songs and circumstances

The Smashing Pumpkins - "33"

2005-12-23T20:08:00.000+01:00

“33” was the fifth and final single from the Smashing Pumpkins’ third album, “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness”, but it also was the first song written by Billy Corgan (vocals and guitars) for that double album.

Corgan : “A simple song in a country tuning, ‘33’ was the first song I wrote when I came home from all the Siamese Dream touring [“Siamese Dream” being the title of the Smashing Pumpkins 2nd album]. I took three days off, and this was literally the first thing that came out of my hands when I sat down. The 'cha-cha-cha' sound is my drum machine through a flanger, and what you hear is the same one right off the demo because I couldn't remember how to recreate it. The stringly sounds are part Vocoder, plus five slide guitars tuned to one note each to create the chords.”
“When I wrote that song I was just moving into my house, I had just gotten married, and in some ways the song talks about me entering a new phase in my life. But it also talks about how I don't really necessarily trust that part of my life. Obviously it has more relevance now that I'm divorced and I'm out of my house... The song has a different poignancy for me now, both because I foreshadowed the future and I was also hopeful that that sort of future was going to work out.”

“33” was the first single released after the firing of Jimmy Chamberlin (drums) and death of Jonathan Melvoin (keyboard player on tour). It is said that the song was released instead of another song called “Muzzle” because there aren’t any drums on “33”, whereas “Muzzle” features great drums by the sacked drummer…

As to why the song is called “33”, Corgan : “I had a friend read my tarot cards and the person said that ‘When you're 33 years old,’ -this is when I was 27, - your life is going to completely change’. I actually had hoped to write three songs: ‘33’, ‘66’, and ‘99’, but I never wrote ‘66’ and ‘99’.”

Available on the double album “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness”

The Subways - "Young for eternity"

2005-09-29T17:53:00.000+02:00

On songwriting, Billy Lunn, the young (19 years old) singer from up and coming band The Subways : "It usually differs as to how the songs come about. I mean, they come to me rather than me picking up a guitar and just stringing out ideas. I wrote a song at work on the back of a delivery receipt and it's now the title track for our album , so it's just generally life being put into music through me and the guitar". That song is the title track for their first album, "Young For Eternity".

More details on how he wrote the lyrics to the song : "I was working in a hotel at the time and I had to write out receipts, because I used to collect all of the dirty sheets from the hotel rooms, and pack them away - and the lyrics just came. I turned over a receipt that I was meant to be handing in, and wrote the lyrics and stuffed it in my pocket, and I got the sack because of it".

Available on the album "Young For Eternity"

Cat Power - "I don't blame you"

2005-09-26T16:53:00.000+02:00

Cat Power"s usual songwriting process : "Usually what happens is, I'll play it [the piece of music] four times early on and be like, is this something I don't want to remember? If it's something I want to remember, I have to play it four more times because I have to remember it. Because in the time it takes for me to look under my bed to find the tape recorder, I lose all the lyrics and the music. My music is really easy because there isn't much change in it most of the time. The words are the journey for me; the visual stuff that I have to remember. It's usually an image and I'll remember. When I press record, whatever makes it on the tape, that is where the song gets saved. Then I'll put it under the thing [the bed] and a couple months later I'll be like, what is this ? And then I'll remember. The trick is remembering it and making yourself, the next night or later that night or a couple hours later, testing yourself without the cassette if the song still resonates with you. The ones that come out are the ones I remember, so, there's a lot of them that are like, no, no, no, no, no".

Cat Power's peculiar writing and recording process for "I don’t blame you": "I sat there while everybody was playing pool, ping-pong, and getting stoned while we were mixing and transferring tape. I was in there singing that song. We'd all been drinking all night or whatever. I was remembering somebody and I was just sitting there. I must have played it 20 times. I got so completely delirious that when Adam [Kasper, producer] walked in he was laughing at me. Usually I don't sing when anyone walks around. I was just staring at him and laughing and singing. I was like, [singing] 'Adam, why don't you and press record ?'" And that's it.

Available on the album “You Are Free”

Dire Straits - "Money for nothing"

2005-09-22T15:37:00.000+02:00

Mark Knopfler (vocals & guitars) wrote "Money for Nothing" after overhearing delivery men in a New York department store complain about their jobs while watching MTV. He wrote the song in the store sitting at a kitchen display they had set up. Many of the lyrics were things they actually said. Mark Knopfler : "The lead character in the song is a guy who works in the hardware department in a television/custom kitchen/refrigerator/microwave appliance store. He's singing the song. I had to ask for a pen and paper while I sat down in this mock kitchen display - which was in the front window of this kitchen electrical and appliance store - and tried to write the tune. In the back of the store, all the TVs were tuned into MTV".

The song was notable for a cameo appearance by Sting singing the song's introduction and backing chorus, a borrowing of the cable network's slogan "I want my MTV" (The line "I want my MTV" was the basis of the cable network's promotional campaign and they often played clips of musicians saying and screaming the line between videos). The songwriting credits are shared between Knopfler and Sting, though Sting has stated that his only contribution was the "I want my MTV" line, which was sung in partial parody of his own song "Don't stand so close to me", originally recorded by The Police. Sting did not want a songwriting credit for this, but his record company did because they would earn royalties from it.

Sting’s part was conceived after the basic tracks for the song were cut. As Neil Dorfsman (engineer) explains : "That was a happy accident. Sting was down in Montserrat while we were doing that song. He had come by to visit and had dinner with us one night, and I think after that Mark and I kind of looked at each other and thought, 'Let's get him on this record.' I'm not sure to this day if Mark had the 'I want my MTV' line written already or wrote it for Sting to be in the melody of [Sting's Police song] 'Don't stand so close to me'".
Knopfler's distinctive, crunchy guitar tone on the main body of the song was another accident. Dorfsman : "I would go out in the studio while Mark would play, and I'd have a couple of mics up on his amplifier ; the guys in the control room would be listening, and I'd move the mics around until it sounded pretty good to them in there. I'd usually use two mics, and I was positioning one and moving the other. It was sort of in a weird spot where you'd never put a microphone and everybody on the talkback said 'Stop! Come here and listen to this !' There was some weird phasing thing happening. I don't know what it was. But it sounded great and we did six or seven takes right away because I wasn't sure we'd ever get that exact tone again. I wrote it all down, but when we tried to better it in New York a month later, we never came close".
Also Dorfsman : "We did a lot of keyboard overdubbing on that song in particular ; we spent a lot of time on the sound and the part. I remember telling Guy Fletcher (keyboards) to treat that whole extended intro section as if it was a science fiction scene and there was a monster coming alive. Eventually we got something that approximated the idea I had. Mark was always looking for sounds that weren't stock, and was into buying keyboards that other people weren't using."

The video was the first to be aired on MTV Europe when the network started on August 1, 1987 (6 years after MTV US). The music video for the song featured early computer animation illustrating the lyrics. The video was one of the first uses of computer-animated human characters and was considered groundbreaking at the time of its release. The characters were supposed to have more detail, like buttons on their shirts, but they used up the budget and had to leave it as is.

Available on the album "Brothers In Arms"

Procol Harum - "A whiter shade of pale"

2005-09-21T18:16:00.000+02:00

There is SO much to say about this song (examples : it's the first Procol Harum song ever but it wasn't originally included on their first album ; the song was influenced by Bach's Suite Number 3 in D Major Air On The G String, as played by Jacques Loussier on a TV advertisement ; the idea for the title came when one of the band members overheard a girl at a party being described as having turned into "a whiter shade of pale" ; before the song was officially released, it was arranged to be played on the pirate Radio London because band members wanted to hear what it sounded like on the radio ; etc...) that I'll give a link to a very complete page : http://www.procolharum.com/awsop.htm

Song available on the album "Procol Harum" also known as "A Whiter Shade Of Pale"

Ween - "Exactly where I'm at"

2005-09-20T17:46:00.000+02:00

Aaron “Gene Ween” Freeman and Mickey “Dean Ween” Melchiondo seem to master any genre of music (hard rock, country & western, psychedelic pop) as proven by the many albums they have put out over the last 15 years. But they are also known for their sense of humor which has brought them to deliberately write an incomplete song, and place it at the start of an album more or less because it can't go anywhere else...

Gene Ween [about the song "Exactly where I'm at"] : "That song is kind of incomplete. You’ll notice it just has the two verses, and the drum kit comes in, and that’s it. With that song, we thought it would sound really cool if it just really kicked in. We were going for like an E.L.O. thing, with a sweeping effect. We just built it up. I wrote the song on acoustic guitar and there’s nothing going on in it [!]. We decided to do everything that was done to that song in the studio. We put a Leslie effect on my voice for the first line, [in] the second line it gets a little clearer, and the third line is crystal clear, and everything has kicked in. We just had fun wasting out at the end with like Robert Fripp stuff".

Dean Ween : "We chose it as the opener just because of the opening line pretty much. There was no other place on the album for it to go. It starts with the line "let’s begin with the past in front / and all the things that you really don’t care about now". It just seemed obvious that it was the best place to put it. It’s real anthemic. Gene came to the studio and didn’t really have anything for it. It’s not much of a "song" song, we broke it down into sections and went for a really psychedelic thing with it".

Available on the album "White Pepper"

Garbage - "Why do you love me"

2005-09-19T16:55:00.000+02:00

"Why do you love me" is Garbage's comeback song, the first single off their last album entitled "Bleed Like Me".

This song is an example of how Garbage songs, according to their own words, don't come together until they're almost finished. Shirley Manson (vocals & guitars) : "We were mastering the song and we ended up editing the heavy guitar riff onto the front of the song, it wasn't there initially. Once we did that, all of a sudden, the record company said 'It sounds fantastic, this is definitely the first single'. We’d always loved that song but nobody had really noticed it. Once they said this was the first single, we were psyched, because it's a very strange single to go out with. It's got that strange middle break, where everything disappears and the whole personality of the song changes. I'm happy they supported that. Record companies usually go for the conservative, obvious 'hit', which of course, as we all know, is the kiss of death".

Before the start of their (since then partly cancelled) world tour, Steve Marker (guitars & bass & samples & loops) couldn't wait to play it live and couldn't wait to see Butch Vig (drums & loops & noise & efx) play the whole song at that speed ! Vig was indeed "dreading playing it live because it's 160 BPM and has all this syncopation and I'm not [wasn't] in shape to do that. I will once we've started rehearsals".

Available on the album "Bleed Like Me"

The Cranberries - "Linger"

2005-09-01T17:46:00.000+02:00

The Cranberries came together early in 1990. The three boys had already been playing together for a long time, but were looking for new lead singer. They had heard of Dolores O’Riordan (vocals) through mutual friends, and, during the audition, Noel Hogan (guitars) played her a few chords he had been messing around with.

O’Riordan took home the piece of music, changed the arrangement a little, wrote some words to it, and brought it back shortly after. The result was an early version of "Linger", and the boys liked it. Brother Mike Hogan (bass) : "“It was actually really good, that that was the song that actually made us". And it would prove to be the hit that would launch their career internationally.

A five-song demo tape, which included a version of "Linger" commenced a bidding war among London record labels. Eventually they signed with Island Records.

Available on the prophetically titled album "Everyone Else Is Doing It, Why Can’t We ?"

Yngwie Malmsteen - "Vengeance"

2005-08-31T17:15:00.000+02:00

It’s a song that appeared on an album that guitar shredder Yngwie Malmsteen released in 1995. Malmsteen : "I had that riff for a while. I remember I put some funky parts in the middle of the song. I thought that was cool. I also thought the pedal-tone licks were so cool. I remember coming up with the riff while relaxing in a lounge room and playing guitar. I don't remember it well as a whole song".
As for the vocal melody in this song and more generally, Malmsteen often comes up with them "while driving my car, because I'm usually listening to pre-production CDs in the car".

Interestingly, Malmsteen has a peculiar general musical process : "Once I record a song, I don't listen to it again. I move on to the next album. My relationship with the music is different from the people who buy the albums. I'm always moving on".

Available on the album "Magnum Opus"

Status Quo - "Under the influence"

2005-08-30T18:19:00.000+02:00

Although they are mainly known (outside of the UK) for their 1986 hit "In the army now", Status Quo put out their first album as early as 1968, and are still releasing new material to this day (the last offering being 2004’s "XS All Areas"). They released an album in 1999 called "Under The Influence" that contains a song of the same name.

Francis Rossi (vocals and guitars ; the slightly baldy one on the picture) talks about how the song came about, over two separate periods of time : "We had the tune and, in fact, part of the melody, the chorus - or the idea of that melody in the chorus - I remember playing on the piano when I was probably 15, maybe 16. I was playing around on the piano at my parents’ house and I had that "de de de derr da der da deerr" melody". Many years later : "And then, when Bernard [Frost, session vocalist for Status Quo between 1976 and 1982 and with whom Rossi wrote many Quo songs] and I were doing our writing stint, we got into that melody. This song came up in tempo and up in tempo..."

As for the lyrics, Rossi again : "The lyrics... l was having some dreams. Lots of very sensuous dreams about twos and threes and various women - and really panicking in my sleep thinking I'd actually been unfaithful to my wife. And I thought "Oh, no - I've done it ! I`ve done that", and I swore I'd never do it, then I'd wake and think, Oh, I haven't! But some of the dreams were so vivid. I could feel bits on the end of my dome-ious, you know? So the line 'I found a new amigo to help me to get my reality right' is obviously the wife..." Hence the influence he is under ?

Available on the album “Under The Influence”

Bob Marley - "No woman, no cry"

2005-08-29T19:22:00.000+02:00

"No woman, no cry" was a song written by Bob Marley but the songwriter credits indicate "V. Ford" : this is Vincent Ford, who ran a soup kitchen in Trenchtown, the ghetto of Kingston, Jamaica, who helped Marley out when he was very poor. One theory had Marley setting Ford's words to music; another reckons that by letting his friend claim the songwriting credit, Marley sidestepped various legal and contractual difficulties. But most probably it was an act of philanthropy, Marley just wanting Ford to have the royalties so as the checks received by Ford would ensure the survival and continual running of his soup kitchen.

The song was made famous by Bob Marley and the Wailers' 1975 album "Live!", which featured this song as performed in concert at the London Lyceum. It was also on the album "Natty Dread", but this original version was nothing like the live performance. It was shorter and sped-up, with little of the energy Marley brought to it in concert.

Here’s how Dominic King describes the song : "In each chorus the title is sung first in the minor, the melody following the root notes, then restated in the major, the tune rising to the fourth, bringing a sense of hope that problems can be overcome. Memorable phrases such as "government yard in Trenchtown" spice up the lyric, and the atmosphere leaps when the extra refrain "everything’s gonna be alright" explodes unexpectedly out of the second verse".

Available on the album "Live!"; Alternative version available on the album "Natty Dread"

Lamb - "Open up" & "Hearts and flowers"

2005-08-19T13:41:00.000+02:00

Lamb is a trip hop duo composed of Louise Rhodes (vocals) and Andy Barlow (everything else, basically). The two songs are a good example of compromise.

Rhodes doesn't really appreciate "Open up".
Rhodes : "My least favourite track on the album. Andy campaigned for it to be included. He likes the "round-the-campfire" vibe in the middle section. But it just doesn't move me".
Barlow : "I think it's got this real "round-the-campfire-bottle-of-red-wine-inside-you" jigginess about it. The track was originally created for "What Sound" [Lamb's third album] but never made it so I had it floating round on my iPod for ages".

As for the other song, "Hearts and flowers", it's just about... the opposite !
Rhodes : "I love the space and stillness of this song. It reminds me of "Feela" on our [self titled] first album and it felt like a lovely closing track".
Barlow : "It's my least favourite tune on the album. It feels like it's been botched together and just doesn't do anything for me. We wrote it in Barcelona and it was the only thing that stayed around after a week of writing. I had this idea that Barcelona would be brilliant for creativity. We stayed in this gorgeous million pound apartment in one of the cultural capitals of the world and it just didn't click".

Both songs available on the album "Between Darkness and Wonder"

Blur - "Out of time"

2005-08-10T10:06:00.000+02:00

"Out of time" was Blur's first release for three years, but more importantly the band's first release without guitarist Graham Coxon. It was the lead single from their seventh album Think Tank.

The song is a bass-driven ballad with minimal drums and only acoustic guitar, inspired by the time the band spent in Morocco. The strings are Moroccan Andalucian strings (as opposed to Spanish ones). Damon Albarn (vocals) : "They’re from the Berber tradition, which has very strong connections with the Moorish tradition in Southern Spain. We met quite a few people when we were out there. We ended up meeting these musicians who were unbelievably good and we didn’t give them a directive, just sort of set them up and let them get on with it and before we even said ‘here’s where it starts and it ends’, they’d done this pass. Which was partially them just tuning up, just warming up and playing little passages that didn’t appear when they were doing it. When we played back, it was all virtually in place, we had to do a very little bit of shifting and it was a magical moment".

The British newspaper NME said the song was about the departing guitarist. Alex James (bass) indirectly answers : "It was done quite early on in the proceedings and it was more or less the first batch of recordings we did".

The song was accompanied by an anti-war music video, directed by John Hardwick, depicting life aboard a United States aircraft carrier. Director John Hardwick : "Like the song, the video is a tender piece of work about distance and loss. It aims to distil the song's beauty into a new and unexpected place".

Available on the album that was almost called "Darklife" (reference to a previous album called "Parklife") but is actually called "Think Tank"

Supergrass - "Eon"

2005-08-09T12:05:00.000+02:00

"Eon" is a song from Supergrass' 3rd album (self titled but also known as "the X-ray album" due to its cover). It's a song in the vein of the 2nd album, with a repeated descending sustained twin sequence of guitar notes, gradually building in intensity.

Gaz Coombes (vocals & guitars) : "It's an old demo I had a long time ago, these two sections of music. It's a piece of music rather than a song with a chorus. It's pretty similar to the original demo, but we all wrote the vocals and lyrics". Indeed, there is not just one songwriter in the band : "We all write songs, all four of us, so a lot of songs come together like that".

As for the enigmatic title, Gaz explains : "It was called 'Eno' for a few months but it's not exactly an ode to Brian Eno, so we changed it"...

Available on "the X-ray album"

OutKast - "Hey ya!"

2005-08-08T17:42:00.000+02:00

"Hey ya!" is a song released by OutKast in 2003 but it was actually written by André 3000 only, André 3000 being one half of the OutKast duo (the other one is named Big Boi). The song is taken from "his" half of the double album OutKast put out (each member contributed one of the two albums : Andre 3000’s was called The Love Below and Big Boi’s was called Speakerboxxx).

