This was the title of the first song I wrote. Ironically, it was written using one of the Ukuleles I’d built earlier in the year during the first lockdown.. It’s loosely based on a dream I had about my mum. She died in 2016, so dreams are the only time I get to see her. In the dream, she looked much younger, and was dancing away. This gave me a starting point for the lyrics.
Writing on the Ukulele is so different to guitar and piano because a lot of the simple chords shapes are actually more complex jazz chords that you would not naturally go to on a different instrument.
For any musicians reading this, some of the chords used in this song are..... C. A9, Cdim, Dim, Cmaj7, Fmaj7, D9, G7, E7, Fmin6...... It may seem like there's a lot going on here, but most of these chord are just slight variations of each other and come naturally when playing a Ukulele.
I had great fun experimenting, layering this new song up with lots of backing vocals, piano’s, bass and drums. Once I had everything recorded, I attempted a mix down of Let’s Dance and was really pleased with it.
Around this time, I was having a catch up on the phone with my old friend Matthew Stockwell. We’d lost touch in recent years, but as with many other people, the lockdown prompted me to make contact with old friends to see how they were. Some good things came out of isolation.
I was telling him about my plans, and by sheer coincidence, he told me that he had been getting into sound engineering and was looking for a project to work on. He asked me to send over the multi tracks for Let’s Dance containing all the instruments and vocals I’d recorded so that he could have a go at mixing the song.
About two weeks later, he sent back the version which was to become the finished mix that ended up on the album. I have to say that his mix blew me away. It was a hundred times better than my mix.
Right there and then we agreed that Matt would mix what would be the whole album. With one song in the can, my only problem now was that I had to write, arrange, perform and produce another ten or eleven songs…….
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