Amerie Wars Friday, 26 June 2009

The vocal from 1 Thing by Amerie over (mainly) Imperial March (Darth Vader's Theme) from The Empire Strikes Back. Surely the crappest Star Wars film, but best piece of music. Anyhoo, this unlikely pairing came about simply because The Phantom Menace came out round about the same time that the Amerie record was blowing up.

1 Thing vid on YouTube.



It was a huge record for a few of my friends and I - a deceptively simple sounding sample-based groove with that awesome soul vocal. It was then I became aware of the producer Rich Harrison who'd done the similarly awesome Crazy in Love a while before. The use of samples (The Meters' version of Oh! Calcutta and The Chi lites' Are You My Woman respectively I think is what really attracts me, but the records were always big crowd pleasers too. I ended up with 2 American promo 12s of this off of eBay, and had tried doing a DIY acapella with not much success. Then the UK 12 had one on it so I ended up with my 3rd copy.

It's a bit of a concept bootleg and needed a beat, so I looked to one of the many Sci-fi themed cover compilation albums that came out in the 70s to capitalise on the whole space movie thing. Spaced Out Disco by The Galactic Force Band contains the huge synth intro to It Takes 2 by Rob base and DJ EZ Rock, in the token original composition (to raise royalties for whoever got their name on it!) Space Dust, but also has a cover of the pop-space-disco Star Wars track by Meco with a big drum break in the middle. Bingo! The break has a nice suspenseful synth tone all the way though, but also lots of R2-D2 noises in it, I can only apologise.

I also added a light sabre sound effect, and when she sings about bells I stuck in a bit of the Bob James Mardi Gras break because I always think of that as being the bells.

PS: I swear this is true and I didn't dream it, but before Amerie was famous I saw her in this TV documentary about Hip Hop and Porn (blame Snoop Dogg). She was presented as an up-and-coming (sorry) porn star who also happened to sing a bit.