First, the panic
It’s not often I wake up with a song in my head but last Fathers Day that’s exactly what happened. While my kids were lining up the presents, I had to excuse myself or risk losing the relentless groove I had thumping around my brain.
Unusually, it was a bass line – so the first thing I did was grab my phone and record it as a Voice Memo. Once captured I relaxed a bit but still remained anxious to get it recorded with real instruments.
I opened up GarageBand, got an approximate BPM using the All8 tap tempo tool then grabbed my bass and copied what I’d sang.
The vibe revealed obvious influences
The bass groove I was hearing was now captured but I could still hear the rest of the song in my head. It was a 70s funky disco vibe and obviously influenced by bands like Chic, Earth Wind and Fire, Stevie Wonder and Kool and the Gang.
The essential pieces
With the bassline down on top on the default GarageBand drums, I next wanted to track the guitar. I knew what I was hearing in my head was the chorus so I had to make the guitar hooky but not over-complicated. The master of this kind of percussive, groove-based guitar part is Nile Rodgers from Chic.
If you don’t know Nile’s work, you probably only think you don’t as he’s worked on some of the greatest tracks in pop music history:
Le Freak and Good Times – Chic
Let’s Dance – David Bowie
Original Sin – INXS
Get Lucky – Daft Punk
We are Family – Sister Sledge
The guitar part evolves
The guitar started as a simple Em7-F#m7-B chord riff played four times then resolving to C/D. (I love this type of chord – used in Never Too Much by Luther Vandross and Rock With You by Michael Jackson.)
Version 1
https://www.soundslice.com/slices/M5b4c/
After playing it for a bit I realised that it needed to NOT be symmetrical, so I changed the last B in the sequence to a B7.
Version 2
https://www.soundslice.com/slices/45b4c/
This was better but I still felt there was something missing – something needed tweaking to make to more unique and “signature” sounding. So I moved the B7 to the second half of the 2nd measure and introduced an Eb diminished 7 chord in the last half of the 4th measure. This was what I was looking for!
I made one final tweak: not to the notes but to where they fell on the rhythmic grid. With the bass groove so heavily emphasising the 1, I shifted the guitar part to start on the AND-AFTER-ONE to prevent the guitar and bass parts stepping on eachother’s toes.
Version 3 (final guitar part)
https://www.soundslice.com/slices/w5b4c/
It was reminiscent of the opening keyboard riff from Cosmic Girl by Jamiroquai.
Main groove complete now add keys
With the bass, drums and guitar now locked in. I grabbed an electric piano sound and played a simple part that emphasised the accents of the guitar part, with piano stabs on the AND-AFTER-ONE, EE-AFTER-TWO, THREE, & UH-AFTER-3
Here’s my Instagram post from that day
I already had the hook for the chorus
I had the vocal melody in my head from the beginning. But it was so high I could barely sing it (as you can hear in the Instagram post) ordinarily I would change the key so I could sing it better but I knew I ultimately wasn’t going to be singing this song. So I left in in the key on E Minor.
As I recorded the vocal, I accidentally swapped between “I can’t stop the way I’m loving you” to “I can’t stop myself from loving you”. At that point I was still unsure of which was best, so I left both in so I could reflect on this later.
The chorus took an hour, the verse takes days
I knew I didn’t want this chorus progression to be the basis for the whole song. How did I know? Well, gut feel to be honest. Sometimes you’ve just got to follow your instinct. So the verse required some kind of departure while still remaining related to what I had so far – and lead nicely back into the chorus.
I started with: Em7-Bm-C as the verse chords but there wasn’t enough “movement” so I opted for Em7-B-Am then Em7-B-C back to Em7-B-Am and resolving once again to my favourite slash chord C/D.
So the departure:
was the changing motion of the chords - descending/ascending/descending
and the fact that 2 of them were different to the chorus of Em7-F#m7-B7
but related:
as the time spent on each chord in 2 measures was the same: 1 bar of one chord, half a bar of the next and half a bar of the one after that
and it landed on the same C/D to resolve and lead back into the chorus
The middle 8 was hardest
A middle 8 functions as a departure from the rest of the song to provide a brief break for the listener’s ears before returning to the main refrain. A common practice is moving to the relative major (if the song is in a minor key) or moving to the relative minor (if the song is in a major key). And that’s exactly what I did here - I moved the tonality from Em to G major and kicked off the middle 8 with a G major 7 chord.
I think I went through 3 versions of the middle 8 before I arrived at something that felt like it belonged. None of the versions differ wildly from eachother but where I ended up was the place that it needed to be.
The finished demo
So I original recorded this at 108bpm but after repeated listening it felt like it was dragging, so instead of altering the BPM of the Garageband project (which is okay for Midi Instruments like drums and keys/synch parts but not for recorded audio because GB does weird things to the audio quality of those) or re-recording it at a higher tempo, I exported the final 108bpm mix out of Garageband into Audacity then bumped up the track to 114bpm and added a studio fade.
Enter the Producer
I took the track to a producer and we rebuilt it from scratch. It needed to shed its Disco-era stylings to become more modern. As the track began to take shape it seemed to require a female vocal a la Donna Summer or Chaka Khan, so we called in a mutual friend who is one of the best.
A different perspective requires different lyrics
As the track was now from a new (female) perspective, some of the verse needed rewriting, so I (bravely) surrendered to a 4-way writing session with the producer, his songwriting partner and the singer.
Working backwards from the hook, we asked questions like: what made this person say this? Why are they saying it now? What can be said at the top of the song to establish this person’s viewpoint? How can the lyric express their changing view as thew song unfolds.
I rewrote the first line to be “Not the romantic type” then rest flowed (easily in parts, painfully in others) until we had Verse 1 - but it was too soon in the narrative to launch into the chorus, so we agreed that there should be an additional section - a Pre-chorus.
Using the producer’s bouncy melody and my line “You got my tongue-tied, tongue-tied” the Pre-chorus came together quickly and led beautifully into the chorus.
Its not yet complete but this gives you an idea of how far this song has come.