Featured image: Sacha Mullin. Photo by Michael Izquierdo.
“But every element of the arrangements was subject to welcome scrutiny,” Sacha Mullin said in an email interview with Scapi Magazine.
Mullin was describing the decisions he and producer William Parker Wood made while working on Social Touch. Every part had to earn its place in the arrangement, a process that asked him to explain what a song needed.
“I don’t think my writing style has changed all that much; it’s still very decidedly me,” he said.
The record’s credits name Mullin and Wood as its arrangers, with Wood also producing, recording and mixing. Mullin described the collaboration as a way of examining his musical choices while retaining confidence in the writing.
“Will really values letting the magic of a song speak for itself, and I felt a great deal of trust in the process of exploring new sounds,” Mullin said.
That attention to what a song needs also shaped “Bed All Day.” Asked about the relationship between its upbeat sound and an uncertain relationship, Mullin said the musical direction grew during production rather than beginning with a plan to make it peppy.
“With ‘Bed All Day,’ I think the lyric itself informed the shape of the chords and that back-and-forth between feeling frustrated and being over the moon,” he said.
“This made sense to me from a storytelling perspective just as much as it did sonically.”
The lyric gave him a reason for the musical movement. When he turned to someone else’s song, Alexz Johnson’s “Voodoo,” he described a similar willingness to follow the arrangement while bringing his own choices to it.
“I felt comfortable changing what I needed to, as long as the arrangement was, in a sense, telling me what it needed,” Mullin said.
“I strongly believe that if you’re going to cover someone else’s work, you have to bring something of yourself to it.”
Mullin recalled Johnson’s fans inviting him to contribute to a celebration of her record. He chose its title track and described the change in its rhythm as a route into the feeling he wanted to carry through the performance.
“And so Will came up with this really great drum pattern, and I ended up feeling like I could take the song somewhere almost heartbeat-like,” he said.
The new drum pattern gave the cover a different motion. Mullin’s measure of the change returned to the song’s emotional shape, the same concern he described when discussing his own writing.
“As I try to do with my own music, I wanted to highlight the vulnerability in the song while maintaining and honoring its strength,” he said.
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