Artwork by Malcolm Smith at Art Party Comics
KJ writes, “Tell Me A Lie” is one of my all-time favorite Nu Shooz songs, and I was wondering what your songwriting process is.
Hello KJ!
Well, first of all, thanks for that wonderful letter. 'Tell Me a Lie' was one of my absolute favorite songs off of "Bagtown." Another was 'The Color of Everything' from “Pandora’s Box.” That whole album was a departure from my normal writing style, which was to start with a bass line, a kick/snare pattern, some nice chords, and go from there.
On 'Pandora,' well... Martin Scorsese made a documentary about Bob Dylan called 'No Direction Home,' which I watched over and over in the studio. And that's when I finally realized what Lyrics could do. That they could be like impressionist paintings. At that point, I'd been writing songs for thirty years. So this time, I STARTED WITH THE LYRICS, just writing free of the music.
The first song that came out of that writing style was 'Spy vs Spy.' It was like a revelation. It opened up lyrics to new rhyming schemes and song forms. In the early days, it was so hard to keep four hours of material fresh. At the end of the night, there were always songs we were tired of but had to play to fill the time. So, I worked on songs in batches of ten and tried to finish two every week for Wednesday's rehearsal. I wrote some pretty flimsy stuff at times, but just good enough to fill the dance floor. (Some of those I'm still rewriting in my head.)
But how I did it was what we called the BONE PILE. The BONE PILE worked like this.
I would work on music and lyrics separately. I'd collect a bag of chord changes that I liked and SEPARATELY a bag of word fragments, mostly TITLES and hooks. Then, I'd try the hooks against the chord changes till I found ones that fit together. It was very much an assembly line process. 'The Real Thing' was a song that came together like that. The lyric fragment I started with in that song was "Whatever you want, whatever you need." And it expanded out from there. Musically, I knew I wanted to make a Gamble and Huff/ Philly Soul song like they might write for the OJays.
So, that might be more than you wanted to know, but that's how it was done.
We really appreciate it when people dig into our band and get beyond 'I Can't Wait.' There's a lot there. And we loved the bit about your bass player from Senegal. Our songs were well-liked in Africa, especially (for some reason) 'Should I say Yes.'