“I remember that being a crazy challenge to make that transition from one key to the next,” Malay said, sounding like Beatles’ producer George Martin tackling John Lennon’s challenge to fuse two songs to create the final version of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” At the 4:26 marker, you can hear the song begin to transform listen closely and it sounds like a descent - to transition from one key to the next, Malay pitched the second half down. Once Frank found the right voice, Malay saw their predicament: The first half was now in a different key than the second. Speaking with Billboard, Malay explained that for the song’s first half - the ancient-history portion, with Cleopatra and the loosed cheetahs - Ocean was intensely meticulous, recording vocal takes for 30 days at a home he had rented in Los Angeles.įrank Ocean, 'Channel Orange': Track-By-Track Review Behind the scenes, though, the song posed a greater challenge than Ocean’s typically dead-pan Twitter commentary let on.įor Frank Ocean and producer-songwriter Malay, the two parts of “Pyramids” emerged quickly and it was clear that they wanted to fuse them - that’s when it became a problem. The songwriting is high-wire act, but he makes it look easy.

“The way you say my name makes me feel like I’m that n-a, but I’m still unemployed,” he sings, revealing how we’re all vulnerable to imagination and performance, whether it’s in the bedroom or the champagne room, with a lover or a stripper. I trolled the music industry.” The song is a neon-lit blockbuster epic that manages to nail the complex interplay of fantasy and reality in a sexual relationship. He tweeted, “Pyramids is a ten minute long single. When Frank released the time-traveling two-part “Pyramids” on June 8, 2012, it was his second announcement of the day earlier that Friday, he revealed that his debut album Channel Orange would be out July 17. These songs beguile and confound listeners, immediately standing out for their ambition and scale, and the 2010s gave us plenty of examples to marvel at, from the aforementioned Kendrick track to the Weeknd’s “House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls” to Frank Ocean’s “Pyramids.”

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