This classical 80s ballad, over a year in the making, incinerates your mind with piercingly beautiful vocals by Chrissy Michel and an intriguing chord game that burns down like a flame.
Chrissy, as well as her husband Fabian, are long-term friends of mine and well known live musicians in the German pop scene, having played with many high rated bands and artists over the years. Funny enough, though, Chrissy had never recorded a song in a studio before, and it took quite some patience to finally find the time to sit down and track together, given family life, the pandemic etc. But there was simply no other voice I could ever imagine to sing what I most likely consider to be my Opus Magnum - Firelady.
The genius is in the chords, which took me over a year to figure out, as they perform several unnoticeable key changes, lowering the key of the song just like a flame would burn down. Making it work easily and still be complex enough to mesmerize the listener from start to finish was a real challenge.
For the main orchestration of this song I moved away from synthesizers and relied on real instruments, like a Fender Rhodes e-piano, the fretless bass, saxophone and guitars. Merely a bit of ear-candy was done with the Roland D-50 and Juno 6, especially the swelling tones and chirping noises on the intro, which are a high pitched percussion loop found in the D-50's PCM rom.
Actually I remember doubling the Rhodes with the Crystal Rhodes patch from the Roland JD-800, so the "no synthesizer" talk is not entirely true, but who cares, right?
Just in case you wondered, the match stroke is not a sound effect downloaded from a web source but an actual recording I did using big cigar matches and fine grade sandpaper, the only combination that sounded just right after a lot of messy trial and error. A normal small match wouldn't audibly cut it. No one ever thinks of that, except sound designers. Also it is quite tricky to not burn your microphone.