Victor Crowl and Michael Moon in Ojai, California
CBC Studio's 212 Toronto, Canada
In between the time of recording the song "roger" with Ted Jacobs at house on the corner studios and Harold Payne's/Faith Rivera's wonderful "You Are My Teacher" I was busy thinking of avenues to go on this song that my wife called "beatle-ish". It's first renditions were kind of like a beatles met pink floyd song (I'll follow the sun) which wasn't bad but it didn't fit the lyrics completely. I asked both Michael and Victor if I could take the direction on it and they were open to it.
After some discussion with Ted we both felt it needed to be lifted to more of a dance beat, I warned Ted that this was a very challenging track prior to his hearing it and he mentioned that it didn't scare him one bit.. optimistic to the end, lol. He heard it and was quiet at first, hesitant then we talked it out. I had a couple of ideas I wanted to try, very dramatic tempo changes both of them but he was open to it.
The first style was a sort of symphony build up thing, naw.. that didn't work (like a david foster moment a bit) with the big drum slow beat, you get the idea. It was frustrating, a couple more variations around it, which included the beatles acoustic tempo and more dance laden 120 bpm techno beat stuff.. fun but not what we wanted completely.
Then one sleepless night it came to me.. I was talking to Gardner (our soon to be music president) Cole and asked him what that Madonna song was that she put out a few years back that was only acoustic guitar tempo as the opener? It was "Love Profusion" YouTube - Madonna - Love Profusion (Music Video) and matched perfectly the opening sequence to give Teddy something to start with. I liked the beat, the lyrics were great and ultimately it was current Madonna material references.
Ted was lovin' it, his speciality was dance mixes and this was right up his alley. I thought if anyone could pull this off he could and boy did he ever! After some subtle tempo adjustments I felt that with this direction both Victor (specializes in dance music) and Michael's vision could be complete and not take it away from it's core goals of exposing what a beautiful lyric that they had created. The true nature of this was to show what it was like to be affilicted with autism and Michael took that from his own experience living it with his Mom.
I heard a few more renditions of it tighten up and then It came to me on another early morning evening while I was giving direction to Ted about the song "roger" that Faith Rivera would be the elixir needed to make this song soar. I still wanted the choir from Canada in it but not as much and knew Faith with her tremendous vocals could add an amazing layer to this already coming together recording. I woke up in a start and headed to youtube to look up a song that I always liked by Duran Duran called "come undone" YouTube - Duran Duran - Come Undone . That beautiful haunting backing vocal of Tessa Niles captured perfectly what I was looking for. Faith loved the idea and recorded the vocals quickly.
I received the track back and was lovin' it! We had what was a very rough demo taken all the way to a current danceable song.. wow! I cautiously sent it to Victor and Michael in various stages of production to graduate them up the final version and they loved it. It was a beautiful blend of lyrics and arrangement but more importantly it was Michael's first time collaborating with another artist in this capacity.
There is more to the story as that the song is of interest by both Victor Crowl and Michael Moon and the video shot in LA on a huge green screen created the right vibe for it. Quirky and fun, almost reminescent of those 60's austin powers moments... lol.
Randy Grossman
HwH Records
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