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Background to Songs: Sarah, Why? KHT
Written by Jimmy
Sarah, Why? is the sixth song on our fourth album, King Henry’s Tears: Billy Joel, meets Elton John, meets Dexter.
Lyrics: Born at 7AM during the Autumns 2010 Summer Jam, this song started with Jimmy drinking coffee, singing to himself, ‘Why, why, why did you ever listen to me? Did I give you any reason, any season for you to believe? That I would be good? That I would be any other man than you’d see?’ The lyrics and music for that bit were fully formed. Than Jimmy had to think, “who would sing this song?’ And the answer was obvious, “Bob”, the misogynist bad boy that populates way too much of this album (for more on Bob, please click here). The next bit of fun was the lyric, ‘that a hunter stalks a deer or a miner seeks a seem of gold for a thrill!’ What an ass Bob had become. So the rest was just filling out the sadness of poor Sarah and the narcisim of bad ol’ Bob.
Musically: Jimmy and Andy then took this to the studio to sort out the tune for the verses. Andy wrote this fully on the piano and it immediately took an Elton John and Billy Joel feel. Lots of bounce. We like that, although the band wasn’t too keen and tried to pull us back from the madness. We prevailed and interestingly, later during the Summer 2011 Spanish Jam, when Andy tried to darken the vocal, the band rebelled. They had gotten used to the bounce! And boy does Rob’s bass bounce on this – of course, the look on his face is that of a ‘bad smell in the room’, but he promises it is not completely feedback. We had a lot of fun on backing vocals when David Ablemen joined us to put on a full boy’s choir backing vocal. We kept most of it in the final mix.
Mixing: This stayed largely un-changed in various drafts. Then Andy worked to darken it a bit and all hell broke loose. The basic issue was it somehow lost it’s mojo. So a lot of mixing was getting it’s mojo back. We upped it a couple beats per minute and had Andy go back to bouncy vocals and then world was restored.
Recommendations: If you like this, you’ll probably like Love You Anyway from our first album, another bouncy little number inspired by the movie ‘That Thing You Do.’ And if you like that, you might as well listen to this:
And if you want more bouncy piano songs, then let’s go to the original source, Elton and Billy.
Enjoy
Jimmy