece of music that became Sympathy Is A Knife. I loved it straight away. The verse tricks you into thinking that it’s in a certain key and has this ‘simplistic’ musical language, but then it flips. The key you think it is in is actually the first chord of the chorus.”
The real magic came, though, when the star in the room put her stamp on it: “Charli is the most amazing writer; she can freestyle anything off the cuff,” says Shave. “In the past, writing with her has always been led by figuring out the melody structure, then working on lyrics. It would often be a case of what feels cool to say in that moment, whereas with Brat, Charli had put so much thought into it before we even got in the studio. She had the concept, title, a curated playlist of key references, and had thought about every song she wanted on it.”
It was Keane, says Shave, who designed the jagged bass sound that features throughout Sympathy Is A Knife, and a track arrangement was eventually sketched out. “Then the pressure was there to make the lyrics brilliant,” Shave remembers. “On the mic, Charli hit that note going into the chorus, which felt so exciting immediately, so we leaned into that almost ‘jarring’ sound, muted the backing track underneath that note, and then found other places we could go to with it. The track just had this burst of euphoric energy.”
Shave says that, although Charli “knew what she wanted to talk about” in Sympathy Is A Knife, finding the right words took a little more time.
“It was funny - my studio is in the basement of my house and you could hear my kids above while Charli was sitting on the stairs trying to write these lyrics. I was like, ‘Oh god, I hope they’re not too loud!’ [laughs].”
After that ‘first draft’ was completed, Shave says that they left the song alone to “breathe for a bit” while they worked on others. By the time they returned to it - this time in Guy Chambers’ Sleeper Sounds Studio - Charli had worked out exactly what she wanted to say and how she wanted to say it.
“After that, it was just about tweaking some words and recording vocals,” says Shave. “When you put words or lyrics to an initial idea, it can either enhance or detract from the feeling of it, so with this we were just searching for that same feeling that our first ever demo had. I recorded the vocals onto a new backing track, and once we nailed it, Finn took it off to produce and made it as amazing as it is.”
Although he says he was proud of the record and its parent album, Shave admits that he could never have imagined just how big the whole project would become.
“Brat really has had an undeniable impact; it’s affected everything from vocabulary to online culture to fashion,” he reflects. “One thing that was really interesting to me was thinking about us having all these conversations at the start saying, ‘Well, this is Brat, this isn’t...’ Then a year later, we were seeing that being debated on CNN! Studio discussions were now being carried out on the world stage.”
