BREAKDOWN ANALYSIS by Planet Giles
TRACK #7
CALL YOU MY SISTER
(from the INSIGHTS album released in 2022)
When we lived in my hometown of London, I used to do a solo piano / singing gig at a Thai restaurant in Lavender Hill called YUM YUM. It was a favourite gig which was blighted by a solicitor who asked me to play for a private party that he held there. When I wouldn’t start because no one was in the restaurant, and I needed 10 minutes to have a coffee and gather myself after taking 45 minutes to unload and set up, he started to remove my equipment from the piano. I warned him not to interfere with my equipment, which was specially sourced by my husband. I didn’t like people touching my gear, as there are horror stories of equipment that has been destroyed through others’ negligence. And we took very great care of every piece of our equipment - and still do. Sadly, there was no getting through. He refused to see sense, and ended up in a pot plant in the Yum Yum window for his troubles. After being fired by the owner, I derigged, drove home and collapsed in tears on the bed. When Pete asked me why I was so upset. I relayed the whole story. He was nonplussed. Then said,
“Why are you crying? I’ll get the champagne to celebrate the fact that you stood up for yourself - and protected our equipment at the same time!”
That stopped my tears in their tracks. And I celebrated all the good times I had had in that restaurant. As they say, all good things come to an end!
And this restaurant will not be forgotten because we knew an amazing keyboard player called Jason Wright who came to eat there and see us play. He was able to play complex bass lines while playing keys, something I watched and admired greatly. We played Call You My Sister for him there and then. And he said,
“That is an incredibly catchy hook, and a hit song if ever I heard one!”
We still think so, Jay!
“I can call you my sister
Call you my brother
Recognise your face cos you’re part of the human race
Call you my sister
Call you my brother”
The verses never seemed to work in English. The reason was that my feeling that the Human Race is a FAMILY in which we as humans are all ‘brothers and sisters’ could not be expressed with any existing language. It needed the creation of a UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE, one that could transcend all boundaries, nationalities, religions, creeds, races to be expressed, understood and accepted by every person.
This to me is the beauty of music. It can unite where divisions occur just by virtue of sound. Words often divide, but sound unites. For this reason, sound trumps words every time!
With that thought in mind, I had a lovely restful nap, and awoke (as so many Creatives do) with a fully formed lyric in my head. I grabbed my little tape recorder and recorded every word as I channeled it in real time. When I listened back to it, it was gobbledy gook! I trusted it, transcribed it and realised that it seemed to be a combination of the sounds of many languages all in one. And I loved it. So did Pete, and we set about thinking of how best to sing and record this new language.
In the end, we put it through a Helicon effects processor. I eventually found an effect I loved by changing and testing a few of the parameters.
If it speaks to you on any level, please do leave a comment below and let us know!
The only way out is through, as the saying goes. And as we hurtle through the current issues that appear on the surface to be causing cleavages in our world, may we arrive soon at the realisation that we are all indeed a shard, an individual spark of a much larger family - The Human Race - who are travelling onwards to greater things, as evolution carries us along the path of expressing its destiny through us towards eventual Unity with all things and all life.
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