Some of you may remember the good ole days when I taught music to Special Ed. High School kids (up until the school shut down completely at the top of August). Well, the most difficult part about maintaining a “9 to 5” and being a working musician is being able to keep some crazy late night hours. There were times that I would be getting off of a red eye flight from the west coast or getting off of an overnight MegaBus/BoltBus ride from a gig in NYC and then driving directly to work… This particular morning was no different. I don’t remember exactly how late I was up the previous night, but I do remember one thing… I. Was. TIRED. During the spring semester in 2011, second period was my planning period. So as soon as my first period class left the room, I would look VERY forward to my 50 solid minutes of peace and quiet before my rowdy ass third period class came in. But just as I was settling in to some silence… My cell phone started ringing – It was Phonte with an epiphany…

I actually had “Same Ole Love” on the computer in my classroom and decided to learn the chords and changes as soon as we got off the phone. From learning the music, I was able to then hear my own drum pattern overtop of the hooks. I then walked over to the drumset in the classroom and practiced that particular pattern until it was time for my third period class to come in… Matter of fact, I practiced that pattern more than a few times because I wanted to be the one to record them and I wanted them to be laid with the same groove and swing that I had in my head.

One of the great things about this remake is not only Jeanne’s performance, but the fact that since she has been on the road with The Foreign Exchange and been pulled into various studio sessions covering several genres of music, she has ignored being a good “Country singer” and has begun to build a solid reputation as a being a dope SINGER… Period. We knew that creating this song for Jeanne and putting it on the album would be a wild card move, without question. Sometimes it is difficult to get listeners to think outside the box, especially with a song that a lot of folks connected and grew up with…. We could already see the tweets and the comments coming…. “Wait a minute, a white country singer redoing a joint by ANITA?!”  ….”I KNOW she ain’t doin’ no Anita Baker song!” No problem… We had a plan. First, we weren’t sure if Jeanne was familiar with the original version or not… Either way, we made it a point to keep Anita’s version away from her simply because Anita has such a distinct tone and sound and we didn’t want it to influence our version at all – plus I was confident that it would help our version stand out a little bit more. So after recording just the piano part to a click track or a metronome… Phonte laid down reference vocals for Jeanne to listen to before she actually went in to record it herself. I even put the piano/click track on my phone so that I could practice the drum pattern on the kit WITH the recorded music playing during my down time in the classroom…. At that point it was just a matter of figuring out when we were going to record the joint in full.

I just so happened to be in North Carolina at Phonte’s spot for what ended up being a few days in April, I was on Spring Break from teaching. Ironically enough, the majority of “Same Ole Love” was recorded the day after Phonte and I recorded our now infamous parody of Mark Morrison’s “Return Of the Mack.” My greedy ass was actually going to work on a Cookout burger while Jeanne came on through the house so she and Phonte could record vocals. In the meantime, I was waiting on a call from +FE frequent collaborator and live band guitarist, Chris Boerner so that I could take a trip to his house and record the drums. I mean, I had taken along one of my favorite snare drums on the plane and everything for this! I ended up getting the call and left the vocal session to head over to Boerner’s spot to set up for my first live drum recording session… On a full kit, that is. It was a quick set-up, no issues at all…. Levels were adjusted, a few drum mic tweaks here and there, then it was time. I played the kit and actually got the drums sounding the way I wanted them to sound on only the second take… Damn near surprised mySELF! Chris dumped the drum tracks on my flash drive and I took them AND the vocal tracks home with me the following day to plug into the open session in my studio. After putting them all together, I recorded the bass guitar track and some additional percussion instruments in order to make the song bounce a little bit more. After I sent the joint to Phonte, he had Boerner add some acoustic guitar… RHYTHM acoustic guitar that really added some more movement to the end hook and dammit… Allyn Love came in and “made the song cry” with that pedal steel guitar. When I heard those final two elements, I was rewinding things MORE than a few times. I was even influenced to add the string line at the end to give the song more of a finalé. Pedal steel guitar? Jeanne singing Anita and sounding GREAT? Kats were proud of this one simply because we felt as though we were breaking a couple of rules and pulled it off successfully… It almost makes me anxious to shatter some more

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