in.the.air

Song of the Day: “In The Air Tonight” – Phil Collins

This is probably one of my favorite songs of all time (ask Jackson). Phil Collins is the man. You gotta give it up. Post-Genesis, the guy pretty much wrote the book on air drums without even reading the manual. “If I got it on tape, I was pretty lucky. I didn’t like manuals, I didn’t really know anything about electronic recording, so if I saw the meter moving, I was happy…‘In the Air Tonight’ was just a drum machine pattern that I took off that CR78 drum machine. You could eliminate certain sounds and program bass drums and snare drums, so I programmed a bass drum part into it, but basically the rest of it was already on there…I got a nice sound on the Prophet 5, which was the sound of ‘In the Air.’” (Phil Collins, Robyn Flans interview, Classic Tracks) Whatever he did worked and still has its place in pop music today, inspiring the moody sounds of producers Kanye West (even though his recreation of Collins’s trademark voco-bratto on 808s & Heartbreaks could cause a tumor) and The-Dream.