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.