5 Iconic Parts of Songs Added by the Studio Against the Artist’s Will
The artist who sings a song isn’t the only person responsible for it. Maybe someone else wrote it, and a whole team at a studio might have worked to put the record together. Occasionally, you’ll see a song credited to someone like Mark Ronson or Marshmello, whose voice is nowhere on the track, and this is fair because they were the real person behind the song.
Sometimes, a song arrives in the studio as the cohesive vision of the person who sings it, and then the studio says, “Nope,” and sneakily changes it. This sounds like sacrilege. But that changed version turns out to be the classic we all love.
Another Brick in the Wall
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To fully understand Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall,” you need to know about their rock opera The Wall and need to know all three parts of the song, with the famous song about schools being just one of them. But let’s say all you know is “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2),” that song that goes, “We don’t need no education.” You know it as a very serious protest against the problem of dark sarcasm in the classroom, a constant issue in such schools as Greyfriars and Hogwarts.
The song features a children’s choir belting out that famous ungrammatical chorus. That wasn’t the idea of Roger Waters, who wrote the song and also wrote nearly all of The Wall. He submitted the track to the studio with only one verse and one chorus, as he envisioned it as just a single part of a longer work. Then producer Bob Ezrin, on his own accord, headed to Islington Green School in London to record some children singing it.
Waters didn’t like the idea until he actually heard what the kids sounded like. Asking Waters in advance was evidently never an option. Ezrin did ask the school in advance, and the heaster loved the idea of the kids taking part in this exercise, but that’s because Ezrin was careful not to first show him what words the kids would be singing.
The Sound of Silence
The way you know “The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel, it starts with quiet electric guitar. Then come loud drums. It sounds like a protest song or something suitable for a funeral, but it’s also rock.
But that famous version of the song is really a remix. The song that Simon & Garfunkel put together was a folk song. Listen to it below, and you’ll hear identical vocals from what you know, but the whole thing is acoustic, and those war drums never enter the arena.
When this acoustic version of the song began getting airplay, producer Tom Wilson at Columbia decided it had potential to become a real hit, if he just reworked it. He got group of session musicians together to lay electric guitars and drums on top, without telling Simon or Garfunkel. They released the track, still without telling the duo, who never learned of this version until buying a copy of Billboard magazine and seeing it was charting.
You can decide for yourselves which version of the song is better. Most people would say the remix, but one of those session musicians who played on it, Al Gorgoni, says, “I hate it. I mean, I love the song, but those guitars — they’re just awful.”
Tom’s Diner
Here’s those songs that you might know without knowing its name, because the full name appears nowhere in the lyrics. It’s called “Tom’s Diner,” and you might know it better as the “doodoo DOOdoo, doodoo DOOdoo” song. Those doo-doos form the chorus, as well as the intro and the outro.
That part is both the best-known section of the song and the majority of the song by length. But when Suzanne Vega wrote and recorded the song, the refrain was just nine seconds that she sang right at the end.
The way she sang it, when she first recorded and released it in 1987, “Tom’s Diner” was a two-minute a capella song. She sang all the parts that we’d call the verses without a break. And then, having basically given us a trochaic tetrameter poem, she ended by quickly saying “doo doo doo” in that same rhythm
Three years later, British producers Nick Batt and Neal Slateford remixed that song, making a hook out of those doo doos and creating the version we all know. They didn’t have Vega’s permission or permission from her label, A&M. They just made the remix on their own and sent it to clubs, a process generally known as copyright infringement. A&M learned about this and, rather than shut the remix down, put it out as a record themselves. They made a lot of money in the process — for themselves and for Vega.
They also made the music video that we embedded earlier, which doesn’t feature Vega. She’s a folk artist, so she really didn’t fit with this electronic single they were now releasing.
Folsom Prison Blues
Johnny Cash first recorded “Folsom Prison Blues” in 1955. Then, in 1968, he visited the actual Folsom State Prison in California and recorded an entire album of live performances, including a new recording of “Folsom Prison Blues.” It might be the only version of the song you’ve heard.
The inmates’ cheers are now a part of the song. The highlight has to be when the prisoners all clap and hoot after Cash sings, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”
Except, in reality, the crowd stayed entirely silent in response to that line. Cash really did record the song at Folsom State Prison, as d. But the men didn’t react to the Reno bit. Applauding a lyric about shooting a man dead must have seemed like a great way to earn a visit from Officer Bill and his beating stick.
That audience reaction was spliced in by Bob Johnston, a producer at Columbia Records. And this remained a secret for nearly 40 years, until an author working on a book listened to the original master recording and was shocked to hear silence in place of the iconic hoots. But don’t let that ruin the whole song for you. The pandemonium at the start of the song, after, “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,” is real.
Bring Me to Life
If you know one song by Evanescence, it’s 2003’s “Bring Me to Life.” From it, you’d assume that the band consists of two singers, a woman and a guy.
And for 10 years, Evanescence did consist of a woman and a guy — Amy Lee and Ben Moody. But Moody, who eventually left the band, didn’t sing. He played the guitar. The guy singing in “Bring Me to Life” is Paul McCoy from the band 12 Stones.
Which shouldn’t be such a big deal except it was Evanescence’s song, and then the label insisted they rope in some man to sing on top of it, else they wouldn’t release it. The way Lee describes it, they said, “You’re a girl singing in a rock band, there’s nothing else like that out there, nobody’s going to listen to you. You need a guy to come in and sing back-up for it to be successful.”
That sort of claim begs to be proven wrong. But the band has been around for over 30 years, and “Bring Me to Life” remains their biggest song by far. Hey, maybe the one they released this year for the soundtrack of Ballerina will be an even bigger hit. It’s called “Fight Like a Girl.”
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