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'That's Enough About You (Let's Talk About Me)' is a track from the 18 era that many of you will probably not have heard of before. It's a rare gem that came about in Spring '96, when the well respected 'Q Magazine' of the UK did an amazing 'experiment' with Bryan. They wrote the lyrics to a song... and BA recorded it. It's the first (and to my knowledge) the only time he's ever done this and with great effect. Read the article first and then listen to the song at the end... (the song itself was only ever available to listen to via 'Q's' phoneline hence the quality). If BA ever releases a boxset of all his unreleased stuff... you might want this to be on. It's a pretty decent tune and like 'Heat Of The Night' and 'Here I Am'... Bryan does the guitar solo. Article
transcribed by Karl Watson / Edited by Steven Stanley: "Although I'm pretty serious about doing this song,"Adams says, "I've actually got a little less serious about my songwriting recently. I might not have agreed to this three years ago. People are very precious about their songwriting but I think I've loosened up sufficiently to do something like this." The rock lyricist, when conferred with a black sheet of paper or dismembered beermat immediately faces two Himalayan problems: One, given the limitlessness of potential subject matter, what on earth do you write about? You suddenly feel like a child at primary school who has been asked to draw a picture of something. Two, once you have a vague notion of the topic you wish to tackle, how do you make it in any way convincing? Another small snag: lyrics are neither poetry nor prose but exist only to have life breathed into them by the music. The rhythm and actual sound of performed words carries a greater weight form than in any other form. You read the unaccompanied efforts of even the most evocative lyricists... Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Smokey Robinson, Morrissey, Elvis Costello, Marvin Gaye - they capture but a fraction of the songs total power before putting pen to paper. 'Q' tentatively subjects itself to a selection of classics... "'Tracks Of My Tears', 'Like A Rolling Stone', 'Brown Eyed Girl', 'Alison', 'This Charming Man', 'Heard It Through The Grapevine', are the texts and they share one common factor: when they approach their subject, invariably relationships, they do so from a uniquely personal angle which somehow authenticates the song. As Randy Newman - not at all slouchsome with a pop lyric himself once remarked, "That line behind the stadium with you in 'Brown Eyed Girl' is so goddamn weird that there must be something to it." With these thoughts in heavy rotation, and 'Heard It Through The Grapevine' playing on the mental jukebox, 'Q' writes a lyric in 15 minutes entitled 'That's Enough About You'. Despite being a fairly acid account of an affair soured by self-obsession it also had, one hoped, the humour, rough-hewn romanticism and radio-friendliness of a Bryan Adams hit. We fax it off and wait. The following afternoon a familiar croak comes down the line. ... "These lyrics are great", he says. Then, strangely enough, "I've been thinking about a sort of 'Heard It Through The Grapevine'". The telephone clicks onto conference and he begins to play an acoustic guitar riff: a variation on the opening Grapevine chords - and sings the verse melody he has in mind. Based around a simple B minor-to-E major pattern, it works extremely well. Then comes a descending chorus, which eventually returns to E major and stays there for 12 bars before the pay-off line is delivered in typically bombastic Adamsian fashion. "What do you think?" he asks modestly. "I'm still trying to figure a middle eight but I'll have something for tomorrow. Are you OK to start recording then?" Yikes. 'Hear No Evil Studios' is located in a discreet pocket of Fulham in South West London. Essentially a facility for recording commercial and orchestral music, it's Adams's local and personal favourite. When we arrive at midday on Tuesday, Adams is already at work with his Scandinavian programmer and engineer Olle Romo, who has recently finished working on Adams's new LP, '18 Til I Die'. Having Romo there, Adams explains, gets around the unwieldy problem of having to use session musicians as Romo can program all the keyboard parts, bass and drums (taken from Bob Clearmountain's CD of drum samples) thus recreating a band sound. "We couldn't have done this without Olle," he explains. "We wouldn't have been able to record a backing track in such a short space of time. I don't know anyone else in London who could do that this quickly." The studio is ambitiously booked for just seven hours but shortly into the session disaster strikes - Romo's IBM computer goes down and we have to wait four hours to find a replacement. We use the time to discuss the song's genesis. ... This is the