The Disco Night That Shaped “Don’t Start Now”

As the lead single from Future Nostalgia, the 2020 album that anchored Dua Lipa’s run through commercial pop, “Don’t Start Now” carries writing credits for Lipa, Caroline Ailin, Emily Warren and Ian Kirkpatrick, with Kirkpatrick producing and programming the track in Cubase. The circumstances of its making are unusually well documented.

The four were on a writing retreat at Warren’s cabin in Wyoming, working to a brief that asked them to repeat the success of “New Rules,” Lipa’s 2018 hit. The session stalled. Then the team, minus Lipa, went to a bar in Jackson Hole that happened to be hosting a disco night. Warren told Rolling Stone they returned the next morning determined to make a disco song, on the grounds that it is the most fun to dance to. Lipa, already moving toward new material, agreed.

That decision determined the arrangement. The drums and bass were programmed, not played, and the low end carries much of the record’s weight: Kirkpatrick built the bass part on the stock Native Instruments Scarbee Bass plugin, using the MM-bass patch. It passes as a live instrument, which says less about the software than about knowing what a bass is doing in a disco track.

Kirkpatrick has pushed back on the dismissiveness pop attracts, telling Sound on Sound that the form is often treated as lesser even though it has to satisfy the largest possible audience. Disco had never left dance music. What shifted here was a mainstream writing room treating it as a method rather than a costume.