Love is the Answer

Album: Lift Your Spirit (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • This big and brassy old-school soul anthem was co-written and produced by Pharrell Williams. Blacc recalled to The Sun: "Pharrell had an idea of how we wanted the song to sound and I watched him build the instrumentation from the very beginning, in just a couple of hours."
  • Blacc's lyrics are about being in a culture where criticism is preeminent. "We live in a cynical time," he told The Guardian. "You can see it when you go on YouTube and there's 75% negative comments. It's just a disease of our time."

    "That's why I wrote a song called Love is the Answer," Blacc continued. "Love is the answer, not hate or cynicism or anonymous denigration: 'Oh, I can hide behind this computer screen and be as foul and ignorant as I want.'"
  • Blacc told Pharrell Williams that he wanted the songs on the Lift Your Spirit album to "make people happy." Pharrell's response: "Funny you should say that, I'm working on a song called 'Happy' right now."
  • This is certainly not the first song called "Love is the Answer" (although there has only been one hit with that title: by England Dan & John Ford Coley, written by Todd Rundgren). Blacc was not deterred. "That's the most basic solution to the world's problems," he said in his Guitar Center Session interview. "Working with the biggest producer in the world, I really want this to be our message."

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