CHR Music Radar: The Secret Lives of Familiar Songs

Five records. Five unexpected histories. And the people, places and accidents hiding inside music you thought you knew.

Sometimes knowing more about a song ruins the magic.

This isn't one of those times.

The best music stories do the opposite. They put another room behind the room you're already standing in.

A familiar guitar figure turns out to have lived another life twenty years earlier. A song written by one artist somehow ends up sounding as though it had always been waiting for another singer. A dance-floor classic begins with almost everything taken away.

That's where we're going with this edition of CHR Music Radar.

The playlist can handle the feeling.

We're following the stories hiding underneath it.

GOTYE FEAT. KIMBRA — “SOMEBODY THAT I USED TO KNOW”

A breakup song that couldn't end until somebody answered back.

It's difficult now to hear the opening notes of “Somebody That I Used to Know” without immediately knowing what's coming.

But the sound that begins the record existed decades before Gotye's song.

The starting point was a tiny sample from “Seville,” a 1967 instrumental by Brazilian guitarist Luiz Bonfá.

Gotye, born Wouter De Backer, built outward from that fragment. Much of the album Making Mirrors was assembled at The Barn, his studio on his parents' property outside Melbourne, using samples, found sounds, programmed instruments and recordings he'd made himself.

Then the song stopped cooperating.

He had written the man's side of the breakup and reached the chorus, but couldn't find a satisfying way forward. An instrumental section didn't solve it. Repeating what he'd already written didn't solve it.

The answer was not another musical idea.

It was another person.

The song changed when Gotye decided the woman in the relationship needed to respond.

Kimbra eventually became that voice, and suddenly what could have remained a beautifully bitter breakup song became an argument.

That's why the record still feels so uncomfortable.

The first narrator has spent half the song convincing us what happened.

Then someone else gets the microphone.

And the truth becomes less tidy.

Listen for: the moment Kimbra enters. It isn't simply a featured vocal. It's the point where the song stops belonging to one person's memory.

TAME IMPALA — “NEW PERSON, SAME OLD MISTAKES”

The Tame Impala song that may have been waiting for Rihanna all along.

At the end of Tame Impala's 2015 album Currents sits a strange contradiction.

“New Person, Same Old Mistakes” is about transformation and repetition at the same time: wanting to become somebody different while suspecting that the old machinery is still running underneath.

Kevin Parker wrote it, performed it and produced it.

Then Rihanna heard it.

Her version, retitled “Same Ol' Mistakes,” appeared on ANTI in 2016 and remained remarkably close to Parker's original production.

The fascinating part came later.

Parker explained that when he was originally creating the song, he had imagined a female R&B voice singing it. He eventually sang it himself.

So when Rihanna's version appeared, Parker didn't hear an artist radically reinventing his song.

He heard something closer to an alternate destination for it.

SZA apparently played Tame Impala for Rihanna during a late-night session, introducing one musical world to another.

That's the part worth remembering.

Genres often look much more separate from the outside than they do to musicians.

Psychedelic rock becomes R&B.

R&B hears itself inside psychedelic pop.

A song crosses the room and discovers that it fits perfectly over there too.

Listen for: how little Rihanna needed to change for the record to belong inside her world. Sometimes the connection was already in the music.

THE ISLEY BROTHERS — “FOOTSTEPS IN THE DARK, PTS. 1 & 2”

You may have known this groove before you knew where it came from.

Put on “Footsteps in the Dark” and wait.

There it is.

That guitar.

That slow, suspended rhythm.

That feeling that everything is happening sometime after midnight.

The Isley Brothers released the song on Go for Your Guns in 1977.

Sixteen years later, another generation heard something inside it.

Ice Cube's “It Was a Good Day” used “Footsteps in the Dark” as one of the foundations of its production.

And the emotional transformation is remarkable.

The Isleys' record moves through romantic suspicion and uncertainty.

Ice Cube's song imagines something almost radically ordinary: a day in Los Angeles when everything goes right.

No violence.

No police trouble.

No catastrophe.

Just a good day.

The sample carries warmth from one record into another, but its emotional function changes.

That's one of the beautiful things about sampling at its best.

It isn't simply borrowing sound.

It's memory becoming raw material.

And once you know the connection, it's nearly impossible to hear either record alone again.

The Isleys are inside Ice Cube.

Ice Cube sends you backward toward the Isleys.

Two songs made sixteen years apart begin talking to each other.

