“Word! Hit me again! Word!”
“Word! Hit me again! Word!”
The “Word!” part was me venturing into language and cultural territory completely foreign to me. It belongs in roughly the same category as knowing how to tilt a baseball cap slightly to one side, wearing long baggy pants and a red T-shirt, and somehow making the whole thing look right. Concepts I understand in theory, perhaps, but have no business attempting myself.
The “Hit me again!” was something else. That was me trying, however improbably, to channel the spirit of the late, great Godfather of Soul, James Brown—one of my musical heroes. I remember hearing Henry Rollins describe James Brown and Iggy Pop as the two “bookends” of American music. So I wasn't entirely without a musical compass. James Brown was part of the familiar musical vocabulary I could reach for while fumbling around in a genre and rhythm that felt foreign.
And yet there I am, saying it on a recording.
The recording is the first demo of “Shiny Gold Button,” a song from The Land of Kindness, a family musical written by Jeff Fritch and eventually performed by Nagoya Players Junior in 2022.
The story of how I ended up saying “Word!” on it begins in 2021, still very much mid-pandemic.
Jeff and I go back a long way. He's a professionally trained dancer and choreographer, has taught tap for years, and is extremely creative and full of energy. We did some tap-and-guitar performances together in 2006 and 2008, and, if my memory serves me correctly, I also created music for a solo dance number or two that he performed on stage.
Then, in 2021, he contacted me out of the blue and asked whether I'd be interested in creating music for a children's show he was developing.
I was mostly homebound at that stage. Zoom, however, had become a regular part of life, and Jeff was really my only connection to the Nagoya Players team at the time. So we met online and he began telling me about this world he'd created: the “Land of Kindness.”
And somewhere in this world there was a shiny gold button.
Jeff wanted a song about it. He gave me some of the lyrics and told me he wanted a kind of hip-hop vibe.
This was not encouraging news.
My relationship with hip-hop at the time was probably akin to Schopenhauer's relationship with rave parties. Worlds apart.
But I said I'd try it.
I went away, worked on something and, a few days later, emailed Jeff an MP3 of what I'd come up with.
He wrote back saying he liked it, but he wasn't sure it would fit the show.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Our next Zoom conversation was where things got interesting.
Jeff got straight into the nuts and bolts of why the original demo didn't work. And here's the thing: everything he said was right.
I'm not sharing that original demo.
It didn't work.
It really didn't.
The problem was that although I understood what Jeff was telling me, I was still pretty confused about what he actually wanted me to do. I couldn't hear the rhythm he was hearing.
So eventually I asked him to stop trying to explain it.
“Just sing me the rhythm. Exactly the way you want it to go. That's all I want. I'll record it.”
And I did.
The rhythm you hear in this demo of “Shiny Gold Button” is an exact replica of the rhythm Jeff sang to me in that Zoom meeting.
Once I had that, something clicked.
In another Note I wrote about how composing can sometimes feel like hacking away at the ground until you hit something solid. Other times, something seems almost to fall out of the sky into your hands.
This was the latter.
Once Jeff had given me the rhythm, the rest came remarkably easily. I'd recently bought a whiz-bang new plug-in that made some rather unusual sounds—unusual for me, anyway—and started incorporating them into the basic track.
I worked pretty hard at replicating Jeff's rhythm precisely, and it was enormous fun precisely because it was difficult. I was much more accustomed to four-on-the-floor, straight-up rock. I was working in a musical language I didn't really speak.
And that's what you're hearing in this recording.
This isn't the version that was eventually recorded with the kids in the studio. This is a musician of a certain age fumbling around in the dark, trying to make sense of a new rhythm. It sounded kind of cool to me. But it also felt completely foreign.
So I sent the MP3 to Jeff by email.
His response came almost immediately:
“This is a hit! You nailed it!”
I've remembered those words.
Everyone experiences imposter syndrome at some point in their lives, I'm sure. For me, there had always been musical territories where I felt I didn't really belong. I knew what I knew. I knew what I could play. And I had a fairly good idea of the things that were probably best left to somebody else.
Jeff's reaction gave me permission to question that.
Not permission in the sense that I suddenly thought I could write anything. Quite the opposite. The whole experience had just demonstrated how much I didn't know. But it gave me permission to explore—to wander into genres I didn't understand, listen, make mistakes, ask somebody to sing the rhythm into Zoom if necessary, and then see what I could do with it.
That's one of the things I carried away from “Shiny Gold Button.”
The rhythm at the heart of the song isn't something I dreamed up sitting alone at my computer. It's Jeff's rhythm. He sang it down a Zoom connection during the pandemic. I recorded it, replicated it, and built the music around it.
One person saying:
“No, not like that. Like this.”
And another person listening.