Listen to James Blake songs, find tour dates and read reviews The best place to find new music on the web. Every day, thousands of people around the world write about music they love — and it all ends up here. 'Retrograde' Sheet Music James Blake, The Theorist. Browse our 2 arrangements of 'Retrograde.' Sheet music is available for Piano, Voice, Guitar with 4 scorings in 9 genres. Find your perfect arrangement and access a variety of transpositions so you can print and play instantly, anywhere.
| 'Retrograde' | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single by James Blake | ||||
| from the album Overgrown | ||||
| Released | 11 February 2013 | |||
| Recorded | 2012 | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 3:43 | |||
| Label | Polydor | |||
| Songwriter(s) | James Blake | |||
| Producer(s) | James Blake | |||
| James Blake singles chronology | ||||
| ||||
'Retrograde' is a song by English electronic music producer and singer-songwriter James Blake. The song was released as a digital download on 11 February 2013 as the lead single from his second studio album Overgrown (2013). The song was written, produced and recorded by Blake,[1] and the music video was directed by Martin de Thurah.[2]
Chart performance[edit]
Weekly charts[edit]
| Chart (2013) | Peak position |
|---|---|
| Australia Hitseekers (ARIA)[3] | 1 |
| Denmark (Tracklisten)[4] | 10 |
| UK Singles (The Official Charts Company)[5] | 87 |
Release history[edit]
| Region | Date | Format | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom[6] | 11 February 2013 | Digital download | Polydor Records |
In pop culture[edit]
The song is featured in several episodes of television shows, including: the extended trailer for season one of The Leftovers, as well as in the pilot episode;[7] the 5th season of The Blacklist; season 1, episode 2 of the Italian Netflix series Baby; season 3, episode 6 of the series Suits;[8] and the episode 'Falling Angels – Part 1' of the BBC series Silent Witness.[9]
The song also appears in the fifth episode of the video game Tales from the Borderlands.[10]
References[edit]
- ^'Why James Blake's Overgrown deserved the Mercury Prize'. www.gigwise.com.
- ^'James Blake 'Retrograde''. YouTube. Retrieved 1 November 2013.
- ^'ARIA Report: Issue 1205'(PDF). ARIA. Retrieved 1 April 2013.
- ^'Danishcharts.com – James Blake – Retrograde'. Tracklisten.
- ^'New Chart Entries > February 19, 2013'. Zobbel.de. 19 February 2011.
- ^'iTunes - Music - Retrograde - Single by James Blake'.
- ^Stahler, Kelsea. ''The Leftovers' Trailer Song Is Haunting Because James Blake's Music Is Perfect For The Show'. Bustle.
- ^'Series, Suits Episode 6'. tunefind.
- ^'Series 18, Falling Angels Episode 1 of 2'. BBC.
- ^Hamilton, Kirk. 'Tales From The Borderlands's Perfect Music Picks Made The Whole Game Better'. Kotaku.
An intimate, thoughtful conversation with the indie superstar
James Blake was just 21-years-old when he released the early EPs that started his rapid trajectory to one of the most revered indie artists on the planet.
He had a musical family – his dad remains a working musician – but a career in music wasn't a foregone conclusion.
Blake learnt how to sing in the same way as many others; listening to classic pop records.
'The first record I bought was The Writing's On The Wall by Destiny's Child,' Blake recalls, speaking with Double J's Gemma Pike. 'I was a different kid.
'I wasn't always a good singer. I sang to Mariah Carey records to learn how to articulate. That's what I did with Destiny's Child as well. Mariah Carey, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell. These great singers, I would study the way they sang.
'I think that's how you develop articulation. You just copy. And then you find your own way of doing it.'
Audio Player failed to load.
Try toDownload directly(15.18 MB)
Play
Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.
Listen to the James Blake J Files above
While he didn't expect that those three EPs would necessarily plant the seed for what has become an enormous career, he did pour a lot into the making of them.
'I worked really hard on them,' he says. 'And I really willed them into existence and willed them to be well received.'
Skip YouTube VideoFireFox NVDA users - To access the following content, press 'M' to enter the iFrame.
It's a classic story. A quiet, unassuming character locks himself in his bedroom and makes beats instead of studying.
'I was using my university time to make dance music,' he says. 'I wasn't really doing that well at university. I just was pouring all my time into that.
'I wasn't really socialising that much. I wasn't really going to the parties. I wasn't busy meeting girls. I was just in my room making music and making my first album.'
5 massive songs
James Blake's catalogue is packed with beautiful, emotional music. But there are a few songs that have connected a little more intensely.
Blake takes us through a few of most celebrated works.
'Radio Silence'
Skip YouTube VideoFireFox NVDA users - To access the following content, press 'M' to enter the iFrame.
'I think it's when I realised I wasn't necessarily as in love as I thought I was,' Blake says of this highlight from his 2016 album The Colour In Everything.
'In a relationship, that can be quite a jarring realisation. It comes with a lot of guilt, and I just couldn't help it.
'So, I wrote about that feeling of wanting to feel something but you're not. Feeling this radio silence. Kind of to say, 'There's nothing I can do about it'.'