André wrote the first version of the song around 1999, and it almost made it onto their 2000 album Stankonia. At the time the song was called "Thank God for mom and dad". He started working on it again in 2002, doing lots of experimentation along the way (like the bizarre 11/4 time signature).

André himself played every instrument in the song except bass (played by Aaron Mills from the funk band Cameo), including the vocal tracks. The guitar chords were the first ones he learned. In his own words, they were inspired by "the Ramones, the Buzzcocks, the Smiths". As for the vocals, he did each line over and over, and by the time it was edited together, it sounded like other people were singing with him.
The girls who respond to Andre when he says "Hey Ladies..." are actually just one person. A woman working in the studio (engineer Rabeka Tuinei) was recorded saying "Yeah" and her voice was layered to sound like many.

The song was finished just in time to be released as the first single from the album. The record company was going to put out "She lives in my lap" when André called and told them "Hey ya!" was finished and should be released first.

The video was inspired by The Beatles first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 : The Beatles came to America and created a frenzy. During the show, the audience was filled with screaming girls who went crazy for the group. For the Outkast video, they made it as if an American band invaded England, played a TV show there, and created the same type of frenzy.

This is not the only similarity with The Beatles. Indeed, OutKast's following single "The way you move" (by Big Boi) knocked "Hey ya!" off the top of the charts in the US, the first time a band had one song replace another of its songs since The Beatles did it in 1964 at the height of Beatlemania.

Available on the double album "Spearboxxx/The Love Below"

Foo Fighters - "Friend of a friend"

2005-08-03T18:57:00.000+02:00

The song "Friend of a friend", while appearing on the Foo Fighter's latest album In Your Honor, is actually one of Dave Grohl (vocals and guitars) 's oldest songs.

Grohl wrote the song in 1990, basing it on his initial impressions of Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic after joining Nirvana. He recalls : "I think it was written right when I moved up to Seattle. I wrote that song about those people that I’d just met. I didn't know them. I was living with Kurt in a little apartment. I’d just moved in and started playing in their band. I was kind of lonely. I'm from Virginia and my family and friends were back there. I was in Seattle with this dark cold winter. There was nothing to do, it was kind of depressing. So I just started writing some songs. I'd written songs before, for Scream [his previous band], and in my friend's basement on a 4-track but this was actually the first song I wrote just on an acoustic guitar".

Grohl even recorded and released a version around that time. Grohl : "I recorded the song on this 4 track while Kurt was sleeping and then played it to a friend when I got home in Virginia and recorded it on an 8 track. And then another friend of mine heard it and she had a record company called Simple Machines in Washington DC. She heard several other songs and asked me if I wanted to release a tape on her label. So I did and the song came out on that release, in 1991 or 1992". The song was released as part of a series called the "Pocketwatch series" and under the pseudonym "Late!", because he thought it’d be funny to "get on stage every night and say 'Hi we’re Late'".

The song was also recorded under the Foo Fighters' name, in 1997, during a BBC session. It appeared on a free tape given away with the NME.

As to why "Friend of a friend" is included on the latest Foo album, Grohl explains : "When we were making the acoustic record, a lot of people thought it would be just vocals and an acoustic guitar, whereas a lot of the songs got built up into this big orchestral things and there was something about this intimate vocal-guitar vibe that can be really powerful too. So after finishing the record, we thought maybe we need one more of those songs with just vocals and an acoustic guitar. I was writing songs, but they were rock songs, not acoustic songs. And then I remembered that song, and I thought it made sense since it's the first acoustic song I'd ever written and it had its place on the album. The few people that I played it for were really touched by it, so I thought 'Great, let’s put it on'. The version on In Your Honor is very similar to the original recording (a little more polished), with Grohl simply accompanying himself on acoustic guitar.

Available on the acoustic disc of the double album "In Your Honor"

Queen - "Bohemian rhapsody"

2005-08-02T18:31:00.000+02:00

"Bohemian rhapsody" (or "Bo rhap" as it is often called) consistently features in Best Song Ever polls and is one of those songs for which the title does not appear anywhere within the words.

Upon its release in November 1975, Queen's fourth album, entitled "A Night At The Opera" was being billed as "the most expensive ever made". After lengthy rehearsals, the four months recording sessions took place at no fewer than six studios - Sarm, Roundhouse Olympic, Rockfield, Scorpio and Lansdowne. Freddie Mercury (vocals) : "We had all the freedom we wanted, and we were able to go to greater extremes. We wanted to experiment with sound. Sometimes we used three studios simultaneously". The experiment was quite obvious with "Bohemian rhapsody", that featured elements of ballad, opera and rock.

Some band members said that Freddie had worked out the entire song in his head and basically just directed the band through the song, first playing a backing track of piano, bass and drums. Roy Thomas Barker (producer) : "Freddie was sitting in his apartment, and he had an idea for the song. He didn't have it all quite worked out, but the basic framework was there. Then he stopped and said, 'Now dears, this is where the opera section comes in!' And I thought, 'Oh my God!'" According to Baker, the song's operatic section was originally intended only to be a brief interlude. But Mercury saw it somewhat differently. "He'd walk in and say, 'We'll just stick some 'Galileos' in here'! It got longer and longer, and we kept adding blank tape. Every day we'd think we were done, and then Freddie would come in say 'I've added a few more 'Galileos' here, dear'!" Mercury himself later admitted that "'Bohemian rhapsody' took bloody ages to record".

The song took almost three weeks to record with the operatic section alone taking seven days to complete. The backing track came together quickly, but the band and their producer spent days overdubbing the vocals in the studio using a 24 track tape machine. By the time they were done, about 120 vocal tracks were layered together. Mercury : "That middle section got longer and longer and longer … We were all in hysterics when it was being recorded. It was quite a mammoth task … between the three of us we recreated a 160 to 200 piece choir effect … we had to sit there going 'no, no, no, no, no, no, no!' about 150 times."

Here's how Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) very accurately describes the song from beginning to end : "The song begins with an a cappella introduction, which are all Mercury doubletracked. This is followed by a ballad, which is again mostly Mercury's vocals. The guitar enters during the second verse, with Brian May [guitars] playing a series of harmonies. After the lyric "shivers down my spine", May created a 'shiver' sound by playing the strings behind the bridge of his guitar. At the end of the second verse, the first guitar solo appears. This was created by May, and it is melodically different from the verses as he didn't like a guitar solo to be just the melody repeated. Now begins a pseudo-operatic midsection. This features interplay between Mercury and a solo piano. The choir effect was created by having Mercury, May and Taylor sing separate low, mid and high sections three times. The band used the bell effect for lyrics "Magnifico" and "Let him go." Also on "Let him go", Taylor singing the top section carries his note on further after the rest of the 'choir' have stopped singing. This operatic section leads to an aggressive hard rock section with a guitar riff that was written by Mercury. After double tracked vocals by Mercury over the top of the guitar, there are three guitar runs, that May described as something he had to "battle with" when performing the song live, but he pulled it off. The song then returns to the ballad style. As the lyrics "ooh yeah, ooh yeah" are sung, a guitar is played in the background to give the effect of trumpets. This was done by playing the guitar through an amp designed by Deacon. The song progressively becomes quieter until finally closing with the barely audible sound of a gong. The sections may appear separate, but there are numerous lyrical and musical motifs that they share. For instance, there are melodic motifs that occur in the ballad which foreshadow parts of the operatic section". Wikipedia also mentions that the introduction to the song is based on the chorus of a piece by Mercury's former band, Ibex.

When it was complete, Queen felt "Bohemian rhapsody" rested firmly on the right side of the ludicrous. May : "We're not into over-the-top productions for the sake of it, but because it highlights the music. That's the object in our eyes". Over-the-top or not, EMI weren't initially impressed with "Bo rhap". Requests were made to cut the middle section of the song. It was argued that radio stations would not play the song, as it was twice the normal length of a single and other record labels would object to it getting double the airplay. The middle section was not cut out, but the actual length was reduced to 5:55 (instead of 7:00) for release as a single. The record company leaked the song to a London radio station in order to build anticipation for the album. DJ Kenny Everett played it a reported fourteen times during his two weekend shows on Capital Radio. The DJ was a friend of the band. When asked if Mercury had ever divulged the song's meaning to him, he revealed the stark truth: "Freddie once told me that 'Bohemian rhapsody' was just 'random, rhyming nonsense'!"

On stage, "Bohemian rhapsody" presented Queen with a problem. The middle section couldn't be reproduced live. Similar dilemmas with "Sgt. Pepper" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" had prompted the Beatles to give up touring altogether, but, for Queen, technology was available to lend a hand. When "Bo rhap" was performed on the following tour, pre-recorded tapes were played during the operatic interlude (and were also used as the band's introduction), while the band vacated the stage, later to return for the song's finale.

Having challenged the three-minute pop rule by releasing a single nearly twice the normal length, Queen went on to set another precedent with the film clip used to promote it. It was the first music video in the sense that it was shot in video instead of film. John Deacon (bass) : "People used to have clips before, but they were all shot on film. "Bohemian rhapsody" was shot on video in about four hours." May : "Everyone thought the film was a huge production. But it was really easy to do, and since then we've spent a lot of time on films which probably aren't as good, and certainly didn't get the exposure." The video was based on their album cover, with the 4 band members looking up into the shadows, and it started a trend in the UK of making videos for songs to air in place of live performances (in this case, it is because the song was particularly difficult to play live).

"Bohemian rhapsody" topped the charts for nine weeks when it was released in 1975, and went on to achieve legendary status when the British Phonographic Industry bestowed the Britannia Award for "The Best British Pop Single Of The Last 25 Years" in 1977.
After Mercury's death in 1991, the song was reissued and again reached No. 1, this time for five weeks. In UK, the proceeds went to the Terrence Higgins Trust, which Mercury supported. In the US, proceeds went to the Magic Johnson AIDS Foundation (Johnson and Mercury being 2 of the first celebrities to get AIDS).
The song also enjoyed renewed popularity in 1992 as part of the soundtrack to the film "Wayne's World". A new video was released, intercutting excerpts from the film with footage from the original Queen video.

Ironically, the song that knocked "Bohemian rhapsody" off the #1 chart position in the UK, in 1975, was "Mama mia" by Abba : the words "Mama mia" are repeated in this in the line "Oh mama mia, mama mia, mama mia let me go."

Available on the album "A Night At The Opera". It can also be found, of course, on any Queen best of.

Kathryn Williams - "Soul to feet"

2005-08-01T16:59:00.000+02:00

"Soul to feet" is the first single taken from Kathryn Williams’ second album, album for which she was rewarded with the Mercury Prize in 2001. Williams : "I started writing that song after I'd done a gig and there'd been a couple of A&R men come up to meet me. They'd come all the way up from London and then spent most of the time talking at the bar. I started writing it in my head that night [!] and when I went over the next day I played them that song".

As for Williams’ general songwriting process : “If I've got a melody that I think is good, I have to write it down then".

Available on the album "Little Black Numbers"

The White Stripes - "Seven nation army"

2005-07-29T12:33:00.000+02:00

Probably one of the easiest but most efficient riffs heard recently. Jack White (vocals & guitars) : "I wrote that riff in a soundcheck in Australia at a show that we played down there”.

Many people wrongly think that the riff was recorded with a bass guitar [The Whites Stripes don’t have a bass player], and that the vocals were recorded with a vocoder. Jack : "That's not a bass at the start but my guitar with an octave pedal”. Concerning the vocals : “I think it's the only time I used two takes of my voice - I doubled it. It said in the NME I used a vocoder, which is a complete insult to me”.

Jack explains where the title comes from : "It was a phrase that I used to say. When I was younger, there was a thrift store around called Salvation Army. I thought it was called Seven Nation Army, at least that's what I called it. That's where the phrase came from and I was building off from that when I was writing the lyrics”. Meg White (drums) : "Jack basically wrote the song around the idea of this guy who comes into town and all his friends are gossiping about him. It gets so bad, he wants to leave town and then he decides not to".

Jack : "The song felt strong when we mixed the album down. It felt like it should be the first track on the album. It just felt like an opening, explosive thing. I thought it would be interesting to release that at first. Also, I thought that if I got offered to write the next James Bond soundtrack that would be the riff for it. I don't think I'm going to get the chance though".

As for the video, it is considered to be one of the most effective motion-sickness-inducing devices.

Available on the album “Elephant”

Paul McCartney - "Waiting for your friends"

2005-07-28T11:01:00.000+02:00

Paul McCartney claims he wrote this song with the help of George Harrison - even though his former Beatles bandmate died from cancer in 2001. Macca felt Harrison's presence with him so strongly that he still doesn't feel like he wrote the track by himself.

McCartney : "I just got this feeling, ‘this is George’. I was like George - writing one of his songs. It just wrote itself very easily because it wasn't even me writing it. It was funny, particularly the second verse - 'I've been sliding down a slippy slope, I've been climbing up a slowly burning rope'. I just thought - it's a George song".

Available on the forthcoming album “Chaos And Creation In The Backyard” due next autumn

Ani DiFranco - "You had time"

2005-07-27T17:54:00.000+02:00

The song describes the emotions associated with the breakup of a long-term relationship. The originality of the song lies in the acoustic piano intro of over two minutes.

Writer Nick Hornby featured the song in his work “31 Songs” [also known as “Songbook”, it is a must-read !]. He attributes the two-minute solo to a depiction of the creative process behind the song.

Indeed, the song begins as you would imagine the writer began her process of creating the tune : a simple fiddling around on the piano, then it slowly moves into the body. The chords find their order, then become notes as the melody is laid down. Finally, the piano gives way to guitar strings, and the song starts properly. Without the beginning, you probably wouldn’t hear or feel the emotion and delicate nature of the lyrics.

So it's a song about breaking up. But it's also a song about writing a song about the break up.

Available on the album “Out Of Range”

Keane - "This is the last time"

2005-07-21T16:02:00.000+02:00

The song "This is the last time" is the oldest track on Keane’s debut album "Hopes and Fears".

Tim Rice-Oxley (piano): "In 2000, I fell in love with the Smiths. At the time, as usual with us, we were feeling down. Tom [Chaplin, vocals] and I were humping boxes around in London and Richard [Hughes, drums] was temping at the BBC. Then suddenly I was introduced to the music of the Smiths. I’d been into Morrissey’s early stuff although, to be honest, I hadn’t realised that Morrissey had even been in the Smiths. I remember being really impressed by how they packed so much into a three-minute pop song. Not just all the hooks and melodies but the pathos and humour as well. They seemed to get everything right and in a concise way. That was a big moment for me — that’s when my songwriting went up a level. And the first song to emerge from that was "This Is the Last Time" — it’s a Smiths facsimile, basically !"

Keane are famous for being a 3-piece pop band with no guitar or bass player. Although Keane have successfully replaced the role of the guitar with their piano arrangements, you can still hear bass on the record. Andy Green (producer) : "Sometimes, Tim played real bass, but if the structure of the song was the same as the demo we found that we could often use bits of the more interesting synth bass [that had been written and played by Rice-Oxley on the demos]. On the track "This is the last time", the verses are demo bass from recordings three years earlier, and the choruses were replayed by Tim on a real bass guitar".

Available on their debut (and to this day only) album "Hopes and Fears"

"Happy birthday to you"

2005-07-20T16:20:00.000+02:00

"Happy birthday to you" is [quite obviously] a song which is sung to celebrate the anniversary of a person's birth.

The melody of "Happy birthday to you" was written by two sisters, Patty and Mildred Hill, in Louisville, Kentucky. One day, in 1893, while Mildred was teaching at the Louisville Experimental Kindergarten School where her sister served as principal, she came up with the modest melody. Patty added some simple lyrics and completed the creation of "Good Morning to All," which was originally intended as a simple greeting song for teachers to use in welcoming students to class each day.
But nobody really knows who wrote the words to "Happy birthday to you" and put them together with the sister Hills' melody, or when it happened.

The ownership of the song has swapped hands many times : the copyright is currently owned by Time Warner but is scheduled to expire in 2030. For more information regarding the copyright issue, see : http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.htm.

Though the song is copyrighted, you do have the right to sing it your friends or family, in a private home.
One of the most famous performances of "Happy birthday to you" was Marilyn Monroe's rendition to U.S. President John F. Kennedy in May 1962. Did she engage in copyright infringement by doing that ?

Available in your head : who doesn't know that song ?

The Killers - "Mr Brightside"

2005-07-19T13:58:00.000+02:00

The song is the first Killers song ever. Half of the current line-up wasn't even part of the band when it was written.

David Keuning (guitars) one day placed an add in the local Vegas Weekly looking for a singer who was into Oasis and Bowie. Keuning : "Brandon [Flowers, vocals] was the only person to reply to my ad who wasn’t a complete freak. He came over with his keyboard and we started going through song ideas straight away. I had the verse to "Mr Brightside" and he went away and wrote the chorus. That was the first song we wrote together and remains the only song that we’ve played at every single Killers show".

Mark Stoermer (bass) and Ronnie Vannucci (drums) then met the two guys at a gig they were doing with a different rhythms section. After being tried out for the band, they joined, and the Killers were born.

Available on the album "Hot Fuss"

Bruce Springsteen - "Born in the U.S.A."

2005-07-13T14:56:00.000+02:00

The title track, "Born in the U.S.A." is one of Springsteen's best known songs. Many have misinterpreted the song as a simple nationalistic anthem, while in reality, it cast a shameful eye on how America treated its Vietnam veterans. In spite of this, many politicians (notably including Ronald Reagan) have used the song without permission in their campaigns.

The fact that the song is so often misinterpreted is probably due to the fact that is an anthemic rocker. Which it wasn’t at the beginning…

"Born in the U.S.A." was the first song Springsteen wrote for the album that would have the same name (his 7th). But he first recorded it on January 3, 1982 on a tape that became his album "Nebraska" later that year (his 6th album). The original version of the song had the same "no frills vibe" as the songs on the "Nebraska" album, and could have been an acoustic protest song. But Springsteen didn't really consider "Nebraska" an album. He released it without hardly any embellisment or elaboration- an uncharacteristic move for the Boss - and held back just a few songs, including "Born in the U.S.A.," for further experimentation. In his notes to his manager Jon Landau, he said he wanted to flesh out "Born in the U.S.A." with the full band.

It happened a few months later. Springsteen was jamming alone with a riff, and when the band turned up they joined in and the song came together very quickly. Springsteen : "I said, 'Roy [Bittan, synth player], get this riff !'. He just pulled out that sound on the synthesizer [the opening fanfare]. We played it two times and our second take is the record". Springsteen also instructed drummer Max Weinberg to keep the drums going after the vocal was finished. He did, and the band improvised the end of the song in the studio.

