Creating Our 70s Soul Song

Urbanization and commercialization of rhythm and blue was the reason for soul music. There was a lot of diversity within soul music such as the bouncy catchy acts of motown to the gritty sound of Stax. As time progressed soul became harder and tougher, it relied on raw vocals and syncopated rhythms. Motown, R&B, Gospel and rock&roll all formed soul music. It dominated the black charts and frequently crossed over into the pop charts. Eventually soul began to splinter as artists like James Brown formed other forms of soul like funk. Although soul music has evolved it is still around today, not only did it inspire all R&B music in the 70s 80s and 90s musicians from around the world kept performing traditional soul (All Music, n.d.)

Soul is focused on songs about love, heartbreak and really focuses on the vocals of a song, because of this as a group we decided to use a song we already knew, and re-create the song into the style of soul. We chose the song ‘Burn’ by Ellie Goulding, as we felt the vocal arrangement had a lot to work with and the lyrics are about being strong and independent when it comes to feelings of love.

“We, we don’t have to worry ’bout nothing / ‘Cause we got the fire, and we’re burning one hell of a something / They, they gonna see us from outer space, outer space / Light it up, like we’re the stars of the human race, human race.” This part of the song is saying that she is burning so bright that she can be seen from space. It is quoting the old saying that it is better to burn out than fade away.

 

“Strike the match / Play it loud / Giving love to the world / We’ll be raising our hands / Shining up to the sky / ‘Cause we got the fire, fire, fire.” Life is burning too bright to allow anyone to get any shut eye or sleep. Goulding is equating love to the light and the fire that burns inside us all. She’s speaking of the passion which keeps us going (Sciarretto, 2014).

From what we learnt about soul music we created a backing track which included a saxophone and piano. During rehearsals we realised our backing track needed more of a backing beat to it so we also added and drum. When staging our piece we created a simple dance and mainly focused on our vocals which we used to create 3 part harmonies to add depth to the song.