Behind The Scenes #12
This Boy
  (link to video)

This is a very special video for me for a couple of reasons. First, it is a Beatles song. All Beatle songs are special to me. I think their music is the most timeless of any music ever written, arranged, and recorded. I try to be faithful to the vibe and feel they gave to their songs in their recordings. I do respect and appreciate people who change the style or arrangement of cover songs to make it their own. But I always seem to like the Beatles' version the most. Maybe it's because I heard their arrangement first and that sets my expectation. Or maybe it's because the minds that created the song also created the arrangement with the same magic. Or maybe it's something else entirely. Whatever the reason, that's why I stay faithful to their style and arrangement.

But the most important reason this video is special is that I did it with my songwriting partner Matt Kramer. Matt and I have been writing music together since we were teenagers. We've written hundreds of songs but we haven't really recorded much together. What brought us together as teenagers was our mutual love of writing and creating our own music. And as part of that process, we found that we found that we both loved Beatle music. We would often jam together and play Beatle songs. We regularly played This Boy with two part harmony, I sang John's part, Matt sang Paul's. Matt does a great job of covering Paul's vocal and I suppose we pulled the song off well enough as a duet. But I always lamented that we never had someone to sing the third part (George's).

Just before the COVID lockdown, Matt made a trip to my house. We were going to be busy with a bunch of things, but on a whim I asked him to pick a Beatles song and we would record it, something we had never done before. He wanted to do This Boy. So, I laid down some initial tracks and my vocal part. I also added the part we were always missing (George's part). When Matt arrived we laid down his vocal. We should have captured the video while Matt was singing his part, but somehow that didn't happen and Matt had to shoot his video from his house while under lockdown. And finally, a little more than a year later, I cobbled together this video.

One interesting bit of trivia about this song is that the first version the Beatles recorded had a guitar solo where the bridge is now. George Martin did not like the guitar solo, so they replaced it with a bridge that featured a searing vocal by John. I never heard the solo that was replaced, but I love the bridge they came up with.