Do You Know was written in one one hour session on a Thursday afternoon in July 2024. On very rare occasions, songs happen like this. They appear from nowhere and seem to write themselves. Its almost as if they already existed. A very similar thing happened with Most of the Time which Georgia Batterley ended up recording for her The Georgia Project album.
What made this even more remarkable was that I also had the arrangement in my head, right down to the drum breaks and offset guitar lines. Could I get this recorded on the same day?
Obviously.
Once I had worked out what key it needed to be in, I opened up a new Logic session and set the structure markers. I then programmed some basic drums followed by bass guitar, acoustic guitars, electric guitars and a piano. I would normally record a guide vocal for reference but as I felt in decent form, I recorded what would be the final vocal take.
I did a quick mix and sent it to Steve Dutton. He said that he liked it so I asked him if he fancied recording real drums for it. I didn’t need to ask him as he already assumed that would be his next job.
Steve is brilliant. He instinctively seems to know what is in my head and then plays it but with added energy and spark. A good drum performance can make all the difference in a song.
Once he’d sent me the drums, all it needed were the finishing touches. A lead guitar part and some backing vocals. The original lead guitar section was twice as long, but listening back I decided it was too long, so I cut half of it out. The right decision
I sent the stems to Brad Mott who I had used to mix the Anyway album. I told him that ideally, I wanted to get this released within a week of actually writing the song. Brad did not disappoint.
Bearing in mind I wrote the song on Thursday, it was now Saturday and all of this has happened in two days. I was speaking to Steve on the phone and asked if I could film him playing drums to it for a potential music video. He was free the day after so I went down. And we ended up shooting a whole music video’s worth of footage.
I started editing the footage on Monday, Brad sent the final mix on Tuesday and the mastered version was with me on Wednesday.
The music video was uploaded to YouTube and the song was submitted for release as a single to all the streaming platforms on Thursday just one week after it was written.
I posted a link to it for review on a song writing forum, and got back some amazing feedback. Paul, a fellow songwriter and member of the forum wrote “To me, it's a perfect piece of pop music and I really love it.” and continued “I don't think I've ever heard a better pop song here. This takes the biscuit...there are hundreds of bands/musicians/singers that have hit the big time and never written anything as good as this.”
High praise indeed.
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