“The Strange Lady I Met on the Shore” is the first track on my new album, La vie sous la mer. Although I’ve already written a short companion book that tells the stories within the songs, this series of articles will tell the stories behind the songs, focusing on the compositional details. This is the third article in the series (indexed here).

In the last article, I mentioned I felt the original beat for Set 7 needed to be changed slightly. There is a disadvantage to working with drum tracks (as I did here, in the early, experimental phase): although they can help generate new ideas, they can actually conflict with those very same ideas when they start developing and becoming something new.

To solve this, I took the bass pattern I’d created and played it by itself, no accompaniment, until it felt “right.” I kept on and kept on, until it felt automatic. Then I recorded it and analyzed the beat pattern in some detail.

What I found was that Set 7 had become something new and funky — yet was still in 7/4. I’d never seen anything like this, so I called the basic beat “7 funk.” Then, on further analysis, I discovered there was another structure hidden within the groove — it was almost a “call and response” situation.

So here they are. On the percussion staff below, the lower beats are the “call” part, and the upper beats are the “response”:

(click the thumbnail to see the staff)

The two eighth notes that begin the call are the funky part. The bass drum hits hard, and the bass always slams those two notes. The other two are optional; they appear in the tumba part in the conga drum section.

The response part is interesting. I practiced using this beat a lot. If you listen to the organ responses to the bass, and the guitar scratching pattern, you’ll hear different parts of it being emphasized. In a way, it was sort of like my own personal 7-clave pattern — a lot of the structure of the song revolves around it. Because of it’s shape, I came to call it the “crown” pattern.

Call and response came to be the theme for this song. I’ll finish this story in the next article.