Springsteen : "At the same time I recorded "Nebraska", I was recording the album "Born In The U.S.A." in the studio in New York, so I had these two extremely different recording experiences going". Many people feel that "Born in the U.S.A." [the song] would have been better understood if it had appeared on the acoustic-driven album "Nebraska". But would we still be talking about the song today ?

Available on the album "Born In The U.S.A."

The Rembrandts - "I'll be there for you"

2005-07-12T21:47:00.000+02:00

The song titled “I'll be there for you”, performed by The Rembrandts, is, of course, the famous theme song to the hit American sitcom Friends which began airing in 1994. Shortly after completing work and releasing their third album “L.P.”, came this then little-known TV show on the NBC-TV network. Danny Wilde (one half of The Rembrandts) : "Kevin Bright [Friends executive producer] was a Rembrandts fan and didn't want a generic house band to record the theme for the show. He called our management and asked us if we'd be interested. So we watched the tape and thought it was very good for its genre and it had all the right people working on it. We thought it would be fun to do, no-one would even know it was us, and during the first season of the show, we weren't even listed on the credits as performers."

Unusually for a duo that always wrote its own stuff, the Rembrandts weren't even listed as writers on the song, either. Wilde : "To this day, we only get performance royalties, not publishing splits for the TV version of the song. It wasn't actually a song Phil [Solem, the other half of the band] and I even wrote. We had credit on it, but Michael Skloff, musical director for the show, came up with the tune and Allee Willis [plus others such as show creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane] came up with the lyrics. All they had was a 30-second verse and a chorus, so we tweaked the lyrics a little bit, and Phil came up with the signature riff at the start of the song".

It wasn't long before the catchy opening ditty for the show was generating a huge buzz at radio. Stations were inundated with calls after they began playing the 30-second clip of the song. One Nashville DJ in particular even looped the 30 second clip into a 3 minute song. Pressure grew for a full-length version of the song to be cut. Solem : “Our record label said we had to finish the song and record it. There was no way to get out of it".

Wilde and Solem sensed that the song would surely overshadow an album they had taken two years to write and record. But despite their protestations, EastWest label head Sylvia Rhone ordered the duo to record a full-length version of the song or face the axe. So to avoid a scenario where the Rembrandts' future was jeopardized, Wilde and Solem agreed. In the studio they wrote more lyrics, added a bridge and completed the song. Wilde : "That's when we became known as 'the band who sang the Friends theme'".

For most bands, a number one hit for 11 consecutive weeks and massive commercial exposure is everything they dream of. It was certainly manna from heaven for the record label. Recognizing the exploitative potential of the situation, EastWest never released "I'll be there for you" as a single. Instead, they tagged the song onto a re-released edition of “L.P.” and sat back as sales of the album far surpassed anything else the Rembrandts had achieved thus far.

Without the song, The Rembrandts may not have sold as many albums. But the song's success and two million-plus sales of the repackaged album sat uncomfortably with them. Wilde : "I guess we sold out, maybe we did. But everyone does it now. It's more acceptable in today's hit-orientated industry. It was hard to swallow at the time, as the alternative pop vibe we spent six years developing took a back seat. I guess it was our old school attitude, but we weren't proud of the song. It wasn't what we wanted to be remembered for”. An unrepresentative legacy [and the loss of hardcore original fans] wasn't the only result of the song's impact : it broke up the band in 1997, as the strain of such massive exposure proved too great.

Between 1997 and 2000 though, enough years passed for Wilde and Solem to regain a sense of perspective on old events and to start the process of making new music together again. After hooking up via the producer John Fields, a mutual friend of the duo, writing started almost immediately for a new album that was called “Lost Together”.

Available (unfortunately ?) on the album « LP »

The Bee Gees - "Stayin' alive"

2005-07-07T17:29:00.000+02:00

Robin Gibb : "Ahh yes, "Saturday Night Fever". I remember it well. We thought up the name for that movie".

"Stayin' Alive" is one of The Bee Gees most popular and recognizable songs, in part because it was played in the opening scene of a popular disco film, Saturday Night Fever. The producer of the soundtrack for the movie, Robert Stigwood (who also doubled as the Bee Gees' manager) called them up one day and asked them to write a few songs for a soundtrack to a film he was planning. At this point, the film was in very early stages and it didn't even have a title yet. Robin recalls : "He rang us up and said, 'Would you like to do the soundtrack for a film ?’ We said, 'What film?' He said, 'A film I'm making. I haven't even got a title for it yet. Maybe you could think of that, too [which they did, indeed].' 'How many songs?' 'Oh, about six or seven.' I said, 'Well, that's about one a day. When will you send us a script?' He said, 'Well, I don't have a script. You'll just have to get on with the soundtrack.' 'Well, I said, 'You haven't got a script, and we haven't got any songs, so we're equal, we're even.' I put down the phone, and we went to work".

Barry Gibb recalls other details : "Robert wanted a scene that was eight minutes long, where Travolta was dancing with this girl. It would have a nice dance tempo, then a romantic interlude, and all hell breaking loose at the end. I said, 'Robert, we don't think the rhythm should break. It should go from beginning to end with the same rhythm, and get stronger all the way. To go into a lilting ballad just doesn't make sense.' The film got changed." Robin : "When we saw the film we were surprised that it fit so well. It just amazed us, since we'd never even seen the script."

The Bee Gees wrote "Stayin' Alive" over the course of a few days while sprawled on the staircase at the Chateau D'Herouville studio in Paris. Later, the group learned that many porno films were shot in those studios. Barry : "The staircase where we wrote 'How Deep Is Your Love', 'Stayin' Alive', all those songs, was the same staircase where there've been six classic lesbian porno scenes filmed !”.

The song was not originally supposed to be released as a single, but fans called radio stations and RSO Records immediately after seeing trailers for "Saturday Night Fever", in which the introductory scene featuring the song was played.

Available, of course, on the soundtrack for the movie "Saturday Night Fever"

System Of A Down - "Chop suey"

2005-07-05T18:09:00.000+02:00

Chop Suey is a Chinese stew (hence the name) made with meat or fish, plus bamboo sprouts, onions, rice and water chestnuts. The title of the song does not appear anywhere in the lyrics. And the reason is because the original name of the song is "Suicide” (there’s a bit of a play on words - "Suey-cide"). System Of A Down had to change the name to make it radio friendly. In the beginning of the song, you hear Serj Tankian (vocals) say "We're rolling suicide".

The song is based on a poem by Father Armeni about the Armenian Genocide (all of the band members are Armenian or of Armenian heritage), especially in honor of those who were valiant enough to risk their lives in order to bring peace to the world and freedom to their people.

The video was shot in the parking lot of a cheap hotel near where the band grew up in Los Angeles. Before the shoot, System posted a note on their website inviting fans to come down and participate. Since they were not well known, they thought they would get about 500, but instead 1500 fans showed up.

Avril Lavigne did a cover of this that didn't go over well with System Of A Down fans. It was described as being "Choplicated".

Available on the album "Toxicity"

Gerry Rafferty - "Baker Street"

2005-06-28T18:02:00.000+02:00

By 1978, Gerry Rafferty emerged from 5 years of record company litigation and his previous hit with Stealer’s Wheel (one of his former bands) “Stuck in The Middle With You” a distant memory. With producer Hugh Murphy he began work on this solo album, "City To City". Rafferty : "I knew I'd written a good bunch of songs so I called Hugh and we started recording. I remember thinking I'd be pleased if "City to City" sold 50,000 copies". It sold five and a half million.

Central to its success was the song “Baker Street” (Baker Street is a real street in London, Rafferty often stayed with a friend who lived there). Rafferty and his label felt it was too enigmatic and reticent to be a single but a groundswell of radio play, producing a huge surge of public interest, changed their minds. The reason ? That saxophone riff, certainly the most memorable sax intro of all time [or is it George Michael's "Careless Whisper" ?].

Urban legend has the riff being performed by British actor and TV quizmaster Bob Holness. In reality the solo was performed by top sessioneer Raphel ‘Raff’ Ravenscroft (who has played on records by Pink Floyd, Marvin Gaye, Abba, Alvin Lee and many others). But Ravenscroft's line was not actually written by him. Rafferty wrote the song with an instrumental break, but didn't have a specific instrument in mind. Hugh Murphy, who produced the track, suggested a saxophone, so they brought in Ravenscroft to play it.

The publisher and the record company couldn't have been happier about the success of the song and subsequently, the album. Everyone concerned was thrilled, until it became clear that Rafferty, who had a reclusive and iconoclastic streak, was not going to tour America to support the album. The album, which hit No. 1, might've gone double-platinum had Rafferty toured.

Available on the album "City To City"

Nick Drake - "Pink moon"

2005-06-23T17:15:00.000+02:00

After two albums of orchestrated folk-pop, Nick Drake chose a radical change for what turned out to be his final album (he died of an overdose of antidepressants two years later). Not even half-an-hour long, with 11 short songs and no more — he famously remarked at the time that he had no more to record — it's simply Drake and Drake alone on vocals and acoustic guitar. Drake recorded them unaccompanied, in the presence of only a sound engineer, in two two-hour sessions, both starting at midnight. Only later was a piano overdubbed on the title track.

After recording the album, Drake dropped off the master tapes at the front desk of Island Records' office building and then swore he was retiring from performing music, planning to train to be a computer programmer and possibly write songs for others to perform. The master tapes layed on a secretary's desk over the weekend and were not noticed until later the next week.

"Pink Moon", the song, was eventually used in a Volkswagen commercial nearly 30 years later, one of life's many ironies, in that such an affecting song could turn up in such a strange context.

Available on the album also called "Pink Moon"

Britney Spears - "Someday (I will understand)"

2005-06-18T13:27:00.000+02:00

Britney Spears says that she wrote the tune, which refers to her imminent motherhood, two weeks before she realised that she was pregnant. Spears : "I wrote this song at my piano, at my house. I wrote it two weeks before I found out that I was pregnant, so it was really kind of weird, because the song's about having a baby... and it's something that I'd been dreaming about for a while. It's kind of like a prophecy".

[thank you No Rock&Roll Fun ! http://xrrf.blogspot.com/]

Available... on internet I believe ? Does anyone know, actually ?

Oasis - "Lyla"

2005-06-17T18:13:00.000+02:00

According to Noel Gallagher, "Lyla" is Oasis' "poppiest thing since "Roll With It". Annoyingly catchy and sounds a bit like The Who". It may be poppy, but Noel has also admitted to not being particularly fond of the song, saying that it isn’t "even the fifth best track on the album". Then why release it as a single ?

Well, the song had existed as a demo since the early recording sessions for the album but was all but forgotten until practically the last minute. The British band had indeed spent over a year working on their troubled sixth studio disc, during which time they scrapped recorded tracks and fired producers (they wrote 66 tracks). The Mancunian rockers suffered a similar trauma when they sat down to choose their first single. Noel : "It was almost an afterthought. We were sat around going, 'It's a good album but we don't have a first single.' There was nothing obvious". Noel remembered the song while on holiday and rather than lose it decided, with the rest of the band, to bring it out as a single.

The song leaked on the internet during late March 2005, weeks before its May release date, after an unauthorised early airing on Polish radio station Radiowej Trójce.

Noel has revealed that the Lyla in the song is actually the sister of the Sally mentioned in the Oasis song "Don't Look Back in Anger".

When performing on the UK music chart show Top of the Pops, Liam Gallagher, who was forced to mime to the music, made no secret of that fact, walking away from the microphone with his mouth closed mid-way through lines that he was supposedly singing.

Available on the album "Don't Believe The Truth"

The Beach Boys - "Barbara Ann"

2005-06-10T17:38:00.000+02:00

"Barbara Ann" was not written by The Beach Boys.

The song wasn't even intended to be a recorded release in the first place.

Indeed, the Beach Boys had a contract obligation to release one more album within a certain time frame. Brian Wilson had already started producing "Pet Sounds" but had to put that aside for a while to meet this obligation. However, he didn't want to spend one minute on this more than necessary, hence the "Party" album idea : the Beach Boys simply decided to through a party at the studio (Mike Love went across the street to pick up some beer) and then simply recorded whatever they felt like singing. Jan and Dead (a then quite famous group) happened to stop by and got invited to join the party. They had previously recorded "Barbara Ann" and Dean suggested they sing that they sing it together, which they did. You can hear them partying in the background, one guy yells, "Pass me an ashtry" and you can hear a girl hollering, "Come on". The guy who was singing lead was actually Dean and not one of the Beach Boys.

On the uncut version, the Beach Boys keep repeating the chorus over and over, getting sillier and sillier (maybe the beer had started kicking in), and one can also hear a "Thanks Dean" shout, thanking him for suggesting they sing the song.

Available on the album "Beach Boys Party"

Phil Collins - "In the air tonight"

2005-06-08T12:25:00.000+02:00

There has been a rumor about the Phil Collins song “In the Air Tonight” that Collins had a childhood friend drown and that there was a guy that could have saved his friend but didn’t (Eminem talks about this urban myth in his song "Stan"). The story and all variations thereof are completely false : Collins actually wrote this about the anger he felt after divorcing his first wife, Andrea, in 1979. This was Collins' first single as a solo artist and all the original songs on his first solo album were intended to be "messages" to his former wife in an attempt to lure her back to him.

As for the song's writing, Collins began working on the drums, found a rhythm he liked, then added some chords on the keyboard that sounded good, and the words just came to him.

The main feature in the song is the drums' sound. They come in half way through the song, setting the template for all the 80's drum songs after that. They sound quite artificial, but they were not produced by a drum machine, but by Phil on his drum kit. Hugh Padgham (producer) used a technique called gated-reverb to produce Collins's trademark drum sound. Usually, drums continue to reverberate after they've been hit. In this case, this reverberation is cut short – it extends beyond the end of that first drum sound (stick hitting skin) but then it abruptly stops.

The song appeared on Phil Collins' first solo album and, as it sold more than any prior Genesis release, prompted the group to change musical direction.

Available on the album "Face Value"

Blink 182 - "I miss you"

2005-06-07T18:46:00.000+02:00

This is a rare acoustic song by Blink 182. And it sounds a lot like The Cure's "Love cats". Tom Delonge (guitars and vocals) explains : "I'm a really big Cure fan, and one day I was listening to their song called 'Love Cats', and I loved the idea of using a stand up double bass [it's a viola and not a member of the guitar family] and jazz brushes. So what we ended up doing was writing a song with all acoustic."

Travis Barker (drums) indeed used jazz brushes to create the scratching sound throughout the song. But bungalo sticks, and regular drum sticks wera also used. And there was also an orchestra for the background effect and there was a three man choir for the choirs.

What's ironic is that the album on which appears "I miss you" includes guest vocals by The Cure's singer Robert Smith... but on the track "All of this".

Available on the untitled album

Marvin Gaye - "What's going on"

2005-06-06T14:33:00.000+02:00

Until this, Marvin Gaye rarely participated in the songwriting process. For the first time, he took control of the production so he could make a statement as an artist. Motown (the record label) hated the idea, but Gaye was an established star and had enough power to pull it off. And he pulled it off indeed.

Mel Farr and Lem Barney were acquaintances Gaye had made during his failed 1970 tryout for the football team the Detroit Lions. Mel Farr : "One day after Lem, Marvin and I played golf, we went back to Marvin's house on Outer Drive in Detroit. We'd hit the ball especially good that day and we were all feeling good, sitting around and kibitzing, when I said, 'Hey, what's going on?' Marvin said, 'You know, that'd be a hip title for a song. I think I'll write it for the Originals.'" Gaye started fooling at the piano and, when Renaldo "Obie" Benson of the Four Tops and songwriter Al Cleveland dropped by to see him the next day, he was still fooling with it.
In truth, Marvin didn't initiate the music himself, the title just being a start for a song. As was often the case, he relied on others to help him break his frequent writer's block. Benson and Clevland wrote an initial rough version of the song, which Gaye took and collaborated with them to finish. When the song was completed, Gaye planned to produce it as a single for The Originals, but Benson and Clevland convinced Gaye to record it himself.

On the finished track, a party can be heard going on in the background, from which Gaye's voice is purposefully detached. Gaye had Barney and Farr, amongst others, singing background. Later on, Motown convinced Gaye to re-record "What's Going On" with a group of professional background singers. But it didn't sound as natural as the original, and Gaye kept the first version.

The song "What's going on" was completed before the rest of the album was finished. Motown chief Berry Gordy tried to block the release of the single, deeming it "uncommercial", but after Gaye threatened to cease recording, Gordy reluctantly relented. "What's Going On" proved to be a substantial commercial hit.

Notably for this record, Gaye sang both lead and background vocals himself, essentially creating what is now recognized as modern-day multitracking. The process had been used for many years to give parts of a recording extra strength, but Gaye took it one step further and sung each of his vocal passes in various harmony parts, creating an ethereal sound that became his trademark.

Available on the album also called "What's Going On"

Meredith Brooks - "Bitch"

2005-06-02T15:47:00.000+02:00

In many interviews, Meredith Brooks has stated that "Bitch" almost never made it on the album, but a friend loaned her the money to help record the song.

In this song, Brooks tries to perform semantic realignment to change the world's perception of the word "bitch", by celebrating the strong qualities traditionally denigrated by the use of the term. The song starts from a depressing place ("I hate the world today") and carries the listener to a very happy state ("I wouldn't want it any other way").

The song has a drum machine rhythm with a guitar accompaniment. It uses guitar riffs to emphasize the word "bitch" throughout the chorus of the song.

Initially, some radio stations preferred not to mention the name of the song and would instead refer to it as "a song by Meredith Brooks". However, with the climbing popularity of the song, its name became more commonplace to announce on the air. When the song first hit the airwaves, most call-in listeners believed the song was by Alanis Morissette due to the recent success of Morissette in rock music at the time.

Several music retailers were also upset with Brooks for using the "b-word" in the song. They insisted that the "b-word" be removed from the single's packaging... Brooks responded by saying that according to the dictionary, the "b-word" is not a bad word. Bitch is actually a noun meaning "female dog".

Despite numerous attempts, Brooks hasn't managed to repeat the same popularity and commercial success as "Bitch". For this, she is commonly seen as a one-hit wonder.

During the shootout for the video, the producer's bitch (in this case = female dog !) got sick for a week after eating catered leftovers on the set.

Available on the album "Blurring The Edges"

Céline Dion - "My heart will go on"

2005-05-31T12:20:00.000+02:00

"My heart will go on" is of course very well-known for being the theme song to the highly popular 1997 movie "Titanic".

The song was written by Will Jennings (American songwriter that wrote many other successful songs, including the lyrics to "Tears in heaven" by Eric Clapton) and James Horner (American composer of film scores). Although James Cameron, the director of "Titanic", did not want a song played over the end credits of the film, Jennings and Horner went ahead and recorded the song with Céline Dion regardless. It is said that Cameron was so taken with Dion's voice that he changed his mind about the song and indeed, the song does play over the end credits.