Blake is less inclined to use songs as a crutch for his emotions nowadays. He's more willing to talk openly about his feelings with those that he loves.
But an artist will always draw from their emotional well when they need to.
'I tend to write the songs as well as have the conversation now,' he says. 'It's just at the time I didn't know how to have the conversation.
'To me the best balance is having the conversation and writing a song about it. Or even write this song first. I don't know. Maybe just, like, talk to people and be a normal person.
'I Need A Forest Fire' (ft. Bon Iver)
Skip YouTube VideoFireFox NVDA users - To access the following content, press 'M' to enter the iFrame.
'I feel very guilty about that track now,' Blake admits. 'Because there really are forest fires and people really do get killed and stuff.
'The lyric is beautiful – I didn't actually write it – but, yeah, I do sometimes think if I played that it would be a bit insensitive.
'It's not about what I think. I mean, I can acknowledge that there's a metaphor going on. Context is important.
I'm sure 99 percent of people probably don't think about that. But there have been times when I've been playing in LA and they've just had huge fucking forest fires that killed hundreds of people. Or playing in Australia, where that's really common. Where it has been a little bit wincey.
The song is some kind of 2010s indie wet dream, with Blake teamed up with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. The writing process was an organic experience.
'It was me playing him a beat, and him singing the hook, and then me doing a verse,' he says. 'And then we just kind of made this song.
'I love that song. Despite what I just said, I bloody love that song. It's great.'
It's just one of many great collaborations James Blake has had a hand in over the years.
'I went to I went to Brian [Eno] in London,' he says of working with royalty on
'RZA was email,' he says of enlisting the Wu-Tang Clan mastermind for 'Take A Fall For Me' from 2013's Overgrown album.
James Blake Retrograde Song Download Full
'Basically. 'Hey, can you do a verse? Here's some money'. It was very much my first introduction to hip hop featuring. But he was great. He sent this beautiful verse back and I was just really grateful.
Blake doesn't write with a collaborator in mind, he usually gets a feeling for who will fit best with the song.
'I will approach someone based on how [a song] feels,' he says. 'Oh Andre [3000] will work on this, or Rosalía will work on this.'
'I mean, obviously, most things I write I think, 'Andre will work on this'. But, you know, you can't always have Andre 3000 on your record.'
You can sometimes though.
'Where's The Catch' (ft. Andre 3000)
Skip YouTube VideoFireFox NVDA users - To access the following content, press 'M' to enter the iFrame.
The Outkast founder's moment on 'Where's The Catch' from Blake's latest record Assume Form is a major highlight of an excellent album.
'I was already working with him,' Blake says. 'We had worked on some music together. I played him the song and he liked it.
'He's done a lot of features in the last few years, not so much solo stuff. I think he was just in the mood to do it. It caught him. I gave him the concept and I think he really related to it.
'He's good like that, Andre. He doesn't go with what the best career or best industry move would be. He just hears the music and if he likes it, he'll rap on it or sing on it. I think that's great. I wish more people were like that.'
Another recent collaborator that Blake was overjoyed to work alongside was … singer Moses Sumney.
'Moses is one of my favourite performers of all time,' Blake gushes. 'It's him, Nina Simone, Joni, Thom Yorke...
'I just love his voice. I love the way he performs.
'He's got that thing, performance wise, so I just wanted to sing with him. I didn't care what it was, I just wanted to sing with him.'
'The Wilhelm Scream'
Skip YouTube VideoFireFox NVDA users - To access the following content, press 'M' to enter the iFrame.
In a lot of ways, 'A Wilhelm Scream', from Blake's 2011 debut album, was the soundtrack to his childhood.
The song is a cover, the original written by James Litherland, Blake's dad.
James Blake Retrograde Lyrics Meaning
'He wrote a song called 'Where To Turn' when I was about 10. I think he released it when I was about 13 or 14,' Blake explains.
'If you're making music, you're playing it a lot. You're working on the track constantly and everybody in the house has to just grin and bear it essentially. Especially my mum.
'I imagine it's pretty similar to what it's like for Jameela [Jamil – Blake's partner] with me. There are times when I'm just listening to a song upwards of 200 times a day. It's a war zone of notes. So, I think my mom would have probably been driven insane.
'But my dad doing that meant that I knew the song incredibly well. I just internalised it. So, it's probably the standout song of my childhood. The song I know the most out of my childhood. And I just felt like covering it.
Blake asked his mum whether she thought his father – who was out playing a show – would mind him covering it.
'She was like, 'Yeah…?',' he laughs. 'It wasn't like, 'Yeah! Do it! Definitely do it!' It was kind of a meh thing. But I think it was important that I did it justice.
'I hadn't really released any music, so there was no existing career or anything. I was just in my parents' house, making music. Not that that would probably change things. My parents are pretty nonplussed by stuff like that. They're not like, 'Yeah, get your dad's song onto the radio!' They were really super supportive, and they love my music now.'
He understands that it's a strange idea, to cover an unknown song that your father wrote in the late 90s, but Blake knew he had a responsibility to make it work.
'You know, covering your dad's song is quite an odd thing to do,' he says.
