The Way I Feel For You is the sixth release of the Bearded Dwarves Reunion sessions, which started in 2022. More info on who we are and why we are doing this can be found here. Short version is Peter Curtiss and I met in college in 1982, developed a musical collaboration and friendship, went our separate ways for a few decades, and are now finally refining and recording our material forty years later.
I wrote a lot of songs in the summer of 1983, and The Way I Feel For You was one of those. Like a few of those songs, this one ended up on the crude, self-produced album that I recorded in 1985. And like all those recordings, it suffered from “early drum machine-itis” — or, more accurately, my under-developed skills with that new technology. This remake tries to capture the intended energy of the original song, but with an arrangement that a decent high-energy rock or 80’s-era new wave band could reproduce on stage without much of a problem.
This was a weird song for me. I had been influenced by seeing Talking Heads in concert, realizing that they were a different band live, almost a dance band, with constant, driving rhythms that made you want to stand on your seat and boogie. And I think I wanted to write something like that — a new wave-influenced dance song, but with some twists.
I was experimenting a lot with complex jazz chords and dissonances on the guitar in those days. This song was an attempt to synthesize that new wave influence and an obsession with jazz chords. For example, the chord progression for the verses is:
E7+9b5 Eb7+9b5 B7+5 Em (3X) C9 D G13 BbMaj9 Em
And the chords for the middle / breakdown section are:
G13 C#m7b5
If you’ve dabbled in songwriting, you will notice that these aren’t typical chords in rock songs. But, at the time, I enjoyed trying to build songs and melodies around such things …with mixed results of course ;-)
Another twist is the breakdown section in the middle, which I imagine sounds a little derivative to ears in 2024. But, of course, this was 1983. I remember wanting this section to sound almost demented, to reflect the unstable emotions of the song’s protagonist. I enjoyed writing it, but the 1983 version had some rough edges that I never liked and never bothered to correct. So I rewrote it for this version, maintaining the basic idea but refining the lyric. I also added the “this is a test” section for this recording; honestly, that was just a tongue in cheek bit of self-indulgence that I hoped might elicit a few laughs. All in good fun.
In retrospect, the breakdown section in this version kind of reminds me of early material from Beck, although this was written a decade before Beck hit the scene. Of course, Beck has more talent in his pinky finger than I have in total. But it has a similar quirky feel, at least to my ears.
As always, this arrangement features Peter’s keyboards throughout. From the start, we were committed to keeping this version barebones — drums, bass, guitar and piano. But Peter came up with a cool, retro-sounding organ line, and we thought it added something. So we made an exception for that. It’s still a simple arrangement, as I resisted the urge to add horn sections, additional percussion and other orchestration. I don’t think the song needs any of that.
One final interesting note: The female background vocals on this recording are from 1985. I recently digitized the multitrack tape of the 1985 recording of this song. On that recording, I enlisted the help of two other college friends — Kim Carson and Tracy Ferrara — to do background vocals. It turned out that their part was recorded on its own track, which meant that I was able to isolate it. And even though that recording was at a different tempo, and the tuning was slightly off, digital audio technology allowed me to match it up to the current recording.
But it’s even more fun than that. It turned out that Tracy sang the main background lyric by herself on one track, four separate times throughout the song. For the current recording, I was able to edit these four separate performances together, such that the part sounds like a backing vocal group, not just one singer. I was pleased and surprised at how well all of this digital audio processing magic worked — it is so interesting that a performance from 1985 can be adapted and repurposed like this. Pretty cool. I lost touch with Tracy and Kim as that era drew to a close, but will thank them again here for doing that session in my dank and dingy parents’ basement forty years ago.
As always, thanks for listening. Enjoy.
The Way I Feel For You