Best known as Kid Harpoon, moustachioed producer/songwriter Tom Hull is one of modern pop's most high-flying hitmakers, his sonic fingerprints found on chart-smashing records from Harry Styles, Shawn Mendes, Florence + the Machine, Shakira and many more.
Aside from his work with Styles on Harry's House, Hull's most successful collaboration is surely Miley Cyrus' Flowers, a disco-infused celebration of self-reliance that became 2023's best-selling global single, earning Cyrus Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance in the process.
In a recent interview with Hull, we sat down with the producer to find out more about working with Cyrus. Praising her wide-ranging creative vision, he recalled how Cyrus draws on a deep knowledge of fashion to inform her music's artistic direction.
"I'm a music guy. I'm fully music. And I'm expected to be music and they’re coming to me for my knowledge of music," Hull says. "So the best thing for me is – taking Miley [Cyrus]’s brain as an example – she's got like 10 million fashion references. She'll bring up images from old fashion campaigns and be like, ‘See the way this looks? I think this is how this should sound’. And that to me is so exciting.
"It’s so important that I don’t cut that off because I have an ego and think that I know everything about music. She's got one of the most brilliant, creative minds ever. I should be tapping into that."
Looking back on the making of Flowers, Hull revealed that Flowers initially began as a slow ballad on the piano before taking on more of an uptempo, dance-pop vibe after an impromptu jam with Cyrus.
"Flowers started out as a piano song," Hull says. "I listened to it for a bit and then, and I could see it being played in Pulp Fiction. And Uma Thurman's singing it. You know? Like that scene where she's with John Travolta and they're all high?
"So then I was like, ‘let's jam it’ and she grabbed a mic and I grabbed a bass, and we jammed and she sang. Literally for like 30 minutes, and after she left I built the whole thing out, and then sent it to her. And she was like, ‘Damn, this is amazing’. That 20, 30 minute little sprint with her just got the vibe."
“I wanted it to be uptempo – more like an I Will Survive. It just felt uplifting to me, and Miley is all about positivity. She’s just not a ‘feeling sorry for herself’ kind of person. She's like: ‘life's awesome. Let's go get it’. That's her. So it worked out.”
