Home / Specials / “How I Made ‘Blue World’ With Mac Miller”: Disclosure’s Guy Lawrence Shares the Process and Experience

Specials

“How I Made ‘Blue World’ With Mac Miller”: Disclosure’s Guy Lawrence Shares the Process and Experience

January 17, 2021

“It was just such a great day.” This is how Disclosure‘s Guy Lawrence described working with Mac Miller on their single “Blue World,” released just under a year ago via the late rapper’s posthumous album, Circles.

While Lawrence first spoke out about producing the track back in August, a new video posted to Disclosure’s social media accounts provides even more details through its first-person, behind-the-scenes look at the entire creative process. Clocking in at 44 minutes, the video first streamed on Twitch this past Christmas Eve.

“This song, I wrote with Mac in LA at Capitol Records, Capitol Studios, Studio D, which is on the first floor upstairs. It was the first day that I’d ever met Mac,” Lawrence said. Arranged organically, the seed for their session had been planted via Twitter DMs. “Such a sweet guy, man. He was so polite and fun,” he added. “He’s dearly, dearly missed.”

Lawrence then dove into the project file of “Blue World,” even describing a trip to The Record Collector, a Los Angeles vinyl hub, where he first found “It’s A Blue World” by The Four Freshmen. As evidenced by its name, Lawrence’s sample of the 1950s single ultimately became the foundation of “Blue World.”

“It draws on a lot of things that I love and I’m really happy with how it’s presented and how it turned out. And I’m really happy with the simplicity of it,” Lawrence said of his work.

The bulk of the video provides a detailed, in-depth narrative of each step Lawrence took to craft “Blue World,” from editing the introductory sonics to mimic the feel of a gramophone to pulling and adjusting vocal chops from “It’s A Blue World.” He also made sure to emphasize how pleased he was with Miller’s raw vocals: “It just sounds great straightaway.”

“I feel very, very, very lucky that I got to work with [Mac] while he was on this planet,” Lawrence continued. “I’m so happy that in the end, his family reached out and they put together this Circles project, because I was sure that no one was ever going to hear ‘Blue World.'”