first time in my life I've ever been given a complete lyric and written a whole song to it," Adams admits. "Normally it gets fragmented. Someone will have a chorus and I'll write a verse but it's harder to work that way. I actually found this an easy way to work. Some people are truly gifted but the way I do it, there's a little bit of gift and a lot of craft. It flows through someone like Springsteen, whereas I hack away at it and have to go and have a cup of tea and think about it. I'm better in collaboration. I'm a team player, a good striker, a person to bounce ideas off." Despite this new-found hands-off approach to the words, he has edited the original lyric, trimming the last verse to just a couplet and abandoning a rather wordy section that could have served as either a bridge or middle eight. "It works much better that way," he enthuses."This melody sounded good immediately - it took me about three and a half minutes to write so I stayed with it.'That's Enough About You' is a good chorus line so I wanted that to stand alone. It struck me as being sort of country-ish. My tendency is always to fall into a blues thing right away because all I listen to is blues. But I wanted this to have strong melody and without wishing to flatter you at all, I thought it was a powerful lyric so I wanted to make a good marriage." He's unsurprised to hear that lyric writing wasn't as simple as 'Q' always imagined. "Sometimes you can spend a year trying to get the lyrics written," he says. "Other times you can bang 'em down in a day. 'Everything I Do' was written in an hour. Mutt (Lange, Adams's producer) and I sat down and it just spewed out. Pretty good hour's work as it turned out." Strumming an old Epiphone acoustic and roaring the tune with a remarkable lack of inhibition, he sets about fleshing out the skeleton of the song. He has written a huge, extremely Adamsesque, middle eight which, he declares with relish, will require maximum D major, A major, B minor power chordage. He wonders for a lime whether the middle eight might make an even better chorus than the one we already have but capitulates under pressure; "Mutt calls me Mr Middle Eight," he laughs. "I'm always coming up with some twist on the middle eight. There's always somewhere to go melodically if you want to and I can usually come up with an idea. On the album we've just finished we cut out three middle eight's right at the eleventh hour. Editing can be a bit like removing a mole sometimes." The computer is finally replaced and we set to work. Adams lays down a rough guitar part and a guide vocal while Romo records a basic rhythm track and bassline then fills them out with some minimal keyboard parts. The songshape and structure verse, verse, chorus, middle eight, solo, chorus, outro - is now established and Romo needs an hour to programme each bar into the IBM whereupon he can start to maipulate the individual sounds. As Adams heads over the road to the cafe a quick cup of tea, he hits on a buzzword for the sound he's after. "Swampy," he announces. "We've got to make it swampy." The greasy spoon's grumpy proprietor has ancient an transistor radio behind the counter. "Does that thing work?" asks Adams. As he turns it on, Marvin Gaye's lonesome croon emerges!: "I bet you're wondering how one new... Spooky enough for you? By the time we get back," says Adam, munching toast. "It should be sounding more like band. Then we'll put down a good guitar track top of that, then a keyboard track, maybe a rider Rhodes TV type thing, then I'll re-sing it, put some soul into it. Then you'll say, That was shit, sing it again. Mutt once made me sing a vocal for song 'All I Want Is You' over and over for four whole days. He kept saying, It doesn't sound right, and I'm going, Well it sounds fucking fine here. Turned out the microphone was blown and had been all week." So does he has anything particular in mind for this vocal? "I just want something that feels good" he says. "Something soulful that will fit with' the swampy vibe. If this was for an album I'd probably live with it for a few days before I sang the vocal but for this I'm just going to try and get by on feel." Back in the control room, Romo has sprinkled his fairy dust over the backing track. Rhythmic kicks and pushes have been inserted to give the track a human feel and the bassline has been pared down to a simple rock tumble. Adams adds rudimentary, but highly effective rhythm guitar before he starts on the vocals. "Right," he says, determinedly striding towards the vocal room. "Let's nail this puppy." It is here is that you start to realise why Bryan Adams is an intergalactically loved megastar and you are not. By Christ, he can sing the arse out of a song. With one hand on his hip and his faced contorted with concentration he does the whole vocal in one take, complete with adlibs, blues grunts and soul man inflections. After a few