Sailing C’s by alert312 & eb83
How do you go about writing another song about Chicago?
Do you do it? Should you do it?
Especially if really good one’s already exist?
But as the young people say: ‘this one hit different.’
Sailing C’s started as all good songs do, with a freestyle.
Typically speaking, if and when Esteban freestyles two things naturally make their way to the surface - Jesus and Chicago. And these two things are clearly apparent in Sailing C’s.
Esteban has a habit of [not so] secretly going into my archive and skimming through all the pieces of music, loops, and drafts there and arriving with sketches of ideas for songs.
It’s a gift, really.
I am quick to dismiss a loop that doesn’t seem to work and move on to the next. I can often follow where my musical inspiration takes me. But Esteban would pick through these folders of forgotten bits of beats and find a couple loops worth working on. He saw the potential in something thrown away. Such was the case with Sailing C’s.
The original loop was a snippet of a Richie Ray & Bobby Cruz salsa song. It was a thundering piano break down that descended multiple octaves and arrived at a one bar loop of a couple notes that rang very reminiscent of ‘ALL CAPS’. Esteban liked the driving nature and percussiveness of the loop and decided to freestyle over it.
No drums.
No tricks.
No processing.
Just raps and loops.
And it worked. It was dope.
V1 was the working version for a while. Over the coming weeks we continued to tweak and refine the verse and music. We added drums and low end, we tightened the writing and the rough spots of the freestyle. It was good. We liked the energy and we liked how this verse reflected Esteban in a fun light.
Sailing C’s is a true picture of eB83 the MC.
It’s Chicago.
It’s deep dish pizza.
It’s Lake Michigan.
It’s hot dogs.
It’s Summer Time Chi.
But it’s also waxing about the beautifully diverse local church here. It’s about the sacred gifts. It’s about the hope found in the New City to come.
“But yo, let there be no confusion,
I want the church of Christ to come together,
Every tribe, larger than Coachella and spanning the interstellars,
Technically I like Techniques and live heat...”
But when I began to mix the song, an issue or two kept arriving.
One was that the song began feeling too ‘backpack’ and ‘mid tempo boom bappy’ for where we were hoping to have the album arrive as a whole. This can be debatable to some folks for sure, but that's how we were feeling. But second (and most importantly) was that the deeper we got into mixing the song, the percussive elements in the salsa sample were competing with Estaban’s vocals. They were sharing the same frequency space and battling each other to be heard. So if I turned down the volume on the sample or removed the percussive frequencies from the sample it changed the energy of the entire song. The music would feel too low and the energy shifted and it no longer felt compelling.
The song ended up on the chopping block, unfortunately.
But I asked Esteban to give me a day to demo something new. If the ‘remix’ worked then we run with it and it makes the album. If it doesn’t then we have to move on without Sailing C’s.
Well, we know how things turned out. We arrived with the song we’re listening to today.
While mixing I came across a Mirtha y Raul record that was interesting. It was early 70’s Latin American pop rock, but it still had the magic that music from the era had. The two elements that caught my ear was the horn riff, clearly, it's undeniable; but secondly, it was a bass line that lasted for only a half a second. A half measure. When I heard how the bass moved I knew there was something worth investigating.
Sampled.
Chopped.
Looped.
Drum’d it up.
And even dusted off my scratching skills for the last 8 bars of the song.
This new version had the sample ethos, energy, and vibrancy we wanted this song to have. So off the chopping block it came. It was smooth sailing from there.
Yes, that was a dad joke.
Enjoy Sailing C’s.
Enjoy all the Chicago inside talk.
And enjoy Jesus in the center of it all.
