The projects read as an artist content in creating in a way that reads and sounds satisfying to her - bucking what listeners may expect from her past music or what traditional trends may dictate. Mulholland opener “Curious” sets a moody, mysterious tone, followed by snappy, trap-heavy cuts like “A Heart’s for the Breaking” or “4TheLovers” After 4AM tracks “Give It All Up” and “I Remember Us… ” deliver a pang of nostalgia with flecks of jittery pop and boom bap. ET to hear the show broadcast live on Sirius XM’s Volume, channel 106.On Friday, the 38-year-old singer will independently release 4AM Mulholland and After 4AM, a “double project” that pivots from her pop-leaning past hits into a deep dive of more subdued, cavernous R&B and trance-laced productions. We like it the way it is.”ĭownload and subscribe to Rolling Stone Music Now, hosted by Brian Hiatt , on iTunes or Spotify, and tune in Fridays at 1 p.m. After we got over our anger, we said please don’t send any more of these. The label sends you different versions of your song, with terrible hooks on them. I was like, don’t you just hear that it sounds cool? And there were different iterations that came. But it’s not really supposed to be your traditional song where it’s taking you here and then you go up there. And it kind of does kind of stay on one track, it doesn’t really have a bunch of changes. “ I remember one of the descriptions was, it’s so linear. As opposed to have someone polished singing it, because then it’s cemented already.” And that gave me room to do my own interpretation of things. He’s not a singer, so it’s kind of like more of the idea of what it should sound like. Later on, he was like, ‘Should I get a girl to sing on the demos?’ And I was like, no! Because it’s very raw when he sings it. You just know how you feel about it.”‘īeating the demo “Rich sings on the demos,” Amerie explains. But you never really know how everyone else is going to like it. I liked it right away.And when we recorded it we looked at each other like hm, this is something. I thought, ‘There’s a lot happening in this track.’ It sounded so different from what was on the radio. The bridge was kind of empty, if I remember correctly, so I went off and wrote the bridge on my own at another time. And at first I was like, ‘Whoa, this song is crazy.’ The way he samples the Meters, what he chose and the way he looped it, gave it this super go-go flavor, which was in him because he’s from D.C. Rich had most of the song already finished. He’s not a make-it-in-front-of-me-right-now, let’s-bounce-back-and-forth-as-we-go creator. “The way Rich works, he has to go into his hole, he creates and then he comes back and you can start tweaking things. Tapes N’ Tapes “Rich had it on a demo tape, actually on a tape,” says Amerie. The Private Lives of Liza Minnelli (The Rainbow Ends Here)
A lot of people are like, she’s saying ‘gobble gobble gobble gobble!’ Why would I say that?” Again!’ People still ask me what I’m saying in.
He didn’t mean it in a rude way, but he’d go, ‘No. Also, it was kind of like my treat, because Rich was really tough in the studio… We would do take after take. “I was literally eating them between takes, because I’m kind of a glutton.
AMERIE 1 THING TODAY DOWNLOAD
To hear the episode, press play below or download and subscribe on iTunes or Spotify.ĭoritos in the vocal booth “There were a lot of guacamole Doritos involved,” says Amerie. The 2005 song paved the way for the decade of pop that followed, combining a wildly syncopated drum loop from the Meters with hyper-rhythmic vocals that owed way more to hip-hop than traditional R&B. On a recent episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, R&B singer Amerie explained how she and “Crazy in Love” producer Rich Harrison made “1 Thing,” which landed at number 90 on Rolling Stone‘s list of the Best Songs of the 21st Century (So Far).