It seems as though all of the stories for …just visiting three begin with a phone conversation between Phonte and I. Welp, I guess with that being said………..
I was having a conversation with Phonte one day…… and he was telling me about a recent connection he made with a certain well-known female vocalist who essentially made it known that she was down to be on the album. Now knowing how things can change on a dime in music without much warning, I decided very early that I wasn’t gonna get too excited until I was listening to a final version of a song with her vocals on it. A few days later, Phonte sent me a folder of four joints, which included the song “Driving” by Everything But the Girl. I’ll admit, I remembered the song VERY vaguely… BUT out of the four that he sent, this is the one that both of us gravitated toward. Technically speaking, when I listened to the song and heard it bounce back and forth basically between two or three chords, I thought to myself, this is gonna be a pretty easy song to redo… This shouldn’t be a problem at all – That is, until I listened closer and heard about 593 layers of synth in the joint. It seemed like every time I listened, a brand new synth patch would mysteriously appear – the track was VERY deceiving. Even when I sent what I thought was the final music to Phonte… he hit me back right back, “Ayo… There’s a synth line that you missed. Go to (insert minute mark value here) and check it out…” DAMN!! I thought I GOT all of um!!! *Angrily opens Pro Tools file back up*
I actually finished a “to be recorded to” draft of the song pretty early… and THAT’S when the real fun began. Once Phonte got back in touch with the originally chosen vocalist, we discovered that her schedule, our album deadline, combined with our touring schedule probably wouldn’t work out – So we ended up having to look elsewhere. But I’m sure we will get to work with her in the near future on some original material… So we turned our attention to Paris, Amber, and Anita… otherwise known collectively as KING to handle the vocals. They were completely down AND were already familiar with the song, ok… dope! Well…… That is, until they were called on to do a small gig opening up at the LA Forum for uhhh….. none other than….. well, this kat outta Minneapolis, MN named…… Prince Rogers Nelson. We were REALLY happy for them landing that show and with the rehearsal schedule they were gonna have to keep, there was no way that they would have been able to record this song and we understood that completely. Meanwhile, during the creation of the JV3, I already knew that it was a must that I had to have a joint with my sister Sy Smith a/k/a “See Smeet”… I always tell people, Sy is one of the sweetest, most down-to-earth people you’ll ever come across…. AND she’s probably also “more real” than a lot of dudes you know – love her to death. And while I was racking my brain trying to think of a song to redo that would be tailor-made to fit her vocally, the answer was sitting right in front of my face the entire time. “Driving” was for Sy Smith… Period. Phonte and I were already plotting on her to record the joint before she even knew about it or heard it! I finally ended up playing the instrumental for her in the van while we were on the road with The Foreign Exchange traveling from Chicago to Indianapolis back in May and she loved it. After we went home from that Midwest run, she got together with Phonte and recorded her vocals. Once I heard the vocal draft, I thought to myself, “She sounds a little different than normal… But it sounds dope as HELL.” I couldn’t quite put my finger on what the difference was or why she sounded the way she did… I just knew that I loved it. When I got Phonte on the phone, he told me that Sy didn’t feel too well while recording it… Ahhhhhhhhh, NOW it makes sense. To me, her not feeling 100% ADDED to the emotion and the sincerity of what she was singing about and it also helped to make it her song. To drive that point home even further, I wanted to change the song at the end into one of my all-time favorite slow joints, “Inside My Love” by Minnie Riperton. When arranging in my head what I wanted to do to re-create “Driving”, the first song I thought about was “Inside My Love”… the drums had a similar feel to me. So I allowed that particular drum pattern from the intro and the verses of Minnie’s song be the influence for the entire cover… I love Sy’s interpolation with the lyrics during that piece. She took Minnie’s opening “Two people….” line and played with it just enough to let the listener know what song we were changing into, but still subtle enough to where it may not hit you until the change is almost over……. Pretty sneaky there, See Smeet.