Here’s The Ten Most Mystical Things Pharrell Thinks About Daft Punk
"People lost respect for the groove," he says. "They're nice robots," he says. "This music represents the freedom of all human beings," he says.
In the fourth episode of the Collaborators series, Pharrell Williams talks about working with Daft Punk on Random Access Memories. He’s intelligent and articulate and very handsome and mystical, and refers to Daft Punk as “the robots” the whole way through.
He talks about meeting the robots at “a Madonna party” and discussing working with them on the new album. When their schedules finally aligned in Paris, Pharrell told them he was in a “Nile Rodgers place right now”. “They looked at each other … and they were like, ‘Okay, so this is what we want you to write to’. They play it – and Nile Rodgers is actually playing on the track. It’s crazy, because on two sides of the Atlantic, we were both in the same place; like, ‘Lets go back to that magical time when music, and the liveliness of music, is what moved people.”
Here are some of our other favourite quotes:
1. “Somewhere outside of the ether that we exist in is a multitude of realms of possibility, and alternate directions. And I think they just went in those libraries and dusted off those things.”
2. “The robots’ music is the power to separate itself from all else that exists. They’re not bound by time and space.”
3. “It’s kind of like the mid-’70s and early-’80s of a different universe and dimension. Not of this one.”
4. “‘Get Lucky’ just reminded me of some kind of exotic island – I’m not sure if it was on this planet or not – but it just felt like a place where it was just forever four in the morning… The music was as alive as the air was, so the air was something that you were gentle and kind and thankful to.”
5. “Being in that world, the only thing that really matters is that you’ve met this girl at this party. Getting lucky is not just sleeping with her, but meeting someone for the first time, and it just clicking. There’s no better fortune in this existence to me.”
6. “This music is very, like, it’s beyond 3D. It’s like 4D. It’s in your mind. You don’t need MDMA for this music, because the music is so incredibly vivid.”
7. “People lost respect for the groove.”
8. “It feels like the only click-track they have is the human heartbeat, and that’s what makes it really interesting. Because these are robots.”
9. “This music represents the freedom of all human beings.”
10. “We’re lucky they hang out on the planet. They could just get back on the spaceship that brought them here and go, and leave us. But they’re gracious, they’re nice robots. They chose to stay.”
And then the robots gave him a Berocca, and he forgot everything that had happened.