THE BASTARD

They say it’s all about the song and the rest is frosting. The arrangement, the production, the performance, the myriad contextual elements, apparently they don’t matter so much. It’s all about that mystical essence residing in a composition. Nonsense really. When a piece of work resonates it’s a complex thing of many parts and not that easy to analyse.

This short edit of Badstuff was derived from the four times I recorded it, each time in a different style: pop, urban, acoustic and rock. The different versions had different emotions because the music was different. It pointed to younger women and their abiding struggles with the wrong guy. Curiously the singers managed to make “badstuff” sound like “bastard” and “pit-stop” sound like “pissed-off” which was of course fully appropriate. I wondered for a minute if songs maybe had a voice of their own after all.

Archive Recordings