Dion has admitted that when she first heard the song, she didn't want to record it. It was her husband (René Angélil), who convinced her to record it.

It should be pointed out that the recording heard on radio and Dion's albums is the demo for the song. Horner, Dion and Sony Music decided to keep the demo as the official recording because Dion's voice was perfect.

Being a huge hit song, "My heart will go on" appears on numerous Céline Dion albums...

Available on the following albums : "Let's Talk About Love", "All The Way... A Decade of Song", live version on "A New Day... Live in Las Vegas". It can also be found, of course, on the "Titanic soundtrack"

Eels - "Selective memory"

2005-05-25T17:28:00.000+02:00

"If I lay my head down I will see you in my dream" : E (vocals) effects a childlike falsetto to sing the first lines of this very calm song that officially closes Eels' 3rd album, before a hidden track ("Grace Kelly blues") kicks up the tempo and ends the album on a different vibe.

E wrote the song in the middle of the night in his kitchen.

During the recording, E played on the same piano Neil Young used on his classic album "After the Goldrush".

Interestingly, E sampled a piece of this song (the strings part) to create a whole new song called "Fresh feeling" that appeared on Eels' fourth album "Souljacker".

Available on the album "Daisies Of The Galaxy"

Radiohead - "Fake plastic trees"

2005-05-23T19:14:00.000+02:00

Thom Yorke (vocals) : "The product of a joke that wasn't really a joke and a very lonely drunken evening and, well, a breakdown of sorts. It was also a very nice melody that I had absolutely no idea what to do with".

The band had just been to see Jeff Buckley play a set (John Leckie, producer : "Thom realised that you could sing like he did, in falsetto, without sounding drippy") and when they got back into the studio, Thom recorded the vocals in two takes and broke down in tears. Yorke : "That was one of the worst days for me. I spent the first five or six hours at the studio just throwing a wobbly. I shouted at everyone and then John Leckie sent everybody else away. He sat me down and I did a the vocals for the track". Ed O'Brien (guitars) confirms : "This took a while to record only because it was better Thom just singing it with an acoustic guitar".

On a purely practical level, Leckie had achieved exactly what he needed: “A simple acoustic guitar–and-voice track, so we would at least have something we could put the strings onto the next day. Indeed, the day after the vocals were recorded, Caroline Lavelle and Johnny Mathias were supposed to come over and record their cello and violin parts. Leckie said to Jonny Greenwood (guitars) : "We'd better have something for them to play". So he just sat down there and then and scored it, creating a somber arrangement overnight, much in the style of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” which was composed in the 1930s. Greenwood (guitars) : "Writing the string parts was my studio highlight, in a megalomaniac kinda way".

Next, the song was fleshed out with overdubs of Hammond organ, bass and drums to gradually build the intensity behind Yorke’s anguished, world-weary lyrics.

The track also benefited from a happy accident when mixer Paul Kolderie got to work on the tapes. The distorted guitars that lurch unexpectedly into the middle of the final verse were originally planned for the start of the verse, but Kolderie missed his cue. Yorke : "It was a mistake, but we kept it".

Radiohead had a track they were happy with, but the American record company, expecting the album to be full of "Creep"-like hits insisted that Radiohead use a Bob Clearmountain mix of "Fake plastic trees". Yorke said: "No way. All the ghost-like keyboard sounds and weird strings were completely gutted out of his mix, like he'd gone in with a razor blade and chopped it all up. It was horrible".

In the end, what you get is a song written about/against the world of mass marketing and mass consumption, but that also appears on the Clueless soundtrack. Yorke : "It makes perfect sense to me. It's a song about going shopping".

Available on the album "The Bends"

Ash - "Kung fu"

2005-05-21T19:15:00.000+02:00

"We wanted to write a really crap Ramones song and it was meant to be the b-side but it turned out too good" (Tim Wheeler, vocals and guitars).

Kung Fu was written in 5 minutes on boxing day 1994 in Belfast and recorded in 2 minutes and 15 seconds the next day in Wales. Ash were indeed on their way to record another track when Wheeler wrote it : they were at the airport waiting to fly out to record with Owen Morris (then famous for having produced Oasis's "Morning Glory" album).

Strangely enough, "Kung fu" was recorded using the Verve’s equipment (probably because Owen Morris was also their producer).

The sleeve for the "Kung fu" single pictures footballer Eric Cantona’s infamous kick on a spectator that occurred in January 1995. In an away match against Crystal Palace F.C., Cantona (then playing for Manchester United) launched a kung-fu style kick against a spectator after being sent off by the referee.
The sleeve gave Ash good publicity. The kick gave Cantona 120 hours of community service after an appeal court overturned a 2 week prison sentence for assault.

Available on the album "1977"

Weezer - "Hash pipe"

2005-05-20T19:54:00.000+02:00

"Hash pipe" was Weezer's first release in many years and the first single on the album that brought the light back on Rivers Cumo's band.

After the lack of success of "Pinkerton" (Weezer's 2nd album), Rivers Cuomo (vocals) moved back to Los Angeles, and painted his new appartment in black. He decided to write a song per day, with the lyrics being the last part and especially being impersonal. Cuomo spent most of his time at home, experimenting new (and rather bizarre) songwriting techniques". Cuomo : "Everyday, I set my alarm at 6 in the morning, and took Ritaline [= medecine] and a shot of tequila". "Hash pipe" was written one morning, a couple of minutes after this ritual, with Cuomo sitting alone in the courtyard with his guitar.

MTV wanted Weezer to change the title to "Half Pipe" for the video so they could appeal to the skateboard crowd and avoid the drug reference. Weezer... refused.

Available on what is known as "The Green Album"

Guns N' Roses - "Sweet child o' mine"

2005-05-19T17:41:00.000+02:00

Duff McKagan (bass) : “‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ was written in five minutes. It was kind of a joke, because we thought, ‘What is this song? It’s gonna be nothing — it’ll be filler on the record’”.

But then, the introduction's infamous D-flat based riff has since been voted #1 riff of all-time by the readers of Total Guitar magazine. Funny therefore to learn where it came from...

Slash came up with the riff when he was playing around on his guitar. He thought it was silly and wanted nothing to do with it, but Axl Rose (vocals) loved it and had him keep playing it. Slash (guitars) : “The other guys would come over [to his home], and one time I was fucking around with this stupid little riff. Izzy (Stradlin, guitars) was there, and he was playing chords behind it. Axl said something like, ‘Hold the fucking phones! That’s amazing!’ It turned into this song, ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine,’ and I hated it for years. Even writing and rehearsing to make it a complete song was like pulling teeth. For me, at the time, it was a very sappy ballad”.

Rose used a poem he had written about his then-girlfriend, Erin Everly, for the lyrics and some inspiration from his record collection for his vocals. He reportedly listened to a bunch of Lynyrd Skynyrd songs before recording his vocal. He liked their down-home, genuine sound and wanted to duplicate it on this.

On the recording, Slash : “‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ was easy to record, but because we were not so professional back in the day, it was the one song where we didn’t count the song in, because it’s a guitar intro. It took me all afternoon to time it out and be at the right place when the drums came in — this was before ProTools and all of that.”

It took a while, but Slash eventually developed a grudging affection for the song “Hearing it now it brings back a flood of memories. Around 1991 it would cause such a reaction that just playing the first stupid notes used to evoke hysteria, so I started to appreciate it”.

Available on the album "Appetite For Destruction"

Coldplay - "A message"

2005-05-17T21:48:00.000+02:00

Chris Martin (vocals) : "My favorite song, it's the simplest. It arrived with 10 days of recording left so it was very exciting to do. It took a day and a half to record".

A couple of weeks before, Martin had handed copies of the unfinished album to several of his close friends (including Ash singer Tim Wheeler) and, after listening to it, they all came back with the same analysis : this album is going to be great, but it's missing something : a simple song.

That's how "A message" came about soon after. Martin was at home, at two in the morning, talking about the album with his partner Gwyneth Paltrow, and she suggested he try to write that other song. Martin lost his temper but then decided he was going to do it. Martin : "I went downstairs and sat with the guitar, and in five minutes it came. It was the first song I've ever written with no clothes on".

[Lets' hope it'll be worth it !]

Available on the forthcoming album "X & Y"

The Doors - "Light my fire"

2005-05-14T11:15:00.000+02:00

When Robby Krieger (guitars) became a member of the band, The Doors started rehearsing on a daily basis, getting tighter and closer, developing what they later called a 'oneness'.
Everything came together at a rehearsal early in the New Year 1966, at Robby's parents' place. The evening before, Jim Morrison (vocals) had suggested that everyone write a song that night using universal imagery. Morrison's song was "The end", which would eventually be his epitaph ("This is the end my only friend"). Krieger also had a song, which was worked on first, as it seemed easier to arrange. The chord progression was inspired by John Coltrane's "My Favourite Things". Everyone tried out things. Ray Manczarek (organ) composed an intro and used a carnival organ sound. John Densmore (drums) struck a 3/4 jazz tempo on his brushes, and Morrison started singing the first verse of Krieger's "Light my fire". Just as they were getting going, Morrison looked up from Krieger's notepaper and asked : "Where's the rest of it ?". Krieger told him that he had got stuck after the first verse. Morrison thought for a moment and just invented the second verse as he stood there. Everyone came together in the chorus, blasting out the last lines : "Try to set the night on... fi-yerrrrrrrrrrr".

Apparently, during that rehearsal, Morrison said that he thought that they should divide evenly all the money the band made, including the songwriting money. Since Morrison was the main songwriter, it was a generous offer, although as he pointed out himself, all the band was sharing in the arranging.

The Doors' record company thought "Light my fire" was too long to get radio play, so the guitar solos were edited down for the single to make it considerably shorter. Many stations played the 6:50 album version anyway. Since the single was a shortened version, fans had to buy the album to get the extended mix, which helped spur sales of the album.

The producers of The Ed Sullivan Show asked the band to change the line "Girl we couldn't get much higher" for their appearance in 1967. Morrison said he would, but sung it anyway. Afterwards, he told Sullivan that he was nervous and simply forgot to change the line. This didn't fly, and The Doors were never invited back.

"Light my fire" was the last song Morrison performed live. It was a show at The Warehouse in New Orleans.

Available on the self-titled album "The Doors"

Chuck Berry - "Johnny B. Goode"

2005-05-02T20:26:00.000+02:00

Johnny B. Goode wasn't actually released as a single and was never a hit. Chart hit or not, the song is firmly ensconced in music history and its legacy lives on today.

The song is the rock and roll version of the American dream - a poor country boy from the backwoods has dreams of becoming a star by hard work and his skill at playing the guitar. The line, "That little country boy could play" was originally "That little colored boy can play", but Chuck Berry knew he had to change it if he wanted the song played on the radio. Berry got the word "Goode" from the street where he grew up, Goode Street in St. Louis. In his autobiography, Berry recalls "‘Johnny’ in the song is more or less myself although I wrote it intending it to be a song for Johnnie Johnson". Chuck met Johnnie Johnson, a pianist and composer, in 1952 when he joined the Sir John Trio. The two continued to work together for twenty years, writing a number of songs including "Maybellene". Johnnie remembers Chuck working on Johnny B Goode but had no idea it was meant to be about him.

Berry created the driving train-like rhythm of "Johnny B Goode" by speeding up a standard twelve-bar blues figure, played on the bottom three strings of the guitar. It became the classic rock'n’roll guitar rhythm, appearing on tracks from the Rolling Stones to Status Quo. Berry’s other great innovation is his own adaptation of the Elmore James attacking slide intro. By combining urban blues with the early electric jazz guitar figures of Charlie Christian and the rhythms and humour of the 40s jump-blues of Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner he created an irresistible blend of danceable rock.

Note that the word "go" is repeated in the song 45 times !

More sadly, in 2000, Johnnie Johnson sued Berry, claiming that he never got credit for helping write many of Berry's hits, including this one. The case was dismissed in 2002, with the judge ruling that too much time passed between the writing of the songs and the lawsuit.

Available on the album "Chuck Berry On Top"

The Waterboys - "The whole of the moon"

2005-05-01T23:35:00.000+02:00

The Waterboys were a British group formed in London in 1981 by Mike Scott (guitar/vocals) and Anthony Thistlewaite (multi-instrumentalist). They later added Karl Wallinger (guitar) Steve Wickham (fiddle) and Kevin Wilkinson (drums).

Scott has often said that the character that inspired the song is a composite of many people. Some have said it was about Prince though Scott has denied this. He once mentioned that the author C.S. Lewis was "in there somewhere". In fact, the result was a tribute to some artists he admired, including Prince the writer C.S. Lewis.

More interestingly, Scott sketched out the song in a New York hotel after his girlfriend asked him if it was hard to write a song.

The year after "The whole of the moon" was released, Wallinger left the band to form World Party, who had a #27 US hit with "Ship Of Fools".

Available on the album "This Is The Sea"

The Police - "Every breath you take"

2005-04-22T16:30:00.000+02:00

Recently ranked 79th in Radio 2's Songs Of The Century it allegedly still earns Sting about a 1000 bucks daily from US airplay alone.

While the song sounds like a sedate and seemingly harmonious love ballad (some people even used it as their wedding song), it was actually written during the collapse of Sting's marriage ; the lyrics describe not well-meaning love but the motivations of a stalker, who is watching "every breath you take/every move you make". Many saw it as a possessive reaction to the split.

The lyrics to the song are very simple and it is on repeated listens that the mood becomes more sinister as you realise that this love is of an obsessive nature. Michael Stipe of REM particularly enjoyed this underlying subtext : "It was beautiful and creepy. So I wanted to write a song (Losing My Religion) that was better" [you are the judge].

The simplicity of the lyrics is also reflected in the uncomplicated melody, and apparently a synth-driven instrumental was dropped for not fitting in with the song's overall tone.
The simplest of chord sequences (in essence C/Aminor/F/G), forms the basis of this song. But the subtleties begin with the hypnotic Michael Nyman-like guitar riff, weaving in extras like added ninths, and echoing the obsessive lyric. The first bridge ("Oh can’t you see ...") is largely driven by Sting’s vocal, but it's the second ("Since you’ve gone ...") which is more innovative, and really seals the song’s originality.
The song is an example of compound AABA form. Steve Huey of allmusic.com says: "Guitarist Andy Summers picks a nearly identical arpeggio pattern on each chord he plays, and Sting's bass line keeps a steady eighth-note pulse without much rhythmic variation."

The middle of the song was finished last. They didn't know what to do with it until Sting sat at a piano and started hitting the same key over and over. That became the basis for the missing section.

The recording process created a great deal of tension in the studio. Sting was very particular about his song and would not let the other members of The Police (Andy Summers and Stuart Copeland) do much with it. Sting had to fight to get the song onto the album. He knew this would be the band's biggest hit when he wrote it but The Police broke up after this album.

The song's hook was the basis for Puff Daddy's collaborative tribute to slain rapper The Notorious B.I.G., entitled "I'll Be Missin' You". Sting was credited on the record, however Andy Summers, who provided the distinctive guitar riff, received money from the sample being used but didn't receive a writing credit. The song was performed with Sting himself at the Grammy Awards. As with many of Puff Daddy's releases, his song was criticized for a perceived over-reliance on the original.

Available on the album "Synchronicity"

Deep Purple - "Smoke on the water"

2005-04-21T14:25:00.000+02:00

The song is about a fire in the Casino at Montreux, Switzerland. The band was going to record "Machine Head" there (and had rented a mobile recording studio), but someone (during the concert) fired a flare gun at the ceiling which set the place on fire. The "smoke on the water" that became the title of the song referred to the smoke from the fire spreading over Lake Geneva from the burning casino as the members of Deep Purple watched the fire from their hotel across the lake.

Left with an expensive mobile recording unit and no place to record, the band was forced to scout the town for another place to set up. One promising venue was a local theatre called The Pavilion, in an effort to capture a reverberative sound; but soon after the band had loaded in and started working/recording, the nearby neighbors took offense at the noise, and the band was able to lay down backing tracks for only one song before the local police shut them down.
Finally, after about a week of searching, the band rented out the nearly-empty Montreux Grand Hotel and converted its hallways and stairwells into a makeshift recording studio, where they laid down most of the tracks for what would become their most successful album.
Ironically, the only song from Machine Head not recorded in the Grand Hotel was "Smoke on the Water" itself ; the basic tracks for the song had been the only things recorded during the aborted session in the Grand Hotel.

The song is known for and recognizable by its central theme, a crunching four-tone minor key blues progression (I-III-IV with a passing flat V) that is perhaps the single most famous riff in heavy metal music history. The riff is properly played without a pick, using two fingers to pluck two adjecent strings held in a IV interval. The riff, played on electric guitar by Ritchie Blackmore, is immediately joined by drums and contrapuntal electric bass and organ parts before the start of Ian Gillan's vocal. Despite the heaviness of the guitar part, constant movement and interplay within the supporting parts keeps the feel of the song from becoming leaden. The song's structure takes a contrasting verse-chorus form, with the driving verse sections building musical tension while the soaring chorus releases it.

The band did not think this would be a hit [!] and rarely played it live. It took off when they released it as a US single over a year after the album came out.

Available on the album "Machine Head" (hence the name of the 90's metal band)

ABBA - "Dancing queen"

2005-04-20T11:10:00.000+02:00

This was written by Abba members Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson. They were inspired by Queen Silvia, who married King Gustaf XVI of Sweden in 1976. Abba performed this at a televised tribute to the couple the day before they were married.

The song preceded and contributed to the huge popularity of disco music in the late seventies. Although it does not contain many of the most common key characteristics of disco music, it has come to be considered as one of the best examples of this genre. This is somewhat ironic as its relatively slow tempo and syncopated rhythm make it quite difficult to dance to.

Its introduction of piano and hummed vocals is one of the most identifiable sections of ABBA's music. Another unusual aspect of the song is that it begins with its chorus.

Available on the album "Arrival"

The Rolling Stones - "(I can't get no) Satisfaction"

2005-04-19T16:29:00.000+02:00

As with many Rolling Stones songs, the key hook is the guitar riff : a fuzz-toned, insistent series of ascending and descending notes. One night in 1965, Keith Richards (guitars) woke up in his hotel room with a guitar riff and the lyric "Can't get no satisfaction" in his head. He turned on his tape recorder, grabbed his guitar, and banged out the opening riff of (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, and went back to sleep. In the morning he listened to the tape. As he recalls, "It was 2 minutes of 'Satisfaction' and 40 minutes of me snoring”.
Later, Richards brought it to the studio where the Stones were recording. Mick Jagger (vocals) took an immediate liking to the riff, unlike Richards, who was worried it sounded too much like Martha & The Vandellas' "Dancing in the Street" [which, BTW, isn’t that obvious].

