Richard X on working with Erasure
Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2020 4:02 pm
https://lastdonutofthenight.substack.co ... -mia-annie
Erasure, “Elevation”
[Mute Records founder] Daniel Miller has always been good to me and understands what I can do, so he sometimes thought of me—and he thought of me for this. He played me the demos, and I said, “Where are the songs?” And he said, “That’s gonna be a hit.” It’s not a criticism—that’s how they work.
With this song, there was a melody, and [Vince Clarke] wanted this whole album to be analog, so I worked on the arrangement before the song—which is quite odd for me, because I think the song informs the sonics. But it was quite easy to work with Vince and [Andy Bell] on this. At the time, EDM was huge, but it was also wiping out all other electronic music in its wake. I wanted a bit of the influence [of EDM], but not necessarily the sound, which made the arrangements a bit dancier.
If you listen to it, it’s still Erasure—but people really hated it when it came out. I think it’s because they made a dance-y looking video. There’s nothing wrong with the song at all. But [Erasure] weren’t in the video, and it was a sunny dance video, so some of the fans were up in arms about that—but they calmed down when they heard the record. It’s nice to have people like them respecting my opinion when I grew up listening to their records.
Erasure, “Elevation”
[Mute Records founder] Daniel Miller has always been good to me and understands what I can do, so he sometimes thought of me—and he thought of me for this. He played me the demos, and I said, “Where are the songs?” And he said, “That’s gonna be a hit.” It’s not a criticism—that’s how they work.
With this song, there was a melody, and [Vince Clarke] wanted this whole album to be analog, so I worked on the arrangement before the song—which is quite odd for me, because I think the song informs the sonics. But it was quite easy to work with Vince and [Andy Bell] on this. At the time, EDM was huge, but it was also wiping out all other electronic music in its wake. I wanted a bit of the influence [of EDM], but not necessarily the sound, which made the arrangements a bit dancier.
If you listen to it, it’s still Erasure—but people really hated it when it came out. I think it’s because they made a dance-y looking video. There’s nothing wrong with the song at all. But [Erasure] weren’t in the video, and it was a sunny dance video, so some of the fans were up in arms about that—but they calmed down when they heard the record. It’s nice to have people like them respecting my opinion when I grew up listening to their records.