'I wanted it to reflect well on his original song. I didn't want it to take away anything from the original. I didn't want to disrespect the original. I always just wanted to do him proud with the song.'
Mr Blake approved of the version. Given the song has been streamed millions of times, and the record it comes from has a spot in countless collections around the world, it seems the general public did too.
'He also gets royalty checks every so often, so that's quite nice as well,' Blake laughs.
'Retrograde'
Skip YouTube VideoFireFox NVDA users - To access the following content, press 'M' to enter the iFrame.
Sometimes, as a listener, you have an idyllic idea of how a piece of emotional music came about. Often, that idea is not at all the reality of the song's germination.
But James Blake's 2013 classic 'Retrograde' comes from precisely the time and space we had always hoped it had.
'It was written at about four in the morning,' Blake says.
'I'd woken up after a tense conversation and just had a bunch of opinions on how things could move forward. I wanted to show support. I wanted it to be loving, but I wanted to make a point. I wrote all these things down not really intending to record them. I just wrote a poem.
'I had this instrumental that I'd made with the hum. I'd done a piano improv and chopped that hum thing out of the piano improv. It's just a dictaphone recording of me playing the piano.
'Then I just went downstairs and sung it over the beat. My manager told me that he really liked the loop and thought I could write a song over it. So that night that I wrote the lyrics down and thought, 'Well, I might as well just get up and do it'.
'I went downstairs and I was in this kind of creative mood. Also, being really late at night when no one else is around, there's a certain kind of meditative beauty to that.'
For all the technology that Blake now has at his disposal, he still says that the piano is where he finds most inspiration.
'Most good ideas that I have come from the piano,' he says. 'It's the thing I've played my whole life. The thing I love the most.'
Why James Blake is better than ever in 2019
The past few years have seen Blake undergo some immense personal growth. He had fame, acclaim and money, but those things don't necessarily give you happiness. He's incredibly open about that growth and seems genuinely proud of the man he has become.
'My whole life is different to how it was when I did The Colour In Everything,' he says. 'I'm different. I changed pretty much the way I approach people and the way I approach music.
'I did a lot of personal work to work on issues and work on my confidence and work on myself and my own comfortability. There's a lot of things that come on under that umbrella of comfortability, but I tried to tackle all of them, so that I could basically be happy.
'It wasn't so that I could then make good music. It was mostly because I just wanted to be happier than I was. Through doing that, I think I've gained the comfortability on stage, which I never had before and maybe it shows a little bit in the record [2019's Assume Form] as well.
'I think it'll show even more on my next record, because during the course of making Assume Form, I was still going through a lot of growing pains.'
Skip YouTube VideoFireFox NVDA users - To access the following content, press 'M' to enter the iFrame.
Aspiring artists commonly believe that attaining a level of success equivalent to that of James Blake's will be a panacea for the insecurities that riddle our everyday lives. Blake found out that this is definitely not always the case.
'I think that through success – having a lot of attention, a lot of eyes on you, a lot of criticism that echoes around your head, personal lulls and ebbs and flows and depression and anxiety and all these things – I kind of got into a place where I wasn't as confident.
'I think TheColour In Anything – as much as I love that album – it's a jungle in a musical sense, I think it's a very dense piece of work, largely because I don't think I was confident enough at the time to write a simple idea and back it.
'I wanted to complicate things, because it reflected my mindset at the time. Assume Form is less so and my new music is even less so. I think that's where I'm going.
'The stuff I'm making now is probably more accessible from a basic standpoint. I'm about to about to put something out which I'm really excited about.'
A legacy to be proud of
The significant personal growth that Blake has undergone in recent years doesn't change how he feels about the work he has made throughout his career.
'Really proud,' he says when asked how he feels about what he's done so far. 'I couldn't be in a better place.
'I get to work with the people that I want to work with. When I meet new people who are just coming up, they seem to like what I've done in the past, and we start from a musical understanding.
'If I'm thinking about what I want to play at a festival, I've got songs I want to play that I've written and I'm happy with.'
Skip YouTube VideoFireFox NVDA users - To access the following content, press 'M' to enter the iFrame.
While he doesn't want to overstate the impact that his art has had on his wellbeing, Blake does acknowledge his career success has had a flow-on effect to his personal life.
'The music didn't necessarily help me, personally, but in some ways it did. It gave me an outlet,' he says.
'Without my career, I probably wouldn't have met Jameela, because I met her at Radio One in London, which was because I had a show on Radio One, which was because of my career,
'It's all just led up to this nice point where I feel like I can move forward and make some really free feeling music. I'm very excited about what I'm putting out next, and I feel like I'm in a really good place.'
There's new James Blake music coming very soon, and he's incredibly confident about how it's going to sound.
Retrograde Song
'I'm much more open,' he says of his creativity in 2019. 'I know that artists probably always say this, you know, 'You should hear my next shit…', but I really do feel like I'm in the best place I've been musically since I was 19, when I felt truly free to make the kind of music I absolutely want to make with no restrictions.'
Listen to The J Files, each Thursday night from 8pm on Double J. Subscribe to the J Files podcast at Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Related
James Blake – Assume Form
Has James Blake released 2019’s first classic album?
Features