The group approached the verse with a series of increasingly urgent, tense harmonizations on the words "and I try" before exploding into the chorus: a cathartic release of all the frustration that has been building throughout the song, the opening riff reappearing in full force as Jagger half-screams the title in a manner that compels the listener to sing-shout along. The chorus then turns into a stream-of-consciousness catalog of complaints about the irritations of modern life, touring, the media, and getting laid. It returns again to the basic shout-hook before all instruments drop out, save a crunching drumbeat. Note how much of the track's texture is set by strumming acoustic guitars; also dig how on the fade-out, Jagger suddenly dips into a lower register for a few lines before shouting at the top of his range, increasing the tension yet further. The Rolling Stones, perhaps, did not realize just how potent the track was at first.

To create the final effect heard on the release, Richards ran his guitar's sound through a Gibson Maestro fuzzbox which he had just received. He thought it would sustain the sound of the guitar to assist a horn section he had planned for "Satisfaction", but the effect was not the one he desired. Reluctant to include the sound on the release, he suggested avoiding further use of the fuzzbox. The other Stones thought the distortion effect created was great and eventually won out over Richards. As for Gibson, it was the first fuzzbox effect that the makers had made, and due to the popularity of the song they'd sold out of them by the end of that year.

Jack Nitzsche worked with The Stones on this, playing piano and helping produce it. He also played the tambourine part because he thought Jagger's attempt lacked soul [!]. Nitzsche was at that time a successful producer.

The song's publishing rights, oddly enough, do not belong to any members of the Rolling Stones. In 1965, they signed a deal with an American lawyer named Allen Klein and let him make some creative accounting maneuvers to avoid steep British taxes. He ended up controlling most of their money, and in order to get out of their contract, The Stones signed over the publishing rights to all the songs they wrote up to 1969.

Richards later described his first opinion of the song : “It was just a riff. I woke up in the middle of the night, put it down on a cassette. I thought it was great then. Went to sleep and when I woke up, it appeared to be as useful as any other album track. The words I'd written for that riff were “I can't get no satisfaction”. But it could just as well have been 'Auntie Millie's Caught Her Left Tit in the Mangle'.
As for the Stones’ sound, Richards claims he can hear Satisfaction's riff in half the songs the Stones have done: "I'm almost to the point now, after writing songs for so many years, that there is only one song – it's just the variations you come up with."

John Lennon once said that "the best songs are the ones that come to you in the middle of the night and you have to get up and write them down, so you can go back to sleep". Ironically, despite him having dreamt up the riff that created the hit (much like Paul McCartney dreamt up the tune for "Yesterday"), much of Richards' ideas for "Satisfaction" were eventually dropped, including the horn section he had wanted.

Available on the album "Out of our heads"

Eminem - "Stan"

2005-04-06T09:53:00.000+02:00

[Lifted from the April 2005 issue of Q Magazine]

Eminem : "I attract some fucking weirdos. I've had people trying to kiss my hand, dudes crying and shit". It was precisely these sort of experiences that would provide the inspiration for the most pivotal song of Eminem's career : the tale of a stalker who bombards his idol with a series of increasingly twisted letters before killing himself and his girlfriend.

In 1998, Brooklyn hip hop producer Mark James saw a trailer for a romantic comedy called "Sliding Doors", featuring a snippet of a lifting love song called "Thank you", by then unknown British singer Dido. James : "They only played the first verse, but it made an impression". James built a framework of beats around a sample of the song's opening lines and sent it to Eminem's manager. Eminem : "I got a tape with the music for what would become "Stan" on it. I heard it and I said I need this". Rather than a love song, though, Eminem interpreted "Thank you" in a completely different light. Eminem : "When I heard the words, I was like 'This is an obsessed fan'. Dido's lyrics instantly put me there. It was one of the few songs where I mapped everything out. I knew it what it was all about from the stars".

Work began on Eminem's second album, "The Marshall Mathers LP", in 1999. The pressure was on to deliver a big-hitting follow-up to his 4 million debut album, "The Slim Shady LP". The mood was focused, only the rapper, the manager Paul Rosenberg and a few studio hands were present. "Stan" was one of the first songs Eminem recorded. Mike Elizondo (bass) : We recorded "Stan" in one afternoon. It wasn't until he [Eminem] played it back that I realized what he'd created. I can't think of anyone else who could do that and it not be corny".

Back in London, Dido was unaware the part her original song, "Thank you", was playing in hip hop history. Dido : "I got a letter out of the blue. It said 'We like your album and we've used this track. Hope you don't mind and hope you like it'". Dido was obviously the biggest beneficiary of "Stan"'s success : her appearance on the song gave her debut album, "No Angel", a new lease of life and went on to sell over 8 million copies.

Available on the album "The Marshall Mathers LP"

Aerosmith - "Sweet emotion"

2005-03-29T13:23:00.000+02:00

A bass-driven song...

Tom Hamilton (bass) : "The bass riff came first. I wrote that line and realized I should think of some guitar parts for it if I was ever going to get a chance to present it to the band. I didn't think I ever would. But it was at the end of the recording and Jack [Douglas, producer of the album] said, 'Tomorrow's jam day, if anybody's got a stray riff hanging around'. So I spent the day showing everybody and we took it from there. Steven [Tyler, vocals] had the idea of taking that intro riff, which became the chorus bass line under the "Sweet emotion" part, and transposing it into the key of E, and making it a really heavy Zeppelin-esque thing".
Brad Whitford (guitars) : "We kind of bastardized that lick from [Jeff Beck's] "Rice Pudding." [i.e., the transitional guitar riff that comes between verses and leads into choruses]".
Hamilton : That part came from all the times that we listened to [Beck's] "Rough and Ready" album".
Tyler : [to Joe Perry, lead guitars] "Remember, we didn't know how to end it ? We got into a big fight. Cocaine was all over the place. It was late and we were at the end of our rope. Finally I said, 'Just fuckin' play a drum fill and we'll go into...[sings outro riff]'. And we did it. It was such a magic moment".
Perry : "We knew it would be killer live - a show stopper. So then the f*ckin' record company got it and said, 'What can we maul to get this on the radio ?' The single version of "Sweet Emotion" is pretty chopped up. They edited it down to just the melodic element. But that's how it was done back then".

Available on the album "Toys in the attic"

Suzanne Vega - "Luka"

2005-03-23T19:29:00.000+01:00

Suzanne Vega : "In some parts of the world. I'm "The Luka Chick", as Beavis and Butt-head put it. And that's okay. I was glad it was that song that made a big noise in the world because I think it was a good song, and an unusual song to become popular. I would much rather have it be that than some little love song - I'm not likely to write them, anyway - or something more stupid".

For Suzanne Vega, the creative process often begins with a chord progression and a rhythm. Vega : "I like chords that are augmented or diminished, and sometimes I build around a minor. 'Luka' was the one exception : It begins on a major chord and has a major-chord feeling all the way through. Usually when I first start writing the words, there's a piece missing, like a bridge or part of a chorus. 'Luka' definitely began with the chords an the rhythm, and then the words fit the song. It is based on a person that I didn't know very well. I'd only seen him once or twice, but I knew his name was Luka, and I based it on his character. I don't think he was an abused child the way the child is abused in the song, so it was a mixture between fact and fiction. It never says that he's abused, but if you look at the words, he says everything that a kid would say who is being abused but won't come out and say it. I don't write about myself, but from the part of me that's the same in everyone."

The reason why Vega uses short words when writing her lyrics is not as one would imagine : "I prefer short words to long ones, because I find that's the quickest way to get someone's attention. If you say, 'My name is Luka/ I live on the second floor,' you're drawn into this picture because it's such specific, concrete information and the language is so simple. But the funny thing was that two years ago I found out that I was an asthmatic - I had never before been diagnosed as having asthma. When I mentioned this to my drummer, he laughed and said he figured that was a reason why I had such short phrases ! I have short words, short phrases, and I don't stand around holding the note or using any vibrato, because I can't - I have no breath. So I guess it's all developed in a way that suits my style. I mean it sounds kind of pathetic, but it isn't, really : it's just making the best of your own limitations, which is kind of what a style is. Developing a style means finding out where your limits are and making the best of them."

Available on the album "Solitude standing"

Robbie Williams - "Angels"

2005-03-22T12:06:00.000+01:00

Take That were obviously never going to be an easy act to follow.

Robbie Williams' first two singles had done pretty well, but the next two singles started a disturbing downward trend. It was at this point that his managers suggested the fifth songwriting collaborator in 18 months – a certain Guy Chambers. Rumour has it that Williams agreed mainly because his mum's boyfriend had 'quite liked' the mediocre pop outfit The Lemon Trees that Chambers had been in.

Whatever the reason, the pair hit it off straightaway and in the first session impressively wrote four songs. Even more remarkable was that "Angels" was the first song they tackled and apparently wrote it in under 30 minutes. Contrary to popular belief, Chambers wasn't responsible for the majority of the song and the credit is equally due : "in the main he was responsible for the lyrics and melody, and I did the music. It was very equal. Rob knew exactly what he wanted to say, and how he wanted to say it."

As important as the success of the single was the fact that he also ceased to be 'that fat dancer from Take That' (as Gallagher brothers from Oasis called him) and finally got the recognition he felt he deserved. Many Britpop fans felt that "Angels" was an attempt to cash in on the then huge Britpop craze by writing a mainstream song in a similar style.

Read how reviewer Dominic King described the musicality of the song and its impact on William's career : "This booted football fan Robbie Williams into the Premier Division. First the big move - a root triad leaps boldly to the ninth on "and through it all". Then some fancy footwork - on the last syllable of "protection" the ninth hangs suspended over the relative minor. A series of fluid passing notes lead us onto the winning score - the George Harrisonesque guitar solo kicking off on the dominant minor. Goooooaaaalllll !"

"Angels" is constantly played on pub jukeboxes. A review of it said that it "taps into the sentimental old git in all of us".

Available on the album "Life through a lens"

Leonard Cohen - "Suzanne"

2005-03-17T13:39:00.000+01:00

Contrary to popular belief, the song "Suzanne", one of Leonard Cohen's best-known songs, takes its title from the name of Suzanne Vaillancourt, the wife of a friend, and not from the name of his own wife.

And though, as Cohen says, "The song was begun [in 1966], and the chord and picking pattern were developed before a woman's name entered the song. I knew it was a song about Montreal : it seemed to come out of that landscape that I loved very much in Montreal, which was the harbour, and the waterfront, and the sailors' church there, called Notre Dame de Bon Secour, which stood out over the river, and I knew that there're ships going by, I knew that there was a harbour, I knew that there was Our Lady of the Harbour, which was the virgin on the church which stretched out her arms towards the seamen, and you can climb up to the tower and look out over the river, so the song came from that vision, from that view of the river. I knew there was a song there".

A woman only fit in the picture after that. Cohen : "At a certain point, I bumped into Suzanne Vaillancourt, who was the wife of a friend of mine, they were a stunning couple around Montreal at the time. There was no... well, there was thought, but there was no possibility, one would not allow oneself to think of toiling at the seduction of Armand Vaillancourt's wife. He was a friend. I bumped into her one evening, and she invited me down to her place near the river. She had a loft, at a time when lofts were... the word wasn't used. She had a space in a warehouse down there, and she invited me down, and I went with her, and she served me Constant Comment tea, which has little bits of oranges in it. And the boats were going by, and I touched her perfect body with my mind, because there was no other opportunity. There was no other way that you could touch her perfect body under those circumstances. So she provided the name in the song".

Cohen worked months and months on the song for matters of intensity. Cohen : "I was still able to juggle stuff: a life, a woman, a dream, other ambitions, other tangents. At a certain point I realized I only had one ball in my hand, and that was The Song".

Before "Suzanne" was released under Cohen's own name, Judy Collins recorded her poignant version of the song that introduced it to the world. Cohen met the folk singer and later sang "Suzanne" down the phone to her and she immediately promised to record it, which she did (124 covers of the song have since been listed). Cohen : "The publishing rights were taken away from me but it is probably appropriate that I don't own this song. I have heard some people singing it on a ship in the Caspian Sea."

About Cohen's relationship with John Simon (producer of the album "Songs Of Leonard Cohen") : "We had a falling out over the song Suzanne. He wanted a heavy piano syncopated and maybe drums and I didn't want drums on any of my songs, so that was a bone of contention. Also, he was ready to substitute this heavy chordal structure under the song to give it forward movement and I didn't like that".

And as for Suzanne ? The young woman is still alive. She was kind of pissed off at Cohen because she felt he should have cut her in on the profits, but Cohen lost the rights of the song anyway.

Available on the album "Songs of Leonard Cohen"

David Bowie - "Battle for Britain"

2005-03-14T16:10:00.000+01:00

David started playing guitar in the mid sixties. The first grown-up thing he ever learned to play on guitar was shown to him by Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin guitarist) when he was a session man. Bowie : "I was doing a session with one of the many bands that I had then. He showed me this riff - alternating F# barre chord to open E string, G chord to open E riff. I thought it was so cool ! I played it over and over. There's a certain enthusiasm of that moment when you learn to play something that never gets lost. It's become the core of who I am and what I do. Whenever I want to bring back that enthusiasm, I dust off that lick".

Bowie definitely wanted to get that enthusiasm back in the second half of the 90's. Bowie : "I used that same riff on "Battle For Britain", one of the first riffs I ever learned. It was just opening up that E string. That's made me so aware of keeping the E's open and taking the chords through it. And it was because of Page".

Available on the album "Earthling"

Michael Jackson - "Beat it"

2005-03-02T18:51:00.000+01:00

Michael Jackson does not read or write music. During his composing process, he sings the melody and vocally imitates the bassline, strings and other parts into a tape recorder. Jackson : "The process is creating a vocal rythm to a click track, which is a sound, a time beat. And I do mouth sounds to that beat. These sounds can be looped according to how you sample it in the computer again and again. This is the foundation for the entire track, everything plays off this. It's the rythm, like the beatbox rythm. Every song I've writtent since I was very little I've done that way and I still do it that way". At times, he sings the sounds directly to the musicians, and when they accurately reproduce his ideas, this is recorded. The tape is then turned to others who transcribe the notes onto staff sheets.

Jackson came up with "Beat it" when his producer, Quincy Jones, encouraged him to write something like "My Sharona", which was a huge hit for The Knack in 1979. Eddie Van Halen played the guitar solo ; he did it as a favor for Quincy Jones. Van Halen wrote the solo by himself and not according to melodies popping out of Jackson's head, though he was not paid for his effort.

Available on the album "Thriller"

R.E.M. - "What's the frequency, Kenneth ?"

2005-02-28T19:19:00.000+01:00

There is a song by the band Game Theory on their 1987 album Lolita Nation called "Kenneth, what's the frequency ?" It was produced by Mitch Easter, who was also the producer for R.E.M. albums "Chronic Town", "Murmur", and "Reckoning". Coincidence ? Yes. Both song titles are related to an incident that occurred in 1986.

One October night of that year, CBS news anchor Dan Rather was walking down a Manhattan street when he was punched from behind and thrown to the ground. His assailant kicked and beat him while repeating, "Kenneth, what is the frequency ?" No one could explain the event, and the rumors flew fast and wide. "What's the frequency ?" and calling a clueless person a "kenneth" became trendy youth culture catch-phrases which is probably why Michael Stipe (vocals) wanted to use them, rather than out of interest for Rather. The incident also became a running joke on "The David Letterman Show". Rather had a good sense of humor about the whole event and later appeared on the show, singing the song with R.E.M. backing him.

In 1997, based on a tip from a psychiatrist, Rather's attacker was identified as William Tager. According to the psychiatrist, Tager, who is currently serving time for killing an NBC stagehand, blamed news media for beaming signals into his head, and thought if he could just find out the correct frequency, he could block those signals that were constantly assailing him. Hence the enigmatic inquiry.

As for the actual writing of the song, Peter Buck (guitars) explains : "Mike (Mills, bass) came up with the chords to "Kenneth," and I helped him rearrange them. It was weird, because I really couldn't get a handle on it at first. It's so circular, I couldn't tell the A from the B section. Michael was asking : "Where do I sing on this one ?" Then we simplified it, chopped out a couple of parts, including a bridge, and, as we accented the chords, the pieces began to fall into place".

"It slows down at the end. The truth is, Mike slowed down the pace and we all followed, and then I noticed he looked strange. We had to rush him to the hospital and it turned out he had appendicitis. So we never got back to re-recording it".

Available on the album "Monster"

Metallica - "Enter sandman"

2005-02-23T18:34:00.000+01:00

"Enter Sandman" is the first song on the self titled "Metallica" album and it is "a one-riff song", according to Lars Ulrich (drums) : "The whole intro, the verse, the bridge, the chorus, all that stuff is the same riff.'' "Enter Sandman" was also the first song written for the album. Ulrich : "That's why it's the leadoff track. To me, it was 'Here's the new vibe gone right to the extreme'".

Apparently, the riff was created one night when Kirk Hammett (guitars) was drunk and picked up his guitar and started recording stuff on a tape recorder. Once the tape stopped, he went to sleep. James Hetfield (vocals and guitars) picked this up in the morning and heard the riff and got Hammett to play it again.

Concerning the guitar solo, Kirk Hammett (guitars) : "I started thinking, 'If Brian Robertson from Thin Lizzy played on this song, what would he play ?' With that mind-set, I started playing what I thought Brian Robertson would play on a song like that, and the entire guitar solo wrote itself ! You know how the guitar solo goes : it plays out, and then there's a lead guitar break that leads into a breakdown ? Here's where I actually got that lick : it's from "Magic Man" by Heart, but I didn't get it from Heart's version ; I got it from a cut off Ice-T's "Power" album, where he used it as a sample. I was listening to "Power" a lot while we were recording "Metallica", so I kept on hearing that lick. I thought, I have to sneak this ! I did change it around a bit, though !"

"Strangely" enough, after the US invaded Iraq in 2003, this was one of the songs they played over and over in sessions designed to break the will of Saddam Hussein's supporters.

Available on the album "Metallica"

The Smiths - "Some girls are bigger than others"

2005-02-22T10:12:00.000+01:00

The curious fade in/out at the start of the song was apparently not made on purpose.

Indeed, engineers and producers often "spoil" mixes they send to record companies so they cannot be used. The most common way of doing this is by whacking the faders down to just below half (to throw to haywire the noise reduction systems) within the first 30 seconds - just as in this song. It means the client (in other words the record company) gets a good idea of the mix but also something totally unreleasable. Normally this is done to ensure payment for a track. The guess is that production on all aspects of the album was so behind schedule, and Rough Trade (The Smiths' record company) were in such a hurry to get it out, they didn't bother to check the master too thoroughly.

