The King's Singers

Simple Gifts is The King’s Singers' first a cappella studio album for 15 years.  There were many many things that made it exciting, but recording in the studio at Status Quo founder Francis Rossi’s house gave the whole thing a lift from the outset.  He would occasionally come in to pick up a guitar or ask David to help with his crossword, and was always amazed by what we were up to!  Musically speaking it was fun creating something that could not be put together outside of a studio.

In the past when working in a studio we have created something from scratch that hadn’t been written or rehearsed before we got there.  The Spirit Voices album has tracks on it like that.  This time around the arrangements were basically all finished, but some things change a little once the recording started.  For example You can close your eyes by James Taylor started life as an arrangement very much like the original song, and was then reworked.  But having rehearsed the second version we thought the character of the arrangement needed a bigger treatment, and during the last week of recording we hit upon the idea of making a second vocal part for it.  That part was then actually the first thing to be recorded.  When we got to the end of the day all we had was a load of ooh’s, aah’s and hums which didn’t amount to very much, but the following day we sang the top chorus.  Having those second choir supporting parts in our headphones as we sang the text was very inspiring.  By the end of the day we put the whole thing together and the studio buzzed with excitement.

The album is called Simple Gifts, but we have songs like the one by James Taylor alongside spirituals and folk songs like Black is the color of my true love’s hair.  Conceptually we spent a long time trying to decide whether we should record a pure folk or a pure pop album, and then gradually the idea dawned that there was something that combined the elements of both ideas: melody.  A good pop ballad is really very much like a folk song, in that it has a strong melody.  We simply chose songs that had beautiful tunes, whether they were written by King Henry the Eighth or Sting!  We approached it believing there is no point at which folk songs end and ballads begin.  A good example of that is Valparaiso, sung beautifully by Paul.  None of us knew the song until Emily Crocker from Hal Leonard emailed me to say she would like an arrangement of it.  She sent an audio file and we were amazed, because Sting has composed an original melody which could have come from many years ago.

Strong melody suggests this album might have been full of solos, and it could easily have been.  But take a track like Helplessly hoping.  This is the kind of song where the accompaniment is a big part of what makes the song successful, and to move away from that would have been a mistake.  Its strength is the 3-part melody from Crosby, Stills and Nash.  To try and extract what you think is the tune from there and arrange it would be weak, so our version is down as this strong 3-part thread.  Then there’s April come she will, written by Paul Simon and beautifully sung by Art Garfunkel on their live Central Park album.  That’s another example where the song is really not just about a melody, exquisite though it is.  The other big element is the accompanying riff, which is a ‘melody’ all of its own.  Thinking of it in those terms made the arrangement so much easier to write.  Certainly the expectation from the listener would be to have the riff start the piece, and I’m sure people listening will be able to sing along immediately!  So both those pieces are basically transcriptions, and all the better for it!

Recording in a studio allows us to do things we can’t do anywhere else.  But there any draw-backs too.  The studio experience is a two-edged sword, because you have all this technology at your disposal, yet you don’t have the benefit of acoustics to give natural warmth to the sound.  We were pretty close up to the microphones, which made it difficult to sing freely because every little sound was picked up.  Mouth clicks, pops, breaths, you name it…  It was a bit like singing in a cupboard!  What came out in the end belies the fact that the space was small, with very little atmosphere.

In that kind of environment having the right producer/engineer is very important.  We were really helped by our expert knob-twiddler Gregg Jackman, who worked with us on Good Vibrations and Spirit Voices - and he did an excellent job on both of those too.  He seems instinctively to know what sound is right for which song.  You can be in the booth singing your bit on a track and thinking ‘I’m not feeling so good this morning, I hope this doesn’t take too long’, then he calls you into the control room and he’s somehow brought the sound to life!  We co-produced this album with him, and Robin and I really got into that side of it.  It’s hard to describe the quality of the album’s sound, but its clear it has a newish, quite immediate kind of sound.  If you listen to Good Vibrations and compare it with this album, the group now sounds much more up front.  It's a very live sound, exciting, something you could call contemporary.

