Being With You

Smokey Robinson's "Being With You" spent five weeks at number one on the Hot Soul Singles chart during the Spring of 1981 and reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, his highest charting solo hit on the pop charts. The song was a number one hit in the UK for two weeks in June 1981, becoming Robinson's second UK #1 single and his first as a solo artist. It would mark his last appearance at the top of the UK Singles Chart.

Tortured Soloist

It's another delightful love song where the poor tenor is tortured about his love for a woman who probably isn't worth it. Nothing like a little drama to make a hit song! This allowed a few openings for the patter to take a slightly different perspective than the tortured soloist, but I avoided going so far as to break the drama entirely.

A Simple Variation

You'll see below I pass the patter back and forth between sections that alternate singing "oo" or "ah". This creates a lovely continuity suggestive of strings while the movement of the line between voice parts adds variation and interest. then all parts join to emphasize the concluding thought of each verse:

Closing Shop For Now

It has been a great project these last 6 months arranging a song a week. Now I got to put it aside and devote myself to my day job, prepare for the trip to sing in Cuba, and kick back a little to enjoy summer. There may be a few more songs over the next few months, but not at the weekly pace. I potted the tomato plants for the deck and mulched the strawberry patch. The sailing club opens next week.

Setting this goal for myself was quite productive. Each week the list grew and grew. Like a lot of things in this world, it was a series of tiny steps: a measure or two at a time, an idea that hits you at the gym solves a problem and suddenly a song lurches forward towards completion. The weeks go by, and by Friday sometimes the weeks' song is finished and sometimes you're just getting started. But by Sunday night, it has to be finished, so make it happen and eventually the songs just start stacking up.

And here is the stack of work since November:

A Groovy Kind of Love

Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing

Ain't That Peculiar?

Baby, I Need Your Lovin'

Being With You

Blue Bayou

Botch-A-Me

Cruisin'

Gypsy Woman

Hit the Road, Jack

I Can't Get Next To You

Love Hurts

Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye

Nowhere To Run

People Get Ready

Shahdaroba

Talking About My Baby

That's the Way Love Is

There Is Nothin' Like a Dame

Tracks of My Tears

Unchain My Heart

Wild Ox Moan

You Are Everything

You Don't Know Me

You're All I Need to Get By

These are all men's a cappella with the exception of "Botch-A-Me", which is SATB with jazz band. That piece is my third commission for Polymnia Choral Society and will be premiered in their final concert of the 2010 season.

I will be happy to send samples to anyone who wants to consider one of these for their ensemble. Just drop me a note.

Bob

Cruise With Me Baby!

"Cruisin'" is a 1979 single written, produced, and recorded by William "Smokey" Robinson for Motown Records' Tamla label. One of Robinson's most successful singles outside of his work with The Miracles, "Cruisin'" peaked at number-four on the Billboard Hot 100.

Bob Dylan once said of "Smokey" Robinson, that he is "America's greatest living poet." Regarding his nickname, "Smokey" Robinson tells the story that, when he was a boy, his Uncle Claude christened him Smokey Joe, which the young William, a Western-movie enthusiast, at first assumed to be "his cowboy name for me". Some time later, he learned the deeper significance of his nickname: It derived from smokey, a pejorative term for dark-skinned blacks. "I'm doing this," his uncle told the light-skinned boy, "so you won't ever forget that you're black."

Smokey's easy poetry shines in Cruisin':

The music is playin' for love,

cruisin' is made for love,

I love it when we're cruisin' together.

Some Diggity, Regular Patter

Cruisin' is one of those songs that's totally mellow and echoes the whole grove of the theme. Sometimes it's intentionally not clear whether the song is really about driving with your girlfriend or something much more intimate. This song really gets hot. I applied just a little diggity, as you'll see below, and really simple patter. There's no clever dialog between the ensemble and the soloist. This mood is not to be broken - there is some serious love-making going on here and you gotta just stay out of the way! So it's chords, chords, chords, structure, layers, supportive patter and just a little diggity to achieve the charm of Robinson's lovely song:

Hey, How Did You Do It?

I spent the week in California on business and had no time to work on this or any other music. I have a stretch of hard work ahead at Palm, and this song plus my next were pretty nearly completed before I left. Yes, I've been working ahead of the pace again. It looks as if I'll take a pause starting next week at the six month mark of this project.

With luck, I'll finish Being With You by next week.

Nowhere To Run, Baby!

"Nowhere to Run" is a 1965 pop single by Martha & the Vandellas for the Gordy (Motown) label and is one of the group's signature songs. The song, written and produced by Motown's main production team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, depicts the story of a woman trapped in a bad relationship with a man she cannot help but love. Holand-Dozier-Holland and the Funk Brothers band gave the song a large, hard-driving instrumentation sound similar of the sound of prior "Dancing In The Street" with snow chains used as percussion alongside the tambourine and drums.

