Roy English, who records under the name Jagwar Twin, has a hit on his hands with “Bad Feeling,” which interpolates the Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory song “Oompa Loompa.” English says the idea came from a joke about the kind of music he was trying to make.
“I was really exploring my ancestors, so I wanted, like, oom-pah music,” he tells ABC Audio. “I kept saying that in the studio: ‘German, Polish, Slavic, you know, oom-pah! Accordions! Tuba!'” Then, inevitably, someone joked that English wanted the “Ooompa Loompa” song.
“One of the producers I was in [the studio] with was like, ‘Yeah, maybe we shouldn’t do that,'” he explains. “And then we were like, ‘Wait! Maybe that’s actually a good idea!'”
“Bad Feeling” was released around the time that the Timothée Chalamet film Wonka came out, but English says he wrote it way before he even knew Wonka existed.
“I had no awareness consciously that a movie was coming out … I wrote it, like, two years ago,” he says. “And it took close to a year just to clear the sample interpolation. But because it took so long, it ended up being the perfect time to release it, with the movie dropping.”
“Bad Feeling” started getting radio airplay after it went viral on TikTok. It’s likely the first song that many pop fans will have heard from him — and he loves the idea.
“I think it’s a great introduction because it’s like all Jagwar Twin’s music,” English explains. “…[T]here’s humor in it and there’s a lightness and there’s also like an undertone of darkness as well … so I think anyone who discovers Jagwar Twin through ‘Bad Feeling’ is going to be stoked when they dive into the rest of it.”
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