Available on the album "The Queen is Dead"

The Verve - "Bitter sweet symphony"

2005-02-21T12:53:00.000+01:00

If you believe the credits in the CD booklet of "Urban Hymns" (on which you can find the song), the Verve neither wrote nor played on "Bitter Sweet Symphony". The composition is credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (though there is a little line that concedes : "Lyrics be Richard Ashcroft") and the song is "performed by the Andrew Oldham Orchestra". ABKCO Music, which controls the copyrights to the biggest hits in the Rolling Stones' Sixties song catalog, owns 100 per cent of the publishing rights to "Bitter Sweet Symphony."

Jagger and Richards did write part of "Bitter Sweet Symphony" – the guitar and vocal riffs in "The Last Time" that were rearranged in marginally recognisable, shlocko form for a mid-sixties Stone-on-strings album speciously credited to Oldham, the band's early manager. Ashcroft admits that, when he bought a copy of the original Oldham record a few years ago, he knew that the orchestrated "Last Time" lick could be "turned into something outrageous".

Ashcroft has paid dearly for his inspiration. Just as "Bitter Sweet Symphony" was about to be issued as a single, ABKCO Music head Allen Klein refused clearance of the sample. Jazz Summers, the Verve's co-manager, went to top Virgin Records brass in the US for help. Virgin vice chairman Nancy Berry played "Bitter Sweet Symphony" for Jagger and Richards, who reportedly liked the track but declined to get involved in the fracas.
Summers also sent a cassette of "Bitter Sweet Symphony" to Oldham, who now lives in Bogota. Summers : "Andrew Oldham sent me this fabulous note. He said, 'Fair cop ! Absolute total pinch ! You can see why ABKCO are rolling up their sleeves'". Klein finally approved clearance in what Summers now describes as "a fifty-fifty deal – fifty per cent Keith Richards and fifty per cent Mick Jagger".

"We sampled four bars" Ashcroft says of the Oldham-record riff. "That was on one track. Then we did forty-seven tracks of music beyond that little piece. We've got our own string players, our own percussion on it. Guitars. We're talking about a four-bar sample turning into "Bitter Sweet Symphony" – and they're still claiming it's the same song".

Nevertheless, Ashcroft has learned to live with the fact that "Bitter Sweet Symphony" is no longer his – legally anyway. He's called it the best song Jagger and Richards have written in twenty years." And he talks, keenly and at great length, about the genesis of "Bitter Sweet Symphony", about what he means by outrageous. "I wanted something that opened up into a prairie-music kind of sound, a modern day Ennio Morricone kind of thing. Then after a while, the song started morphing into this wall of sound. There are three or four vocals in there. It's like an outro to a Temptations record, except I'm the four guys in a row: the rhythm one underneath, the sex and violence voices, like a doo-wop thing".

Chris Potter (sound engineer for the album) on the whole process of recording the song : "It started with the infamous Andrew Loog Oldham loop which Peter (Salisbury, drums) and Simon (Jones, bass) played over the top of. That loop, just for the record, is very little. It's a basic chord progression and a couple of bongos, it's not the string riff. It's no big deal. Then we started laying down guitars and vocals and things. I remember we used quite a lot of loops. I think some of the guitars were looped guitars that start at the beginning of the track and end at the end of the track. We didn't have too much of a musical arrangement for it until quite late on. It hadn't been set in stone. A lot of things on this track go from beginning to end, playing all the way through on the tape, so we muted things in and out in order to get the musical arrangement. There are Nick (McCabe, guitars)'s guitar noises at the beginning. It was one of the first things he played on. He gets amazing things out of guitar feedback, that you've never heard before. He seems to be able to control it and when you think about what guitar feedback is, it's a really difficult thing to keep a rein on and make the tones and noises that you want to. He's really incredibly good at it, so that's what those swirly, seagull noises are. He also plays some Coral (electric) Sitar on this. I still hear things in this record and I can't quite put my finger what they are, and I know exactly what's on it, I mixed the bloody thing. You can hear the way that some things mingle against each other and some sounds sort of intertwine producing some other sound as a result. There's a lot of stuff on it, it was a bit of a kitchen sink job sometimes, this record. Some of the sounds only come in for odd moments here and there, the odd bar".

"It was the right first single from the album but when it was first talked about as first single I was quite surprised. We hadn't finished it at that point and it developed much further until in the end there wasn't really any other choice. The first single couldn't have been anything else".

Ashcroft: "It's beyond hiphop. With hiphop now, the trend is to leave the thing they've sampled as the hook, to sell more records. This song was old-school hiphop – take something but twist it into something else. Take it and use your imagination".

Available on the album "Urban Hymns"

Placebo - "Pure morning"

2005-02-18T14:00:00.000+01:00

"Without You I'm Nothing" (Placebo's second album) was co-produced by Steve Osbourne, previously mixer for Happy Mondays and U2. Brian Molko (vocals and guitars) : "We wanted someone who had one foot in the dance camp, to texture our music in a slightly more modern way. Because, as most of our songs were written at soundchecks, the basic recording is quite straightforward, but there's also a lot of trickery involved".

The exception to the Osbourne-produced sessions is the song "Pure Morning", which grew from a spate of cutting new b-sides with Phil Vinall at London's Livingstone Studios when Placebo unwisely believed the album was dusted. Molko : "Pure morning didn't even exist before we went into the studio one morning. We worked up a loop - it came out of nowhere, really - and before the end of the day we had a song. I immediately thought it should be the first single". And it was indeed.

Available on the album "Without You I'm Nothing"

AC/DC - "Thunderstruck"

2005-02-17T18:34:00.000+01:00

A lot of AC/DC's hooks are single string riffs where Angus Young (guitars) alternates between freted notes and playing the open string. Like "Thunderstruck" for example.

The famous intro/main theme for the song came from a warmup guitar exercise he learned for stretching his fingers. Angus Young : "I was just fiddling around with my left hand when I came up with that riff. I played it more by accident than anything. I thought 'not bad' and put it on tape". Sounds so easy...

When recording that part of the song, all of the other strings were taken off his guitar except for the B string (second thinnest) so that no accidental notes would be hit.

Available on the album "The Razor's Edge"

Green Day - "Homecoming"

2005-02-16T19:49:00.000+01:00

Billie Joe Armstrong (vocals and guitars) wrote what was the first single of Green Day's last album to date, the song "American Idiot". He'd written a bunch of other songs too, but the band felt that this song was far better so it was like : "This is where we should start from". So they scrapped all of what they had done before. But the song "American Idiot" proved a hard fact to follow. Mike Dirnt (bass) found the solution : comic relief.

Tré Cool (drums) : "Mike was in the studio one day, and he wrote this 30-second song that was really funny and cool. It was basically a song about being alone in the studio. Then Billie came back and was like, 'Oh I want to do that', and he wrote a 30-second song and stuck that on the end of Mike's. Then they were like, 'Tré, you make one'. So then I made one, and then Mike made another one, and Billie made another one, and we kept that going until we had ten minutes of music. It started off funny and took more of a serious turn towards the end. We were trying to out-do each other and make it better than the one we did before".

Armstrong : "We kept connecting these little half-minutes bits until we had something. I wanted to have one great part after another - boom, boom, boom - all put together really well. It's a tricky thing to do and the transitions are really important".

Cool : "A lot of things came from the idea of writing a bunch of 30-second songs". One of those is of course the song "Homecoming", one of the two "rock operas" on the album that last for 9 minutes.

Available on the album "American Idiot"

4 Non Blondes "What's up"

2005-02-14T19:07:00.000+01:00

Christa Hillhouse (bass) : "For a short time, Linda (Perry, singer and main songwriter) had quit her job and she was living with me in this little 2-bedroom flat in San Francisco. She wrote the song when she was in a room down the hall. I was in my bedroom having sex [!], and I stopped because I heard her playing that song. I remember running down the hall and saying, 'Dude, what are you playing? I like that.' We had a lot of rock, thrashy stuff back then, but Linda always would pull her ballads out. I remember being struck by it. She kept looking at me, going, 'Does this sound like something? Am I plagiarizing someone?" I said, 'Finish the song, it's beautiful.'".

The title is not in the lyrics. The chorus refrain is "What's Going On," but that's the name of a 1971 Marvin Gaye R&B classic, so they always called the song "What's Up".

Hillhouse: "For any song, people are going to try to read deliberate meaning into, but when Linda wrote the song, she was just sitting down the hall. We played guitar all the time, that's all we ever did. We practiced every day. I know people who think about formulas when they write a song or they think about structure - Linda has never lived that way. Linda's pretty organic in that way, she just sits down and starts singing what she's feeling. There is a difference between the songs she wrote then and the songs she writes now [she writes songs for the likes of Pink or Christina Aguilera]. She got to a point now where I think she is thinking about them structurally, but back then, she played acoustic guitar and all the songs she wrote she'd just sit there and here they'd come. A lot of people write like that. I write like that - a song is kind of there already and you're like the speaker. All of the sudden there's a song in my head and I don't know where it came from."

Hillhouse: "Recording that song was interesting. We recorded it with the rest of our album in Calabasas in Southern California with this producer, and Jimmy Iovine at Interscope heard the version we recorded with Interscope and then he heard the version we did on our demo take, and Jimmy Iovine liked the demo better. It was a cassette. He and Linda met, and then Linda came and said, 'We're going to re-record it.' I was like, 'Good,' because it got a little too foofed up in major production land - it softened it up and took something out of it. We went to Sausalito and recorded it separately in one day, raw, because Jimmy Iovine knew the demo version was better than the one we did with the producer and all the fancy equipment."

Hillhouse: "The song was an expression of something she was feeling, and it ended up being a pretty universal experience. There's just something there that's pure, that you almost can't define, and that's the thing. We were just living as honest a life as we could, and I think the music that came out of it had heart. I remember when she was writing the verses to What's Up, she knew it so well, she thought she heard it before. I think that's why the song connects with so many people. What she was feeling she was able to translate. If you look at the lyrics, they don't mean anything. It's the way the song makes certain people feel. In Europe, they don't speak English, but they know every broken-English word, and that song makes them feel something. I knew right when we played it, the song made the whole room feel this thing. It's a connection to humanity. Certain simple songs, that's what they do. There's an honesty there that breaks through that people can relate to. Then of course they played that song to death and a lot of people are really sick of it."

Available on the album "Bigger, Better, Faster, More"

Portishead - "Half day closing"

2005-02-08T13:41:00.000+01:00

Adrian Utley (guitars, moog, song writer): "It took us two years to make this album because we got into a really bad hole after our first album and tour. We were miserable and blocked about what we were doing. I feel that 'Half Day Closing' got us out of that. We thought, 'Let's just do this; let's just finish something.'" [could there be a song having the same effect for their long awaited 3rd studio album?]
"It was a departure for us, really, because there are no samples on it -it's Geoff and me playing live. It was inspired by an album by the United States of America, from 1967 or '69. It's a psychedelic band that people tell us is quite obscure. We tracked up loads of weird Moog stuff over the top - weird noises and odd melodies. And we put Beth's vocals through a rotating organ cabinet called a Leslie. We just sort of tripped out, really".

Geoff Barrow (songwriter, decks, drummer): "It's kind of roughly based on an old psychedelic track from the United States of America, an old psychedelic band. It's really weird because I don't know musically how similar it is. I know it's styled on it. It's the only one I play drums all the way through in, which I was absolutely chuffed with, I've actually managed to play drums through a whole track. Rather than it being based on samples, that was the turning point of the record really because what we did is that Dave put up some channels, me and Ade went into the studio, I got on the drums Ade got on the bass and we recorded it start to finish. We usually use samples and stuff like that and spend ages on arrangements but literally we just went "okay let's record it" so we recorded this track and built it up like a normal guitar band would build up a track and mixed it like it as well. It's kind of like people will say it's a bit psychedelic or whatever but I don't know. We were just on that thing of nothing mattered, the whole Portsishead thing didn't matter. We were just going to enjoy recording a track - didn't matter what it sounded like, we were just going to bang it out and be noisy and not kind of rock noisy".

"It wasn't even going to be on the album it was just something to do to really be inspired by music again and feel like you're doing it for the enjoyment rather than you're doing it because of a business. And that's pretty much how it came together and it ended up on the album and its one of my favourite tracks".

Available on the album "Portishead"

The Calling - "Wherever you will go"

2005-02-04T13:14:00.000+01:00

Alex Band (vocals and guitars) : "Me and Aaron (Karmin - guitars and co-songwriter) came up with it together, it was one of the first songs I've ever written, although we never finished it until a year later. We just came up with it while we were jamming on our acoustics one day. I never dreamed that from that simple riff it'd become this huge song [well, you, reader and listener, will make your own opinion on that slightly arbitrary comment!]. It's just a handful of chords really but that's often the best way. We've never set out to write complicated songs, and I don't think we ever will".

Available on the album "Camino Palmero"

Ryan Adams - "Shallow"

2005-02-01T14:25:00.000+01:00

Does Ryan Adams listen to other people’s songs and deliberately steal ideas? Or try to play like them and then come up with his own variation? Ryan Adams : "Even when I’m trying to write in a vacuum and do something just based on a bass guitar line, I’ll find references to other songs. I can’t tell you how many times that’s happened. So instead of just avoiding them I go, ‘Oh this kinda reminds me of…’ I usually mean what I’m singing, and so I figure that’s the main point".

"Shallow" is Ryan Adams ripping off Oasis ripping-off T.Rex (who probably ripped-off some blues guy in the first place), complete with Liam Gallagher-style vocal and a lyric that apes ‘Roll With It’s’ "You gotta say what say don’t let anyone get in your way". Ryan : "Yeah. That’s totally my homage to Noel Gallagher and those guys. We had this T.Rex part and I thought it needed a middle eight, so I was gonna go total Oasis. ‘Cos there’s no point NOT doing it".

Ryan : "The record’s called ‘Rock N Roll’, so it really is me playing homage to all this rock’n’ roll music I’ve loved forever, so I didn’t care. Maybe some people won’t get the joke and they’ll say, ‘He’s just ripping people off left and right!’ It’s like, ‘NO ! – that’s the point!’"

Available on the album "Rock'n Roll"

George Michael - "Careless whisper"

2005-01-24T18:58:00.000+01:00

“Careless Whisper” was George Michael’s first solo single, although it was actually co-written with his Wham! bandmate Andrew Ridgeley when they were 16, on a bus (Wham!’s first demo actually contained 40 seconds of “Careless Whisper”). Contrary to popular belief, the song was not based on an actual event in George Michael's high school dating life, George himself admitting that he “knew nothing about romance and certainly nothing about love”. It was a fictitious story, but the song still was a hit.

The song was deemed too 'low-key' for a release by a teenage pop sensation like Wham!, and that’s why George released it on his own. More importantly, by 1984, George was making plans for a post-Wham! career - and “Careless Whisper” had a big role to play in those plans.
It was billed as a George Michael solo single in the UK, although in America it was credited to Wham! featuring George Michael. Michael was being groomed for a solo career and the record company wanted to get his name out. But regardless of the name on the cover, the single was a huge success, taking the top spot on both sides of the Atlantic.

It’s a simple song with just four chords. The track’s main features are the mournful saxophone intro and George’s anguished vocals as he pleads for forgiveness from the lover he’s cheated on.
It was recorded in Paris. The song was arranged and produced by George. He also did the backing vocals. George claims that he has gotten more compliments on his writing of the sax solo at the beginning of the song than on anything else he has ever written.

The irony inherent in thousands of love struck couples smooching to a song about infidelity appears to be lost on most people. Not George though – after all, his “guilty feet have got no rhythm”.

Available on the Wham! album "Make it big"

Milli Vanilli - "Girl you know it's true"

2005-01-18T14:08:00.000+01:00

Ironically, the song “Girl you know it’s true” reached its peak American chart position of #2 on April Fool's Day in 1989.

Ironically, because Milli Vanilli are notorious for being the only group to have their Grammy Award stripped from them after it was revealed that they had not been involved in the creation of their breakthrough album and did not sing in concert.
Rapper Charles Shaw and singers John Davis and Brad Howell were the ones whose voices actually appeared on the record. Frank Farian (the man who created the group) used Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan to front Shaw, Davis and Howell because he felt that these musicians were talented but unmarketable.

Shaw was the one who first spilled the beans about Pilatus and Morvan (the faces of the group) not being the voices on the record and lip-synching during live representations. Embarrassed by the situation, Morvan and Pilatus confronted Farian and insisted that he allow them to sing on their next album. Farian, however, had no interest in agreeing to this, so revealed the truth to reporters on November 15, 1990 after the record of Girl You Know It's True skipped during a live performance on MTV : at a concert in Bristol, Connecticut, the tape skipped, repeating the line "Girl you know it's..." over and over. Pilatus and Morvan sung with it for a little while, and then ran off stage. The crowd didn't seem to care, but the media made a big deal out of it, and they were exposed soon after Farian’s revelation. The Grammy was rescinded four days later, Arista (the record company) dropped the act from its rosters and a court ruling in the US allowed anyone who had bought the album to get a refund (!!!).

For many cultural critics, Milli Vanilli’s story seemed to be a perfect representation of the artificial, pre-packaged nature of the pop music industry itself.

Shaw, Davis and Howell later released an album as “The Real Milli Vanilli”.
Morvan started a solo career, performing light alternative music that is far from his glory days with Milli Vanilli.
Pilatus began a series of criminal acts, arrested for assault and vandalism, among other crimes, in Los Angeles. He died in 1998, at the age of 32, after overdosing on a combination of drugs and alcohol.

Available on “Girl you know it’s true”

Blur - "Song 2"

2005-01-17T18:16:00.001+01:00

“Song 2” is also known as “Whoo-Hooo”.

With loud guitars and cryptic lyrics, Blur wrote the song to make fun of grunge music that was big in America at the time. The band recorded it in about 30 minutes, and the band tried to add more production to the recorded version and finish it off, but without success. They saw this as a learning experience. Alex James (bass) says it was “The realization you don't have to polish everything. Sometimes the thing you do first of all is when you mean it”.

At one point, Blur weren't sure if this was even a contender to be included on the album, thinking it too short. However, their US record company loved it. It ended up being Blur's biggest hit… in the US.

It is the second track on the CD, the second single from the album, it hit #2 in the UK, and it is 2 minutes long.

Available on the album "Blur"

Elton John - "Your song"

2005-01-14T13:52:00.000+01:00

"I don't think I've written a love song as good since." As is the case with so many artists, Elton John’s first hit is also one of his best loved.

