Just to be clear, this is not a Rickroll. Far from it. This is the story of how Rick Astley’s legendary hit “Never Gonna Give You Up” came to be.
LISTEN NOW: Rick Astley tells the Song Exploder podcast how ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ came to be
Rick Astley and “Never Gonna Give You Up” songwriter/producer Mike Stock joined the Song Exploder podcast as they gave listeners the inside story of how it came to be. The phrase “never gonna give you up” is one that’s immediately associated with the song. Astley recalled the experience that led to him coming up with the title of the song.
Pete Waterman, who was one of the producers of the song, had a girlfriend from the same town that Astley was from. After a tumultuous phone call between Waterman and his girlfriend, Astley recalled the advice he gave to Waterman. “I don’t really remember, but he says to this day that I said, ‘you’re never gonna give her up anyway,’” Astley said. “Whether that’s true or not I don’t know, but I like the story.”
Regardless of how that line came to be, it inspired Astley and the producers to build the song around that line. “Everything about the song, from the opening line to the chorus, is leading up to ‘never gonna give you up,’” Stock said. “You have to know where you’re going and that’s a great roadmap. But if Pete came up with a random title, I was always trying to make sense of how it fits in with the artist.”
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The song’s title is also deeply personal to Astley. “Rick had already told me that he was still dating his girlfriend with whom he went to junior school with at the age of 5 or 6 they knew each other,” Stock recalled. “I thought, well this is a lifelong fidelity so ‘never gonna give you up,’ that fits in. You can lead a song to that hook line.”
Astley then touched on working with the production team of Stock Aitken Waterman and how that influenced the making of the song. “I think in their eyes, a lot of the time they were trying to emulate the great production teams [like] Motown, [and] various others that basically have a sound and the artist came and sang over it,” Astley said.
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Song Exploder is a podcast where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. Each episode features an artist discussing a song of theirs, breaking down the sounds and ideas that went into the writing and recording.
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