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This song was the first single for performer and songwriter Brenda Russell. The song came to her while she was washing dishes at a dinner party she was hosting. Says Russell, "I was washing the dishes and this little song came in my head, and all I had in those days was a piano in the living room where all the dinner guests were. I knew that I had to get it down, put it on the tape recorder or I was going to forget it, and I knew it was good. I'm a very shy writer, I don't like writing in front of people. So for me to go in that living room, sit down at the piano, and write that song while they were all sitting there was really, really hard for me... I did it because I knew this song in my head was too good to just keep going along with the dinner conversation. You know, it's like, I gotta get this down. And luckily I did that, because it became my first hit record."
Russell does not have a formal music education. She composes music "by ear," records it, and a transcriber writes it down. Says Russell, "I used to be intimidated by the musicians who had theory and everything, and they knew all the stuff. But they weren't so creative, a lot of these guys that I knew that I came up with. They knew all about F sharp goes with G flat and all that stuff, but they couldn't just sit down and just make stuff up. They were locked into reading everything... And I thought, Hmmm, maybe I shouldn't try to learn anything technically, because I might lose the innocent ability to just hear things in my head and pluck them out on a piano. I always think that songs or stories that come from that special place in your psyche, when you're not really banging your head against the wall, but something just kind of floats in from the cosmos, so to speak - those things touch people in a special way when they hear it. It's almost like they sense it came from a special place, because it touches the same special place inside of them. I always think that." (Thanks to Brenda for speaking with us about this song. Read her full interview in the Songfacts interviews section. Her website is www.brendarussell.com/.)
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