Remarkably, lyricist Bernie Taupin was just 17 years old when, in 1967, he wrote the words, although it was not until four years later that the song became a hit.
The duo’s partnership came about by chance. Both Elton and Taupin had replied to a record label advert seeking new talent. Neither did quite enough to impress on their own, but the label saw potential in both and suggested they team up. The pair hit it off straight away and one of pop’s most enduring collaborations was born. Taupin soon moved in with Elton and his mum in north-west London and began furiously bashing out lyrics. “Your Song” was actually conceived one breakfast, while he was eating scrambled eggs. The original lyrics have coffee stains on them.
The most striking thing about the song is its innocence – it couldn’t have been written by anyone other than a teenager who, in Taupin’s own words, “had never got laid in his life”.

Elton wrote the music in about 20 minutes, as he often did with Taupin's lyrics in their early days. Elton’s uncomplicated music complements Taupin’s unpretentious lyrics and that really sums up why “Your Song” has remained such a favourite.

Elton's "We All Fall In Love Sometimes" is about the writing of this song.

Elton John performed the song on The Simpsons. Apu had asked him to serenade his wife, Manjula. The lyrics 'for you' were replaced with 'from Apu'.

Available on the album "Elton John"

Pink Floyd - "Wish you were here"

2005-01-13T18:37:00.000+01:00

The song is about the detached feeling most people go through life with. It is a commentary on how people cope with the world by withdrawing physically, mentally, or emotionally. Roger Waters (bass & vocals) has said this song was based on a poem he wrote about Syd Barrett's (former guitarist) fall from reality. It was said that Syd's friends would lace his coffee with LSD, which eventually lead to his mental breakdown.

David Gilmour (guitars) wrote the music based on Water's lyrics. It is one of the few Pink Floyd songs written this way, as Waters usually had music in mind for his lyrics when he took his songs to the band. Gilmour, who latched onto the elegiac quality of Waters’ lyric and fashioned a simple folky melody.

Syd Barrett, their old band mate, had been in seclusion for years due to drug induced psychosis. During the recording sessions, a fat, shaven-headed person wearing grey Terylene trousers, a nylon shirt and string vest wandered into the studio. The band ignored the visitor and kept on playing and it was the visiting Andrew King who finally recognised their guest: 'Good God, it's Syd! How did you get like that?' To which Syd replied, 'I've got a very large fridge at home and I've been eating a lot of pork chops.' The whole event was slightly un-nerving since the theme of the album was based on Syd and his subsequent madness."

The intro fades in from a car radio, as if the song was appearing from the airwaves, further accentuating the lyrical theme of dislocation and absence. David Gilmour then begins to play along to the radio - in stereo. Waters had the idea to "bunch up" the sound to mimic an AM radio, and Gilmour played along with it. You can hear extraneous noises from Gilmour, sniffling and others noises.
At the end, listeners with perfect hearing may just be able to discern a violin amongst the wind effects on the fade, performed by an un-credited Stephane Grappelli, famous jazz musician who was recording in nearby studios.
Musically, the song is in constant pivot between an optimistic G Major and a downcast E Minor. The song fades out before this change can ever be fully resolved.

It is the only song co-written by Waters and Gilmour that Waters continued to play at his shows after leaving Pink Floyd.

Available on the album "Wish you were here"

U2 - "One"

2005-01-11T18:47:00.000+01:00

The band wrote the song in Berlin after toiling there for months trying to record Achtung Baby. The Edge (guitars) : "It was autumn 1990. We were in Berlin, at Hansa Studios (formerly a Nazi mess hall) where Bowie recorded 'Heroes', trying to get traction with some new songs. It wasn't going well. Adam (Clayton, bass) and Larry (Mullen, drums)'s rather jaundiced view of Bono's and my songwriting ability was becoming more and more evident as our various experiments went nowhere. We were listening to a lot of industrial music, and the sounds we were making were quite intense".

The Edge : "It was a very pivotal song in the recording of the album -- the first sort of breakthrough in what was an extremely difficult set of sessions in Berlin. I like the lyric a lot because it treads a very fine line between becoming too clear, too jingoistic, but in the end it never does... stays personal".

The song apparently came from nowhere. Bono had a couple of middle-eights that fitted together, and it was while fiddling around with these mongrel tunes that the inordinately emotive lyrics of "One" began to seep through. "They just fell out of the sky," says Bono. "A gift from above." This much he knows: the Dalai Lama had asked U2 to participate in a festival called "Oneness." Having sensed the unsavoury whiff of hippiedom, Bono sent back a note saying, "One -- but not the same." Unconsciously, this became his hook.
Bono (singer) : It is a song about coming together, but it's not the old hippie idea of "Let's all live together." It is, in fact, the opposite. It's saying, 'We are one, but we're not the same'. It's not saying we even want to get along, but that we have to get along together in this world if it is to survive. It's a reminder that we have no choice".

"The lyric was the first in a new, more intimate style. It's two ideas, essentially. On one level it's a bitter, twisted, vitriolic conversation between two people who've been through some nasty, heavy stuff: 'We hurt each other / Then we do it again.' But on another level there's the idea that 'we get to carry each other.' 'Get to' is the key. The original lyric was 'we have to carry each other' and it was never quite right -- it was too fuckin' obvious and platitudinous. But 'get to'… it's like our privilege to carry one another. It puts everything in a different perspective, introduces that idea of grace. "It opened up new horizons for U2. It's not a song we would ever try to rewrite. We wouldn't want to go there again. But the small scale of it, the intimacy, has been revisited for various other records and songs. The restraint was something new -- we learned how holding back can be even more powerful than letting go."

The Edge came up with the guitar track while working on "The Fly". The Edge : "In the midst of all the recorindg, I went off into another room to put together some ideas for 'The Fly'. I came back with two, neither of which worked where they were meant to, but on Daniel Lanois's suggestion we put them together and Bono was really taken with it. So we all went out into the big recording room -- a huge, eerie ballroom full of ghosts of the war -- and everything fell into place. Bono's melodies and phrases were following, and by the end of the day we basically had everything, the whole form of the song : they had recorded the bare bones of what some call "the greatest song ever written." Bono : "The humbling bit about songwriting is that anything above good usually feels like an accident. A lot of U2 songs are first drafts".

"'One' was played over the radio a lot during the Los Angeles riots. At least, that's what I heard from some friends," Bono says, "which is surprising because I never saw the song as something hopeful or comforting".

Available on "Achtung Baby"

Pearl Jam - "Given to fly"

2005-01-10T18:48:00.000+01:00

The song borrows its structure from Led Zeppelin's "Going To California". Mike McCready (guitars) : "It's probably some sort of rip off of it I'm sure. Whether it's conscious or unconscious, that was definitely one of the songs I was listening to for sure. Zeppelin was definitely an influence on our song".

Mike McCready : "I just wanted him (Eddie Vedder, singer) to sing on it ! (laughs) That was enough. I did have the intention of making a dynamic song with a sense of flow. I built it like a wave on the ocean. It starts out slow and small, then builds until it gets really large, then breaks like a wave and gets small again". And over again.

Available on the album "Yield"

The Cure - "Killing an Arab"

2005-01-07T14:14:00.000+01:00

"It was a short poetic attempt at condensing my impression of the key moments in 'L'etranger'" (Robert Smith, singer).

Indeed, the song was inspired by Albert Camus' book The Stranger (also known as The Outsider). Camus published The Stranger in 1942. The song the Cure wrote is not a racist song, but still caused a lot of controversy because many people assumed it was, due to the title. The book deals with existentialism, and the title "Killing An Arab" was taken from a passage where the main character thinks about the emptiness of life after killing a man on a beach.

Arab groups protested this song because of the title. For The Cure, it wasn't worth the trouble to defend it so they asked radio stations to stop playing it. At the time, any music considered controversial could get you on lists created by conservative groups who would then pressure radio stations not to play your songs and stores not to sell your music. Smith: "The song was written in 1976, when I was 16. We used to play it in a pub in Crawley and it didn't seem that earth shattering at the time, and it seemed quite ludicrous to me that it suddenly became an issue afterwards. It was only when someone suggested that it was somehow some sort of publicity stunt that I thought, 'This has really gotten out of hand,' and that's when I asked for it to be withdrawn from airplay, just to make it obvious that we had no interest in perpetuating it as an onrunning issue. It was just unfortunate that the real world intruded".

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee raised objections to the air-play of the song when "Standing on a Beach" (a Cure best of) was later released. Smith and his record company (Elektra) drew up a cover sticker explaining the song's intent and requested that radio stations discontinue airing the song.

Available on the album "Three Imaginary Boys"

Muse - "Space dementia"

2005-01-06T13:12:00.000+01:00

Matt Bellamy (singer): “Space dementia is the term NASA uses for what happens if you’re left out in space for a long time, because if you truly conceptualise the situation of being there and looking back on earth, it can drive you mad. The song is about a person whose quite important in my life and who gives me space dementia when I look at them. It’s about being intensely engrossed so that you become obsessive and almost nasty”.

The first word of the song is not “height”, as it is written in the lyric-book of the album (Origin of Symetry), but it’s “H8”. H8 is a microcomputer. Matt: “Using a microcomputer (Hitachi H8 / 3048F) which can be built into the industrial machines, you can learn and understand the inputs/outputs of the microcomputer as a basis of robot control”.

Matt: “Space Dementia was supposed to be the big ending to the album. If you stick it on really loud speakers, it reaches the absolute limit of what is the sub and what is the height of your ear. So it hits the extreme of what our hearing range is. We were going to secretly increase the dB to the point where it was illegal”.

“It didn't work at the end of the album, so we put it further to the front, and had a big argument whether to have this big ending or not to the song. We actually recorded the first section of the song in the earlier session, and then we recorded the ending as a completely different thing. We had the song playing and then we came in playing as it finished, with a different instrument set up and everything”.

“It was supposed to be a shock thing because up until then it was all piano, and then go all dirty guitars and death”.

Available on the album "Origin of Symmetry"

Led Zeppelin - "Stairway to heaven"

2005-01-05T13:43:00.000+01:00

Robert Plant used to indroduce this piece on stage with the words "This is a song of hope". He has often refused to explain the song further, leaving it up to everyone to make their own interpretation.

That being said, a lot can still be said about the song.

It is rumored to contain backward satanic messages, as if Led Zeppelin sold their souls to the devil in exchange for "Stairway To Heaven." Supporting this theory is the fact that Jimmy Page bought Aleister Crowley's house in Scotland, which had become a well known Satanic church and was known as "The Toolhouse." In his books, Crowley advocated that his followers learn to read and speak backwards. Robert Plant addressed the issue in an interview with Musician magazine: "'Stairway To Heaven' was written with every best intention, and as far as reversing tapes and putting messages on the end, that's not my idea of making music. It's really sad. the first time I heard it was early in the morning when I was living at home, and I heard it on a news program. I was absolutely drained all day. I walked around, and I couldn't actually believe, I couldn't take people seriously who could come up with sketches like that. There are a lot of people who are making money there, and if that's the way they need to do it, then do it without my lyrics. I cherish them far too much."
Robert and Jimmy wrote the song in an old mansion called Headley Grange in Worcestershire, England, where they recorded most of their 4th album. It was a huge, old, dusty mansion with no electricity but great acoustics. Bands would go there to get some privacy and focus on songwriting. One night, in front of a roaring fire, Page strummed the chords to this for Robert. Plant wrote 90% of the lyrics right there in front of the fire. He has said in many interviews that he didn't seem to be writing, that something else was moving his pencil for him. Plant is a great admirer of all things mystic, the old English legends and lore and the writings of the Celts. He was immersed in The Lord Of The Rings around this time and many of his lyrics reflect that.

The acoustic intro was borrowed from the song "Taurus" from the band Spirit, who toured with Led Zeppelin when they first played the US. The band Spirit has acknowledged this, and is okay with it.
Zeppelin bass player John Paul Jones decided not to use a bass on this because it sounded like a folk song. Instead, he added a string section, keyboards and flutes. He also played wooden recorders that were used on the intro. Bonham's drums do not come in until 4:18.
The guitar solo, now considered a classic that most aspiring lead guitarists try to learn note-for-note, was never actually played that way in the studio. It was pieced together out of several different takes by Jimmy Page, who then learned the solo after the fact to be able to perform it live. If you listen closely on the album, you can hear the "punch-ins," places where the recording engineer, Eddie Kramer, edited the tracks.

Jimmy Page considers this a masterpiece, but Robert Plant does not share his fondness for the song. Plant has referred to it as a "wedding song" and insists that his favorite Led Zeppelin song is "Kashmir."
Every youth who picked up a guitar has tried to play this. In the movie Wayne's World, it is banned in the guitar shop where Wayne starts playing it.

The Beatles - "While my guitar gently weeps"

2005-01-03T13:52:00.000+01:00

George Harrison was reading the 'I Ching', the Chinese book of changes, and decided to apply its principles of chance to his songwriting. At his parents' Lancashire home, he picked a novel off the shelf with the intention of writing a song based on the first words that he came across. The words were 'gently weeps' and so George began to write.

Eric Clapton played lead guitar. He and George Harrison were good friends, but George had to convince him to come to the studio because Clapton was worried the other Beatles wouldn't want him there.
Clapton's presence actually eased the mood in the studio at a tense time for The Beatles. They were at each other's throats during recording of The White Album, but they all relaxed when Clapton showed up.
The song was the first song Ringo played on after leaving the band in frustration a few weeks earlier. He returned to find flowers on his drums to welcome him back.

The strange guitar sound on the album is a guitar being played backwards. They recorded a guitar separately from the rest of the song, and reversed the track to create the music for the song.

According to legend, it's supposed to sound like George is saying, "Paul, Paul..." at the end (because Paul had supposedly died.)

Lou Reed - "Walk on the wild side"

2004-12-30T11:11:00.000+01:00

Reed recorded this 2 years after leaving The Velvet Underground, a band that was very influential, but not commercially successful. This was Reed's second solo album. His first flopped, and for a while it looked like his music career was over. David Bowie produced the album.

This is about transvestites who come to New York City and become prostitutes. "Take a walk on the wild side" is what they say to potential customers. Each verse introduces a new character. There is Holly, Candy, Little Joe, Sugar Plum Fairy, and Jackie. The characters that are all cronies of the infamous Andy Warhol Factory, as was Lou. "Little Joe" refers to Joe Dallesandero, who was also one of Andy's kids in the factory. He was in several films by Warhol. "Holly," "Candy," and "Jackie" are based on Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, and Jackie Curtis. They are all real drag queens who appeared in Warhol's 1972 movie Women In Revolt. Woodlawn also appeared in Warhol's 1970 movie Trash, and Curtis was in Warhol's 1968 movie Flesh. Reed: "I always thought it would be kind of fun to introduce people to characters they maybe hadn't met before, or hadn't wanted to meet."
Reed struggled with his sexuality for most of his life. His parents even tried to "cure" his homosexuality.This came out at a time when audiences were intrigued by cross-dressing and homosexuality in music. "Glam Rock," where the performers wore feminine clothes, was big, and artists like Bowie and Elton John were attracting fans both gay and straight.
This was not banned by the notoriously conservative BBC or by many US radio stations because censors did not understand phrases like "giving head."

The sax solo at the end was played by Ronnie Ross, a Jazz musician who lived near Bowie in England. When Bowie was 12 years old, he wanted to learn the saxophone and begged Ross to give him lessons, which he eventually did. When they needed a sax player for this, Bowie made sure Ross was booked for the session, but didn't tell him he'd be there. Ross nailed the solo in one take and Bowie showed up to surprise his old friend.
The famous bass line was played by a session musician named Herbie Flowers. He was paid 17 Pounds for his work.

Norah Jones - "Don't know why"

2004-12-29T13:58:00.000+01:00

This was written in 1999 by a songwriter and guitarist named Jesse Harris. A few weeks after he wrote it, he recorded it with a violinist and released it under the name Jesse Harris and The Ferdinandos. He sold the album on his web site.

Harris knew Jones because they were both musicians in New York City, but he didn't have Jones in mind to sing this because she was a Jazz singer. When he joined Jones' band in 2000, he considered using a female voice on the song and offered it to Jones. She changed the key to fit her voice and added a drum beat. She still thought of it as just a demo, but it got the attention of an executive at Blue Note Records, who offered her a record deal.

This was recorded as a demo in one take in October, 2000. Harris played guitar and almost stopped the take because he didn't like the mix in his headphones. He kept going and was glad he did, since that was the keeper. Jones and her band were willing to do another take, but the engineer, Jay Newland, thought it was perfect and wouldn't let them. They did try some more takes in another session, but the results were too convoluted, and Jones was assigned to a different producer, Arif Mardin. He had worked with many famous artists, including Aretha Franklin, and was brought in to capture Jones' distinctive sound. He did this by keeping the original demo take and adding some guitar and a vocal harmony, which made Jones harmonize with herself.

The Bangles - "Eternal flame"

2004-12-28T18:25:00.000+01:00

Bangles lead singer Susanna Hoffs wrote this with songwriters Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly. Says Steinberg, "Tom and I met Susanna Hoffs and we set out to write several songs for their next recording. When we got together with Susanna, she admired a song that Tom and I had written for Cyndi Lauper called 'Unconditional Love.' I think she liked the song because it was highly melodic and resembled a ballad that would not have been out of place on The Beatles' Revolver album. She was sort of envious of that song, she said she wished we could come up with something as good as that song. I told her, 'Susanna, we're going to write something better than that song.'"

There is an Eternal Flame at the gravesite of Elvis Presley in Memphis. Says Steinberg:"Susanna was talking about The Bangles having visited Graceland, and she said there was some type of shrine to Elvis that included some kind of eternal flame. As soon as those words were mentioned, I immediately thought of the synagogue in the town of Palm Springs, California where I grew up. I remember during our Sunday school class they would walk us through the sanctuary. There was one little red light and they told us it was called the eternal flame. When I was a child I remembered thinking it never burned out, that it was something like the sun or something beyond our capacity to even contemplate. It seemed like a very profound thought when I was a child. I thought, 'Well that's a great title for a song,' so very quickly I wrote the rest of the lyrics for the song based on that title."

