One of my favourite things to do with pop songs is to change them in such a way as to give the listener a fresh perspective on something they’ve heard a hundred times before. The original “I Kissed a Girl” is an insipid pop song about making out with a girl at a bar as a fun experiment. I don’t have anything particularly negative to say about the song, but I don’t exactly have too many positive things to say about it either. But if you take away the saccharine nature of the original, what you get is a song about indulging in something that’s perhaps a bit risque.
So I tried to capture some of the sultriness implicit in the song’s nature, to put a new spin on it:
It didn’t start intentionally, but by the time this song was performance ready I was trying to channel as much Prince as I could wrap my unworthy fingers around. That man knew how to infuse sex into rock music with a funk twist, which was precisely the combination of sounds I was trying to work in there.
I’m trying to get a bit more ambitious with the sounds and themes I’m working into my covers and originals. One of the pitfalls I fell into a lot with my early looping covers is the ‘dead air’ problem, where you’re spending a lot of time layering things while the audience waits for you to move the song forward. The challenge I’m setting for myself now is to structure my arrangements in such a way as to avoid spending too much time without giving the audience something new and interesting to pay attention to. I’m particularly happy with the way this one worked out, and will undoubtedly try to write more like it.
Crommunist 
Comments
Trackbacks & Pingbacks
No incoming links found yet.