From the Ida Vaults
Here's a new "digital single/EP" from the Ida vaults courtesy of the Numero Group. The song is "Shotgun"; the photo is by Pat Graham; phone video by Liz from Dreamland last summer, including Bernie Worrell and the beautiful console; the super analog film is from our dear friend and Annapolis legend Andrew Richardson from the video he made for "Shotgun" when he roadied for us on the Low/Ida East Coast tour in the fall of 2000. We used excerpts from the video with "shotgun strings" from the EP.
Our First Album
"Shotgun" was on our first album, and I wrote it off of a beat I played on Liz’s high school drum kit, which was set up in our apartment in Brooklyn. We added a ceramic pot as a rack tom, and though I personally thought it was super cool, it definitely sounded like something was slightly wrong, particularly on this sad, slow song with this clanging kind of weird cowbell showing up all over the place on the original 4-track demo.
I got home from work one day and played this groove on the drums, and the song flew out—the lyrics, chords, voicings, and the harmonies too. It was one of those songs that was written really fast and spontaneously; in the half an hour it took to play and record it and write out the words on a scrap of paper, it was just there, like a found object.
It’s played with both E strings tuned down to D on the guitar. "Accidents," "Stuck," and later on "Backburner" and some others were also written in that same tuning. We generally tried to write a few songs in each of the alternate tunings we used, most of which were much more unusual than this one and came from Liz.
Bulletproof Soul
Anyway, we were obsessed with Sade’s "Bulletproof Soul." The song and the incredible harmony of Sade Adu and Leroy Osbourne’s vocals really influenced and moved us. "Shotgun" is kind of like Ida’s "Nothing Compares 2 U," but obviously it never got anywhere near the radio. I always wanted a good R&B singer to cover it and make it their own—someone with no fear at all, like Roberta Flack, or someone with a majestic falsetto and some real open-hearted ache, like Frank Ocean.
Fool in the Rain
On the version of "Shotgun" that we released on "Tales of Brave Ida," I played drums, and it sounded like a 5-year-old kid who’d never played the drums before pounding out a Go-Go beat at half speed and trying to play the insane drum fills at the end of "Fool in the Rain"—wait, I’m definitely making this sound way cooler than it is. I can’t believe nobody told me to stop when we were recording it—but it was before Miggy joined the band, and it was the one song that had "drums" on the album, so it stands out in that sense.
Our Tribute to Lovers Rock
Secretly, I always wanted the chance to record "Shotgun" again someday, so on "Will You Find Me" we decided to give it another try. We cut a new version at Warren Defever's home studio in Livonia, MI, with drum machines, synths, electric piano, and acoustic guitar. Karla doing these staccato hits with the beat was like all our slow jam dreams finally coming true. Warren’s production is brilliant, and this is Liz’s favorite version of the song. It is probably the most Sade thing we ever did, like a tribute to Lovers Rock, and it was previously released on the "Shhh" EP (Time Stereo 2002).
Stings Only Mix
"Shotgun Strings" are from Rick Lassiter’s arrangement, played by Rick, Ida Pearle, and my sister Cecilia. The original WYFM mix of "Shotgun" was too dense, and you almost couldn’t hear the song anymore; there was just too much happening. We tried pulling the strings and the guitars out of the mix, and it got much better. But the strings were so beautifully written and played that we couldn’t let them go. Trina Shoemaker and I had separated them from the track and made a "strings only" mix. When we were doing the final mixes for WYFM with Warren, we decided to use this "strings only" mix as an interstitial standalone piece. Warren made a sound collage of Rick’s string arrangement, looping, layering, and cross-fading the strings, and it became this oceanic sound world that he made in front of me at ON-ME Sound. We loved this new piece so much that we ended up using it as an outro/coda for the song. It felt and sounded like it was meant to be that way all along.
The Wizard of Woo
In memory of the Wizard of Woo and because of the immediacy and joy of hearing his unbelievable uncut funk and feel on a song that was literally written on pots and pans, we asked Gillian to strip down the mix to just vocals and electric piano. We also returned Rick Lassiter’s string arrangement back to the mix and left it just like that because Bernie loved the strings. Gillian, who currently works at Dreamland, was born the same year we began making this album. It was 25 years ago that we recorded "Shotgun" there with the incomparable Trina Shoemaker and Sue Kapa as the assistant engineer. It was meaningful to go back to the same room after all this time had passed.
