While some songs blast out of the blocks and become hits right away, others take a while to resonate with the listening public.
Such is the case with Ravyn Lenae’s Love Me Not. Originally released on 3 May 2024, as the lead single from Lenae’s second album, Bird’s Eye, it only began to chart after it went viral on TikTok later that year, and has been hanging around on ‘most played’ lists ever since.
Now, alongside producer Dahi, Lenae has been breaking down the song and discussing how it was made in a mini documentary for Mix with the Masters.
Love Me Not’s life actually began before Lenae even got involved. Its beat was something that Dahi had been kicking around for a while, and he played it to her when they met up in the studio.
“When I first heard it it reminded me of the feeling I got when I heard Hey Ya! [OutKast], or when I heard Crazy, [by] Gnarls Barkley,” says Lenae, which is definitely a positive start.
“The genesis of the record came from a sample pack that I got from my friend, Ritz Reynolds,” says Dahi. Specifically, the warped, two-note guitar part that plays throughout the intro and verses.
However, despite being musically simple, the recording of this was actually pretty involved.
“He [Reynolds] was like, ‘yeah, we just layered, like, 10 different guitars to get that guitar tone,’” says Dahi. “I was like, ‘oh, shit, that's pretty amazing.’”
Next, the drums: “I found this drum break, just from all the drum breaks I have collected over a long time, and layered that over that sample,” explains Dahi. Simple as that.
There’s a little more to Love Me Not than that, of course… but not too much more. “The basics of the record is really just the layering of guitar, bass, Farfisa [organ],” says Dahi.
Keeping the instrumentation ‘classic’ certainly helps with the vintage vibe, but what of the vocal hook, the rhythm and delivery of which is undoubtedly a key contributor to Love Me Not’s success? That, we learn, came from someone who’s a famous artist in his own right.
“I remember having a session with Anderson .Paak,” says Dahi. “The first session we did was this song, actually, where he came by and I initially had the verse section together and then he came in with the hook.”
We actually get to hear .Paak’s original vocal, and Dahi says that, when he played Lenae the demo, she was onboard immediately. “As soon as I played it for her and she heard it, she was like, ‘Oh, I need that, I want that. This is like, this song is magic.’”
Lenae used .Paak’s scratch the vocal as the basis for her own. “I think the initial way he sang it definitely gave me what the character is. But then I put, like, my own colours on top of it,” she says. “I knew that I wanted to write the second verse and really give, you know, my perspective and my spin and melodically what I would naturally do on it."
Subscribers can check out the full 101-minute Love Me Not documentary on the Mix with the Masters website.
