Showman Dan - a true story...
Sometimes the direct route to your destination isn't available. Like several of the songs that will soon be released onMadeleine Peyroux's new recording ("Let's Walk," available on June 28th), we began working together on it when she sent me a set of lyrics and a melody (and in this case, a quite unorthodox formal structure). Setting it to music in a couple of different ways, and honoring that unorthodox formal structure, I came up with a couple of unusual and elaborate pseudo-rockabilly versions of the song. We knocked those around for a while and eventually felt convinced enough of one version to ask Graham Hawthorne to add a live drum track to it. We dressed it up a bit more, and considered the demo ready to take to the tracking session, and filed it away in order to move on to some other songs. Busy with those, we left this one alone until, very near to our deadline, with our tracking session looming the following week, we listened to our demo and both balked. (Words that came to my mind were "weird," "odd," "unnatural," and "What were we thinking?!") But sometimes distance (time, in this case) is just what you need to hear things in a fresh, more detached way, and immediately we got to work. It was clear to both of us that the unorthodox form had to go; it just wasn't working. The design needed to be simpler, and the music needed to get out of the way of the lyric in order to support it better. Somehow we recognized a bluesy underpinning, though it had been pretty buried in our earlier version, and then we discovered that a simple, classic shuffle feel seemed like a good match for the story. Madeleine was quick to rethink the rhythm and the notes of the melody, which required a bit of editing and rewriting of the lyric, and though we knew there was still some cleanup work left to do on the lyrics, we were convinced pretty quickly that we had something that was going to work for us and, to our great relief, that we had averted disaster. Right away, still working and feeling good that we had something better, we started rethinking the bridge, and very quickly came up with the music that eventually became the background vocals imitating an Ellington-era brass section, a bit of a detour in the track, maybe, but one that really felt like it reflected the protagonist of this song himself, Madeleine's street-wise musical mentor Danny Fitzgerald. Yes, this one is a true story...
