When Yellabush/Columbia/RECORDS Nashville released Koe Wetzel’s collaboration with Ella Langley, “Jaded,” the imagery included a sparkly, green mirror ball.
The visual spoke volumes about the song. For starters, its emerald shade runs close to the color jade. But it also suggested disco and/or danceable pop, and given that Depeche Mode and The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” were among the reference points that Wetzel’s creative team mentioned along the way, it fit the style.
Enjoy it while it’s here.
“It’s 100% the most pop song that I’ll probably ever record in my life,” Wetzel says.
It wasn’t something he set out to do, but he didn’t fight it either when the opportunity came along. On Jan. 14, he and Langley were writing at the home studio of Nashville songwriter Jordan Schmidt (“Kid Myself,” “Who Told You That”). They’d tried to launch an upbeat song with several other basic ideas but weren’t getting anywhere. The fourth writer in the room, ERNEST, solved the issue.
“ERNEST kept humming this song, ‘How’d you get so jaded?’” Wetzel recalls. “I was like, ‘What the hell is that? What are y’all doing?’ They had the bare bones of it. And I was like, ‘Dude, let’s finish that right now.’”
“Jaded” was a chorus that ERNEST, Langley and Schmidt fashioned a few months prior. Having written another song that day, ERNEST blurted out the hook while tripping around on a piano. But they didn’t finish “Jaded,” and it seemingly slipped off the radar.
“To be honest,” Schmidt says, “I had completely forgotten about it until Koe joined us on the write in January and they brought it back up. It was like, ‘Oh yeah, this was really cool.’”
Even in its limited state as a stand-alone chorus, it already embraced the contradictory tensions that make it work. Calling someone “jaded” is never a compliment, and yet the energy, and the melody, were undeniably uplifting.
“It had such an ‘80s disco feel to it,” Wetzel says. “ERN got on a Mellotron, [maybe], and he had this progression. What you hear now, I think we moved it to a Dobro, and it [took on] a Stranger Things feel, and I think after we got done writing it, we were like, ‘All right, do we want to [make] this weird? Or do we want to get it more in our realm?’”
Those were hardly the only questions they asked. The lyrical core of “Jaded” is a mild interrogation: “Who broke your heart?” “How’d you get so lonely?” “Who made you like this?” The song says little in terms of detail about either person in the storyline, and yet the collective questions give the listener a strong sense of the brokenness inside the relationship.
“The whole time,” Wetzel says, “It’s like, ‘Damn, we love this person so much, but why is it such a pain in the ass to love them?’”
As much as the singer seems baffled by his partner, a first-verse confession casually suggests that the very issues that frustrate him make them compatible: “I kinda like it/ How you’re damaged just like me.”
“I think we’ve all kind of tried to date that person that, for whatever reason, is just not giving it their all, mostly due to fear,” Schmidt suggests. “It’s that almost-desperation of ‘Why are you like this? Who made you like this? Why can’t you see what we have is awesome and commit to it?’”
As the song unfolded, both singers found their place in it. The original work had been written with Langley in mind, and she would hang on to the chorus melody each time around with Wetzel providing congruent harmony. When they locked in on the verses, they pitched them in a smoky, lower register that suited his voice, and as they segued into verse two, Langley shadowed some of his lines, repeating the questions as he sang them.
“When we were originally writing the chorus with Ella in mind, we were kind of going at that ’70s Fleetwood Mac kind of thing,” Schmidt says. “After I did the demo, what was meant to be more Fleetwood Mac turned out to be a little dancier. I don’t know if it was just the tempo or what, but it wasn’t intended to be the kind of dancy [song] that it is.”
Wetzel and Langley took turns recording the demo voices – which were subsequently used on the master – in Schmidt’s lone vocal booth, inspired by the song’s energy. Langley got a tad adventurous as she worked on harmonies, creating what Wetzel calls “the Stevie Nicks oohs and ahs in the choruses.”
Langley gave Schmidt lots of extra sounds – a hum, a mouth noise, a short melody here or there – and those ad libs would fuel some of the production on the final version.
Producer Gabe Simon (Noah Kahan, Jessie Murph) was moderately surprised when Wetzel brought him the “Jaded” demo, which veered from his typical direction.
“He was talking about, ‘I just love this ’80s thing, kind of like Depeche Mode, and then all of a sudden you have these crazy sounds that I would never put on a song,’” Simon says. “He’s like, ‘I just want to ‘Koe’ that. I want to make that me,’ and so we spent a couple days at Easy Eye Sound.”
Columbia senior VP of A&R Ben Maddahi felt the “Stayin’ Alive” groove was applicable to “Jaded.” Simon’s challenge was to balance the joy of dance music with the angst of the “Jaded” story. During one of the sessions, an assistant engineer in the back of the control room ran out, and when Simon checked on him, he found the man in tears over a fresh breakup. It clarified for Simon that the pain in the lyric still connected over the groove.
“For me,” he says, “having that guy walking around in the room just honestly crying was really, really, really palpable.”
Simon pieced together specific sounds to attain the right mood. He used three different drummers’ performances, for example – “It ends up making a super drummer,” he says – and Simon played a rhythm guitar part alongside Josh Seratto’s original part to make it sound more like a band. Seratto led into his solo with a minimalistic Lindsey Buckingham attitude, and Simon toyed with some of Langley’s ad libs. In one example, he layered a single tambourine tap onto a random note she’d dropped and colored it with Seratto’s tone to create one of those effects.
Simon and Schmidt worked on the mix extensively with Maddahi, ultimately running through 17 versions before they found the final. Wetzel and Langley had signed off by the sixth one, but the production team kept at it.
“It was a fucking rodeo,” Wetzel says. “I was cool. But that’s why Gabe is who he is, because he hears certain things, and Ben Maddahi and Serrato – you know, we’re all perfectionists.”
After the last one, Maddahi sent Schmidt a celebratory T-shirt that read “Jaded_Mix_17.” Its final approval came after The Night Champion was already released. It was added to the project when the YellaBush/Columbia/RECORDS Nashville single went public on Aug. 6.
“Jaded” launched at No. 8 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart dated Aug. 22, and is up to No. 23 on Country Airplay in its fourth week. The 17th mix of upbeat energy and relationship tension is clearly working.
“This is the most pop song that I’ll probably ever make in my entire life,” Wetzel reiterates. “For a lot of the new fans that are coming into the country genre right now, I feel like it’s a cool tune for them, especially if they don’t know me. They obviously know who Ella is. And that’s good for us as well.”
