Tuesday Tune: 9 to 5 Man
Hello all, it is Tuesday Tune time again, and I have chosen to focus on a Kyri heavy track this week, which is in the shape of 9 to 5 man (remix).
I suppose I should set the scene a bit, and go right back to the beginning. When Alex and I started the band, we wanted to be the world’s worst They Might Be Giants tribute act. But as we tried to sing and play their stuff, we decided we would rather do our own stuff. Alex had been in bands before, with a friend of ours from school called Alexis, but it never really panned out. It was a hot summer, I can’t remember if it was in our second or third year of Uni, and we just thought we would try and put something down. As I mentioned in the first blog about this, it wasn’t great. It was a bit of a piss take about a friend of ours, but we got the bug. Sitting back and hearing something we had written was a real buzz.
Time passed, and we wrote more and more stuff, but due to the nature of my inability to play an instrument, and Alex’s innate guitar playing style, our songs started to feel a tad repetitive. On our journeys back from Uni for the holidays, a lot of us from school would gather at our usual in Southgate which was called the Crown. We had been going there since we were 17, and it is where we felt comfortable. Although both Alex and I had known Kyri at school, I would never have called him a friend. He was friends with a couple of the others, but at the Crown, we got talking and he mentioned that he had been teaching himself the keyboard. Both Alex and I were very excited about this, and asked him if he wanted to join us in recording some stuff. After a bit of persuading, he agreed, and the rest, as they say is history.
It started with Kyri augmenting some of our older tracks, and us having to re-record a few due to our brazen disregard for timing, vs Kyri’s more precise form or recording. But this was good, it made us brush up on stuff.
Which brings me to 9 to 5 man. I have uploaded both versions of the song, the original, and the remix. I would be lying if I said I didn’t prefer the remix, but the original still gets to something very core about the song.
Now they say you shouldn’t really write when you are tipsy, as the work you produce will not be very good. I know there are some counter arguments to this, but for me, I imagine the first argument would hold true. However, the lyrics for 9 to 5 man were born from this state. I had recently been thinking about how soul crushing it must be to go through life merely doing a 9 to 5 job. With no creative or emotional outlet, trapped maybe in a marriage you didn’t care about with children you didn’t care about. Surely that kind of hell is the worst because you know it is a prison you have built for yourself. So I wanted to write a song from this point of view. A confessional of a man who wished to get out of all this, but couldn’t.
The lead character, the narrator, is a sad and pathetic individual, all he can do is highlight all the things in his life that he cannot stand or change, and as the song ends, as he surveys everything he realises it is just 9 to 5.
So Kyri went away with the lyrics, and then a week or so later, he convened us at Alex’s and played us what he had done. I would be underselling it if Alex and I didn’t just sit there, almost opened mouth, at what he had done on his own. For me, the tune and the general pacing of it was pitch perfect, with little to no input from me other than the lyrics. Alex saw the various different things he had done, and it no doubt kicked his musicianship on another level, as he broadened his influences as a result.
We became quite productive for a window there, with Kyri bringing us songs which he had been working on his own, and also ones he worked on with Alex alone ( I shall post these in time). I would now have 2 people to send lyrics to, and it was great to get different interpretations of tunes and the words I had written.
Then something strange happened. Of the three of us, I am most definitely the most into electronic music, hip hop and the such like, and as a result I love sampling. The idea of sampling something was an idea I could only really convince Kyri to do. He said he would look into it and give us an example. And boy did he give us an example!
As I stated, 9 to 5 man was all about a miserable character with a miserable life. What I didn’t expect is Kyri to go away, add a funk guitar sample, and knock the whole thing up to 11. It is a very different beast to the original, and it is hard to see them as the same song at all. Kyri also blatantly foresaw the use of Auto-tune, with a phase effect on his voice (the closest we could get to vocoder / auto tune in those days).
So sit back, and enjoy. I love this song a lot, I hope you do too.
- Anand
