Jason DeRulo, Kisean Anderson, Jonathan Rotem

F. S. Merriwether

I actually spent most of the week working on a version of Chris Brown’s “Forever,” but it really wasn’t coming together the way I wanted, so I tabled it for now and went looking to the latest top ten charts to see what else I could find. Aside from a really trashy song about hotel room sex, this was the highest ranking song I’d never heard of, so I went with this one. It had a fairly standard structure, which is kind of a nice change, but I was a little puzzled by the shifting pronouns in the chorus, so I switched all of them to second person. Started out with banjo, then added in uke and mandolin. Seemed like it still needed more strumminess, so I mic’ed an electric guitar and played it unamplified. Added a snare, some cymbals, and a floor tom for the bass drum part, then a variety of other percussion. By this point, it was getting kind of muddy sounding, so I stopped before adding a bassline.

Vocals were a challenge as well. I did about seven takes singing pretty much as high as possible (without slipping into falsetto), then I scrapped those and dropped an octave. I’m not sure this is any better, but it was at least less painful. I ended up doing a ludicrous number of harmonies, so the “Mmmm whatcha say” bits are in five-part harmony. Given that I can’t sing a melody, this was perhaps a bad idea and certainly added to the overall muddiness.

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First off, it’s fairly clear that I got some bad lyrics. Changing the chorus to “you only meant well/well, of course you didn’t” instead of “you only meant well/well, of course you did” is a significant change, but it gives the whole song the feel of being written by a bitter junior high student, which I actually kind of liked. Anyway, the actual version is much weirder and heavily auto-tuned than I would have guessed (I actually was thinking that this DeRulo guy was in the Mraz/Johnson/Blunt kind of wimpy singer-songerwriter vein), but I’m pretty pleased with my version. I hardly even assign lyrics to between-chord runs (like the “to really be your man” line), but I should probably do it more often (even if, at this tempo, it leaves me a little out of breath and rushing to catch up). I’m still not happy with my vocal performance or the muddiness of the recording, but, as far as music-writing goes, I think it went pretty well.