We started recording in November 2007 with 6 days, and finished with 10 days in January 2008.  Obviously a day in the studio is not like a day in a normal acoustic recording session.  In the last week of recording we were putting in twelve hour days.  It takes a lot longer than you might think to set up the tracks and to get everything in the right place.  And once the singing is finished, there is mixing to be done.  Gregg does a lot of this as he goes along.  We are lucky that Signum, our record label, doesn’t pressurize us to work too quickly, because albums like this need a lot of studio time.  The only limits we really had were with Gregg’s schedule and ours.  When it came to it we were able to work in a relaxed way and if we produced a 3 minute piece of music at the end of the day, we were happy!  But we got slicker as we went along, and began to expect to finish two tracks a day, which was important because we had a tour to the USA looming, and we also needed to finish so that the disc could be released in time for our 40th anniversary concerts in May 2008.

There are ten of my arrangements on this album.  Four of them were written specifically for the album: Valparaiso, April come she will, When she loved me, and You can close your eyes…  The latter I discovered by accident.  The first of 2 flights on a US concert day was late and caused us to miss our connection.  Paul suggested we hire cars and drive from Washington DC to State College Pennsylvania on February 6th, 2007.  Half way along the 4-hour journey we stopped at a Starbucks in the middle of nowhere to get coffee and change drivers, and I noticed a new Carly Simon disc called Into White for sale, which had this song by her ex-husband James Taylor as one of its tracks.  We continued our long drive and put the cd on, and as soon as I heard You can close your eyes I knew I had to arrange it for the group.  If it hadn't been for that missed flight we probably would not have known the song even now.  Having said that you can't guarantee arrangements will always work - the first draft of this one was disappointing, but after a long time thinking about it and reworking it the shape came while we were in the US in December 2007, and then the second choir part was extracted from the new arrangement at the very last minute.  Of the other songs The water is wide was done before I joined the group, and was originally a 4-part arrangement.  In 1995 I expanded it, and it was the first arrangement of mine the group performed.  That was a very proud moment for me, and I’m pleased to say the piece has stayed in the repertoire.  I followed that up with The turtle dove and I love my love, so they are not new but haven’t been recorded before.  We all admire the skill of Billy Joel, and have been singing She’s always a woman since Chris joined.  It always goes down very well, especially as it features his lovely velvet voice.  And it makes a great start to the album.

People sometimes ask me how I pick pieces to arrange.  What really does it for me is if I like the song.  I arrange music far better if I like it, because the ideas come much quicker.  It doesn’t have to be a song which when hearing the original you think ‘Ah, that as it stands would sound good as a King’s Singers song’.  It's better when you feel it could work with something fresh added to the song.An example of that is When she loved me.  I had already done I will go sailing no more from the original Toy Story movie, and what inspired that was David’s performance of Texas girl at the funeral of her father which is also by Randy Newman and on our Good Vibrations album.  There is something very poignant about a countertenor singing a sad song.  When she loved me is sung by a girl in the movie - Jessie the cowgirl - but she is talking about her female owner, so it does work as a male lead.  My children have the movies on DVD and love them, but it was actually Stephen who suggested When she loved me specifically.  We were expecting to record I will go sailing, but Steve said ‘What about that other one..?’  and I knew immediately which one I would prefer.  We were in Holland at the time and I went straight to the piano and did the introduction.  The rest of it was easy because it’s basically close to the movie soundtrack, with a few extra spicy chords thrown in. 

The other two arrangers on this album are Bob Chilcott and Peter Knight, and of the two my arranging style is furthest away from the latter.  He wrote for the group in the early ‘70s, and his style is very much to do with textures.  He writes some advanced chords, and has a beautiful harmonic structure to his arrangements.  They are real classics and the two we have got on the album - Swing Low and You are the new day are good examples of his style.  Bob Chilcott works more on the ostinato principle.  He’ll get a pattern, like in Greensleeves, Steal away or The gift to be simple, on top of which the tune sits.  I was in the group with him for 3 years and learnt a lot from him in terms of arranging. I love my love has an ostinato for example, and I arranged that while Bob was in the group, looking over my shoulder!

This album is coming out in The King’s Singers 40th anniversary year.  It makes a great birthday gift to our fans, but isn’t representative of everything we do now.  If we wanted that we would have to record an album more like a typical mixed programme which the Byrd to Beatles DVD does.  Over the last few years we have recorded many classical albums so we all thought it was time to redress the balance.  These songs are going to enter the repertoire and refresh the close harmony section of concerts as well as the content of masterclasses that we give, because the music will be published in a Hal Leonard book in the autumn of 2008.  Before long we hope to be enjoying groups from around the world singing these songs back at us and perhaps we’ll even singing with them!  We love performing You are the new day with the second choir part, and the James Taylor song should work well like that too.

Philip Lawson