seconds, silence, as the track spools out, his voice reverberates enquiringly around the studio. "Was it OK?", "No, that was shit, do it again." "Thanks a lot,!" he laughs. "Have I got time to do the harmony now?" He has and he does and it's amazing. Once again it's absolutely note perfect, doubling up his vocal at thirds and fifths on the choruses and snaking ingeniously around the chorus hookline. The puppy is well and truly nailed. It's getting late and there's barely time for a playback. We re-book the studio for a further eight hours on Thursday. Adams and Romo listen intently to the track and swap mystifying studiospeak about "gating the snare" and "re-EQing the floor tom on the four". "That's not a bad little ditty, we'll put some meat in the sandwich on Thursday," smiles Bryan Adams, a vegan, packing away his guitar for the night. Thursday morning and Romo has beefed up the backing track baguette beyond all recognition. The drums are huge and impressively real as they cannon out of the studio monitors. The bass sounds like an overweight person breaking wind on a plastic chair. This, for once, is a good thing. Adams turns up with a bagful of 'Marks & Spencer's' salad and a hunch that a harmonica might sound good before the chorus. An old Fender Twin Reverb amplifier is duly hired and set-up and Bryan blasts some blues harp through it. Listening back he isn't convinced and scraps the idea. "Anyway," he says. "You don't hear harmonicas on hit records these days." For the lead guitar parts Adams settles on a mildly distorted white blues sound. He plays over the track 23 times before he hits on an opening lick he likes. The much-promised power chords are added to the middle eight and in combination with the lick they nudge the whole song into overdrive. The guitar solo. played on Adams's PRS electric, necessitates a further 18 run throughs before he pulls off a wonderfully understated break. "Simple is the hardest thing to do," he apologises. For the outro, Adams fancies some mob-handed backing vocals and press-gangs 'Q' into joining him at the microphone. It is only when the headphones are on that it registers quite how loud Adams sings. At one point, 'Q' attempts to emulate his high volume, raw-throated vocal style and nearly suffers a ruptured oesophagus. The "BVs" are done satisfactorily, we experiment with some percussion before selecting a sampled tambourine to enhance the chorus and middle eight beats. Then the esteemable Romo constructs a rough mix and the serious listening commences. Adams stands stock still, frozen in concentration between the monitors with the track hammering out at full tilt. He listens again and again, asking Romo to make minor adjustments to sounds that a radar-assisted bat would have trouble picking up. It's only after the rough mix is finished that Adams suggests we elevate the track further with some organ. Fortunately, last year one of Hear No Evil's regular clients bequeathed a Hammond C3 to the studio, so the appropriate old Leslie 760 speaker cabinet is miked up and Adams pumps out some elementary chords for the chorus and a little vamping on the outro. In a rare outburst of emotion, Romo leans back in his chair as the organ deluges the control room. "Fucking wow." he says. Before the final mix, Adams has a 20-minute sleep to clear his head and rest his ears while Romo makes minuscule last-minute alterations. Once the mix-to-tape is in progress, Adams appears to be physically absorbing the sound, every sinew of his body reacting to the music. It'S delicate balancing act allows for even the tiniest errors to be massaged out. Particularly vibrant guitar phrases can be amplified while particularly crap ones can be binged. Certain words can be gently magnified to give them greater expression while others are consigned to what Adams calls "the circular file". During the process, which requires a micro surgeon's attention to detail, tambourines are sharpened, organ notes are dampened, drum fills are boosted and backing vocals are laughed at. You know you've got a result when Romo is happily shuffling around the room and Adams is singing along at the top of his voice. "It sounds just like a Bryan Adams song!" you yell over the music. And it does. We all shake hands. It's an euphoric moment. Before we copyright the song, Adams says he'd like to change the title to 'That's Enough About You (What About Me)'. Brackets, he says, proved rather lucky for Everything I Do (I Do It For You). It would be churlish to argue (it really would!). Realistically speaking, we decided jubilantly, 'That's Enough About You (What About Me)' will probably be Number 1 all over the world by September. Failing that, Adams says, he might put it out on a B-side sometime. Either would be us fine. See what you think... 'That's Enough About You (Let's
Talk About Me)' download now > |
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