Steinberg: "Tom started to write the chords and the melodies on an acoustic guitar at my house. The bridge to the song, or the middle eight as the British would say, the part that starts, 'Say my name, sun shines through the rain,' that part in particular is very Beatlesque. Tom, who's a great lover of harmonies, worked with Susanna to create almost a tribute to The Beatles and Beach Boys background harmonies in our demo and The Bangles recreated them on their record. One of the unusual things about that song, which is also attributable to its Beatlesque roots, is the fact that it really doesn't have a chorus. The part that starts, 'Close your eyes, give me your hand, do you feel my heart beating, do you understand,' that part sets out to be the verse of the song and then the title is incorporated in the last line of the verse when it says, 'Am I only dreaming, or is this burning an eternal flame.' By the end of the song when all The Bangles chime in and resing the first verse at the end of the song, the whole verse feels like a chorus. The Beatles used to write in that way, for example, 'We Can Work It Out.' The line, 'We can work it out,' is sort of a tag in the verse. The verse ends with, 'We can work it out, we can work it out.' It isn't a chorus, it doesn't begin with the line, 'We can work it out,' which would be more traditional pop hit structure. The whole song 'Eternal Flame' is so melodic that it doesn't really miss a traditional chorus, it just works the way it is. In one more Beatle type arrangement decision we do the bridge after two verses and then there's a guitar solo and then we do the bridge again. Again, The Beatles would often do that. In the song 'We Can Work Out,' the bit that begins, 'Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing and fighting my friend' - I think that happens twice in the song. Sometimes if you have a bridge that's really good, it's nice to repeat it, and also if a song doesn't have a traditional Pop chorus you almost need to repeat the bridge so that the song is long enough and that's what we did in 'Eternal Flame'."

Steinberg: "One of the main differences between our demo and what was to become The Bangles' record is that we based our demo on the acoustic guitar while The Bangles' record, which was produced by Davitt Sigerson, is based on a simple piano. I think we based our demo on the acoustic guitar because there was no keyboard player in The Bangles. When you're a songwriter and you're trying to write something for a particular project, you very self-consciously do whatever you can do to see that it gets on the record and to ensure getting it on the record you want to make it sound like something the band could play. For that reason we tried to leave keyboards off our demo, but then we were very pleased with Davitt Sigerson's production and the way it featured the piano. I know Tom and I both loved Davitt's production, we both loved Susanna's lead vocal and all The Bangles' harmonies and were very pleased with the way the song turned out."

The Bangles broke up soon after this was recorded.

Jimi Hendrix - "The wind cries Mary"

2004-12-22T13:39:00.000+01:00

Jimi wrote this in 1967 for Are You Experienced?, inspired by his girlfriend at the time named Kathy Mary Etchingham. He'd gotten into an argument with her about her cooking. She got very angry and started throwing pots and pans and finally stormed out to stay at a friend's home for a day or so. When she came back, Jimi had written "The Wind Cries Mary" for her.

Jimi wrote the song quietly in his apartment and didn't show it to anybody. After recording "Fire" (which was about his sexual relationship with Kathy), he had 20 minutes to spare in the recording studio, so he showed it to the band. They managed to record it in the 20 minute period they had.

Steve Earle - "John Walker's blues"

2004-12-21T13:24:00.000+01:00

Written from the perspective of John Walker Lindh, an American who converted to Islam and ended up fighting for the Taliban.
Earle doesn't condone the actions of Lindh, but feels that it could have happened to just about anyone growing up in America. When this was released, Earle's son was 20-years-old, about the same age as Lindh.
The chorus comes from a verse from the Qur'an, "I am a witness, there is no God but God."
The song created a great deal of controversy before it was even released. Based on the lyrics, some members of the media blasted it for sympathizing with Lindh, although that was not Earle's intention. The New York Post ran the headline: "Twisted ballad honors Tali-Rat."

The Beatles - "Yellow submarine"

2004-12-13T13:51:00.000+01:00

This was used as the B-side of "Eleanor Rigby."
Paul McCartney wrote it as a children's story. The story goes that Paul was lying in bed late one night, and an idea popped in his head to write a children's song - the actual song may have been a spin-off from Bob Dylan's Rainy Day Women #12 And #35." Paul purposely used short words in the lyrics because he wanted kids to pick it up early and sing along.
Ringo sang lead, as he did on many of the lighter Beatles songs, including "Octopus's Garden" and "Act Naturally."
The sounds of bubbles, water, and other noises were recorded in the studio. John Lennon blew the bubbles through a straw, George Harrison swirled water in a bucket. The vocals were sped-up to make it even more quirky. Vocals of the submarine crew are John and Paul in the studio.
Some people felt this song had deeper meaning about drugs or war. The Beatles said it did not, but they were used to people reading too much into their songs. On The White Album, there is a song called "Glass Onion" that addresses this issue.
The chorus at the end consists of the studio crew, as well as their friends Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall, producer George Martin, and Patti Harrison.
According to Steve Turner's book A Hard Day's Write, about a month after the album was released, there were barbiturate capsules that started to be known as "yellow submarines." McCartney denied any comparison to drugs and said the only submarine he knew that you could eat was a sugary sweet he's come across in Greece while on holiday. These had to be dropped in water and were known as "submarines."
After he got the idea for the song, McCartney dropped by Donovan's place and asked him for suggestions to close the tune. Donovan came up with "Sky of blue, sea of green." Donovan went with The Beatles on their retreat to India in 1968.

Deftones - "My own summer (shove it)"

2004-12-10T13:48:00.000+01:00

"My Own Summer" was written in Seattle, during the hot summer of 1994. Trapped inside of his room by the heat and sun, Chino Moreno (lead singer) boarded up his windows with aluminum foil and wished for "an apocalyptic-type thing" where all of the people on the streets would disappear and the sun would go away. He called this dreamworld "his own summer," which is where the song title comes from.

Chino said in an interview once, that he wrote this song once when he was sitting in a room. He hates day-time and light.... he always preferred night time (who doesn't)... so while he was in the room, he put foil or a blanket or something over his window so it was all dark, and wrote a song about if it was his choice, how summer would be (thus, 'my own summer'). "there are no crowds in the streets, and no sun in my own summer" proves that.

While they were recording "Around the Fur", Chino said something like he couldn't get to sleep because the sun was in his face. He said something like it was bugging him [the sun] and it reminded him of Armageddon, and we should all know what that means. Here's an example of why it would mean that: "Hey you big star, tell me when it's over, 'cause I'm through when the 2 hits the six and it's summer cloud. Come the sun aside" and then there's: "There's no crowds in the streets and no sun in my own summer" He wants to know when it's over because well, everything would be dead.
Armageddon would mean that no people would be left, therefore no crowds in the streets and no sun for anyone to see.

Linkin Park - "Breaking the habit"

2004-12-07T19:11:00.000+01:00

This is about someone who has the tendency to do things to hurt himself physically and mentally. "You all assume I'm safe here in my room unless I try to start again" - this means he spends a lot of time in his room, where everyone thinks he can't do anything to hurt himself, but little do they know that he could at any time start hurting himself without them knowing. He regrets all the things he has done or had done to him in the past and he constantly picks himself apart for it. "I don't wanna be the one the battles always choose cause inside I realize I'm the one confused," is saying he gets a lot of problems thrown at him and he doesn't understand why this always seems to happen to him.

"Clutching my cure, I tightly lock the door" - The cure for emotional pain is to cause physical pain."You all assume I'm safe here in my room, unless I try to start again" - That is showing that the person prefers solitude, and although others think he's safest by himself, it's really when he's worst off, because he will start his self harm all over again. Also, he doesn't seem to understand his pain and all he wants is for it to go away, but the only known way for it to go away is to cause more. It's a vicious cycle.

Mike had been trying to write a song around this lyrical idea for for over five years but nothing seemed to work. While the album was being put together, Mike began working on an interlude, crossing a digitally manipulated beat with strings and piano. Brad and Joe suggested that Mike make the small interlude into a whole song. The piece was extended to three minutes and sixteen seconds and went under the name "Drawing." When Mike took it home to write lyrics, it only took him less than 2 hours to get the song that he was trying to write for years. With some finishing touches of live piano and live strings, the song was finally complete - six years in the making.

The Smashing Pumpkins - "Today"

2004-12-06T14:18:00.000+01:00

This reflects the mood of lead singer Billy Corgan, who was very depressed when he wrote it. Corgan was in therapy, suffering from writer's block, and struggling with expectations that The Smashing Pumpkins would be the next Nirvana.
Corgan: "I was really suicidal. I just thought it was funny to write a song that said today is the greatest day of your life because it can't get any worse."
Corgan played almost all the instruments on this, partly because he was a control freak and partly because drummer Jimmy Chamberlain was unreliable due to drug problems.
The record company put a lot of pressure on the band to complete this album, which put Corgan in a tough spot because he was having trouble writing songs. This came to him pretty quickly and his demo appeased the record company because they thought it would be a hit.
Corgan never thought much of this song. He thought of it as a light pop song, even though many listeners thought it was quite meaningful.

Radiohead - "Street spirit (Fade out)"

2004-12-02T13:28:00.000+01:00

"'Street Spirit' is our purest song, but I didn't write it.... It wrote itself. We were just its messengers... Its biological catylysts. It's core is a complete mystery to me... and (pause) you know, I wouldn't ever try to write something that hopeless... All of our saddest songs have somewhere in them at least a glimmer of resolve... 'Street Spirit' has no resolve... It is the dark tunnel without the light at the end. It represents all tragic emotion that is so hurtful that the sound of that melody is its only definition. We all have a way of dealing with that song... It's called detachment... Especially me.. I detach my emotional radar from that song, or I couldn't play it... I'd crack. I'd break down on stage.. that's why its lyrics are just a bunch of mini-stories or visual images as opposed to a cohesive explanation of its meaning... I used images set to the music that I thought would convey the emotional entirety of the lyric and music working together... That's what's meant by 'all these things are one to swallow whole'.. I meant the emotional entirety, because I didn't have it in me to articulate the emotion... (pause) I'd crack.... Our fans are braver than I to let that song penetrate them, or maybe they don't realize what they're listening to.. They don't realize that 'Street Spirit' is about staring the fucking devil right in the eyes... and knowing, no matter what the hell you do, he'll get the last laugh...and it's real...and true. The devil really will get the last laugh in all cases without exception, and if I let myself think about that to long, I'd crack. I can't believe we have fans that can deal emotionally with that song... That's why I'm convinced that they don't know what it's about. It's why we play it towards the end of our sets. It drains me, and it shakes me, and hurts like hell everytime I play it, looking out at thousands of people cheering and smiling, oblivious to the tragedy of it's meaning, like when you're going to have your dog put down and it's wagging it's tail on the way there. That's what they all look like, and it breaks my heart. I wish that song hadn't picked us as its catalysts, and so I don't claim it. It asks too much. (very long pause). I didn't write that song."
Thom Yorke.

Counting Crows " Mr Jones"

2004-12-01T14:03:00.000+01:00

"- I love this song because there's so many levels to it. On one level, it's a simple guy song -- but it also has to do with all the things you dream about as a young musician, and how silly and sad and helpless it is to think that everyone's going to love you if you're famous. What do you think is going to be satisfying to get these dreams fulfilled? I can't tell you why I want some of the things I want, but I want...I want...I want... The song is about how strange it is to feel like the thing that makes your dream come true and the thing that makes you appear to the world is also what makes you feel like you're sort of disappearing to yourself. I think I felt very much like I was slipping away. It didn't feel like, `wow, I'm everywhere.' It just felt kind of crappy. "I think Mr. Jones, in a lot of ways, is about dreams, but there's a cautionary element to it. The guy keeps saying, `when everybody loves me, I'll never be lonely,' and you're supposed to realize that that is probably a mistake. It's a ridiculous statement."

(From Storytellers) : This is a song that has been misinterpreted greatly, to say the least. I think people too often look for symbolism in songs when they're simpler than they seem. This, in particular, is much simpler than it must seem to a lot of people. I have heard everything from it being about some ancient blues man who taught me to play music, which is completely ridiculous (but like somebody's movie fantasy). And I've also heard it's about my dick, which is even more ridiculous. Why do people go there, you know?

When we did the interview for "Rolling Stone" I walked with David Wilde into the Musée d'Orsay in Paris one day and the first thing that happened was these two kids ran up to us and said, "Hey! You're the guy from Counting Crows, right?" And I said, 'yeah.' And he said, " Is Mr. Jones about your dick?" I wanted to kill the guy because I knew where that was going to end up, which is the first paragraph of the article in "Rolling Stone."

It's really a song about my friend Marty and I. We went out one night to watch his dad play, his dad was a flamenco guitar player who lived in Spain, and he was in San Francisco in the mission playing with his old flamenco troupe. And after the gig we all went to this bar called the New Amsterdam in San Francisco on Columbus and we got completely drunk. And Marty and I sat at the bar staring at these two girls, wishing there was *some* way we could go talk to them, but we were, we were too shy. And we thought, we kept joking with each other, that if we were big rock stars instead of such loser, low-budget musicians, we'd be able to, this would be easy. And I went home that night and I wrote a song about it.

And I joke about what's it about, that story. But it's really a song about all the dreams and all the things that make you want to go in to , you know, doing whatever it is that like seizes your heart, whether it's being a rock star or being a doctor or whatever it is, you know. And I mean, those things run from like 'all this stuff I have pent up inside of me' to , 'I want to meet girls' you know, because I'm tired of not being able to. And it is a lot of those things, it's about all those dreams. But it's also kind of cautionary because it's about how misguided you may be about some of those things and how hollow they may be too. Like the character in the song keeps saying, 'When everybody loves me I will never be lonely.' And you're supposed to know that that's not the way it's gonna be, probably. I knew that even then. And this is a song about my dreams."
Adam Duritz

Damien Rice - "The blower's daughter"

2004-11-30T13:59:00.000+01:00

The Blower’s Daughter, in which the refrain, “I can’t take my eyes off you”, is finally qualified by “Until I find someone new”. Now this song, he says, was about this girl he was obsessed by. No names of course, but she was the daughter of this “blower”. Anyhow, he had recorded it several times and none of the versions satisfied him. To make matters worse, the blower’s daughter hadn’t been talking to him for a while and what he really needed was to sing it to her.

“Then she happened to call over one night. We had some food and just before she left I invited her to the room where I had the mike set. I said: ‘I just want to sing you a song’. I just sat in front of the mikes and pressed record and played her the song.” And, phut, by the end of it, the pash was over. He could take his eyes off her.

Coldplay - "God put a smile upon your face"

2004-11-29T13:42:00.000+01:00

"When we came to record it in the studio, we struggled because there was something not quite right about it. I wasn't happy about where we'd left it and where we were happy to leave it. We couldn't put a finger on what it was so it was really a nice day when I was trying to record bass at the time, and me and Chris were sitting down trying to brainstorm it to find what was wrong. And so I just started to do some bass lines and between the two of us we came up with this kind of groove which stays on the same note as opposed to changing. It gave a lot of bounce to the song and made it roll along in a much more fluid way; it was a bit mechanical beforehand. And it's just interesting that something small like that can really change the whole vibe of a song. And it really nice because from then on it became one of our favourite tracks and it almost did not get on the record. It's now one of our favourite tracks."
Guy Berryman

Oasis - "Champagne Supernova"

2004-11-26T01:51:00.000+01:00

"Some of the lyrics were written when I was out of it. There's the words: 'Someday you will find me/ Caught beneath a landslide/ ln a Champagne Supernova in the sky'. That's probably as psychedelic as I'll ever get. It means different things when I'm in different moods. When I'm in a bad mood being caught beneath a landslide is like being suffocated. The song is a bit of an epic. It's about when you're young and you see people in groups and you think about what they did for you and they did nothing. As a kid, you always believed the Sex Pistols were going to conquer the world and kill everybody in the process. Bands like The Clash just petered out. Punk rock was supposed to be the revolution but what did it do? F all. The Manchester thing was going to be the greatest movement on earth but it was f all. When we started we decided we weren't going to do anything for anybody, we Jut thought we'd leave a bunch of great songs. But some of the words are about nothing. One is about Bracket The Butler who used to be on Camberwick Green, or Chipley or Trumpton or something. He used to take about 20 minutes to go down the hall. And then I couldn't think of anything that rhymed with 'hall' apart from 'cannonball'. so I wrote 'Slowly walking down the hall/ Faster than a cannonball' and people were like, 'Wow, f , man'. There's also the line 'Where were you while we were getting high?' because that's what we always say to each other. But the number of people who've started clubs called Champagne Supernova is fucking unbelievable."
Noel Gallagher

Damien Rice - "Cheers darling"

2004-11-25T13:54:00.000+01:00

One of the best illustrations of Rice's gift comes on the bitter "Cheers Darling," a song Rice wrote at 3 a.m., after an argument with an unfaithful lover. At the Tin Angel, he performed it as a theatrical piece, stopping between toasts to provide details on the relationship.
"That really did come about at 3 a.m.," Rice says. "I put down this loop of rhythm I made out of clinking glasses and percussion noises. Then after I listened back, I just recorded whatever words fell out of my mouth. That showed me how interesting stuff comes from not thinking, not trying to be clever. Really, not trying at all."

The moving "Cheers Darlin'" works in the same way, describing the deflation Rice felt after spending an evening flirting with a woman at a pub only to have her call her boyfriend to come take her home. "I wrote that while I was drunk," Rice says, smiling. "I came home right after it happened, banged out the chords and just started singing it. The vocal take that's on the record is from that night. I tried to do it over, but I couldn't really recapture the same feeling.
"The boozy sneer is evident as he sings, "Cheers darlin', here's to you and your lover boy" and in every spiteful "darlin'" that follows, culminating in his imagined confrontation, "What am I darlin'? A whisper in your ear? A piece of your cake? What am I, darlin'? The boy you can fear? Or your biggest mistake?" All the while, the musical accompaniment gets more exquisite. "I took the song to my friend Jean [Meunier, a French pianist] and asked him to play along," Rice says. "I taped it, and it's great to hear him get into the song. You can hear it, how he plays only a few notes at the beginning, and by the end, he's playing this magnificent piece."

Consider Cheers Darlin’, a bitter little number in which Rice sounds drunk — for the good reason that he was — although he says, being a little feller (5ft 8in) a couple of glasses of wine will do that to him. He composed it, or it became composed, in one burst after a disappointing evening in a Dublin bar with a girl whom he was hoping would be his girlfriend. “She probably wasn’t, but I got the impression I was getting signals. Elbows touching, all that. It was like, OK, we’re going somewhere and there were more drinks and chewing cigarettes and leaning against each other and I got to a point where I realised that I was missing my last bus home. I was broke and if I didn’t get the bus that meant getting the taxi and I really didn’t have the money. But then she wasn’t going either, so I thought we’re going to spend the night hanging out together. Then she turned around at midnight and said, ‘Och, I’m late, I’ve got to go and meet my boyfriend’. So I had to get a cab. So that was €40 because I lived outside of Dublin.” No wonder he was furious.
“I was a little frustrated, yeah, at first.” But at 5am he was ringing his producer in America and telling him he had written this new song and feeling healed. “I remember feeling really quite excited and I’d forgotten all about the crap that I’d gone through that night.”