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5. Exploring Future Nostalgia’s influences

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Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia album was released in 2020 – the title says it all. Like many (but not all) 80s-influenced projects, it draws on the sounds and techniques from the time, while applying totally modern recording and production styles, creating a vibe of an era that never quite existed.

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As we mentioned in our intro, some of Dua Lipa’s songs, across both of her albums, specifically refer to songs from the 1980s. For instance, Physical lyrically refers to Olivia Newton-John’s cheesy classic Let’s Get Physical (1981), although it doesn’t imitate or sample anything from the original music track.

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Future Nostalgia’s Break My Heart takes the connection further, as it directly quotes the guitar, bass, and drums of Need You Tonight, the 1987 hit by archetypal Australian dance/rock band INXS. The original artists were given a full writing credit from day one, so nobody really loses out on that.

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Break My Heart also enjoys another 80s connection, in that Chad Smith, of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Will Ferrell, and Chickenfoot fame, plays real live drums on it. The Chili Peppers formed in 1983, and Chad joined them in 1988, becoming their third drummer, so that definitely qualifies as 80s!

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You could capture some of the necessary mood through creating a ‘fake’ sample – record or program your own rock/disco backing track, with a beat, bass, and rhythm guitar, make it as ‘live’ feeling as you can, then cut it into a simple 4 or 8-bar loop and use it like a sample.

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Most DAWs have a decent acoustic drum kit, and a useable electric bass – pick or finger-style. Getting a convincing guitar sound is harder – the answer is usually to record a real guitar – second choice would be to use one of the guitar plugins that are on the market.

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To make a fake sample, you first have to treat it like a regular production job. Mix it, add effects, master it, and so on. Then once you’ve isolated the relevant section, render that as a stereo mix, then import into your ongoing project and apply timestretching or other effects.

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Maybe live drums were used because the producers wanted to get closer to the original INXS vibe. If you need a drummer substitute, you could use any decent sampled live-sounding kit, or turn to a period-correct drum machine – and no drum machine is more ‘correct’ than the LinnDrum.

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In fact, the LinnDrum is at the heart of another song referenced by Dua Lipa – her Be The One tune is very like Don Henley’s Boys Of Summer from 1984. In this shot we’re trying to get a feel of the original by importing the MIDI file to Ableton Live.

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This song was first created using the then-cutting edge LinnDrum for beats, so we’re using the Ableton Live LinnDrum kit – the factory drum rack preset is known as LD Core Kit. This will get us close enough to get a working start and decide what to do next.

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Note that the MIDI file we found online for Boys Of Summer is a type 0, which means some effort has to be made to separate the various instrument parts into separate tracks manually – in a type 1 MIDI file, this is already done for you.

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What really separates these songs from their 1980s inspirations is the production, especially when it comes to the way vocals are handled (in our opinion). At that point it’s all business, with a definitely 21st century approach, including the inevitable pitch and harmony effects on the voice, and crisp, heavy, mastering.