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Tones And I

Dance Monkey

Tones and I's 2019 song about busking, built by producer Konstantin Kersting from the loop-station arrangement she played on the street, which spent 24 weeks at number one in Australia and became one of the most streamed songs on Spotify.

By korczis 3 min read
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Review

Genre and Mood

Tones and I’s Dance Monkey is pop and electro-pop with a street performer’s instincts: catchy, playful and energetic enough to stop people walking past.

Song Summary

Toni Watson wrote the song about busking. She told the radio host Smallzy that it is about the pressure she felt to keep entertaining people on the street, who would shout for more or simply leave, and that if “dance for me” is replaced with “sing for me”, it is pretty literal. She recalled writing it alone in a dark closet in about thirty minutes. Konstantin Kersting produced and mixed it in his Brisbane studio, and it was released on 10 May 2019.

Musical Breakdown

Intro

There was no demo. Watson played Kersting the song as she performed it live, built from loops, and its main eighth-note keyboard line, which she played on a Korg Minilogue, opens the record.

Verse 1

No source walks through the verses. What Kersting describes is the bass Watson played on a MIDI keyboard, which he layered from Moog synthesizers and swung to make it more jagged.

Build-up

In the pre-chorus the kicks arrive, with an 808 added underneath.

Chorus

The first chorus is deliberately lean: a kick, the bass line and a snap. The second becomes a double chorus with backing vocals, guitar and keyboard.

Bridge

The middle eight passes through a vocoder.

Climax

The final chorus adds what a loop station could not: big group vocals that Watson recorded with friends, guitars and more keyboards.

Concepts in Focus

Dance Monkey began as a loop performance. After she lost her retail job, Watson bought an RC300 loop station and busked up and down Australia’s east coast with it. In the studio Kersting kept that skeleton and expanded it to 19 keyboard tracks, from a piano sample to a steel drum, so that they would make one cohesive sound.

Her busking version already had a four-on-the-floor kick in its drop; on the record Kersting layered five kick sounds in the chorus. The hook is the chant itself, sung back to the crowd that demands it.

The music video, directed by Liam Kelly and Nick Kozakis, casts Tones as Mr. Tones, an elderly man who sneaks out of a care home with friends for a dance party on a golf course. For another 2019 Spotify giant, compare The Weeknd – Blinding Lights.

Artistic Context

Watson grew up on the Mornington Peninsula near Melbourne and moved to Byron Bay in 2017 to busk, where she met her manager, Jackson Walkden-Brown. She signed to Bad Batch Records in February 2019; Dance Monkey was her second single and appeared on her debut EP, The Kids Are Coming.

Impact and Reception

The song topped the charts in more than 30 countries, spent 24 weeks at number one in Australia and eleven in the UK, a record there for a female artist, and was the first song by a woman to pass three billion streams on Spotify. It won Best Pop Release at the ARIA Awards, yet Watson has said she loathes it a lot of the time. Listen for the busker inside the hit.

Learn from this track

Introductory

What you will learn

  • Explain how a busker's loop-station arrangement became the skeleton of a studio production.
  • Follow how a producer adds layers section by section, so that each chorus is bigger than the last.
  • Connect the lyric of a pop song to the working life of its writer, here a street performer asked for more.

Listening guide

  1. the keyboard line The main eighth-note keyboard figure from her busking version, played by Tones on a Korg Minilogue and layered with piano, steel drum and other sounds.
  2. the bass A bass line she played on a MIDI keyboard, layered from Moog synthesizers and swung by Kersting to make it more jagged.
  3. the pre-chorus Kicks and an 808 enter, the first part of the bass section, and the song gathers itself for the chorus.
  4. the first chorus Only a kick, the bass line and a snap; the second chorus doubles with backing vocals, guitar and keyboard.
  5. the final chorus Big group vocals she recorded with friends, with guitars and keyboards she could not play on her loop station.

Concepts in this track

music video

144 tracks

A short film made to accompany a song. Since MTV it has shaped how songs are remembered, and on YouTube it is often the main way a song is heard.

loop

27 tracks

A section of sound repeated seamlessly. Loops, from tape to software, are the building block of hip-hop, house and techno, where change comes from what is added or taken away.

hook

99 tracks

The short, memorable idea a song is built to stick with you: a sung phrase, a riff, a synth line. A hook is designed for repetition and usually arrives early.

four-on-the-floor

20 tracks

A steady kick drum on every beat of a 4/4 bar. It is the pulse of disco, house and most techno: the body always knows where the next beat lands, so everything else can move around it.

Listen next, and why

Questions for discussion

  1. The song is about a crowd demanding more from a performer. Does its success make the lyric more or less ironic?
  2. What does a song lose and gain when a one-woman loop arrangement becomes a 116-track studio session?
  3. Tones has said she often loathes singing it. Why might a writer grow tired of her biggest hit?

References

  1. Wikipedia. Dance Monkey. Encyclopedia
  2. Wikipedia. Tones and I. Encyclopedia
  3. Sound On Sound. Inside Track: Tones And I 'Dance Monkey' (2020). Interview
  4. YouTube (Tones And I). TONES AND I - DANCE MONKEY (OFFICIAL VIDEO) (2019). Video

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