FOOD | ARTS | COMMUNITY | STYLE+LEISURE
How did this end up being a covers record?
It was sort of a throwaway idea. I originally thought I was making a
jazz record. I did a lot of jazz in college and was obsessed with
Nina Simone – I followed her all over the world and saw her play a
bunch of times – and made a recording in college that was jazzy. I
had just finished my Master’s in creative writing and I was like, “I
need to make music.” I needed a project. I just kind of needed to
rotate the crops a little bit. And then I started talking to my brother,
and he sent me a text message with like 30 songs from the ’80s, and
I was like, “No – you know, it’s just too obvious. An ’80s covers
record?” But then he sent me an arrangement that he did for
“Addicted to Love,” which is on the record, and I was like, “This is
amazing.” And it just gave me this idea – if I’m gonna do covers, it’s
not gonna be jazz covers. It’s gonna be pop covers, but they’re
gonna have really specific parameters. It’s gonna be songs done by
men, first, and songs that came out – originally I thought ’80s and
’90s, but as the process went forward, the focus became very narrow: They’re ’80s pop covers. And it was really a crazy experience
because I didn’t know what song we were doing until we were
doing it, and the arrangements – I literally did the arrangements like
minutes before we recorded the scratch vocal and we recorded the
key parts, like the piano parts. Like, I don’t even know how these
songs go to be honest with you. I’m learning that right now because
we’re playing them live, and I’m like, “Jesus! What is that chord?”
You know, it was like, very much like sort of a wild science experiment.
What was the most exciting song to unpack, to realize how its parts
work? What was the most illuminating as far as somebody else’s
songwriting?
Well, I will tell you the hardest one of all of these was “Maneater,”
by Hall & Oates. For many reasons, one being that those lyrics, man.
It’s really hard to take it seriously when you take it out of the, “Oh-oh,
here she comes,” when you take it out of that finger snapping, the
lyrics on their own are like… “A she-cat tamed by the purr of a
Jaguar” is one line! Actually I performed it live while we recorded,
and I was like, “I can’t sing this line.” So, instead of it being about
a predatory woman, it becomes about the pain of being the predator. It’s a very mournful lament, the way that it ended up, and I think
that was the most exciting experience for me, because I was really
nervous that it was gonna suck. I mean, of course, I’m nervous that
everything’s going to suck, until it’s done, and then I’m like, “Oh, my
god, this is awesome.” I was just like, “I don’t know if this is going
to work.” And also, it was the last one that we recorded, and I was
really sick, so it was just a struggle. I went back and forth, taking out
one of the chords because I felt like it… it was going in the kind of
vibey, mournful direction, and then you’ve got these… a major chord
in there, that’s in the original, that just makes it sound just far too
happy. We were changing the chords, the chord structure, literally
again up until the second that we just said, “This is finished.”
www.camerondezenhammon.com
may 16 |
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