Team makes a hit single

On the radio, where it has been ubiquitous all summer, the million-selling single Where Are U Now by Skrillex and Diplo with Justin Bieber is four minutes of high-tech bliss: a sweet-voiced mixture of longing and recrimination, a lonely plaint with a dance beat.

The song arrives in a swirl of electronic sound and vanishes in a distant echo, like a phantasm. But behind it, as with most Top 10 hits, is a matrix of inspirations and decisions, coincidences and hard work, marketing and luck. In a series of interviews, the people behind the hit provided a detailed look at the work that went into Where Are U Now, for a case study in the way pop music is made today.

Like many current hits, Where Are U Now is an electronic confection facilitated online. Bieber was not in the studio with Skrillex and Diplo, and did not even know the song was being produced. Where Are U Now is also a one-time alliance of musicians from diverse musical camps.

Unexpected
It is a mutually advantageous coalition, but an unexpected one: the electronic dance music underground meeting a teen idol. Diplo recalled thinking: “No one would expect it. It would be so insane.”

Bieber, 21, has been a pop star since he was 13, a pin-up for squealing fans. But teen idols do not last, and his challenge is to make the transition to a lasting career. After a series of tabloid embarrassments, he had not released any music for more than a year. (Another song he was working on, he said, was titled No Pressure.)

Skrillex and Diplo have busy individual careers as producers, remixers and disc jockeys; teamed up, they bill themselves as Jack U. Diplo, born Wesley Pentz, is a 36-year-old connoisseur of bass-heavy styles from around the world. As electronic dance beats have infused Top 10 pop, Diplo has produced hits for M.I.A. (Paper Planes), Usher (Climax) and another of his collaborative groups, Major Lazer, which has a current hit with Lean On.

Skrillex, the stage name of Sonny Moore, 27, is better known as a DJ, headlining clubs and festivals and pumping out propulsive, crushing dubstep remixes. Where Are U Now has given Skrillex his first pop hit.

The song opens hushed and hovering, with a stereo-panning whoosh, four somber piano chords and Bieber’s electronically stuttered voice, leading into a mournful verse about a friend or lover he helped, who has now abandoned him. Eventually a dance beat kicks in and a mysterious, flutelike squiggle — Skrillex calls it the “dolphin” — announces itself again and again as the vocals all but disappear: There’s just the occasional refrain, “Where are you now that I need you?”

Halfway through, the track pauses, then offers another hymn-like verse; the dance beat returns, a little pushier with electronic handclaps, and the refrain and “dolphin” carry the song to the end, with a final, echoing “I need you the most.”

The collaboration began at a party. Skrillex and Diplo were in New York in September 2014 during Fashion Week, and at an Alexander Wang event, they ran into Scooter Braun, who manages Bieber and other acts Diplo has produced.

Skrillex and Diplo were looking for vocal tracks for the debut album by Jack U, which channels their electronic expertise into more-or-less-pop songs with a different vocalist on each track. Diplo asked Braun whether Bieber had new material.

He did. A week earlier, Bieber had recorded Where Are U Now with a frequent producer and songwriting collaborator, Jason Boyd, aka Poo Bear.

Bieber said that he recorded the song with Poo Bear in about an hour and a half. That was the quick part. Skrillex and Diplo went on to work on the track, on and off, for four months. “We made it a song that feels like it’s from the future,” Diplo said.

Music tricks
They reversed the original order of the verses. They took the lone a cappella vocal track they had from Bieber, cut it to stutter certain words in the introduction, and pitched it higher and lower in various parts of the song, allowing Bieber to answer himself from below and harmonise above.

They toyed with dance beats, keyboard chords and bass lines — thickening the song and then thinning it again. They concocted sounds that were determinedly different from standard dance-club fare; what seems like a snare drum, for instance, is actually a tweaked version of an Indian tabla, Skrillex said.

And they devised the “dolphin” — the song’s most instantly recognisable, most insinuating hook. It is not an acoustic or electronic instrument: It is a brief snippet of Bieber’s vocal line, a subliminal reinforcement of the melody. It is pitched two octaves above the original, run through various distortion and equalisation effects and given a very short tail of reverb, creating a digital sound with a human core.

Operating on dance-music terms, Skrillex and Diplo did no promotional buildup for the song. At midnight as February 27 began, they suddenly released their debut album as a duo, Skrillex and Diplo Present Jack U. The pop-oriented songs, Diplo said, are “a huge departure for ourselves, also for dance music.” “We’re trying to do something outside the box,” he added, because dance music “had become so congested and homogeneous.”

Where Are U Now is tucked in near the end of the album, the ninth track. It did not stay hidden long.

That afternoon, Bieber tweeted about the song for the first time to his tens of millions Twitter followers. “This one is special,” he wrote, garnering more than 81,000 retweets and 92,000 favourites to date. In March, he asked his Twitter followers to begin requesting the song on the radio. “We got one,” he wrote.

Later that month, he wrote, “Let’s make it about the music.” Bieber also started turning up as Jack U’s surprise guest when Diplo and Skrillex worked the spring and summer electronic dance music festivals, beginning with the massive Ultra festival on the beach in Miami on March 29. Bieber still marvels at the response. “Everyone’s applauding and cheering, and giving me a reaction that I never thought I would get, especially for that type of crowd,” he said. “I’m just breaking through as being accepted by the masses and not necessarily a young generation. It opened my eyes to a whole new audience, a whole new platform.”