When
you’re a musical group, especially if you make your own music and write songs,
you want to be in the recording studio, tracking your progress by doing
sessions. That’s the lingo. . . yeah, musicians doing sessions; we sound like
jazzers or something sophisticated-like.
At any
rate, we did record demos (all analog -- it WAS the eighties, after all, and
CDs were just starting to happen), notably for a few labels like , with Steve
Burgh in NYC, and also in Nashville.
Yup,
that’s right: Bert Stein, the VP of our record company, had a working
relationship with a few Nashville-based songwriter/producers, notably a guy
names David Malloy. Malloy’s friend, Spady Brannon (sounds VERY Nashville,
eh?), often wrote with him. Stein was pushing us to record one of the songs
they sent him on a demo (written by somebody named “Jason Snaarz,” which we
thought suspect -- was probably Malloy and Brannon for all we knew) called “You
Are Not Alone.”
Because
we’re good musicians, we learned the song and arranged it with our three part
harmonies (“stirring!”) and pretty acoustic guitars. . . before you knew it, it
became a nice little anthem for the disenfranchised (“They’ve got the
system/You’re out on your own/They’ve got ways to make it seem like they’re
right/And you’re always wrong. . . They’ve got the power of the press behind
them. . . etc. etc. till the
chorus: YOU ARE NOT ALONE/YOU ARE NOT ALONE).
We
truly hated the song at first, but it grew on us. . . and it made it to our
first album, oddly enough.
I’d
still like to know who Jason Snaarz is. . .
No comments:
Post a Comment