Listen for: the guitar figure. Then listen to “It Was a Good Day” later. Same musical DNA, completely different life.

GEORGE BENSON — “GIVE ME THE NIGHT”

The song he almost didn't record.

George Benson was already an extraordinary jazz guitarist when Quincy Jones asked him a provocative question.

Did he want to make another great jazz record, or did he want to go for the throat?

Benson chose the latter.

He had heard what Jones had done with Michael Jackson's Off the Wall and specifically asked to work with some of the same musicians.

Jones brought in Rod Temperton, the Heatwave songwriter whose credits included major parts of the Off the Wall universe.

The sessions continued for weeks.

Then Benson packed his bags.

He thought the record was finished.

Quincy Jones called.

There was one more song.

Benson was tired and wanted to leave, but Jones convinced him to return to the studio.

That song was “Give Me the Night.”

They recorded it in a day.

The guitar part Benson played in the middle caught Jones' attention, and he pushed for it to appear throughout the record, including the opening. It became one of the song's signatures.

There's another great detail.

Patti Austin, who sang backing vocals on the session, later recalled that Jones and Temperton had been going out to clubs while working on the music.

It looked like nightlife.

It was also research.

They were listening to tempos, watching rooms and studying what moved people.

That makes “Give Me the Night” feel slightly different.

It's a club record built partly by people who bothered to go see what a club actually felt like.

Forty-plus years later, DJs are still benefiting from the fieldwork.

Listen for: Benson's guitar against that immaculate rhythm section. Jazz didn't disappear when he crossed into dance music. It simply changed clothes.

SOUL II SOUL FEAT. CARON WHEELER — “BACK TO LIFE”

Before the beat, there was almost nothing.

Here's a wonderfully strange fact about one of the great groove records of the late 1980s:

When “Back to Life” first appeared on Soul II Soul's debut album Club Classics Vol. One in 1989, the album version was essentially a cappella.

Caron Wheeler's voice carried it.

The beat we now associate so strongly with the song came into focus when “Back to Life” was prepared as a single.

And that beat came from somewhere very specific.

Soul II Soul didn't begin merely as a studio project. Its identity grew from London sound-system and club culture, particularly the group's influential nights at the Africa Centre.

Jazzie B has described the Africa Centre as crucial to Soul II Soul's development because it created a space where a larger musical community could participate.

Rare groove.

Hip-hop.

Soul.

Electronic drums.

Live musicians.

DJs.

Dancers.

Different musical languages occupied the same room.

Programmer Gota Yashiki later recalled that while acid house was exploding around them with four-on-the-floor rhythms, the Soul II Soul team wanted something different: a heavier, hip-hop-influenced groove delivered in the most soulful way possible.

Electronic and organic sounds were layered together.

An 808 supplied enormous low end.

Live-feeling parts kept the rhythm human.

Strings from the Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra were sampled and tightened into the production.

And the record emerged with a pulse that didn't quite sound like anything else around it.

Which makes its journey perfect.

A song appears nearly naked.

Then the culture surrounding it gets put back into the record.

And “Back to Life” becomes a dance-floor classic.

Listen for: Caron Wheeler first. Then the beat. Knowing the vocal once stood almost alone makes the rhythm feel less like accompaniment and more like an entire world arriving around her.

SONGS DON'T STAY WHERE WE PUT THEM

That's the thread connecting these five records.

They move.

A piece of Brazilian guitar becomes the beginning of a global pop record.

A psychedelic Australian song finds its way to Rihanna.

A 1977 Isley Brothers groove resurfaces inside West Coast hip-hop.

A jazz guitarist walks into a Quincy Jones session and walks out with a dance-floor anthem.

An a cappella becomes one of the defining grooves of British club culture.

Music has always behaved this way.

Across genres.

Across cities.

Across decades.

Across people who weren't necessarily supposed to be standing next to each other in the record store.

That's why the history matters.

Not because every song needs a lecture attached to it.

Because occasionally one small fact opens a door.

You hear the record again.

Maybe you notice something you missed.

Maybe it sends you searching for Luiz Bonfá, ANTI, Go for Your Guns, Rod Temperton or the Africa Centre.

One song becomes two.

Two become five.

And suddenly you've disappeared pleasantly down a musical rabbit hole.

That's exactly what the Radar is supposed to do.

LISTEN: CHR - RADAR VOL 1

Let the playlist take care of the journey.

We'll keep looking for the stories hiding inside the records.

Music. Movement. Culture.