You Don't Get Me High Anymore

Album: Three (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • The first single from Phantogram's third album finds vocalist Sarah Barthel singing about a feeling of nothing being good enough. She explained to Pitchfork: "Metaphorically, it's about addiction. It's also about certain things that we see in culture, pop culture, and even music that we find redundant, that we've always kind of strayed away from as a group.

    It also taps into this idea of wanting to feel something. Basically, wanting to feel something strong and doing whatever it takes to feel it again, because you know it feels good and you miss it."
  • Ricky Reed's production has a shuffling beat and tropical synths. "The lyrics are dark," said Barthel. "The melodies are emotional, and it just makes you wanna move."
  • One of the lyrics was inspired by a recurrent dream that guitarist Josh Carter has.

    Woke up stoned in the back seat from a dream where my teeth fell out of my head.

    "I often have dreams where my teeth are falling out," Carter told Genius. "It's an unsettling dream, to say the least. I've looked it up before but I can't remember what it means, it's not usually a very happy dream."
  • The duo wrote this song with their producer, Ricky Reed, and their frequent collaborator Dan Wilson.
  • This samples the drum break from "Hook And Sling (Part I)," a 1969 track by Eddie Bo that he wrote with Alfred Scramuzza. Because of the sample, Bo (under his real name, Edwin Bocage) and Scramuzza have writers credits on "You Don't Get Me High Anymore."
  • Ricky Reed recalled the crafting of the song to Billboard magazine:

    "Josh [Carter] and Sarah [Barthel] brought in a demo that had a rough version of the bassline and sort of gibberish lyrics that were roughly in the melody and tune. Together with Dan Wilson, who we wrote the song with, we started hacking into the lyrics and trying to create this psychedelic experience. So we'd sit around the campfire in the backyard of the studio and just talk and talk and talk, trying to get the lyric right.

    Meanwhile, on the sounds side, I started digging in with bass synthesizers, live bass, distorting everything, trying to blow everything out and find the right combination of sonics to sort of make that main grinding bass of the tune. I would also say the other thing that's interesting about that is the other song contains the other synthesizer effect; a very, kind of '90s house organ sound in the pre-chorus breakdown where they sort of hotly debated in all the circles, 'Is this gonna be too soft? Is this too pop? Where does this fall?'

    It turned out to be just the right blend for them because with Phantogram, if you can do something that's clean, it's going to be jarringly clean. Their sound is so built on being grinding and gritty that we thought the most surprising thing to do would be something clean."
  • The song's co-writer Dan Wilson took a shot at recording this for his 2017 album Re-Covered, but he couldn't make it work. "My voice just didn't sound right singing the verses the way Sarah sounds so right on the Phantogram version," he told Songfacts.

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