In celebration of #StarWarsDay, as many call it, we'd like to share something we made a couple of months ago. It is a cover/adaptation of an original composition by the great John Williams, written for Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983) titled "Luke and Leia". This piece also plays for a moment in the new film Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. Katya and I decided to add lyrics to this moving melody (my favorite of John Williams' works) just in time for the release of the new film.
We got a bunch of love on it when we shared it with several Star Wars fan blogs and sites. One in particular, The Bearded Trio, even interviewed us about it. If you're interested in learning how this piece came about, continue reading below:
"Like with most of our music, things get going pretty quickly. The idea emerged one night about 10pm as I fiddled with the chord changes to this masterpiece on my little keyboard and said jokingly to my partner Katya: "we should add lyrics to this and put it out as one of our covers..." She kinda laughed and stayed on her phone." Chris continues, "I figured she was doing something else and continued to doodle on my keys, when much to my surprise a little while later she had already started to put together some of the first lyrics on her phone's notepad as she usually does. That's when I realized we were gonna do this."
"We wanted to honor the elegance and majesty of John Williams' work and of course be respectful of the fans when it came to the lyrics so from the get Katya said she wouldn't be too specific. She wanted to write lyrics that can be from the perspective of Luke but also from that of Leia and keeping in mind all the things these characters have been through in the span of all the films. That night the lyrics were finished completely and then we went to sleep because if we started singing at that time our neighbors would freak."
"The next morning by the time Katya woke up I had already been awake producing the track (a good bulk of it anyway). I'd say I worked on it for 2 hours tops. And after breakfast we went right in and recorded the vocals. I remember we were done before 5pm because I had to go run some important errands that night. The next few days I would sit down for an hour or two and tweak the production a bit and then put it down. After like 2 days of working on it on my own I sent it to my good friend Eli Menezes, one of the greatest guitar players I know (Richard Bona, Lauryn Hill, Jennifer Hudson, Meshell N'degeocello to name a few of his credits) and told him this crazy idea I had of doubling the main string line in the big musical break halfway through the song with a nice solo lead guitar. I sent it to him and minutes later he sent me back not just the solo but also a few other killer backing guitar tracks which added that special touch the song was needing. Now I knew it was done, so next step was sending it off to my other awesome friend Ricky "String" Ramos, another great guitarist with humongous credits (Wyclef, BoyzIIMen, Kci and Jojo, Trey Songz) who is also an incredible mix engineer, and told him our crazy idea to which he said: "Heck yeah! Let's do it!".
"The mix had been finished for a few weeks. We made phone calls, sent emails to anyone and everyone we know in the industry who could maybe get a line to either Disney or Lucasfilm or even John Williams himself with no luck. We sat on it for a bit and every now and then would talk about how we needed to plan the release of this well. We wanted to maybe shoot a video but knew we weren't going to put it up for sale as it's based on someone else's copyright, so we weren't sure it was smart to invest in a full on video shoot. We knew we wanted fans of Star Wars to listen and feel what we felt as we listen to this song full of emotion. The other thing is we are also working on our own EP with original music and are full time working on other projects, me as a producer and Katya as a singer so we didn't really know when was a good time until a few days ago I was on twitter and saw the ad for the digital release of The Last Jedi, I screen shot it and sent as a text to Katya and Ricky and told them: "we have to release this on Tuesday!". Ricky was graceful enough to send me the high res mix Monday afternoon, which I sent to Bill Henderson (Azimuth Mastering), who's done some beautiful masters for us in the past and crossed my fingers that he could do it that same night. He did, and while he did that Katya and I scrambled to put together a descent lyric video to go along so we can have the whole thing up on Youtube by midnight which we did. exhales"
"As to doing more John Williams' classics? Maybe. I have a compilation of his hits from all the films he's scored and I love them all. Who knows? This one is already getting great feedback so as a good friend of mine says: "we just might could!". Just gotta find the time, which honestly I have no idea how we managed for this one with all the other things we're juggling at the moment."
Thanks again for all your support! Have a great May 4th!
-Chris & Katya
Break Out The Crazy
