Early December 2017: Three days to go before the album sessions and I hadn’t settled on an arrangement for “The Quiet Part”. I knew the song had to start off, um, quiet and build and drop a couple times, but in my head it sounded both soft and top heavy.
I fired up Spotify to listen to something/anything else for a minute, and up came Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness”. Thockemthockemthockemthockem…
Hey, what if we did that?
I should have figured River Guerguerian would know exactly what I was after: “You want side stick on this?”
“Maybe? Let’s hear it.”
And he played “The Quiet Part” just like Al Jackson, Jr.