Blog
Background to Songs: I’ve Just Seen A Face, KHT
Written by Jimmy
I’ve Just Seen a Face is the 7th Song on our fourth album, King Henry’s Tears. Like Machivelli’s The Prince, we tried to put our favourite parts smack dab in the middle.
Music: For followers of Abubilla Music, you know we love the Beatles, the Beach Boys and great songwriters from any genre. And most of us are McCartney Beatles and a few of us rate ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’ as one of Paul’s top 3 songs. The song was recorded in 1965, and interestingly, has no bass track (Sorry Rob). In the best example of having a good day in the office, the song was recorded at Abby Road on the same day as Yesterday. Jimmy saw Paul perform it in 1976 during the Wings Over America tour (he won tickets on WPGC to see this concert on Saturday and won tickets on WPGC to see the Eagles, Linda Rohnstadt and Jackson Brown on Friday – Jimmy’s version of a good day in the office). The Beatles version is very fast, country and very short. Paul chose to focus on the celebration of the choruses. It is perfect. Here is Paul performing it in Russia:
Lyrics: The lyrics of I’ve Just Seen a Face are amazing, both joyful and very, very sad. Here’s the third verse:
I have never known
The likes of this, I’ve been alone
And I have missed things and kept out of sight
But other girls were never quite like this
This is all hidden in the fast tempo and upbeat vocals, but the singer who has just seen a face was coming from a pretty bad place.
Our cover: This cover brings the total number of covers we have done to, well…. one. We had three goals with the cover:
- We wanted to capture the sadness of the lyrics. We couldn’t possible improve on their version so we didn’t try. Instead we decide to focus on the sadness of the verses early on … all minor keys, all Charlotte beautiful stark vocal backed by Hannah. Ed spent a lot of time on the minor chords in the chorus – which actually shifts between major and minor but works. Rob and Ed spent a lot of time getting that little shift between the minor openning and the major outro. And we all love when Hannah and Chartlotte’s vocals come together with ‘I want all the world to see, I want all the world to see we’ve met.’ We get tingly. But we cry at BT commercials.
- We really wanted a God Only Knows type close. We know we didn’t come close, but Ed and Jimmy have been trying for years to get something that we could put layer over layer of vocals on. This was our chance.
- We wanted to close out a song like the Beta Band, Dry the Rain. We love the rhythms of the close of this song, so we went for it…
Mix: We had a ton of tracks and the key to Andy’s mix was to build as slowly as possible. Verses 1 and 2 with just guitar and bass. First chorus, simply adding Hannah’s ‘Falling, Falling, Calling’. Verse 3, we tried to make this the starkest which is Paul’s lyric at its saddest. We kept the next Chorus still stark and minor. Then at 2.20 we switch to major key, bring in the shakers and we hope you tingle a bit with the double ‘I want all the world to see we’ve met.’ Then we just go to town. At very last minute we added the final layer of Hannah doing ‘I want all the world to see we’ve met’ throughout the outro. We stripped back instruments to the end to just leave vocal and clapping.
Recommendations: If you like this, maybe you’ll like all our other attempts at multiple vocal tracks. Most notably, the other extravaganza on this album, 71 Hours To Monday, Global Remix:
If you’d like to hear the inspirations for this cover, here are the three main ones:
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And Paul saddest Beatle lyric which we kept in mind while we did the first few versus, Eleanor Rigby. We like David Cook’s cover on this one:
Hope you’re okay with our version
Jimmy