How "Pittsburgh" Was Written

what’s really interesting is that the original concept for ‘pittsburgh’ was that it was going to be a chopped & screwed version of ‘Cornell’, with different lyrics. we instead decided that it might be more effective to instead represent what we wanted to by making cornell a totally organic rendition of the song, and having pittsburgh be a harshly ‘electronic’ version of the song. before we decided to make that change, i had whipped up a version of this ‘chopped and screwed’ take on ‘cornell’, with what ‘cornell’ had become at the time (and if you check into the file for cornell, you’ll see what i mean…).

as we developed cornell, we had the idea to scrap the main vocal and use vocoders. once we did that, we realized that was totally the direction that we wanted to go. here is a vocoder version of ‘cornell’ which was really created right at the point between its formal transformation into ‘pittsburgh’ -

once that vibe was established, it was just a matter of committing to it. knowing that ‘cornell’ would be a very organic experience, i tried to make this one as ‘digital’ as possible. here is an early version of the song with a bit of a tamer ending and less samples involved. this was the first time that the new lyrics had been put on this instrumental.