Ghost in the Machine (song)
The collaboration began with an online conversation between Bridgers and SZA; the two musicians rapidly completed the song a week before the album was scheduled for release.
[10][11][12] The album incorporates various disparate moods and musical styles: while some tracks had an aura that SZA described as "aggressive", others, such as "Ghost in the Machine", were balladic or soft.
[15] During the making of the album, SZA created a list of possible collaborators, including Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, Olivia Rodrigo, Doja Cat, Drake, and Kendrick Lamar.
[18][19] "Ghost in the Machine" is a ballad composed in a moderate tempo and primarily built on peaceful electronic production that switches to a piano backing during Bridgers's verse.
[32] The making of "Ghost in the Machine" began in 2022 with a drum loop produced by Matt Cohn, followed by piano and keyboard notes from Rob Bisel.
[33] The latter two instruments were acquired by Bisel within a week of "Ghost in the Machine" being written, and he stated that his work on the song was partly inspired by his experimentation with "new toy[s]".
[19] She was motivated to write the song out of exhaustion caused by the constant fighting between people on Internet spaces such as Instagram over morality, which she believed was at the expense of meaningful connections: "I feel like there's so much debate about what's good, what's bad, what's this, what's that?
[21][42] American Songwriter's Thomas Galindo interpreted the line as showing anxiety about the growing influence of artificial intelligence within the music industry,[21] whereas Nylon's Steffanee Wang wrote that SZA expressed a need to stop being treated like a machine by her job.
[12] SZA turns to a lover for escapism and gratification, to assuage her disillusionment with modern relationships and distract her from an ambiguous disaster that Tucker thought could symbolize the end of either their romance or the world.
[23] Chow interpreted the relevant lyrics as showing SZA's desire to remain in a relationship despite feeling drained from it, and he wrote that this was a common theme in SOS.
[41] Bridgers's verse begins with the lyric, "You said all of my friends are on my payroll / You're not wrong, you're an asshole",[21][43] which Alexis Petridis of The Guardian wrote was evocative of "tension clearly compounded by fame and success".
[59] Critics primarily focused on whether SZA and Bridgers were a congruent pairing; several praised the collaboration as successful despite the two artists' different musical styles.
[60][61] Chow wrote that "Ghost in the Machine" was the best collaboration on SOS, reasoning that the feature was bound to work because the two musicians' discographies overlap significantly in terms of subject matter, which prevented an "awkward" genre crossover for Bridgers: "it has often felt like the two of them are anxious, horny Spider-Men pointing at each other from across the genre-verse.
Rolling Stone's Will Dukes considered the exploration of artificial intelligence a contrived effort, akin to a "Black Mirror trope about the AI Art Generator".
[42] SZA performed "Ghost in the Machine" live for the first time on March 4, 2023, at Madison Square Garden in New York City as part of the international SOS Tour.
