larson i guess you could call me the late bird

Jean-Jacques Perrey, now 85, communicates through his daughter Patricia via email. But trace it back in reverse chronological order and you get the closest there is to a patient zero: an obscure, almost-novelty 1966 Perrey and Kingsley track called “Countdown at 6.” The electronic music pioneers put this baby coo in the middle of a little riff on “Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda,” featured on their Vanguard Records release The In Sound From the Way Out! Maybe it came from one of their children at the time? Somehow, this baby coo was not fully indexed in the great nexus. Want to know who did the “Yeah! Woo!” in Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two”? That’s Bobby Byrd with the “Yeah!” and James Brown himself with the “Woo!,” over a drum break from Lyn Collins’ 1972 funk single “Think (About It).” Finding all this out is as easy as: “Siri, who did the Wilhelm Scream?” If you don’t know who’s screaming “Look at ya!” on Kanye West’s “Runaway,” just put the question to Google and you’ll find out it’s Rick James. Supernumerary sounds on records, no matter how seemingly insignificant, can usually be traced to its source. The digitization of music has served as a mass cataloging project for anyone interested in dissecting a track down to its molecular makeup. We live in the Genius age, where every line of text and every bit of information is now annotated, searchable and definable. Aaliyah thought the baby coo was cute and, with that, it was slotted snugly inside one of the empty spaces in Tim’s beat, becoming instantly iconic.īy 8 AM, the track was mastered according to Timbaland, later that morning “Are You That Somebody?” and this baby coo were already being played on the radio. Its melodic curve mirrored a glissando on a violin, from a note high on the staff to a harmonic far above the fingerboard. It was a baby cooing happily, lilting up like the softest arc extending from the gentlest slingshot, lasting no more than half a second in the air before falling back down to earth. Then, Tim had an idea: He flipped through his CDs, found the one he wanted and played it for everyone. They had four hours.Īs he tells it in a brief clip posted on YouTube, Tim made short work of the beat and, soon after, Static found the hook. It wouldn’t be enough to put just any song together – they expected a chart-topping radio hit. Tim, his songwriting partner Static Major, and Aaliyah came together and took shelter in The Village Studio in West LA. There was just one catch: He had to have the master of the track to the label at 8 AM. The deal was already “etched in stone,” and Tim would get $400,000 to do it.

On the other end was Barry Hankerson, Aaliyah’s manager and uncle, asking Tim to produce the lead single for the Dr. Late one night after a show in 1998, Timbaland received a phone call.

Larson i guess you could call me the late bird