Danielle Haim remembers coming into the studio with three thoughts in her head:
1. She and her sisters still needed an opener for their new album.
2. They should try sampling somebody else’s music.
3. That somebody should be George Michael.
This was last year in Los Angeles, as Danielle, Este and Alana Haim were chipping away at what would become the fourth LP by the rock trio that bears their family’s name. With Danielle and her friend Rostam Batmanglij working as co-producers, the band had made great progress at Rostam’s place and at Valentine, a vibey old studio in Valley Village, two blocks from the Haims’ childhood home.
Yet Danielle and Rostam agreed that they hadn’t yet cracked “a song that felt like Track 1,” as Rostam puts it now.
So with inspiration drawn from Beyoncé’s densely referential “Cowboy Carter” and with Michael on her mind as always — “I’m just a huge fan,” she says — Danielle walked in one day, “and I was like, ‘All right, hear me out, I have this weird idea,’” which was to use the funky chorus chant of Michael’s classic “Freedom! ’90” as the basis for a Haim song called “Gone.”
Rostam’s first reaction?
“My first reaction was: That’s gonna be expensive,” he says.
The George Michael sample — a precursor, it turns out, of the sisters’ pal Taylor Swift’s interpolation of “Father Figure” on “The Life of a Showgirl” — was one of several creative decisions Danielle and Rostam unpacked in a recent conversation about the making of Haim’s “I Quit,” which came out in June to admiring reviews and which the band is supporting on a tour that will stop Thursday night for a hometown show at Inglewood’s Kia Forum. This week, the band announced that it will release a deluxe edition of the album with three new songs on Oct. 17.
Danielle, 36, was calling from Austin, Texas, where Haim was due to play that night; Rostam, 41, was in New York, where the musician and former Vampire Weekend member has made a second home away from L.A. (In addition to Haim, he’s also worked with Clairo, Frank Ocean and Carly Rae Jepsen.)
The follow-up to 2020’s “Women in Music Pt. III,” which earned a Grammy nomination for album of the year, “I Quit” began, Rostam recalls, with Danielle’s saying, “I need this record to be tough.”
The frontwoman had just broken up with her longtime boyfriend, Ariel Rechtshaid, who’d also co-produced Haim’s first three albums; the songs she’d started writing looked back unsparingly at a failed relationship to figure out what she’d done wrong — and, perhaps more importantly, what she hadn’t. To capture that emotional state — bruised yet clear-eyed — Danielle wanted “kind of a raw sound,” which for her as the band’s studio drummer came down in large part to the beats.
Rostam Batmanglij co-produced Haim’s “I Quit” with the band’s Danielle Haim.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
The songs on “I Quit” lurch and shimmy and lope but can peel out at any moment toward some unknown destination. “I have never played a snare harder in my life,” Danielle says, than she did in “Love You Right.” For “Everybody’s Trying to Figure Me Out,” she abandoned a click track and let the music speed up in the choruses and slow down in the verses.
As on Haim’s previous records, the music is cleverly laced with electronic textures, as in the album’s lead single, “Relationships,” which places an airy synth lick over a chopped-up R&B groove. Yet “I Quit” is rooted in the energy of a band playing live in a room.
“I was thinking about that doc the Red Hot Chili Peppers made on ‘Blood Sugar Sex Magik,’” Danielle says, referring to “Funky Monks,” which tracks the Chili Peppers as they record their hit 1991 album with producer Rick Rubin in a high-ceilinged Laurel Canyon mansion filled with instruments.
Says Rostam: “It was Este on bass, Danielle on drums and Alana on guitar — maybe me on guitar too — and just letting the jam create what would eventually become the song.” Even tunes that developed into something more involved — like “Gone,” with those parts borrowed from “Freedom! ’90” — retained a certain scrappiness.
“I’m pretty sure that guitar solo is first take, no editing — just Danielle ripping it,” Rostam says.
Haim albums always showcase the sisters’ tight vocal interplay, typically with Este and Alana behind Danielle singing lead. But “I Quit” also contains lead turns by Este in the dreamy “Cry” and, for the first time in the band’s catalog, Alana in the disco-ish “Spinning.”
“I feel like Alana is this bright, shining star who has a little bit of reluctance about being in the spotlight, but when she has the spotlight, she commands attention,” Rostam says. He points to her acting performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 movie “Licorice Pizza” — Haim and the director have worked together for years on the band’s music videos — as an illustration of what he means.
“The way she tells the story, Paul was like, ‘I wrote this movie and there’s a part in it for you,’” Rostam says. “She opened the script and saw her name on every page, and her jaw dropped. But when you see the movie, the camera loves her.”
“I Quit” bookends the nod to George Michael with another sample in the album’s closer, “Now It’s Time,” which features the Edge’s strobing guitar riff from “Numb” by U2.
It’s not the first time Haim has crossed paths with the veteran Irish band. In 2017, U2 repurposed Danielle’s lick from Haim’s “My Song 5” for its song “Lights of Home.”
“When that happened, my mind was fully blown,” says Danielle, who struck up a friendship with the Edge and Bono as a result. Not long after that, she and Rostam found themselves spinning their wheels as they worked on Haim’s 2019 single “Summer Girl.”
“Rostam was like, ‘We should get Bono,’ and I was like, ‘I guess I could text him,’” Danielle recalls with a laugh. “I shot my shot, but he was busy at the time, so nothing happened.” Yet U2 came back into view when Danielle and Rostam took a break from “I Quit” to go to Las Vegas to see the band’s show at the Sphere.
Back in L.A., Danielle found herself “on a ‘Numb’ kick” and asked Rostam to try to make “Now It’s Time” sound like the track from U2’s “Zooropa” LP.
“I took her completely literally and was like, ‘Let’s sample it and see what happens,’” Rostam says. “I really didn’t expect it to work, but it unlocked something. Danielle recut the vocal and suddenly the lyrics and the melodies felt right in a new way.”
One more bit of U2-ology: As they recorded “Everybody’s Trying to Figure Me Out” at Valentine, Danielle tuned her snare drum to match Larry Mullen Jr.’s on “Sunday Bloody Sunday.”
“An iconic snare sound,” she says.
“The final product is different,” Rostam adds. But for him, dialing in a detail like that — then using it as a creative springboard — is key to understanding what he and Danielle were trying to accomplish on “I Quit.”
“In an era when it’s easier than it’s ever been to make music with a computer, I think what excites me is the idea that you could hear somebody like Danielle play a guitar part or a drum part and know it’s her,” he says. “And I think the reason that’s possible is because style is defined by imperfection. The rawness is the humanness.”
This story originally appeared on LA Times