This version was ranked #358 on Rolling Stone's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

The record's brass-heavy arrangement and chorus of "nowhere to run to, baby/nowhere to hide" have made the song a popular one at sporting events, whether played in its original version or reinterpreted by a marching band. The song has also been seen as one of the songs played heavy by troops during the Vietnam War and has since been a title and inspiration in TV shows such as Quantum Leap and Murphy Brown.

This is a song that really rocks, and should be an enormous amount of fun for an a cappella group. The trick with a piece like this is to expand the groove and use variation to create tension and energy without a brass section, drums and snow chains. You got to use the forces you have and do it vocally!

Silence is Golden

It's as taught in Zen - things are made of their opposites. Music is made up of silence just as it is made out of sounds. Negative space makes the positive space more powerful and impressive, and that's what we're going for with Nowhere To Run. I create silence and hushed intensity to allow headroom for the big stuff, making it seem even bigger. For example, when I have the upper voices hit some of their chords like brass hits, they explode out of this quieter space driving the intensity higher.

Another Problem

The song is a dance song. It does not need to go anywhere. It starts at Defcon 7 or 8 and stays there start to finish. As I've said before, your audience probably won't be dancing - they will be all ears and all the dancing will probably be in their mind's eye. If verse 1, verse 2 and verse 3 are all the same, they will begin wondering if they left the oven on back home. You don't want them drifting off like that! You gotta develop things and vary them without breaking the driving force concept of the piece.

To do this, I broke down one verse into a taut duet with the soloist against the tenor 2's. This diminishes the volume in a way that draws in the listener to something even more intense than staying at full overdrive. The bass line continues underneath keeping up the rhythmic underpinnings, making the verse a kind of trio. You'll see this below. Hmm, more silence to create space and tension....

What Else?

Well, I try to develop patter instead of nonsense sounds imitating guitars, drums and instruments. Don't get me wrong, I love the chung-chung and beatbox stuff. But when I have the opportunity for voices to sing, and can weave a vocal texture that stimulates the mind, it's just a lot a fun! My basses are always ribbing me about the stupid sounds I make them sing, so I try to give them more words to contribute something greater to the whole. Basses can really add a whole other dimension singing words.

Patter usually echoes the lyrics and sentiments of the solo line. One thing I often do is use patter is to create tensions against the main lyric. You know the tenor is always wailing on about how "She left me" and "What will I do without her", "Can I get her back", and all that stuff we love in pop songs.

I found when I give my backup voices a position of their own and a perspective that is other than that of the soloist, it creates drama, and sometimes it creates comedic tension and hilarity. It's perfect, for example, when the tenor is wondering what went wrong and the basses, with their low tones, become the natural voice of reason and authority. They adopt a position of telling it "like it is", saying things like "I told you so" and "It's just wrong" and "If I were you, this is what I'd do".

In Nowhere To Run, I let the basses be this third person witness to the "trapped" soloist, and you can see how this creates so much drama and fun, adding another dimension to the overall expression. I let them become quite outrageous.

As I drive to the finish with the final verse, I break it down once again, and use the layering technique to build the energy back to climax. This is driven further underneath with the basses' patter becoming wilder and more insistent so the climax reaches a dizzying point, ending with a big "brass" hit on a really dirty chord by all voices. The silence afterwards is deafening!

Next week: Cruisin'

You're All I Need To Get By

This weeks contribution is a wonderful song about just plain good love. Whew! Enough about broken hearts, lost love and all that! No sorrow nor blues here, but rather just plain tons of good vibes:

"Like an eagle protects his nest, for you I'll do my best,

Stand by you like a tree, dare anybody to try and move me."

The Composers

Written by real-life couple Nickolas Ashford & Valerie Simpson, You're All I Need To Get By became one of the few Motown recordings of the 1960s that was not recorded with the familiar "Motown sound". Instead, it had a more soulful and gospel-oriented theme surrounding it that was influenced by the writers, who also sang the background vocals on the original recording.

The Covers

That first recording by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell peaked at number 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 1 on Billboard's Hot R&B/Soul Singles chart for five weeks, becoming one of the longest-running number one R&B hits of 1968 and the most successful duet recording of Marvin Gaye's entire career. Other covers:

Dionne Warwick 1969

Diana Ross 1970

Aretha Franklin 1971

Michael McDonald 2004

Structure, structure, structure....

And chords, and counter melodies. This arrangement pulls a lot of my tip sheet together in one place. You see some of the counter melodies here in the bass line, giving it interest but also adding interplay against the main melody. Delightful chords, with well-led voice lines lend a smooth sound bringing out wonderful colors. Notice the bass line variation - 4 measures one way, and then 4 measures another way.

There are always several things going on, changing in a fluid manner but held together by structure, structure, structure. The basses exhibit a bit of fun diggity here and there. Meanwhile, their patter progresses - what I need, what I want, all, I, need....

It was a big holiday week and I got to share it across several traditions. Hope you enjoyed it and I hope the creek near you is subsiding....

Next week: Nowhere To Run